All Those Women in One Woman.

In Palmares, Gayl Jones returns to formulations of silence and gender in a spiritual coming-of-age story that demands an expansion of scholarship on these recurring themes in her novels. Almeyda, another silent protagonist in Jones's oeuvre, becomes a woman while both her enslavement and fugitivity bring her across Brazilian landscapes to its largest quilombo. This paper examines two fugitive disguises in the novel that stage the complex links between Almeyda's silence, her gendered coming of age, and her diasporic storytelling. The framework of "silent stories" aims to explore the novel's productive paradox of silence alongside encounters with queer gender and sexuality that mark Almeyda's coming of age. As Almeyda becomes a woman, or perhaps many women, her stories embody gender possibility and paint silence as more than a restitutive and resistant strategy for those in the diaspora, but rather as a spiritual necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]