The Well That Wept Blood

Abstract

Abstract This article uses the oral myth of a blood-weeping water well from a small city in the Amazon River to discuss the origins and the significance of haunted waterscapes for Black Amazonians. According to this myth, a well that still exists on the lands of an ancient sugar plantation weeps blood to mourn the slaves whose bodies were carelessly thrown there after a life of exploitation and abuse. The article tracks the history of the myth by interrogating its Indigenous substrate, its arrival to Amazonia in the nineteenth century thanks to Bantu-speaking enslaved Africans, and its additional twenty-first-century changes in a context of post–military dictatorship Black rural mobilization. It points to the centrality of haunted waterscapes and slave ghostlore in present-day processes of identity building and Black mobilization in Amazonia (Brazil), and highlights the necessity to study analog processes across the African diaspora in the Americas.