Basking In Blackness In Bahia With Travel Noire

After the first flight and first layover, I was less anxious and annoyed than I had planned to be. In fact, I was smiling. Subtly, of course. I expected to feel alone, lost, vulnerable, but sitting on that plane from Panama City to Sao Paulo, I was everything but. New York spoiled me, yes, but whether I thought it did or not, it prepared me to look at myself as a global citizen. Sitting on the train and walking down crowded city streets in different boroughs, it’s uncommon to only hear one tongue spoken in passing. There will be conversations that you technically can’t understand or jump into, but you feel it. 

Foreign sentences don’t feel foreign, so sitting in this aisle seat hearing a black man speak in Portuguese—a language my ear was never trained for—to a white Brazilian after being told “Gracias” by an ethnically ambiguous fellow while in Panama’s airport felt like magic. I don’t feel lost even though I don’t fully know what they’re saying; I feel enamored. Inspired. Just because I’m a part of this right now by osmosis. Part of cultured roots and lilty tongues. To witness that gradual transition from gate to gangway was unlike what I’d imagined it to be; it was better.

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I’d never heard of a “Brazilian winter” before. When you think of winter, you think of New York at its most unforgiving. Or Canada. Crisp white lawns and slushy brown streets. The hurt of numb, red fingertips and constant reminders that the socks you bought aren’t quite thick enough. Scarves, fuzzy hats, mittens with removable thumbs for struggle texting. Frosted breath and hot cocoa and fire escapes and days off school and work. Not Brazil. Not Salvador da Bahia with its roosters that crow at six in the morning and two thirty in the afternoon without ceasing. With its sudden, heavy rains that wane out into scattering, cool mist twenty minutes after starting. With its hot, hot suns and the relieving shade from wide green palms and extending branches. From the infinite stream of flip-flops slapping and pitter-pattering across uneven, uphill cobblestone. With its moquecas and caipirinhas eaten and sipped plentifully on the airy edges of patios, blending with the tune of American laughter and smoky Portuguese lilts in the kitchen. With its clumped up houses with clothes lines extending out of open doorways, gridiron windows and snaking roads out front. This is not a wintertime I could’ve imagined (nor is it one I wish to leave), yet here I sit on my private balcony passing over sweet memories made as the time passes before my capoeira class.

These past three days have felt like plenty more, and the friends I’ve made within them have felt like long lost family. That’s black people for you. That’s the main reason I was so adamant about test driving a Travel Noire Experiences trip for myself. There’s something so magical about the binding feeling that comes with color. Good ol’ melanin. Browns, beiges, butters and blacks. Even straight out of the gate at the airport they found me, lost-looking and confused and tired and delirious looking for a TN’s taxi driver holding a teeny, tiny sign. I scanned the airport rich with a language I simply couldn’t navigate at the moment and came across a cluster of black people with my eyes. I had a feeling they were my group but I kept to myself to avoid mislabeling and embarrassment on my part. They spotted me spotting them, and with disarming smiles and a crooked finger, beckoned me over to them, confirming my correct association. From there, all discomforts were gone.

When I was trying a pitiful first attempt at samba during our welcoming dinner across from a seasoned musician with a body more nimble than mine, all discomforts were gone. When I was sweating out half my body weight at a joint Samba and Afro-Brazilian dance class, the discomforts were gone. When Genny rubbed Marquita’s bug spray over my arms and back for me because my vanilla extract was fading and I’d already been bitten thrice, the discomforts were gone. When I, a Spades newbie, lost terribly to some hooting and hollering pros, all discomforts were gone. As we chatted over meals about race, identity, colorism, careers, dating, self-love, self-worth and self-care, discomforts went out the window. Never before have I traveled with such an immediate sense of sureness, openness and instant familiarity. And in a city boomingly black at that? It’s safe to say I lucked out.

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I’m four days post-Bahia and while I’m thinking about how I can’t believe it’s over, my mind is also saying I can’t believe I was even there. It’s crazy to be back in the hustle and frazzled flow of New York again when less than a week ago, we were staggering up those cobblestones like we owned them and nursing sore muscles after each and every trek. Spitting salt water out of our mouths as we bathed in warm beach waters. Memorizing a triad of steps, rhythms and a handful of duck-and-kick commands for capoeira. Napping on the cushions of a private boat as we hopped from islands off the coast of Bahia. Feeling warm fingers knead the knots of pre-existing stress out of our backs during much-needed body massages. Lazing away in woven hammocks as our browning hues glistened under the orange sun.

Making friends with the witty and insightful front desk attendants at our hotel, even though we’d been competitively shouting and shrieking in the lobby at all hours of the night playing Heads Up. Splintering odd into small fireside chat clusters, opening up the not so sunny cracks and crevices of our souls to people whom, at this point, were not longer strangers. Depression, renewal, emptiness, encouragement, need for change, all hashed out to reached renewed understandings of ourselves and each other. Watching the rounded sun sink out of the sky to kiss the rolling waves on the horizon, and all who lay along the sandy shoreline stop to applaud and marvel at the sight, showing gratitude to the powers that be for letting them see, live, experience another day. And there I was, grateful, too.

Grateful to be amongst these beautiful human beings from all walks of life. Grateful to have had them show me another side of myself. To letting themselves be my artistic muse. Grateful for these new, even if only for a moment, big brothers and big sisters (at 26, I was one of the youngest on the trip) to encourage and uplift me even though they’d just met me. Grateful to challenge myself with disconnecting and digging deeper as we learned about our temporary home, how Bahia got blanketed in black when those slave ships docked and how the awful things they experienced at the hands of the pale and the foreign is a mirror image to America. How we, the brown, are full of life and legacy no matter where we are planted.

I was not compensated for this post in any way, the trip just genuinely made me feel things and write them down.