My name is Angelina.
When I close my eyes, the memories of those early years come back to me clearly — the farm in São Paulo, the sun-baked earth, the smell of damp soil after rain, the simple house that both sheltered us and tested us. It was there, in that landscape of toil and resilience, that the fierce spirit of survival that would define my whole life was forged.
My father, Valente Sanches, was born into crushing poverty. At six years old he was sent to live with his uncle, and his childhood ended that day. There were no toys, no schoolbooks — only tools, and the weight of work he was too young to carry. For his sweat he was given scraps of food and a corner of the house to sleep in. But even then, something hard was growing inside him — a hunger for dignity, for a life that belonged to him alone.
By twenty-two he had hardened into a man of skill and pride. One day he stood in front of his uncle and said it plainly.
“I am ready to manage a farm of my own,” he said. “I know what I am doing. Either pay me, or I leave.”
His uncle looked at him, surrounded by his own grown sons, and answered with cold indifference.
“Then go,” he said.
So my father went. With nothing but his own determination, he walked away from servitude toward whatever came next.
Years later he met my mother, and together they built a life. We became a small family — my father, my mother, my sister Rebecca, our grandfather, and me. We lived and worked on a sprawling farm owned by a wealthy Italian immigrant family. Their land stretched on forever — fields of green and gold, a river cutting through the middle of it, a grand farmhouse at the centre that reminded you, every day, who owned everything and who did not.
Our own house was far more modest — faded blue, with wooden windows and doors worn thin with age, cracks letting in both light and hardship. When the rains came we rushed to scatter pots and bowls across the floor to catch the steady drip from the roof. When the sandstorms swept through, fine grit invaded everything — our clothes, our food, even our dreams.
Inside, the house held just four rooms — a kitchen, a living room, two small sleeping quarters. The bathroom was outside, nothing more than a corner with a bowl and a cup for washing. The toilet was outside too — a wooden hut with a single hole in the ground. Crude. Simple. Unforgiving.
This was the world I was born into. A world of struggle, of survival, of spirit.
There was no electricity, no light at night, no television, no fridge. When the sun went down, life simply stopped. By half past six we were in bed, swallowed by darkness. We ate dinner by candlelight, the flames flickering against the cracked walls, throwing shadows that seemed bigger than the room itself.
My earliest memory is not one of laughter or safety. It is one of fear.
I was three years old, sitting in a metal tub with little fish shapes on the handles. What should have been an ordinary bath turned into something else. I refused to let my mother wash my hair — the soap was cheap and it burned my eyes like acid, and I would not let it happen. Her patience ran out with every refusal. Her voice grew harder, sharper.
And then, in her fury, she grabbed me. In one swift motion she forced my head under the water. I gasped, I choked, water filled my throat, and my tears were indistinguishable from the bathwater closing over me. My whole small body convulsed, fighting for air, and I could not understand what I had done to deserve it. It was my first lesson in fear, and I never forgot it.
My mother, Laura, carried a story written in sorrow long before I was born. Her bloodline carried a gift — a lineage of African healers, and my grandmother had been chosen to carry it forward. But what should have been a blessing became something else.
When her time came to inherit it, she turned away from it. Denied what ran in her own blood. And perhaps, in refusing it, she paid a price for that refusal.
The tragedy came quickly. At nineteen years old, reaching up to pluck an orange from a tree, a sharp spike pierced my grandmother’s hand. She developed tetanus after the injury, and within days she was gone.
My mother and her twin sister were four years old. Orphaned. Passed from relative to relative until they ended up in an orphanage. Eventually their uncle came back from the army and fought for legal custody of them both. He was a man respected and feared in equal measure — tall, severe, all discipline. He gave them a roof over their heads. He could not give them love.
That wound in my mother never healed. And I paid for it for most of my childhood.
It hardened into something that came out the only way it could — downward, onto us.
I was not an easy child. I bombarded my mother with questions that never seemed to run dry.
“Why does the sun follow me when I walk?” I would ask, again and again.
“Why do I have a shadow?”
“Why do I have to eat, and sleep, and… poo?”
Her answer was almost always the same — a sigh, her lips tightening, her head shaking slowly. But I never stopped. One morning, when I pushed her on why the sun and the moon never met, her composure finally cracked.
“It just is, okay?!” she screamed.
And yet, no matter how worn down she was, every single dawn she rose again before first light. She tended the animals — horses, pigs, dogs — lowering the bucket into the deep well, hauling the water up with her arms straining and sweat on her brow, pouring life back into creatures that depended entirely on her.
Then breakfast, then lunch, then the walk to the road with my sister Rebecca and me, waiting for the school bus under a punishing Brazilian sun. My legs were too small for the walk, so she carried me — her strength wearing down a little more each day, but never giving out completely.
The work never ended. Laundry beaten by hand against stone. Floors swept clean, only for the wind to dirty them again within the hour. Trips back to the well as the animals cried out with thirst. Her exhaustion was written plainly across her face, though she never once spoke of it.
Often she was left to carry all of it alone. The men of the family were gone for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, working other people’s land. Their absence left my mother the sole guardian of the house, the children, the animals — of survival itself. She became the pillar we all leaned on, even as the weight of it bent her back and tested her spirit.
And in those long stretches when the men were away, another shadow moved across the farms.
Word spread of a man drifting from one farm to the next, his mind twisted with violence. Nobody said his name if they could help it. He targeted the vulnerable — women left alone, children unprotected. Rape. Murder. He left both behind him wherever he went.
At night the women of our community gathered together in the main farmhouse, hushed and afraid, the children pulled close as the dark crept in. Five mothers and their children, pressed together, clutching 12-gauge shotguns with hands that trembled but did not let go. My mother’s voice stayed flat and certain through all of it: “Stay quiet. Stay hidden. Act as if no one is home.”
There were five women, their children, and shotguns held ready. I was too young to hold a gun. My job was to be silent and still. I was very bad at being silent and still ordinarily, but those nights I managed it. Fear is an excellent teacher of skills that nothing else can teach.
For months we lived like that — never knowing when he might come. Every creak of wood, every rustle of wind sent hearts racing. Every night stretched out into something that felt endless. At last, after what felt like forever, he was caught. Relief moved through the farms like a fragile breeze — though none of us forgot how close fear had lived to our door.
As the seasons turned, so did everything around us. The familiar warm breezes of Brazil gave way to a humidity that clung to everything like a wet blanket. And then came the sickness — a wave of illness that swept through the children of our region. I had been vaccinated, but it found me anyway. Measles took hold of me with a vengeance, a fever that climbed past forty degrees, a rash spreading from my feet to my tongue, itching and burning at once.
Outside, the rain poured without mercy, seeping in through the holes in our roof, turning the mud floor beneath us into a swamp. My mother fought for me — cold cloths pressed to my skin, prayers said aloud as if her voice alone could keep me tethered to this world. Help was six kilometres away, and our only transport was a donkey, useless in flooded ground.
My sister Rebecca never left my side. I remember her whispering through tears: “I’m so sorry to see you like this… but I’m here.”
Somehow — through herbal remedies, and luck, and whatever else holds a small body together when it shouldn’t — the fever broke. The rash faded. I survived. But the experience left its mark on more than my body.
After that brush with death, I began to feel something new. Something invisible, but undeniable. I was never quite alone anymore. An unseen presence followed me — watchful, comforting. I spoke to it the way you’d speak to anyone standing beside you, because to me, that was exactly what it was.
My mother would stare at me in horror. “Who are you talking to?” she would ask. And when I told her — who it was, what we had talked about — fear would cloud her face. She knew I was speaking to someone unseen. Maybe from the farm. Maybe from the house. Maybe a relative long dead.
Desperate, she began to pray over me, burning a seven-day candle in honour of my guardian angel. But to her terror, the candle melted down to nothing within minutes, as if some unseen force had consumed it whole.
Whispers began moving through our community. People called me a demonic child. My mother, frightened and ashamed, went looking for advice from other women who shared her beliefs, searching for some way to protect me from a power she did not understand.
The weight of that reputation settled onto my small shoulders and lit something rebellious in me. I refused to simply obey. Instead I threw the gate wide open and let loose every lie and dark tale my imagination could produce.
My family was horrified. For this, my mother punished me daily — cruel spankings that left welts and bruises on my skin.
As a child I hated her, and I dreaded every day, knowing another beating was waiting somewhere in it — belts, flip-flops, whatever was closest to her hand. One day, in a fit of rage, she ordered me to fetch the strongest branch I could find from a nearby tree. When I brought it back, she beat me with it until I was sobbing, deep red welts striping my arms and legs.
It was my grandfather who finally stepped in. His voice shook as he begged me to stop crying, afraid that if I didn’t, she would kill me. “Never let her see you break,” he told me. “She thrives on your tears. You must die standing up — don’t live on your knees.”
But the beatings continued, each one worse than the last. The belt cut into my skin until it bled. My mother taunted me, daring me to cry out. Through clenched teeth, through pain I had no name for yet, I spat back at her with everything I had: “No! Kill me now — or when I grow up, I will kill you!”
That moment cracked something between us as mother and daughter. A fracture that would shape us both for years.
The torment did not end when her hands grew tired. Even alone, voices haunted me. I could feel something lingering close, its presence heavy, suffocating. The more I heard them, the more anger and sorrow grew in me. I knew, somewhere underneath everything, that I did not belong in that place.
At five years old, I made my first attempt to end my life.
It wasn't a decision born of thought — I was five years old, and five-year-olds don't reason through despair the way adults do. It was simpler and more terrible than that. It was the body looking for an exit from pain it had no other tools to manage. The voices, the beatings, the weight of being called demonic in a community where that word carried real power — and underneath all of it, the deep confusion of a child who loved her mother and couldn't understand why that love was never, ever enough to protect her from that same mother's hands.
Against my mother’s warnings, I waded into the river, into currents far too strong for a child that size. I swam out toward the forbidden depths, wanting nothing more than to disappear. The water pulled me under, dragging me down toward silence — and then, out of nowhere, a piece of wood larger than my own body surfaced beneath me. It lifted me. Carried me. Pushed me back toward the riverbank.
Gasping, clinging to that strange piece of driftwood that had no business saving me, I felt nothing but despair. Why had I survived? Why had death refused me, too?
I lay on the bank with the river still audible behind me, mud against my cheek, the sun pressing down on my wet clothes. I did not feel grateful. That is the honest part that took me years to understand — a child that age who does not feel safe in the world does not experience survival as a gift. It felt, in that moment, like an extension of everything else that had happened to me. Even this I couldn't do right. Even the river sent me back.
It took decades to understand that the piece of wood was the answer to the question I hadn't yet learned to ask.
I stumbled home in tears, consumed by guilt and confusion. The relief of still being alive twisted almost immediately into a sharper, harder question, one that would follow me for years to come.
Why am I here, if all I feel is pain?