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The above passage was written by Thomas Ewbank, an English gentleman traveler who sojourned in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1850s, more than thirty years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil. On the occasion Ewbank describes, he had hiked alone and unarmed into the dense tropical forests of Santa Teresa, a mounded series of steeply rising and nearly inaccessible hills, to make sketches of the vistas there, which then, as today, offered unparalleled views of the “artificial world” below.
It is small wonder that both Ewbank and the “kind-hearted man” whom he met in the darkening woods sought, though for very different reasons, to escape from that world and to view it from afar. It was, by all accounts, one of enormous suffering, cruelty, voluptuous lethargy, absurd pageantry, and easy death. Foreign travelers who wrote about Rio were impressed not only by the natural splendors of the wilderness that hemmed the city but by the human bodies that clogged its elite parlors or, alternatively, those that ran, limped, and collapsed—and certainly despaired—along its narrow, muddy, and stinking streets.
“It is a principle with them to sit and rest as much as possible,” one traveler wrote of Rio’s listless elite. “With this view of life, they eat, sleep, keep their temper and grow fat. Calm and composed, quiet and noiseless” (Stewart 1856, 274) the bodies of the wealthy were pale and “very corpulent, from their living well and taking little exercise” (Gardner 1970, 4). Exceptions were made on holidays and Sundays when “in their best dresses, and in formal procession of two and two” (Gardner, 295) “some of the fattest ladies and gentlemen” (Ewbank 1856, 274) were to be seen promenading in Rio’s majestic parks and going to and from worship, followed by a retinue of liveried but barefoot house slaves. “I would . . . implore them to think,” one writer remarked, “of the evil slavery brings, not only to the Negroes but to themselves, not only to themselves but to their families and their posterity” (Graham 1824, 228).
Not far from these pampered settings, Rio’s auction houses sold “crockery- ware, old books, shoes, pickles, etc.” as well as “living beings.” “They were of every shade, from deep Angola jet to white or nearly white” (Ewbank 1856, 282, 283). “Rows of young creatures were sitting,” another writer observed, “their heads shaved, their bodies emaciated, and the marks of recent itch upon their skins” (Graham 1824, 227). The “anguish” of mothers who were “brought out, exposed, examined, and disposed of” was matched by weeping children, “obviously dreading to be torn away” (Ewbank 1856, 283). Others lay wasting from disease, hunger, and a gruesome journey across the Atlantic or the countryside, “evidently too sick to sit up” (Graham 1824, 227). Meanwhile, throughout the streets of the city, “coffee-bag carriers, their naked bodies reeking with oily sweat,” arrived from the outlying plantations, bearing on their backs their masters’ exportable products, while others, “tugging and hauling and pushing over the rough pavements heavily laden trucks and carts,” transported for their urban masters “an overload for an equal number of mules or horses” (Stewart 1856, 72). Those who rebelled were submitted to the “heaviest and cruelest instruments of torture . . . doubling the bodies of the victims into the most painful and unnatural positions” (Ewbank 1856, 438).
Suicide among the enslaved was rife, and many of those who fled from forced toil had, in fact, “reached the spirit land” (Ewbank 1856, 281). While the swollen wealthy dined on the best that the bustling city and fertile countryside could offer, slaves stuffed themselves with dirt (Koster 1817, 213) and were buried in shallow graves in the woods or simply thrown upon the wide, crescent-shaped beaches where dogs did “their work of abomination” (Graham 1824, 111).
Some, evidently, escaped from this fate and fled to the wilderness of Santa Teresa, the dense forest high above the city where Ewbank lost his way. There, they “harbor[ed] . . . and prowl[ed] for means to live” and slaked their thirst from the legendary waters of the Mae d’Agua River (Ewbank 1856, 428). They would have done so at, or close to, the site of the present-day community that I call Morro do Sangue Bom, a shantytown that clings precariously to the awkward tilt of Santa Teresa’s highest peak.1
Those who now live in Morro do Sangue Bom, most of whom are descendants of both urban and rural cativos, or captives, tell the tale that their hillside community was built upon the bones of slaves. My nine-year-old friend, Tiago, one of the first to tell me this simple and unembellished story, only shivered and said, “Who knows?” when I asked him if the garbage-strewn, windswept plateau on which we had gone walking might be haunted. Even now, Morro do Sangue Bom, despite its location in one of the world’s most densely populated cities, abuts a massive tropical forest. As Tiago’s elders knew, vicious gangsters and death squads sometimes dumped the bodies of their victims in the woods nearby. It was the violence and injustice in the world of the living rather than the spirits of the dead that most preoccupied the people of Morro do Sangue Bom.
The story may well be apocryphal. When I searched through various archives, looking for forgotten tales of Santa Teresa, I could find nothing that hinted at a cemetery of slaves. Given the careless lassitude with which deceased captives were apparently laid to their final rest, I had difficulty imagining that their masters would have had them carried so far, high into a place that held fear for so many. I like to believe that the rumored dead who lay underneath the soil of Morro do Sangue Bom were quilombolas, escaped slaves, who, while not entirely free, would have worked and lived for themselves and for each other, and buried their own with feeling and respect.
Outsiders still fear the morros, or hillside shantytowns, of Santa Teresa, populated as they supposedly are by what the district’s middle-class residents are apt to call marginais, or criminals. Like the man that Ewbank met in the woods, most of the people who are found there are grossly misjudged. Imagined from the outside as a den of thieves and dope peddlers, from the inside, Morro do Sangue Bom, and other communities like it, are working-class neighborhoods whose marginality is given less by the few criminals who prac- tice their trades there than by poverty and racism. The bones of history, as the story of the slave cemetery suggests, are partly buried but still close to the surface of everyday life. “Slavery has not ended,” Daniel, Tiago’s father, told me. “They used to beat us with the whip. Now they beat us with hunger.”
Although Daniel repeated this observation several times during the twenty months that I lived in Morro do Sangue Bom—usually after his wealthy clients failed to pay him for his labor—neither slavery nor racism were frequent topics of conversation there. This is one of the greatest puzzles of Brazil, what drew me to conduct ethnographic research in a favela, or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro: although racism is abundantly evident in Brazil’s bifurcated social structure, in the interactions that constitute everyday life for Brazilians of African descent, and in the derogatory ways that blackness is figured in speech, Brazil is renown throughout the world as a “racial democracy.” Neither Daniel nor his young son Tiago were deceived by this notion, but as a nationalist ideology, a cultural myth, and as a dream of how things ought to be, the force of democracia racial (racial democracy) is strong enough to muffle the impulse to talk—spontaneously, freely, explicitly—about the wounds of racism.
This book is about the ways in which a variety of urban Brazilians—particularly those of African descent—struggle with the meanings of skin color, race, and racism. These meanings lie at the center of Brazilian culture—culture conceived not as a monolithic product of uniform beliefs and practices, but as a site of contradiction, inequality, and discordance. Dreaming Equality approaches the ideology of racial democracy from the perspective of those who live in the shadow of its promises while experiencing its deceptions and betrayals.
Racial Democracy: Myth and Dream
Although the racial democracy thesis is far more than a literary construction, its codification is usually attributed to Gilberto Freyre, Brazil’s preeminent sociologist, historian, and novelist. First published in 1933, his best-known work, Casa Grande e Senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves, 1986), is arguably among the great masterpieces of Latin American literature. Throughout his long career, Freyre sought to construct what he called an “intimate history” of Brazil, and he defined that history as the product, above all, of the collision between, and blending of, European, Amerindian, and African cultures. Under the tutelage of Franz Boas at Columbia University, Freyre challenged the racist theories then current in Brazil and elsewhere, and through an artful mixture of historical research, more or less casual obser- vation, literary musing, and voluptuous prose, he defended the African contribution to Brazil’s culture and reconstituted the country as a democracia racial, or racial democracy.
Largely because the Moors of Africa had once conquered and ruled the Portuguese, Freyre argued, those who settled Brazil were, unlike their English counterparts to the north, relatively free of most onerous and distancing forms of racial prejudice. What Freyre typically described as a “lubricious” (if sometimes sadomasochistic) eroticism between Brazilian masters and their slaves was called to serve as both a metonym of and a metaphor for the uniquely harmonious and sensuous character of the nation.