This is going to get to Regional food preferences and even traditional music but I have to go back to the beginning of the story which is travelling in a dugout canoe on the Marrowijne River that separates Suriname from French Guiana in the rainforests of Northeastern South America. I was with a group of people that were setting up arrangements for an anthropologist expedition the interior rainforest of the former Dutch Guiana the following summer.

There were five of us outsiders traveling in a 20 metre dugout canoe powered by a 75 horsepower outboard motor. We had two boatmen and a translator as well as a utility type who did most of the cooking.

In each village we wished to stay in we had to go through a welcoming ceremony which took quite some time because it required listening to long conversations in the dialect of these people which was made up of several West African languages. They were descendents of former slaves from the coastal plantations who had been living successfully for nearly three centuries in the bush. They were fiercely independent and took the cleansing ceremonies for outsiders very seriously. They had managed to keep their traditions as well as their self-respect even though they were well known to the coastal people where the cities are. Known as Djuka or Aucaner people, they disocuraged vistors but once you made it "in" they were warm and hospitable people.

Our boatman was very interested in one particular village, Manlobi which was several days upriver and along our route. There was an obiahman there who had the reputation of being able to cure very serious injuries and illnesses. The boatman knew him because he was one of the more frequent travellers on the river. He usually made a trip every year. He was Djuka but he had chosen to live on the coast.

I wish I could think of his name and it probably will come back to me later but I do remember he made a living taking tourists on short canoe trips up to Stoelman's Island and back to Albina, a one day round trip to the furthest settlement where there was electricity and direct communication with the outside world. If any of these place names sound familiar to you it may be because they are near the mouth of the river that leads to Devil's Island and the associated French city, St. Laurent.

The boatman had a little farm on the coast and, a few months before, while clearing brush with a "cutlass" (what I had always called a machete) he had hit a stone and the blade had glanced off, struck his leg and severed his Achilles tendon. His impaiment was pretty serious and he had been anxious to take this trip because it meant he would be able to stop off and see Papa Mato in Manlobi. He was convinced Papa Mato would be able to cure him.

When we came ashore in Manlobi, even we outsiders could tell that there was something wrong. The people looked listless and paid little attention to our crew. Soon, our interpreter was able to tell us what was wrong. The village had a kind of idol(when I did get to see it quite a while after all of this, it reminded me of an oversized sofa pillow). It was of enormous significance to the people there and it had been stolen. Papa Mato as the religios leader had decreed that there would be no religious celebrations of any sort, including drumming, for a period of time that I don't remember exactly but it was longer than we were going to be there. It also meant that he was not going to be able to treat the boatman's Achilles Tendon.

(I have a choice where to go with this story now, to the food or to the music. I think I'll go to the food.)

The staple food in this part of South America is manioc root but the variety that grows there is poisonous. The Indians taught the Djuka people how to grind it up by pounding it mercilessly and endlessly in hollowed out tree trunls with a very heavy pole. Then they showed them how to place it in a woven cylindrical sack that is hung from a tree with weights attached to the bottom of the sack. If you've ever seen a Chinese finger-trap toy, you will easily understand how this works. The more pressure i.e. wieght, you hang on the sack, the greater the squeexe. What comes out is a juice with the poison in it. The poison is used on hunting arrows and the 150 pound log of ground manioc, now quite dry, is ready to be cooked in one of the two main ways it is served there. It can be prepared as something like Grape Nuts, little hardirregular balls of the stuff or baked on griddles into a thin round flatbread. In either case, the texture is dry and hard. Since most of the food is stews of one sort or another, the bread can be added as we might rice or used as an implement with which to eat it. It is tasteless and so hard that it makes stale tortilla chips seem flavorful and delicate. If you ar enot careful, it can rip up the insides of your mouth. (I remembered being on the Arizona desert watching a javelina eating cactus, thorns and all and thinking with a mouth like that I could eat the manioc bread.) It was extrememly hard to see how anyone could get excited about sitting down for a meal in which manioc made up the central portion but when I saw not only the villagers eating with pleasure but the boatman and crew who were returning home, eating with the enthusiasm of a Bostonian reclaiming his baked beans or a Texan his barbecue, I could see how much associations have to do with taste. I guess comfort food can be nearly anything.

After dinner, I sat next to Papa Mato in his home, a thatched hut with a dirt floor on which no one ever sat. There were always chairs and stools. The translator was busy but when it was my turn to talk, I mentioned music. I had been recording the music of the Djuka whenever I could but it appeared that in this village, because of the recent desecration of their shrine, this would not be possible. There was to be no music. What was particularly disappointing was that the Djuka have a separate tradition of religious drumming that I hadn't heard and Papa Mato was reputed to be an outstanding exponent of the form.

I asked if I could play. Would that be all right with Papa Mato and with the villagers? He encouraged me to do so and I brought into the cabin my appalachian dulcimer. Wildwood Flower, Buffalo Gals and Cripple Creek were well received. Then Papa Mato asked to inspect the dulcimer. I passed it to him. He did the usual things of tapping the face, hitting the strings randomly, that sort of exploration. Then he handed it back to me. Everything had gone so well that I now took a chance. I turned it over and beat out a little paradiddle on the back of the instrument. Then I handed it back to the old obiahman. Slowly, at first, and then with increasing strength and purpose, he began drumming with his hands. No one said anything or interrupted him until fifteen minutes or so later he was through. He was transformed, his eyes were clearer, his face more expressive. I don't know exactly what happened but the music had done something to him and for him and even if we didn't know any details, all of us outsiders knew that we had just been a part of something special. We had seen another aspect of the power of music.

Hmmm, maybe this should have been better placed in "Why We Sing."