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The country has the largest population of African descent outside Africa: of its 210 million citizens, more than half claim some degree of African heritage, according to the most recent census. Jones’s willingness to move beyond a specifically North American canvas is salutary, for much in Brazil’s experience merits the attention of anyone interested in the history of slavery. How might Americans react if a Brazilian were to write a novel about the Underground Railroad? It is yet another variation on a question heard more and more frequently in recent years: To whom does a story belong, and who has the right to tell it? But Jones makes a convincing argument for seeing Palmares as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas through the Middle Passage-and even, by extension, other victims of colonialism and racialized oppression-can lay claim. There exists, in other words, a certain sense of proprietary self-esteem associated with Palmares that could make it risky for a foreigner to take up the story. The Brazilian government has also created the Palmares Foundation, charged with promoting black pride and cultural awareness, and in 2018 the Palmares period figured prominently in an exhibition called “Afro-Atlantic Histories” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The Palmares episode is a cornerstone of Afro-Brazilian pride and identity-akin to Masada for Jews or the Battle of Chapultepec for Mexicans-and November 20, the date the last leader of Palmares was killed and his head stuck on a pike to be paraded through the streets of Recife, has since 2011 been a national holiday known as Black Consciousness Day. But beyond that danger, which Jones largely avoids, lies a larger issue. The composer Antônio Carlos Jobim was fond of saying that “Brazil is not for beginners,” and there is no denying that something about the place makes it easy for bedazzled foreign newcomers to trip themselves up, as demonstrated by works as different as John Updike’s Brazil (1994) and Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land of the Future (1941). Palmares is an audacious work, and on multiple levels. So in writing a novel called Palmares, Gayl Jones, recognized since the 1970s as one of America’s most important black writers, is breaking new literary ground and performing a laudable act of historical redemption. Yet the Quilombo dos Palmares, as it is known in Portuguese-the fugitive haven of Palmares-remains largely unknown and understudied in the English-speaking world, despite the increasing attention paid in recent years to similar examples of slave resistance in the southern United States, such as the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, and in the Caribbean. In longevity combined with size, Palmares is thus probably the most spectacular example in the New World of marronage, the term scholars apply to enslaved people fleeing their servitude and creating their own settlements in isolated or hidden places. Throughout the 1600s Portuguese colonial authorities, rightly fearing that Palmares was becoming both a threat to their hegemony and a beacon to those still enslaved, sent one expeditionary force after another to try to eradicate the community, but they succeeded only after more than a century of effort, in 1695. By the middle of the seventeenth century the population of Palmares is estimated to have exceeded 20,000-at a time when Rio de Janeiro had only 7,000 inhabitants. In the lush uplands of what was then the Captaincy of Pernambuco, they established clusters of villages, fortified them with palisades, created a polity of their own based on African models, and named it Palmares, after the palm trees that grew in profusion there. During the last decades of the sixteenth century, enslaved Africans escaping from sugar plantations began to congregate deep in the untracked interior of northeastern Brazil.