In the 1880s, a woman known by two names – a “25-year-old fula, missing her front teeth” – zigzagged between the coffee regions of the Paraíba Valley and the capital of the Brazilian Empire.Footnote ¹ Always itinerant, always seeking the freedom to come and go as she pleased, the free Benedicta Maria da Ilha (who was also the enslaved Ovídia) rambled from place to place, hiring out her domestic services and forging bonds with multiple protectors, who would later willingly defend her when she was “unjustly” imprisoned as a fugitive slave. In a peripatetic life that always circled back to the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, Benedicta/Ovídia experienced multiple flights, misadventures, and hairpin shifts in fortune. When she was finally captured and imprisoned at a slave trader’s house in a São Paulo coffee town, she presented authorities with a plausible story about her identity as a free, unencumbered young woman who earned her living as a domestic servant in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote ²

An extensive judicial complaint detailed Benedicta/Ovídia’s many comings and goings. In it, our protagonist presented a narrative – her own narrative – of an identity built around constant displacement. Yet meticulous subsequent investigations – which privileged the voices of her master, judicial authorities, and medical-legal experts – toppled this constructed identity, concluding that she was indeed Ovídia, a woman enslaved to Captain Fernando Pinheiro, a well-established resident of the Imperial capital.

Even thus unmasked, however, the free woman Beneticta opens an important window, through which we can apprehend the ways in which women on the borders of slavery and freedom constructed their identities during Brazil’s age of abolition.

This chapter unravels during the final years of slavery in the 1880s, a time marked by the widespread dislocation of people at various stages of liberation – slaves, fugitives, and the newly free – many of whom abandoned Brazil’s plantations en masse, seeking new social and geographic spaces in which to recommence their lives. Yet these processes of physical displacement were highly gendered. Men and women coming out of slavery clearly faced different social challenges. Among women, the path to autonomy had to be continuously negotiated within the private realm of domestic labor and explicit personal dependency.Footnote ³

This chapter builds upon a vast historiography. Over the last few decades, a continuous stream of new research has enriched our understanding of slavery’s rapid transformation during the abolition period, especially after the Free Womb Law of 1871 (which, among other things, legitimized slaves’ rights to claim freedom in Imperial courts of law). Through careful analysis of freedom suits, criminal records, and other legal documents, this historiography has brought into sharp focus slaves’ own agency in acquiring various forms of freedom, ultimately showing how enslaved peoples’ legal actions helped to delegitimize slavery itself. Drawing upon this perspective, this chapter seeks to recuperate the social practices, ways of life, and world visions that resided below the surface of the testimonials offered in Benedicta/Ovídia’s case.

These reconstructed life narratives – Benedicta’s and also Ovídia’s – reveal social identities established and divided in the complex borderlands between slavery and freedom. In comparing this young woman’s possible lives – as Benedicta and as Ovídia – the commonalities are striking. In cities such as Rio, enslaved and free Afro-descendant women were submitted to the same kinds of labor and social norms. The same commission houses often consigned their services, and even lack of pay did not differentiate them: as “Benedicta” repeatedly noted, even free women often worked without set salaries. Yet the Benedictas and Ovídias of the period diverged in one fundamental respect. Free women enjoyed the privilege of unimpeded displacement, which allowed them to zealously defend more autonomous familiar and affective spaces. Enslaved women, by contrast, felt the full weight of their owners’ control in their daily comings and goings. Thus, in the carefully constructed narrative of Benedicta’s life as a free woman, she constantly swapped jobs and occupations, always in defense of her autonomy; indeed, constant movement appears to have been the defining mark of a life lived in freedom. Her owner, Captain Pinheiro, reinforced the strategic importance of unimpeded displacement from the opposite perspective, seeking to establish his ownership and authority by affirming his careful control over Ovídia’s daily life, even when she was working as a wet nurse or a servant-for-hire.

Benedicta’s Story: A Free Woman Falls Victim to a “Horrendous Crime”

On April 15, 1880, Benedicta Maria da Ilha sent an anguished plea to her former employer and protector, Bráulio Muniz Dias da Cruz. Muniz was police delegate in the Paraíba Valley city of São José dos Campos and had previously held the same post in the nearby city of Cachoeira, where he had employed Benedicta as a servant for a few months in 1879.Footnote ⁴ The letter – likely penned by a sympathetic passer-by, as Benedicta was illiterate – was a desperate plea born of desperate circumstances. Benedicta, whom Muniz knew as a free woman, had been taken captive in a slave convoy under the command of Hermínio José Cardoso. The convoy had left Rio de Janeiro in mid-1880 and was now slowly snaking through the Paraíba Valley, displaying its human wares for sale. After a formal salutation, the letter read:

Other letters, always penned and mailed by unknown parties dismayed by the young woman’s unjust imprisonment, had already reached Delegate Muniz from Rio de Janeiro, Barra Mansa, and Cachoeira. Muniz had not hesitated in taking action: upon learning of Benedicta’s captivity, he wrote directly to the Imperial chief of police and to the police delegates of all the other relevant cities. Muniz demanded immediate investigation and forceful measures against “reducing a free person to bondage, one of the most horrendous of crimes.”Footnote ⁶ Upon receipt of the last letter, Muniz went further, travelling to the city of Taubaté determined to do whatever necessary to “free this unhappy woman from the claws of these vultures.”Footnote ⁷

Delegate Muniz’s energetic measures added to a chorus of complaints about the illegal enslavement. In her initial deposition, Benedicta testified that her troubles had begun in Rio de Janeiro, when she agreed one day to accompany a clerk to the home of Capitão Fernando Pinheiro da Silva Moraes. Moraes ran a business commissioning the services of slaves and free workers, and Benedicta hoped to claim back wages that he owed her.Footnote ⁸ Instead, she found herself in a terrible predicament. As soon as she entered Pinheiro’s home, he asked: “What is your real name?”Footnote ⁹ She responded: “Benedicta Maria Albina da Ilha.” The Captain did not seem to like her answer, declaring that

Benedicta was then imprisoned and sent to the slave convoy, which traveled by train to various cities in the Paraíba Valley, displaying its “merchandise” to buyers in private homes. In Taubaté, she had been impounded with other slaves in Manoel Silveira Maciel’s house, where she awaited a buyer disposed to spend one conto and 200$000 réis on a young housemaid, expert in laundry and ironing, whose race or color was alternately described as crioula, parda, cabra, and fula.Footnote ¹¹

Benedicta’s captors made every imaginable threat and kept her under strict vigilance. All the same, as the many letters to Delegate Muniz attested, she always managed to find strangers willing to help. Even Sabino, a slave-for-hire whom Cardoso had contracted to discipline the slaves in his convoy, ended up allowing her certain liberties, which she used to spread word about her predicament wherever she went. Sabino’s hard-hitting deposition suggested that he himself had been convinced by Benedicta’s arguments. Identifying himself as thirty-six-year-old unmarried cook, born in the state of Sergipe, Sabino described his first encounter with Benedicta:

Sabino testified that the “girl” always told him that “she was free and was named Benedicta … allegations she repeated throughout the journey from Rio de Janeiro to this city.” In one of the cities where the convoy stopped, Benedicta had encountered some old acquaintances, who found it odd to see her among slaves for sale. It was from them that Benedicta learned Delegate Muniz’s whereabouts.Footnote ¹²

After the initial complaint, Benedicta was transferred to judicial custody and the official inquiry began. All of the witnesses corroborated Benedicta’s statements. Delegate Muniz, Benedicta’s protector, provided especially interesting and influential testimony. Muniz stated that he had first met Benedicta when he was suddenly called to Cachoeira’s train station in October or November of 1879. There, he encountered a young woman who had been detained by the local station chief because she had disembarked in Cachoeira (in São Paulo province), even though she held a ticket to Boa Vista (in the Rio de Janeiro district of Resende). For most travelers, this might have been understood as a simple distracted mistake. But Benedicta’s appearance rendered her error highly suspicious, and the station chief immediately surmised that she was a slave on the run.

By the 1880s, railroads had considerably expanded the prospects of enslaved runaways: trains themselves facilitated quick escape, and train stations were important spaces to collect information and establish valuable contacts. Vigilance of people who “looked suspicious” intensified accordingly: at times, capitães do mato (bounty hunters) lurked in train stations and other public places, on the lookout for those whose manner, color, or social vulnerability might indicate they were fugitives.Footnote ¹³ Benedicta did have at least some money – she had purchased a ticket – and she was respectably dressed in a black dress and shoes (a mark of freedom in much of nineteenth-century Brazil). Nonetheless, her parda skin colour and missing front teeth attracted attention, forcing Benedicta to constantly prove her freedom. Because of her liminal physical appearance, Benedicta was forced to fill in the gaps in her social identity with whatever elements she could attain: a passport, freedom papers, personal references, and personal protection from well-established free families or individuals.Footnote ¹⁴

Confronted by the station chief’s suspicion in Cachoeira, Delegate Muniz interrogated Benedicta and conducted a thorough investigation in her native region. He concluded that she was free. Still, the relationship he established with her was highly asymmetrical. He came to employ her as a maid but described his payment to her – 9$000 réis that Benedicta herself referred to as salary – as “charitable aid.” He also refused to entrust Benedicta with the documents that supposedly proved her identity as a free woman, giving her only a passport, a document that slaves – but not free people – were required to carry when moving about in public. With seemingly the best of intentions, aimed at shielding a vulnerable person who could easily become the target of all kinds of swindles and abuses, Muniz nonetheless offered Benedicta protection rather than autonomy. As a poor, single woman, lacking family ties and circulating in unfamiliar environments, Benedicta needed to avail herself of personal protection and favors, especially those of men who could offer her safety as she moved about through public space. All women – free, freed, or enslaved – had to tread the path to autonomy with particular care.

For enslaved women – young or not so young – the decade of abolition offered new possibilities, just as it did for other captives. Yet women and their children were a minority among fugitive slaves, rural migrants, and quilombolas (maroons). Even in flight, women’s space for maneuver was mostly molded in the private sphere of domestic service, which was always understood not as work but rather as an exchange of favors and loving care.Footnote ¹⁵ For free and enslaved women alike, the paths to autonomy were delimited by restrictive gender norms, which mostly limited poor women’s subsistence strategies to the domestic sphere.

Not that Benedicta was indifferent to her juridical status; her entire police complaint illustrates the force, daring, bravery, and cold-bloodedness with which she confronted authorities, slave traffickers, her supposed owner, and all manner of witnesses. In every deposition, she insisted that her real name was Benedicta Maria Albina da Ilha – single, twenty-five years old, born in the city of São José do Príncipe to Albina da Ilha and her legitimate husband Manoel da Ilha (or Manoel Bagre), a fisherman. Her parents were “still alive, and like her aunt, they were never enslaved.”Footnote ¹⁶ She made a living as a domestic servant-for-hire.

These same depositions allow us to retrace Benedicta’s life trajectory. She began life on a farmstead called Macundum, in São José do Príncipe, where her family lived and worked as agregados (dependents). The owner of the sítio (plantation) was Benedicta’s godfather, and she was raised in her godmother’s house. Finally, at twelve – that is, in 1867 – she had gone to Rio de Janeiro, where she began to support herself as a servant-for-hire. Her life from that point forward was precarious and insecure, as she zigzagged from one workplace to another. After arriving in Rio, she hired herself out to D. Elisa, wife of Bento Maria da Cruz; from there, she passed through six homes, schools, and commission houses before employing herself in 1876 at the home of Fernando Pinheiro, on the Rua do Príncipe dos Cajueiros.Footnote ¹⁷ Pinheiro, however, abused his authority, renting her out to various other families under the pretense that she was enslaved. Benedicta testified that she always left such placements – as a free person she would never permit herself to be treated as a slave – but Pinheiro never paid her a salary, alleging that he was saving money for her in a special account. Finally, she and Pinheiro had a falling out; when she decided to leave, he allegedly told her that “the door was open.”

In those circumstances, Benedicta claimed to have left Pinheiro’s house, spending the night in the São Cristóvão railway station on her way to a “party” near the Boa Vista railway station. Confused, she instead left the train at Cachoeira, where Delegate Muniz had interrogated her and taken her in. There she remained for two months, waiting for her freedom papers. With only a passport and a bit of money, Benedicta then returned to Rio, where she hired herself out to Fuão Manuel’s commissioning agency, at Rua da Conceição 42. The agency rented her services to a judicial official, but she soon returned.

In repeatedly seeking out commissioning agencies that rented out the services of slaves and poor workers, Benedicta reiterated the choices of many other poor women, free and enslaved, who often resorted to such firms – intermediaries in the labor markets for wet nurses and other domestic employees – in the 1870s and 1880s. Increasing attempts to control “rented” domestic servants – and especially wet nurses – theoretically assured the moral and hygienic fitness of the wet nurses and maids who would infiltrate their clients’ day-to-day family lives.Footnote ¹⁸

In the name of sanitary regulation, Rio’s domestic workers increasingly endured bodily examinations, discriminatory medical-racial classification, and close tracking of their physical movements and employment arrangements. By contrast, domestic workers created their own social worlds in Rio’s streets, tenements, zungus (cheap rooming-houses), casas de fortuna (centers of fortune telling and other mystical practices), and other oblique spaces. Selling quitandas (homemade delicacies), renting out rooms, sharing secrets and religious rites, earning money, experiencing love and flight, raising children or entrusting them to others of their own choosing – these were the key elements of the lives that free, freed, and enslaved women engaged in against the backlight of the whitened, sanitized city imagined by urban authorities and systemized in medical-sanitary discourse. The world of the streets – Carioca Square, Rocio, the Campo de Santana, and so many other spaces inhabited by slaves and other marginalized people in the 1880s – allowed washerwomen, wet nurses, and other impoverished women such as Benedicta Maria da Ilha/Ovídia to survive in the slave city’s hostile environment.Footnote ¹⁹

Benedicta sometimes chose to work as a laundress, enjoying relative freedom of movement among the city’s public fountains and laundry basins; other witnesses would later assert that she also labored occasionally as a wet nurse, an occupation associated with slavery and restricted movement. Regardless, she seems to have developed strategies to preserve some degree of personal autonomy; thus we can understand her constant flights, displacements, and ongoing written and personal recourse to acquaintances, relatives, lovers, and friends.

Yet, as it turned out, Benedicta’s strategies could not prolong her freedom indefinitely. After returning to Rio in 1879, Benedicta had her fateful reencounter with Fernando Pinheiro. He then sent a clerk to fetch her, either on the promise of back pay or on the ruse that Benedicta’s sister had arrived in Rio and was staying with one of their aunts in Rocio Pequeno 111. But when she arrived at the Largo de Carioca, in central Rio, Pinheiro – aided by his slave Olavo – grabbed her by the collar. And thus began the saga that gave rise to Delegate Muniz’s indignant inquiry. In her testimony – given in Pinheiro and Cardoso’s presence, with cold-blooded decisiveness – Benedita denied that she had ever had a child or worked as a wet nurse as the captain had declared in his testimony and insisted that “she knew Pinheiro as her amo [master] but never as her owner, and he only decided to present himself as such a short time ago.”Footnote ²⁰

Living by favor in strange lands and strangers’ homes, hiring herself out as a domestic servant, jumping constantly from one job to another, lacking a secure hearth or salary, and in constant fear of enslavement, Benedicta’s existence might seem provisional and insecure, scarcely distinguishable from urban slavery. Yet even this small degree of provisional freedom was enough for Benedicta to risk everything, incessantly confronting the powerful men who sought to block her path.

There was one last person, however, whom she had yet to confront: Ovídia, a slave woman.

The Same Story in the Master’s Words: “Ovídia, a Slave I Wish to Sell, Adroit but Prone to Running Away”

Accused of criminally enslaving a free person, Captain Fernando Pinheiro da Silva Morais was forced to respond to public authorities in the city of Taubaté under penalty of conviction under the terms of Article 179 of the Imperial Criminal Code.Footnote ²¹ In his deposition, Pinheiro stated that in January 1878 he had purchased a seventeen-year-old slave named Ovídia, a native of São João do Príncipe, from Francisco Picão. As proof, Pinheiro attached a copy of the purchase deed, which in fact attested the purchase of a “17-year-old crioula, single and apt for domestic work” for one conto de réis.Footnote ²² Accordingly, Ovídia/Benedicta was probably twenty-one years old when the case unfolded.

In repeated depositions, Captain Pinheiro stated that, between January 1878 and August 1879, Ovídia had behaved extremely well and was always rented to third parties. After a certain point thereafter, however, she became insubordinate and began to run away incessantly, and Pinheiro decided to sell her away from Rio. What could have suddenly transformed an “adroit,” well-behaved young slave into an inveterate runaway, who lied and spurned discipline to the point where her master wished to banish her from the city?

Ovídia’s alleged master himself provided a possible explanation. Pinheiro affirmed that for a time Ovídia had been rented out as a wet nurse to a certain “Lucas” and that she had also breastfed one of Pinheiro’s own children until white marks on her neck raised suspicions about her health.Footnote ²³ From then on, Ovídia no longer worked as a wet nurse. Pinheiro said nothing – not a word – about the child that Ovídia must have given birth to; the baby is literally absent from the record. Where might she or he be? Had they been forcibly separated at birth? Was the child stillborn? Had the newborn been given away or placed in the Santa Casa de Misericordia so that Ovídia could work as a wet nurse? The Free Womb Law (1871) would not have permitted the child to be sold as a slave, although there are indications that mothers and ingênuos (children born free to slave mothers) were sometimes sold together, on the promise of the services the child might provide as a ward before attaining maturity and full freedom.Footnote ²⁴

As Maria Lúcia Mott and Miriam Moreira Leite have suggested, a history of abandoned enslaved children was the necessary corollary of the demand for wet nursing, which created an impressive rental market for postpartum enslaved women in Brazil until baby bottles came into widespread use in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ The “baby wheels” of Catholic orphanages frequently received the children who might have been forcibly removed from enslaved wet nurses, whose masters believed that the babies would impede the women’s ability to nurse other children.Footnote ²⁶ Ironically, those same orphanages themselves employed enslaved women, who – with or without their own babies – had to breastfeed far more abandoned children than their undernourished bodies could sustain.Footnote ²⁷ The high mortality rates that decimated such children throughout the nineteenth century would seem to confirm this interpretation.Footnote ²⁸ Ovídia and her child may have been part of that history.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, nascent hygienic discourses increasingly vilified wet nurses as dangerous vectors of contagious disease as well as morally corrupted practitioners of ignorant and barbarous habits. This justified the piecemeal prohibition of wet nursing, which could have occurred in Ovídia’s case when Pinheiro began to worry about her health.Footnote ²⁹

If Ovídia was no longer allowed to nurse a white child, could she still have breastfed her own baby? How had the young mother reacted when she was separated from her child? Who was the father? Did the birth or separation explain her constant flights? Did the child live in Rio, and was that why Ovídia always returned there?

The records’ opacity in relation to Ovídia’s child stands out. Witnesses say nothing, and the authorities display a visible indifference to the motives or consequences of the separation. Not a word indicates the child’s fate or even directly acknowledges his or her existence. We only know that Ovídia is a mother because of two indirect clues. First, Pinheiro mentioned that Ovídia served as a wet nurse, though he did not link her change in behavior to the birth of a baby or her separation from the child. Secondly, Benedicta herself denied that she had ever had children, which led Pinheiro to affirm the contrary. This contradiction eventually became a crucial point of evidence in the investigation: to resolve it, two medical specialists submitted Benedicta/Ovídia to a gynecological exam, the results of which confirmed her legal identity. By certifying that the young woman had given birth, the legal-medical procedure put to rest her existence as Benedicta Maria Albina da Ilha.Footnote ³⁰

Despite its unhappy end, Benedicta’s biography embodies the ambivalence of her age. In the eyes of her contemporaries – as in ours – the enslaved Ovídia assumed Benedicta’s voice to tell a plausible story about the border between slavery and freedom. In an era infused with the bitter waning conflicts of slavery and shaped by the webs of dependency and exclusion that enveloped women emerging from captivity, Benedita’s credibility swayed on the fine line that separated slavery and freedom.

Half-Sisters: Benedicta and Ovídia Meet on the Threshold of Abolition

Benedicta – variously described as parda, cabra, fula, crioula, or negra – was so sure in her statements, and witnesses were so decisive in describing their time with her as she lamented her fate on the slave convoy or recounted her story through the bars of her prison cell, that it is difficult for a reader to emerge unconvinced. Yet the investigation undertaken in her native São João do Príncipe unveiled another reality.

As their inquiries deepened, the authorities found another Benedicta – Benedicta do Espirito Santo, a twenty-six-year-old laundress and seamstress born in Mato-Dentro (a small hamlet on the outskirts of São João do Prínciple) to a man named Manoel Moreno, or Manoel da Ilha, and his wife Albina. This new Benedicta affirmed in a certified letter that her godparents were the same as those whom the other Benedicta had named as her own. She also claimed to know Ovídia: the two had lived together under the roof of José Antonio de Medeiros and his common-law wife, the Benedictas’ godmother Maria Benedicta de Sampaio. When Medeiros died, the godmother – Maria Benedicta – inherited the house, but Ovídia was given to their daughter Júlia, an heir to the estate. Júlia married a man named João Baptista Picão, who then moved to Rio and sold Ovídia.

Maria Benedicta, along with the godparents and various plantation owners and residents who still lived in the Vila of São João do Príncipe, provided testimony that finally clarified the mystery of Benedicta’s double identities. There was a young woman named Benedicta. But she has never left the Vila.Footnote ³¹

Was Benedicta Maria Albina da Ilha’s story thus just a sham? A fake identity taken on by Ovídia in order to pass as free? How had Ovídia and Benedicta developed a relationship so close that Ovídia could convincingly take Benedicta’s identity as her own?

Jailed in Taubaté, Benedicta regaled her jailers and passers-by with her story: intent on resolving the intricate mystery, Tabuaté’s judge convoked the jailers as witnesses. One, Ignacio Marcos do Amaral Sobrinho, placed the final piece in the puzzle. He testified that he and Tabuaté’s subdelegate happened to be near the jail’s barred window one day as a man named Eduardo Rosa conversed with Benedicta/Ovídia. When asked, Rosa stated:

Yet in a later conversation through the same jail window, Benedicta/Ovídia offered a different version of the facts; asked the same question, she now responded that she was free, and the child of free parents, and that she had only said she was Ovídia before because she was forced to do so by her false owner.

Benedicta had been born in the region with the greatest concentration of slaves in the Rio de Janeiro portion of the Paraíba Valley: the family Souza Breves alone held an unbelievable 6,000 people. Yet Benedicta/Ovídia emerged in a context of small-scale slave ownership.Footnote ³³ In that social environment, both Benedicta and Ovídia likely moved in a world where enslaved, freed, and free people intermingled without constraint.

Benedicta and Ovídia shared a father – the poor fisherman Manoel da Ilha, Manoel Moreno or Bagre, or simply Manoel – and to a certain extent a common destiny. They grew up together as dependents in their godparents’ house, where their shelter entailed service and favors. Despite their father’s poverty, Benedicta do Espírito Santo enjoyed certain advantages: she received her godmother’s name and protection, and she could remain in the hamlet where she was born, maintaining the social ties – and the social subordination – she had known since childhood. Ovídia, daughter of the enslaved Feliciana, also bore the burden of growing up in a non-natal household, but it was magnified by the mark of precariousness. When her master died and his heir married, she endured sale and subjection as a slave-for-hire with no certain home, circulating hither and thither, entirely dependent on the needs of others.

Amidst this life of constant displacement, Ovídia conceived a child, whom she could not keep. In her comings and goings, Ovídia tried constantly to find her people. In Boa Vista she sought her mother, who lived nearby; in Rio de Janeiro she said she needed to find her aunt, her niece, or her sister. Above all, despite the risks, Ovídia insisted in going back to the Imperial capital. Even after Muniz granted her a passport, she did not seek out a new path and consolidate her escape as Benedicta Maria Albina da Ilha. Instead she returned to Rio and the risk of re-enslavement. This suggests that, for Ovídia, freedom did not translate into the abstract liberty to come and go as she pleased but rather the chance to maintain and sustain her family and emotional ties. Where were Ovídia’s partner and child? It was perhaps to them that she always wished to return.

Benedicta and Ovídia: Sisters in Freedom?

The court records that trace Benedicta/Ovídia’s trajectory narrate the final years of slavery in Rio and the Paraíba Valley from the perspective of a young, vulnerable woman. In reading them, a historian is forced to grapple with the many complex scenarios that rendered abolition in the Brazilian Southeast an extremely ambivalent, nebulous, and even disorienting social process. For Benedicta/Ovídia, the decade of abolition did not clarify the frontiers of slavery and freedom; on the contrary, it effaced them, placing the question of freedom on an entirely different plane. The lives of free or freed women tested the limits of an imprecise liberty, which were molded and stretched according to each individual’s capacity to mobilize favor and protection. Racialized practices of state sanitary control countervailed, armed with new discourses and policies designed to recreate subservience among the free women who sought to emerge from slavery.

Benedicta do Espírito Santo and Ovídia were sisters, but their fates diverged under slavery – so much so that Benedicta do Espirito Santo, perhaps in defense of her own free status, never once mentioned the intimate ties that bound the two women. But in abolition’s wake, their lots would again converge. Women emerging from slavery or its borderlands would negotiate their freedom in the private worlds of kitchens, wash bins, and backyards, where women – married and single alike – carried out the endless tasks of domestic labor: nursing and caring for babies and small children, cooking, telling stories, singing lullabies, always far from their own sons and daughters. Lodged anywhere they would fit – in cramped, unhealthy alcoves, pantries, or improvised shacks – the Benedictas and Ovídias of Brazil’s “post-abolition” period remained almost invisible, both to their contemporaries and to modern historians.

Body as Identity: Marks, Features, Diseases

From beginning to end, the court records of Benedicta/Ovídia’s arrest sought to establish her true identity. The first question was one of property: who owned her? Could Benedicta/Ovídia dispose of her own body, moving and acting freely as an individual? Was her body another person’s property? Or was Benedicta/Ovídia’s bodily agency limited, allowing her to act reflexively while constricting her ability to live as a full social being? The underlying juridical question takes us to the heart of discussions of slavery and its ambiguities. Enslaved people’s duality – as human beings and as property – always generated formally irresolvable juridical-philosophical questions, leaving unsettled the extent to which enslaved people could exercise will, agency, and consent. Such issues were especially problematic in criminal cases involving slaves.Footnote ³⁴ Brazil’s Imperial Criminal Code, from its inception, crystallized this ambivalence. In defining slaves as potential criminals, capable of free will, the law defined them as “persons.” Yet, as legal property, slaves were by definition entirely subject to the wills of others. This flagrant contradiction was constitutive of modern slavery, though it rarely impeded the social relations that upheld Brazilian slavocracy.Footnote ³⁵

The Free Womb Law of 1871, which granted enslaved people the right to possess savings and negotiate their freedom, fractured slavery’s foundations. Throughout the 1880s, challenges to slavery’s legitimacy intensified, training a spotlight on the contradictions of rigid juridical definitions. This, combined with a sharp increase in slave flight and freedpersons’ displacement, evacuated slavery’s normative underpinnings, leaving only a strict and minimalist legal mandate.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, in Taubaté, police and judiciary authorities recognized their obligation to protect any property rights that might have pertained to Benedicta/Ovídia’s alleged master, but they also did everything in their power to steer the case in the opposite direction.

Because she was a woman as well as a slave, Benedicta/Ovídia faced distinct social and juridical impediments in her quest to possess and control her own body. As a woman, she shared with her free and freed sisters countless dangers and social restrictions: sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, the dangers of childbirth, and constant vigilance and constriction. As a slave, however, she bore a burden that distinguished her from the wider circle of women: her race and legal condition rendered her and her body a locus of and justification for sexual transgression.

The nineteenth century imposed a set of norms that controlled – or tried to control – women’s social and physical autonomy in order to concentrate and control family property. From the 1860s forward, lawyers and jurists began to formulate their reasoning about sexual crimes in new ways, substituting older notions of patriarchal honor (in which women’s virtue was a family possession) with visions centered on women’s individual integrity. The belief that women’s bodies constituted social capital subject to collective control nonetheless persisted, especially in new medical and hygienist discourses that idealized wifely or motherly domesticity and virtue.Footnote ³⁷

Enslaved women, however, faced a different reality. To start with, the dominant moral codes did not extend to slaves. Reproduction was generally considered desirable (depending of course on economic circumstances, the type of slavery, and the owner’s profile). Enslaved women’s sexuality did not transgress virginity taboos; it did not result in socially recognized paternal responsibilities; and it did not impact inheritance. From the slaveowners’ perspective, enslaved offspring reproduced the workforce and could generate significant profit, even after the Free Womb Law. For masters like Benedicta/Ovídia’s, who lucratively leased their slaves as wet nurses in Brazil’s nineteenth-century cities, full-term pregnancies were a sine qua non.Footnote ³⁸

If enslaved women sometimes enjoyed more sexual liberty than free women, that liberty was infused with the constant danger of violence – and especially sexual violence. Rapes committed by masters were not considered crimes, because the right of property prevailed over all considerations, regardless of the victim’s age, civil status, or physical condition.

This same logic, by which a master’s right to own and use an enslaved body superseded a slave’s right to bodily integrity, applied in cases of prostitution. From the 1870s forward, thanks to a campaign carried out by Rio Judge and Police Delegate José Miguel de Tavares, the practice of slave prostitution was widely recognized as abhorrent. But Rio had no laws or regulations prohibiting prostitution, and no legal impediment prevented owners from sexually exploiting their slaves through prostitution.Footnote ³⁹ While humanitarian reform campaigns like Dr. Tavares’ – which sought to punish the men and women involved in slave sex trafficking by manumitting the prostituted slaves – had significant social impact, they did not result in jurisprudence that limited seigneurial power over enslaved bodies.

Once more, courts found themselves confronted with a nearly unresolvable contradiction. Consolidated jurisprudence sanctioned property rights over enslaved bodies and their sexuality. But those principles clashed both with laws that protected women from sexual attack and with dominant understandings of honor and morality.Footnote ⁴⁰ To intensify the contradiction, new racial ideas involving Afro-descendant irrationality and impulsivity had begun to slip into debates about slavery’s weakening hold. Such ideas were evoked fluidly by lettered observers and manifest in rapidly shifting social norms and practices.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet in the midst of this flux, observers unanimously held that women – and especially Black and enslaved women – had to be controlled. Thus during the 1880s, when Benedicta/Ovídia confronted jurists, slave dealers, her master, and his witnesses in the courts of law, the freedom she struggled for would still have afforded her only limited bodily autonomy.

The dilemma of Benedicta’s legal status – whether she should be classified as free or enslaved – was compounded by the ambiguities of a society that had not yet developed classificatory tools capable of defining juridical personhood more generally. In the 1880s, when slavery still reigned and masses of freed and conditionally liberated people abounded, official social classifications and notarial records could be treacherously fluid and dependent on older forms of social recognition.Footnote ⁴²

Traditional societies did, of course, take a strong interest in controlling their populations. If the notorious case of Martin Guerre awakens us to the incredible feats of an ingenious imposter who successfully impersonated a rich agriculturalist in both business dealings and the matrimonial bed, we must also recall that his deception was entirely undone after three or four months, due largely to a careful investigation of his identity.Footnote ⁴³ Still, governments seem to have taken special care in supervising and scrutinizing the mobility of women, whose cold and fluid makeup – according to fashionable Galenic theories – predisposed them to deceit.Footnote ⁴⁴

In Brazil, private and public strategies of control coexisted through the end of slavery. Faced with the challenge of accurately identifying Benedicta/Ovídia, judicial authorities resorted to divergent identificatory repertoires, blending traditional procedures – which depended on scars, birthmarks, and physical appearance – with modern techniques such as the medical-legal exam.

Just as sanitarist discourses regarding childbirth, childcare, and breastfeeding eventually became the only legitimate source of “rational” healthcare practice, so medical-legal examinations allowed male doctors to appropriate areas of expertise previously dominated by women. Medical-legal examinations, which replaced those traditionally performed by midwives (both medically trained and popular), were highly invasive and permeated by masculine worldviews and scientific racism.Footnote ⁴⁵ By usurping private procedures that women already experienced as shameful, men who carried out gynecological exams and described their findings in impenetrable technical terms demonstrated how medical-juridical practices helped define racialized forms of eugenic knowledge that would shape sanitary discourse at the turn of the twentieth century.

Benedicta/Ovídia’s legal-medical examination aimed to determine if she had ever been pregnant and if she had carried a pregnancy to term – which is to say it was yet another attempt to establish her true identity. In the judicial records, amidst the juridical queries and cryptic technical vocabulary, one can discern warnings about the unruly sexual life of a young woman with no name, no family, no master, and no certain home, whose very skin was an emblem of social inferiority.

Seen through the eyes of judicial authorities, Benedicta/Ovídia’s judicial record depicted a body that reneged both work and proper identification. For an Afro-descendant woman, whose social status oscillated between slavery and social degradation, even fragmentary evidence was sufficient to point toward such a conclusion: sexuality outside of marriage, a pregnancy that failed to produce a family, the marks of diseases transmitted through breastfeeding, a constant, rootless mobility. In laying claim to her own body and its story, Benedicta/Ovídia denied outsiders that interpretive power, even if many dimensions of her life remain obscure.

Introduction

This chapter tells the stories of three young people, living on the cusp of freedom during Brazil’s last decade of slavery. Anísia, thirteen in 1883, was born free to a mother who later married an enslaved man.Footnote ¹ Guilherme, twenty in 1886, was legal property until Brazil’s final abolition but sought his own freedom through negotiation, refusal, and flight.Footnote ² Esperança, fourteen in 1883, was born enslaved and grew up manumitted but unfree, raised and taught letters by the same woman who had sold her mother south.Footnote ³

Anísia, Guilherme, and Esperança all suffered horrific physical and symbolic violence, perpetuated by people who elsewhere donned the mantle of benevolent emancipation. Their stories unveil the malleability of Brazilian slavery in its last gasp but also place in sharp relief the limitations and contradictions of Brazilian freedom.Footnote ⁴ In Recife, as in much of Brazil, the jagged legal border between captivity and manumission marked territory riddled with private power and violence. What did legal emancipation mean when private and corporatist logics contested and controlled the law? How did intimacy structure exploitation, within and outside slavery’s bonds? How did dependency open avenues for advancement even as it cemented inequality? How did the stigma of slavery elide with racial subjugation?

Such questions must find answers in the lives of the people for whom they mattered most. Yet they also demand a broader perspective: lives like Anísia’s, Guilherme’s, and Esperança’s cannot be disentangled from their place and time, nor from the broader historical processes they helped to propel. Recife – Brazil’s third-largest city and an urban magnet for the Brazilian Northeast – was a striking hybrid in the late nineteenth century: one of a handful of Atlantic cities where radical transformations in global paradigms of urban life overlapped significantly with legal bondage.Footnote ⁵ In Recife – as in Rio, Salvador, Havana, and New Orleans – both slavery and its undoing molded urban modernity, and the cities thus forged call into question many of the central tenets of North Atlantic urban history. Slavery and the struggle for freedom shaped social geographies, the balance between public and private power, the strategies necessary for urban survival and social advancement, the relationship between urbanity and equality, and the nature of urban violence. The resulting urban fabric had a very different relationship with phenomena such as liberalism, citizenship, equality, and the rule of law than idealized formulations of the “sociological modern” might suggest.Footnote ⁶

As Anísia, Guilherme, and Esperança navigated the juncture of slavery and freedom, their lives, their city, and the historical construction of urbanity were intimately entwined. In this chapter, I probe those linked histories, beginning with Recife’s belle-époque self-construction and a few reflections on the sticky normativity of urban historical templates. I continue with an analysis of Recife’s history as a “slave city,” permeated and contoured by the structures, experiences, and struggles of slavery and manumission.Footnote ⁷ I end with Anísia’s, Guilherme’s, and Esperança’s lived experience of that city, illuminated through a close recounting of the three crimes that marked their lives.Footnote ⁸ Throughout, two questions resonate. What kind of city did slavery make? And how did an urbanity shaped by slavery limit the scope of urban freedom?

Recife, Modern City

In May 1900, twelve years after abolition, a locally prominent Portuguese-born “merchant and man of letters” named Antônio Joaquim Barbosa Vianna published a historical guide to his adopted city of Recife.Footnote ⁹ There was nothing special about the book. Like countless other literary boosters, Vianna outlined “the history of our capital from its most primitive days” and also “stud[ied] it with much discernment in our own times from a political, aesthetic, religious and commercial perspective.”Footnote ¹⁰ Echoing English chronicler Henry Koster, Vianna introduced Recife as it would have appeared from the deck of a transatlantic steamer, apparently “emerging from the water” as the vessel approached its port.Footnote ¹¹ Vianna then condensed four centuries of urban history to a series of legal, military, and technical benchmarks, emphasizing the Dutch engineering that had first rescued Recife – “the American Venice” – from its tidal mudflats; the bridges and landfill that had created continuous terrain from an aquatic archipelago; the erection of churches and monumental buildings; the ways in which foreign observers such as Koster had recognized the city’s material progress; and Recife’s nineteenth-century adoption of street pavement, water piping, and port improvements. If there was still much to do, it was “only a matter of time and good will”; Recife would soon be “a great city, hygienic and elegant.”Footnote ¹²

To illustrate, Vianna invited his reader to metaphorically board Recife’s “americanos” or “bonds” – the four tramlines that traversed Recife’s tiny urban core.Footnote ¹³ Vianna’s tour signaled the infrastructure of economic and urban progress: sugar warehouses and ports; rail stations and iron bridges; water, sewer, and gas works.Footnote ¹⁴ Multiple landmarks embodied modern governance: the governor’s palace, the central courthouse, the “magnificent” model prison, military installations, the school inspection board. The sinews of well-regulated economic life extended throughout the central city: banks and commercial associations, fashionable shops, factories, the newly built municipal marketplace, sanitized slaughterhouses. There were public charitable institutions, including hospitals, orphanages, and a beggar’s asylum; Recife also boasted multiple pedagogical institutions, from religious and technical schools to selective preparatory schools to institutes of scientific research and one of Brazil’s two original law schools. Multisecular Catholic churches had pride of place, but so did a masonic temple and multiple markers of secular associative and cultural life: the stately Santa Isabel Theater; the Institute of Archaeology, History and Geography; the Portuguese Reading Room. There were five newspapers, a telegraph office, a chic “International Club,” and an ever-expanding system of parks and plazas suitable for public promenades.

In this initial synoptic excursion, and in the subsequent 200-page Almanac, Vianna did not mention slavery. There was no trace of non-European heritage. Indeed, people were scarce, beyond lists of prominent politicians and “men of letters”; it was left to the reader’s imagination to fill the streets. In the name of this imaginary urban public, Vianna celebrated Recife’s achievements and urged all Recifenses to “come together with the patriotic intention of elevating and strengthening” their beloved city, so that it might achieve the “great, truly great” status it was destined for.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet Vianna’s sanitized Recife, empty of inhabitants and especially of women and Afro-descendants, was not the only depiction that circulated in the belle époque. Recife was a minor destination on the commercial and touristic circuits of the Atlantic world, commemorated in troves of postcards.Footnote ¹⁶ Some dutifully documented Vianna’s progressive wonderland: there were artfully tinted representations of tramlines running past tall, Dutch-style rowhouses, the Santa Isabel Theater abutting a public promenade, the majestic façade of the central railway terminal. But travelers’ appetites for picturesque novelty could also prick the boosters’ bubble. One missive, mailed in 1904, showed a busy commercial street lined with tall buildings and crosscut with tramlines and electric wires. Among the pedestrians, a lone gentleman in a top hat seems to observe an urban scene to which he does not fully belong: brown- and black-skinned barefoot street vendors, one carrying a basket on his head, crowd the carefully paved street; the only visible vehicles are open-air wagons, propelled by mules. Not a single woman occupies this public place. The scrawled inscription indulgently recounts the inhabitants’ recalcitrant relationship with modern times, explaining that, while Recife’s city fathers have tried to rename the street after a locally born vice-president of the Republic, “the people” insisted on still calling it the “Rua da Imperatriz,” eleven years after the Empire’s demise.Footnote ¹⁷

Those barefoot Black street vendors, with their stubborn love for a deposed empress, recalled Recife’s slavocratic past and had no place in Vianna’s city. Neither did the workers in a 1906 postcard image: a row of Afro-descendant washerwomen, dressed in white, beating and scrubbing soiled cloth in the tidal flats of a Recife river.Footnote ¹⁸ And the inhabitants of Vianna’s Recife certainly did not live in the row of mud and palm homes denominated “negerhutten,” “negreries,” “negroes-houses,” or “chouponas dos negros” on another missive.Footnote ¹⁹ On a final postcard, a top-hatted gentlemen who might have occupied Vianna’s public sphere seems displaced on a street, beaten from hard earth and called “the Rua Sete Mocambos” (“Street of Seven Shacks”). He converses in a doorway with a Black woman in a Victorian ankle-length dress; elsewhere, a barefoot man in a straw cap talks with a roughly clad boy, and baby pigs root for food.Footnote ²⁰

It would be easy to dismiss such images as errata, holdovers from another era that still inhabited the margins of a city rapidly evolving toward Vianna’s carefully curated modernity. And yet, during these same years, some of the very pioneering maps and censuses that marked Recife’s modernization – the very documents that signaled the city’s entry into transnational circuits of urbanity, where places and populations were knowable – indicated that this was far from the case.Footnote ²¹ A 1906 map, prepared by engineer Douglas Fox, showed the bold outlines of urban modernity: rectilinear streets, rail lines, monuments, stone buildings. Yet subsequently annotated copies still preserved in the city’s engineering archives mark swampy neighborhoods of “negro” cabins, called mocambos, filling in the voids and blank spaces of the original map.Footnote ²² In 1905, public health official Octavio de Freitas estimated that the thousands of mocambos in Recife were “the main dwellings of the poorer classes.”Footnote ²³ Recife’s pioneering 1913 census (the first in Brazil to count informal dwellings) affirmed his point; 66 percent of the city’s dwellings were either improvised shacks or auto-constructed wattle and daub homes.Footnote ²⁴ While the cinematic tramcar city certainly existed, it was interspersed and overwhelmed by a very different urban and social reality, one in which Black people, the spaces they inhabited and created, and the relationships they forged with the classes who had owned their ancestors shaped the city as surely as did any vision of “modern” progress.Footnote ²⁵

“The City” in the Urban Canon

Vianna’s selective urban portrait of Recife was not unique. In the field of urban studies, sage deconstructions of history’s grand narratives have been both abundant and relatively futile.Footnote ²⁶ Empirically, both scholarship and common sense tell us that cities are enormously heterogeneous, both internally and across time and space. Historians and social scientists have long argued that real cities are forged by geographical accident, socioeconomic contingency, and political expediency, rarely tracking the overdetermined narratives that once tethered their emergence to variants of economic, political, or social modernization. Across many continents, urban novels and ethnographies have dwelled in the blank spaces of standard mental maps of urbanity, documenting the emotional, sensorial, extra-official, extralegal relationships, rifts, and systems that create the stuff, if too seldom the science, of cities. In the abstract, it seems almost absurd to argue against normative mirages of urbanity that have already been disrupted and dispersed.

Yet there is a stickiness to the grand urban paradigms, a stubborn, constant return to the notion that “the city” – as a physical place and an object of study – is ultimately a site of both rupture with a retrograde past and normative convergence on an idealized future. Perhaps this is because so many of the grand modernizing narratives of the North Atlantic have claimed the city as their stage. Cities have been theorized as the sites of democracy, citizenship, public law, and state bureaucracy; they catalyzed commerce, industry, consumption, and technology; they nurtured lettered culture, public spheres, and artistic sea changes; they produced individualism and anomie but also class consciousness, racial resistance, gendered emancipation, and sexual liberation. Underlying all of this is the notion that cities are exciting because they are laboratories of forward movement, the sites where the dreary temporal sequences of human life become “history” through rupture and transformative change.

Thus, the roads that lead to urbanity might be motley, but their destination – urbanity itself – still announces itself through familiar landmarks. Physically, “cities” are serviced and sanitized; their streets are paved and mappable; their safe and solid buildings enjoy access to electricity, water, and sewage; residents are mobile and connected, whether through telegraph and telephone lines or wireless networks. Legally, cities are legible and regulated; their expansion is contained by the rule of law, their cadastral maps are clean, their laws are written to be enforced, their inspectors and police forces keep order or impose the state’s overbearing gaze. Culturally, cities constitute and broadcast taste, distinction, and creativity, broadcasting innovation to a global stage, whether in the form of steel-framed skyscrapers or street art. The idea of the city still evokes a string of sociocultural forms and values – anonymity, liberal individualism, egalitarianism, freedom, participation in a vibrant public sphere. At some abstract level, all of these signs and symbols still converge on normative hopes for urbanity as the embodiment of progressive transformation – what Mike Davis calls “cities of light, soaring toward heaven” – even if cracked cement, convoluted politics, and flagrant flouting of urban “norms” evoke continuity, disjunction, or decline.Footnote ²⁷

Historians, especially outside of the North Atlantic, have a peculiar role in this urban convergence narrative. Individual works of urban history or historical anthropology – Kirstin Mann’s Slavery and the Birth of an African City, Partha Chaterjee’s The Politics of the Governed, or James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity – pull on the loose strings of urban convergence, suggesting the ways in which urban futures are also shaped by threads of continuity with heterogeneous pasts. But in general, even decades after Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe,” most urban histories still adhere to well-circuited scripts and methods.Footnote ²⁸ Particular objects of study periodically glare and fade: historians might focus on technological modernization or urban planning, city cinema or hip-hop, bureaucratic rationalization or rights to the city, the formation of working classes or the ethno-racial dimensions of urban space, consumerism or financialization, gendered emancipation or moral surveillance. But the overwhelming emphasis is still on the creation and diffusion of historical scripts that circulate across urban borders, emphasize abstract and idealized forms of urbanity, and are built methodologically from the sorts of questions, categories, documents, processes, and logics that indicate rupture and “modernity.”Footnote ²⁹

In this process of urban history-making, intense multivalent imperatives are at play. Even in the North Atlantic, but especially outside of it, scripts of urban rupture and convergence have long held normative power for policymakers: they shape history on the ground as well as in the abstract. For a booster like Vianna, living on the perceived edges of belle-époque globalization, it was vital to construct a version of Recife’s past that pointed toward a modern, Europeanized future – not only because he shared that urban vision but also because he believed that his city’s fate depended upon its ability to participate fully in the civilizational and economic circuits of transnational modernity. Intellectuals often find themselves in a similar bind: transnational conversation and the cosmopolitan respect that come with it involve the deployment of “universal” categories and methods, which require the translation of local histories into narratives that are recognizable from the perspective of other historical realities. Historians must thus play a constant double game, at once describing the historical processes they perceive and linking them to the transnational historical canon.

The urban history that has emerged from this process is substantially incomplete. We understand far more about performative and revolutionary politics than we do about the quiet but vital interactions that structure incremental change. We know much more about the “global city” than we do about vernacular citybuilding.Footnote ³⁰ We can trace the urban impact of laws and institutions but remain relatively ignorant about informal networks and orders. We have a vivid imaginary involving the development of the “public” sphere of the lettered city but perceive only fleetingly the circuits of community, politics, and culture that lie beyond its edges. Taken together, these tendencies flatten, blur, and decenter the urban histories of women, people of color, and the urban poor; they also render invisible the ways in which such understudied urban currents shape broader historical processes.

This is especially evident in relation to the urban history of slavery and emancipation, in part because abolition and the movements that lead toward it appear as such significant moments of historical rupture. Cities have been constructed as magnetic spaces of release: when slavery ends, freedom begins, and freedom is heavily associated with the emancipatory currents of urban modernity. Freedpeople mark their liberty by claiming citizenship, entering the public sphere, moving freely, severing the bonds of personal dependence, claiming cultural autonomy and horizontal solidarity – in short, by deconstructing the worlds that slavery made and entering an “urban” space where they act and are acted upon as “modern” subjects. In Brazil, studies of those processes have yielded moving and significant insights into the cidade negra, into Black contributions to the making of the Brazilian working classes and the Brazilian public sphere, into Black agency in the forging of Brazilian nationalism and national culture.Footnote ³¹ Yet this approach has its limitations. It is highly gendered, illuminating a public world in which women were largely marginalized; it can also significantly obscure Brazil’s urban “afterlives of slavery” and discourage research on the subterranean structures and relationships that limited the emancipatory potential of both freedom and urbanity in Brazilian cities.Footnote ³²

A few of these urban histories less examined are especially salient if we wish to think more deeply about the urban afterlives of slavery in Brazil, particularly their gendered dimensions. One traces the circuits that continued to bind the rural and urban worlds well beyond slavery. Another emphasizes the intimacy of Brazil’s urban inequalities. A third explores relational power (power derived from and structured by personal relationships) and its ability to permeate Brazil’s liberal institutions. And a final history highlights urban informality. None of these is in any sense novel in the landscape of Brazilian social thought; the first three have structured iconic iterations of national self-understanding since Euclides da Cunha, Gilberto Freyre, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda.Footnote ³³ Yet themes of rural connection, unequal intimacy, and relational power often emerge in Brazilian historiography as features of a temporal, geographic, and normative other – forged in the rural or slavocratic past, symptomatic of stunted development and incomplete modernization, existing in frank opposition to an urbanism forged from liberal modernity. In the case of informality, we see precisely the opposite: it is portrayed as a contemporary urban distortion without a knowable history, unconnected to the deepest currents of Brazil’s national evolution.Footnote ³⁴

In the narratives that follow – of the city and of Anísia, Esperança, and Guilherme – I sketch moments lived out in a modernizing city where rural connection, unequal intimacy, relational power, and informality framed and constrained freedom’s emancipatory potential; an urban world where mocambos and barefoot pedestrians revealed as much about the future as they did about the past. My intention is to dive deeply into the historical junctures where vivid struggles for varying degrees of urban freedom produced continuity rather than rupture, in hopes of exposing some of the raw historical threads that stretched unbroken from Recife’s slave past to its experience of urban modernity. My focus is intensely local and experiential; if Vianna wished us to see the city as it might have appeared to a streetcar tourist in search of Progress in 1900, I aim to recapture something of what Recife might have looked like to an enslaved or Afro-descendant person in search of urban freedom in the 1880s. But my intention is not strictly microhistorical: I highlight the continuity and intersectionality inherent in these urban struggles for freedom not because they were unique but rather because they open windows on global dynamics that shape modern cities far beyond Recife’s tidal floodplains.

Recife: Reef, Archipelago, Slave City

Recife is, as the name suggests, an aquatic city – less solid land than low-lying archipelago, riddled with swamps and tidal rivers, only rising definitively above sea level several kilometers from the Atlantic shoreline. For nineteenth-century observers, the city had “the appearance of being built on water”; everywhere, the sky and sea stretch uninterrupted to the horizon, broken only by “the coconut palms’ fragile grace.”Footnote ³⁵ Aquaticism could also have a drearier significance: good land was scarce, bad land flooded, with predictable complications for transportation, communication, and even the definition of solid property. In the late nineteenth century, 400 years after initial European colonization, Recife’s extensive municipal territory comprised a tiny continuous urbanized core and a web of suburbs, sugar plantations, and hamlets, linked precariously by dirt roads, railways, and rivers.

Recife had evolved as a port city, as a military and bureaucratic bulwark, and as a node of rural power and wealth. Cattle, cotton, slaves, and sugar passed through it; patriarchs and their sons crossed paths and cemented loyalties and enmities in its churches, educational institutions, marketplaces, and government chambers. The streets (and rivers) belonged to a different population: free artisans, freedpersons making ends meet as laborers, dependents, or vendors, and enslaved men and women, feet bare, moving but constrained as slaves de ganho, captive free agents.Footnote ³⁶ The city’s population was sparse – 116,000 in 1872, 146,000 in 1890 – and many (slave and free, destitute and powerful) still circulated regularly among rural plantations, suburban Big Houses, and urban neighborhoods.Footnote ³⁷ Recife was the capital of Pernambuco, larger than São Paulo and the most powerful urban magnet in the Brazilian Northeast. But it was a city deeply entwined with its hinterland and closely integrated in webs of hierarchy and dependency, more the hub of a regional network than a citadel of liberal modernity.

Recife had been built on sugar and slaves, and that fact marked its economy, its population, its social geography, its power structures, and its urban character. From its heights in the early seventeenth century, under a brief period of Dutch occupation, Recife and its sugar economy had ebbed and flowed (but mostly ebbed). The nineteenth century saw considerable expansion in the volume of sugar production, and the 1880s marked something of a resurgence: Imperial subsidies for centralized sugar mills went disproportionately to Pernambuco, and the value of sugar milled in Pernambuco was more than 70 percent higher between 1886 and 1890 than it had been between 1871 and 1875.Footnote ³⁸ But problems of supply, transport, and foreign competition ensured that the surge was brief. And even at its height, sugar prosperity was of a very particular kind. It correlated with high slave prices but not with better wages for free labor; it eventually encouraged concentration of landed wealth; it did very little to encourage linkages that might have promoted deeper levels of economic development; it failed to develop transportation and port capacity beyond a scant and dysjunctive railway system; and it required little of its workers beyond raw strength and the specific delicate skills of sugar processing.Footnote ³⁹ In the 1880s, sugar was Recife’s economic engine and dominated Pernambuco’s provincial finances. But the economy thus created showed little dynamism and few opportunities for ascension in a free labor market.

Recife’s urban form was thus quite different than that of cities that grew from manufacturing or commerce. Recife’s commercial dominance, status as the seat of provincial government, and law school all ensured that the Northeast’s most powerful families would maintain a strong urban presence. But most of those families were more prominent than rich, and what wealth existed was more effectively controlled than expanded. In 1873, 13 percent of the municipal population was enslaved, working in a wide variety of settings, from the cane plantations of Recife’s western expanses to semi-free contract labor in Recife’s urban core. That percentage had dropped sharply since mid-century and would drop to around 4 percent before abolition: some able-bodied slaves were being sold south, families ripped apart to feed Brazil’s more dynamic coffee economy, and others had been voluntarily freed or promised freedom to encourage loyalty and productivity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Overall, 70 percent of Recife’s population was illiterate in 1872. Despite well-publicized initiatives granting tax exemptions to industrial entrepreneurs, only 9 percent of the laboring population was occupied as urban “workers,” an expansive category in which factory labor figured lightly. Only 3 percent of Recifenses were “artisans,” who tended toward greater skill and political independence.Footnote ⁴¹ Fewer still belonged to the barely emerging professional and bureaucratic classes. Commerce involved rudimentary basics and imported consumer goods; in both realms, a small class of mostly Portuguese immigrants sat at the top ranks, their dependents and some free Brazilians staffed the middle, and free Afro-descendants dominated street-selling. Most male workers were categorized as undifferentiated day laborers or servants; most women worked in domestic tasks or street-vending.Footnote ⁴² The “free” labor market was constrained in a variety of ways. Vagrancy laws, the threat of military recruitment, and the specter of re-enslavement forced men and women to seek fixed patrons and protectors; the importance of private referrals to the labor market forced all workers to insert themselves into patriarchal hierarchies.Footnote ⁴³

Slavery and the sugar economy also profoundly shaped Recife’s demography. By the 1870s, generations of piecemeal manumission – at once a form of labor discipline and a right hard-won by the enslaved and their relatives – had done their work. The free Black population already greatly outnumbered the enslaved, and 59 percent of all Recifenses were Afro-descendant. But “freedom” almost always entailed incorporation into vertical patriarchal networks that greatly restricted effective autonomy, and those networks shaped the urban fabric far beyond the edges of slavery. Recife attracted relatively few of the migrants who helped to loosen such structures in other cities; foreigners comprised only 7 percent of the population in 1872, and of those nearly 1 in 10 was born in Africa. But it did attract many migrants from surrounding provinces, sons of provincial patriarchs jockeying for advancement and influence within a dense network of personal and political alliances.

Among aristocratic families and their ranks of slaves and dependents, circulation between the countryside and “the city” was a constant, its circuits etched by personal connections, its rhythm determined by life-stage, health, affective ties, and economic or political exigency. Even within the city, people circulated and moved surprisingly frequently: sobrados (aristocratic townhouses) were never static places. Those movements hinged on personal and familiar logics and only rarely responded to free markets in land, labor, or housing. Circulation often originated in mortality and sheer need: deadly disease was still a constant, relatively independent of social status; orphans and widows became a malleable and mobile class of domestic dependents; and superstition and sorrow could move even aristocratic families to mobility.Footnote ⁴⁴ Only in the small urban core – the central neighborhoods of Recife, Santo António, and especially São José – did free artisans and workers establish something that more resembled the relatively independent poor workers’ neighborhoods of Rio or Buenos Aires.Footnote ⁴⁵

Recife’s topography ensured that its communities were more tentacular than continuous outside of the urban core. But slavery and the vertical patriarchal networks that grew from it created remarkable heterogeneity across the entire archipelago; decades after streetcars and steam railways had made urban social differentiation possible, segregation was rare.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the urban core, some well-to-do families continued to share intimate space with their unequals and to rub shoulders with poorer neighbors, each with its retinue of dependents – slaves, servants, fictive and blood kin, boarders. These unequal intimacies often subsisted within aging sobrados (townhouses), where the descendants of once-prosperous rural families hung on to a modicum of aristocracy by taking in paying renters. Outside of the urban core, in the bourgeois neighborhood of Boa Vista or the gentile suburbs of Graça and Madalena, households were larger, but heterogeneity persisted, with slaves, servants, criados, and dependents living in the same compounds as lawyers, commercial brokers, and politicians. In Recife’s distant outreaches, still more rural than urban, engenhos (sugar mills) anchored small communities of intimate unequals. Across the archipelago, wealth, dependency, and bondage moved together, a phenomenon that can be seen in simple statistical correlations as well as anecdotal evidence; again, only the urbanized core showed signs of more significant racial and class differentiation.Footnote ⁴⁷

Social heterogeneity and the continued importance of vertical social networks had multiple intangible impacts on Recife’s urban evolution. In combination with the inconstancy of Recife’s social geography, they produced striking degrees of vertical social intimacy and recognition. In Recife’s urban archipelago, individual communities were small and interconnected: this was still in some sense a “face-to-face community,” where no one was anonymous when they ventured into urban public space.Footnote ⁴⁸ Emblematically, before the early twentieth century, police often failed to ask for specific addresses when interrogating witnesses and defendants, because everyone could be found if need be. And individuals were recognized – seen – as part of a larger, known social network, points in the dense web of vertical social ties that situated every individual and shaped their prospects for sociability, mobility, and advancement. This rarely implied the kind of harmonious coexistence that Gilberto Freyre famously idealized; slavery and weak public institutions ensured that the hierarchies of interdependence were enforced with violence, coercion, and exploitation, whether implied or exercised outright.Footnote ⁴⁹ But poor and marginalized people were not anonymous individuals in Recife, even in the eyes of the wealthy. Everyone was part of someone’s network of power and dependency, either immediately recognized as such or sure to make the connection known as soon as they needed to get something done. In the absence of effective public institutions or opportunities for advancement, no one was autonomous. Even in its late-nineteenth-century form, the city was still a space where the lifeblood pulsed from the private sphere, even in ostensibly public contexts.

Against this backdrop, Recife was quickly acquiring the signs and symbols of North Atlantic urban modernity. In the 1860s it became the first city in Brazil (and perhaps the world) to use steam locomotives – maxambombas – for municipal transportation. Sewers, running water, pavement, and gas illumination provided creature comforts; new shopping districts, cafes, landscaped parks, theaters, and public buildings came to symbolize the public elegance of the urban core. Law students debated Italian positivist criminology and German legal theory; sugar barons mechanized and modernized; a few factories sprung up; boosters advocated sanitation and slum clearance. After 1870, as slave prices quickly spiked and the 1871 Free Womb Law forecast slavery’s institutional expiration, manumissions accelerated and slavery’s imprint on the urban landscape began to fade: by 1887, there were only some 2,036 enslaved people in the municipality, down from no fewer than 15,136 in 1872.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Celso Castilho has documented, the politics of abolition and republicanism expanded Recife’s public sphere and evoked ideals of citizenship, freedom, and equality that linked Recife to revolutionary spaces across Brazil and the Atlantic world.Footnote ⁵¹

For Gilberto Freyre, whose characterizations of nineteenth-century Recife remain iconic, all of this indicated that Recife’s heterogeneity was quickly giving way to the ecological succession and social distance predicted by the early Chicago school of sociology.Footnote ⁵² Public spaces were setting the pulse of urban life, no longer simply the channels that linked private worlds but rather powerful arenas of public culture and power. For Freyre, the social world of the engenho (sugar plantation) and sobrado (townhouse) was disintegrating as freed slaves claimed their independence in nascent shantytowns (mocambos) and wage labor markets and commercialism began to cut the bonds of vertical hierarchy, sentiment, and vertical interdependence.Footnote ⁵³

But there is every reason to think that Freyre lamented prematurely the demise of private, relational power. Recife became linked to a transnational urban ideal in these years, but that ideal’s imprint was as inconstant as the city’s topography. Slaves walked paved streets with bare feet; tramways passed through swaths of swamp and cane; quilombos (maroon settlements) grew strategically near rail stations. Manumission and abolition were achieved on the basis of relational power. Seemingly liberal institutions, as Sergio Buarque de Holanda argued eight decades ago, proved welcoming homes for patriarchal logics.Footnote ⁵⁴ Recife’s orphanage favored children with a letter of recommendation for scarce beds; Recife’s police delegates, public prosecutors, and judges followed logics of loyalty as well as law.Footnote ⁵⁵

Even the mocambos – the shacks that came to symbolize Recife’s informal city, and for Freyre the quintessential symbol of freedmen’s desire for independence and the city’s increasing social segregation – were from their origins deeply embedded in webs of relational power. Mocambos were ubiquitous, part of the city from the start, the majority of urban domestic structures as late as 1913.Footnote ⁵⁶ But they were built not only on resistance but also on sufferance: they occupied ceded land, outside the strictures of the law, at the whim and by the rules of individuals with the material and political resources to create zones of exception in Recife’s urban landscape. Already in the nineteenth century, mocambos were concentrated heavily in some neighborhoods, especially Afogados and Arraial. But they might appear anywhere; in the backyards of sobrados, on the borders of old engenhos, on the swampy banks of tidal rivers, in the abandoned interstices of Recife’s archipelago. Everywhere, they created zones of private power, where cheap housing came at the price of loyalty, rent, and subordination. It is no accident that many of Recife’s poor communities, like many of Rio’s favelas, still bear the name of their founder or boss – the Alto Jose do Pinho, the Alto do Pascual, the neighborhood of Mustardinha.Footnote ⁵⁷

So it was, in general terms, that sugar and slavery imprinted their legacy on Recife, creating dense networks of relational power, altering the meaning of economic and institutional change, forging a distinct urban form in the southern reaches of the Atlantic world. But what did it mean to live in such a place? What did mobility and liberation signify in this urban context? How did their pursuit intersect – or not – with North Atlantic urban ideals such as equality, individuality, citizenship, and public accountability? For historians seeking answers to such questions, a city like Recife presents specific methodological difficulties. Precisely because the city’s lettered classes frequently aspired to European forms and ideals, newspapers and literary sources tend to emphasize Recife’s intersection with the North Atlantic; likewise, maps, almanacs, censuses, and governmental studies overwhelmingly emphasize normative features of urbanity, obscuring categories and experiences that do not conform. To unearth experiences thus silenced, the remainder of this chapter follows a generation of social and cultural historians to the moldy archives of Recife’s criminal justice system, where life stories and sociocultural networks can be painstakingly reassembled and cross-referenced with civil registries and print periodicals. The resulting stories of captivity, freedom, and violence immerse us in the intimate, relational logic of a slave city in its waning days, placing in sharp relief the ways in which legacies of inequality would persist and deepen in the post-emancipation period.

Stories

Conclusion: Afterlives of A Slave City

What can we learn from Anísia, Guilherme, and Esperança about slavery in the city and about the city that slavery made? In relation to slavery, these cases sound cautions about any easy association of urbanity and full emancipation. Recife was, at least in part, a space of imagined and actual degrees of freedom, where enslaved people could sometimes attain greater control over their work, their time, their homes, and their bodies.Footnote ⁸¹ In the relative intimacy of homes and small workplaces, manumission seemed more attainable, and many of the enslaved worked autonomously, de ganho. Rarely, the brand of slavery itself could fade in the urban crowd, especially among men. All of these hopes and desires were evident in Guilherme’s initial foray to freedom or in Antônia and Esperança’s life stories.Footnote ⁸² Such hopes surely ratcheted higher during the heyday of Recife’s abolitionist movement, amidst a cascade of high-minded speeches, performative emancipations, public homages to prominent abolitionists, emancipationist rallies and cultural events, and steadily expanding channels to freedom. As Celso Castilho and others have shown, activists often elided abolition and citizenship and claimed the public sphere as its amphitheater. It is tempting to grasp at the truly emancipatory strains of those movements and possibilities, to see in abolitionist-era Recife the roots of rupture and convergence on deeper, more egalitarian, and more public freedoms.

Yet our stories strip those hopes away, largely because they occurred in a city where personal power networks permeated the institutions of government and the notion that formal freedom denoted equality, autonomy, or anonymity was almost inconceivable. In Esperança, Guilherme, and Anísia’s world, the intimacy of urban work proved deadly, autonomous employment was hard to come by, and runaways didn’t stay anonymous for long. Degrees of freedom could be lost as well as won; a single sale transformed an urban slave into a rural one, formal freedom could connote conditions no different than domestic slavery, a string of racial and sexual slurs could turn a white daughter into a mulatta prostitute. Only a strong protector, who by his very presence eroded freedom’s meaning, could ward against such fates. Similarly, the performance of emancipationism – or even abolitionism – often had little to do with full freedom, much less equality. One could imagine our protagonists rallying for José Mariano, or whispering rumors about underground railways, or listening hopefully to the echoes of abolitionist rallies through open windows; we surmise that many like them did just that. But we know for sure that every one of our villains, from Cardim and Drummond to Cerqueira and Dona Herculina, had both personally freed slaves and taken part in the public performance of emancipation – ceremoniously manumitting favored captives to the rapt praise of local journalists, defending powerless slaves in court, denouncing the barbarie that slavery inflicted on owners and slaves alike, giving ostentatious speeches on Joaquim Nabuco’s selfless dedication to the cause. In Recife, the ethos and logic of inequality encompassed both those who sought freedom and those who believed it was theirs to grant.

The limits of urban emancipation thus underlined freedom’s precariousness. But Anísia, Guilherme, and Esperança’s stories also reveal the deep and durable logics of an urban form that grew entwined with bondage. In idealized formulations – caricatures, really, but meaningful all the same – cities often represent a stage in a positivistic historical progression: from agriculture to manufacturing, from relational power to liberal governance, from unfree labor and patriarchal dominance to the triumph of market logics and an egalitarian public sphere. But in Recife, as in so many actual cities, – north and south – urbanity meant something quite different. There, the rural and the urban were locked in patterns of symbiotic circulation, and the city derived its power from its ability to serve as a nexus of rural economies and social relations. In Recife, private spaces anchored a discontinuous urban landscape; public space was simply the intersection of the private worlds represented by Dona Herculina’s sobrado, Cerqueira’s engenho, and Dr. Cardim’s household compound – or even Guilherme’s quilombo and Antônia’s mocambo. Within and among those private spaces, everyone – slave and free – was enmeshed in relations of intimate dependency, and nearly everyone’s social world was known or discoverable: anonymity was never more than a step or two removed from recognition. Intimacy served as the conduit for information and rumor, within and across social scales; unequal intimacies facilitated urban survival, mobility, and opportunity, just as they regulated passage through degrees of freedom. Relational logics permeated public institutions and shaped the public sphere, limiting liberal visions of egalitarian individualism even when that public sphere was overtaken by the tides of abolition.

What did freedom look like, lived in such a relational city? What did urbanity look like, forged with such unequal freedoms? Did the city that slavery made eventually dissipate, opening space for the liberal, egalitarian, individualistic “city”? Gilberto Freyre, writing between the 1920s and the 1950s, believed regretfully that he was witnessing just such a sea-change.Footnote ⁸³ Recife, like many Brazilian cities, spent much of the twentieth century literally and figuratively razing its colonial and slavocratic pasts. Sobrados became tenements and then rubble; centenary trees made way for broad avenues; the spaces of wealth and poverty began to disentangle. In our own times, thirteen decades after the events recounted in this chapter, Recife has navigated both modernity and post-modernity: factories have grown and shrunk; boulevards have become thoroughfares; elegant belle époque avenues have fallen into decadence while shiny globalized malls have risen from Recife’s mudflats. Mocambos have become favelas, Big Houses have become luxury highrises. Recife has protagonized some of the most progressive strains of Brazilian politics, from communism to agrarian reform, liberation theology, the pedagogy of the oppressed, and the right to the city.

But amidst all of the trappings of urban modernity, the building blocks of the slave city are still striking: banal private violence, racialized inequality, unequal intimacy, rural–urban continuums, the discontinuity of public and urbanized space, the powerful logics of relational and private power. These urban continuities – and their utter legibility far beyond Brazil’s borders – suggest the need for an alternate modernizing narrative rooted in the slave city and the informal, relational webs that sustained it.

Less than a month after the abolition of slavery on May 13, 1888, Councilor João José de Andrade Pinto – of Brazil’s Supremo Tribunal de Justiça (Supreme Court) – received a writ of habeas corpus filed by the attorney Ernesto Ferreira França. He had compiled a vast documentary record of investigations conducted under the direction “of the judges, magistrates and Police Chief of the Municipality of Cantagalo.”Footnote ¹ Their main complaint was as follows: “The former slaves of Fazenda Socorro, in the town of Carmo de Cantagalo … which belongs to Captain Manoel Pereira Torres, want to leave that plantation; but they are held in unlawful restraint by said Captain.” One of the main victims was Sebastião Rufino dos Santos Maranhão, a freedman “to whom the Supreme Court granted habeas corpus, along with his companions,” because he had been “persecuted, threatened with death and [forced to become a] fugitive.”

The counterattack, less than a month later, came from the pen of Jeronymo Mizisur Nogueira Pavido, the planters’ lawyer. He had marshalled battalions of arguments. On June 9, he told the judge: “I am unaware of the facts that are the subject of said habeas corpus; given that the authorities of the town of Carmo … will tell me nothing about it, just as the freedmen in question have not made any sort of petition to this tribunal.”

The crossfire of justifications was just beginning. Witness statements had to be gathered. An immediate decision was made “to hear the former slaveholder; as this is a matter of freedom, he should be summoned to appear in person in order to provide clarifications.” However, the first impressions came from the police inquiry. Under the court’s order, the local police commissioner of the town of Carmo conducted an investigation. In the following days, he rejected the charges: based on his “reading of the documents” that had been sent, he could “certify that there was no evidence of the violence that those ex-slaves claimed to suffer or the forced constraint that they claimed to be persecuted with.” On the orders of police headquarters, a police officer – Lieutenant Francisco da Cunha Telles – was sent out to “visit all the areas where there are large numbers of fazendas [coffee plantations] and examine who was doing the work in each place, and also obtain information about how the interests of the freedmen who work on those fazendas are being served, and instruct the respective detachments about how to proceed with local authorities in repressing vagrancy and vagabondage, prohibiting illegal procedures with regard to any arrests they might have to make.” Various plantations in the municipalities of Sumidouro, Miracema, Muriaé, and Carmo received visits. The result: “it is affirmed that there is nothing new among the freedmen, even on the plantation of Captain Manoel Pereira Torres, they are not constrained, and I inquired in great detail about them.”

Interested parties were present at the interrogations of the planter and later of the freedmen. In his statement, Captain Manoel Pereira Torres reportedly said

Most of the freedpersons underwent a group interrogation, though some were dispensed from the summons “to appear at this police station … because they were ill”:

The document described here sheds light on some of the meanings of freedom in the coffee plantation areas in southeastern Brazil during the period immediately after slavery’s abolition. Could the freedmen choose where they wanted to live and work? Did they have the autonomy to move freely? What were the expectations of behavior attributed to former masters and former slaves?

These are some of the themes that, in recent decades, have been consolidated in Brazil around the question of post-emancipation. Although the idea is not always stressed, the concept of post emancipation posits that it makes sense to think about Brazil’s end of slavery in a plural way. The post-emancipation period – its timelines, periodization, meanings, symbols, issues, theoretical and methodological foundations – is complex. When did it begin? The day after May 13, 1888? When did it end? During the Vargas era in the 1940s, when laws that gave some support to rural workers reverberated with memories of the possibility of true abolition? The concept of post-emancipation demands broader periodization, one that would lead historians to make less use of the idea of “post-abolition” (which refers almost exclusively to the chronological period immediately following the “Golden Law”). This is important because many histories of post-emancipation can be reconstructed from the experiences of thousands of men and women who achieved legal freedom and lived autonomous lives before final abolition, in a nineteenth-century society that was still besieged by slavery. It is thus possible to think of a broadened chronology of post-emancipation – say from 1830 to 1950 – that articulates dimensions of Brazil’s rural, urban, and labor history along with aspects of its nation-building projects and social thought. Such a history would place post-emancipation at the very center of contemporary Brazil’s historical formation. Researchers from the most varied fields would be challenged to expand the possibilities of addressing Brazil’s contemporary history, and especially its labor history, as additional chapters of post-emancipation.

With regard to the histories of slavery and freedom, Brazil went through a long historiographic movement of erasure. We are now assembling another movement, focused on the meaning, resignification, and use of memories and histories of slavery and post-emancipation. In this chapter, we join empirical research with theoretical reflections in order to explore the formation of post-emancipation narratives and memories in Brazil’s slaveholding Southeast. It is possible, in that region, to reintegrate the histories of freedom, control, and autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. In various archives and other historical sources, we can find inscribed – albeit in multivocal form – important intersections in the histories of land, labor, mobility, migration, control, and power.

Access to Land in the Shadow of Slavery

In an original study that combines oral histories and documentary sources, Ana Maria Lugão Rios has demonstrated how an itinerant peasantry was formed in Brazil, particularly in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.Footnote ² This process was grounded in the dynamics of land access: in property that was bequeathed to slaves and freedpersons so that they could engage in subsistence agriculture, in occupations opened up by the displacement of Black peasant families in the decades prior to abolition, and even in the formation of Black peasant towns, some of them remnants of quilombos (maroon settlements) or linked to them.  Rios took an interesting analytical approach in order to deal with the multiplicity of rural universes in which diverse peasant communities – and especially those made up of Black descendants of the enslaved – came into contact. In different regions there were myriad situations. Some areas had open economic frontiers, in others the frontiers had already closed; some had vacant public land, others very little. Some regions were undergoing rapid economic expansion, while others were in decline. Many zones combined plantation agriculture with peasant production, while others were dominated by one or the other. Considering all this diversity, it would be nearly impossible to depict a single reality for the first decades after abolition. The matter would become even more complex if we also considered the earlier period when slavery was still legal and abolitionism was in full ferment.

A national approach to the study of slavery, abolition, and post-abolition – and of post-emancipation in the broader sense – is rife with traps, leading often to overgeneralization, the reinforcement of stigmas, and the silencing of diverse historical experiences. Research is still scarce about the formation of a Black peasantry during slavery and its iterations in widely varying rural settings. In diverse regions, slaves, immigrants, and free workers (many of whom were freedpersons) came together, reproduced, and organized themselves into peasant communities that were rooted in family, territory, or ethnicity and were constantly on the move.

While this movement is difficult to capture in methodological terms, it is not impossible. The flow of land grants to freedpersons in slaveholders’ wills does not necessarily have to be quantified or measured by the benchmarks of agricultural production to convey meaning: even singular situations can help explain the expectations of land and work that expanded the meanings of freedom during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

In the slaveholding Southeast – and especially in Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo – new rural ventures arose from north to south, often creating tension between coffee, sugar, and food production and the economic frontiers of migration and mobility. For the area of São João da Barra in northern Rio de Janeiro province, for example, several wills reveal narratives containing intersecting sentiments of generosity, expectation, rights, and custom among enslaved people, freedpersons, slaveholders, planters, and heirs.

In 1872, Candido Alves de Azevedo expressly stated in his will: “I hereby leave over one hundred braças [fathoms, equivalent to about 6 feet] of land … including half of the improvements thereon, to Hortência Mariana da Conceição (free) and Prudêncio (baptized as a slave with specific conditions that would lead to his liberty), land that they will enjoy … after my death and that of my wife.” Besides the land, the couple would inherit three slaves. In addition, he left “over one hundred braças of land from the same plot as that of the couple, with any improvements thereon, to my slaves Claudino, Felismindo, and Custódio, who will enjoy this bequest after my death and that of my wife.” Prudêncio would have to be freed in order to inherit the land, and some other slaves – Norberta, Ana, and Bernarda – would simply be “freed, as if they were born from a free womb.”Footnote ³

Domingas Maria de Azevedo’s 1873 will was even more detailed. In it, she spelled out the possession, property, and later freedom of “the slave woman named Theodora, who has borne children named Albino, Luiza, Maria, Justina, the first aged sixteen, the second twelve, the third eight, the last three.” “To these children,” she wrote, “because of the love I came to feel when raising them: I grant Albino his freedom from this date forward, as if he were born from a free womb. To Luiza, Maria and Justina I also grant freedom, but on the condition that they attend to my husband Lúcio Antonio de Azevedo; upon his death they will enjoy full freedom as if born from a free womb.” Regarding land, she continued: “I furthermore declare that I leave the said crias [children raised in her home] lands 350 braças deep, bordering on the front with Dominicano de tal, in the back with José Vieira, on one side with me, and on the other side with Lauriano de tal. I leave these lands to the four aforementioned crias and to one more who was born after the Free Womb Law and to any other siblings who might be born in the future.”Footnote ⁴

In 1882, Izabel da Silva Rangel endorsed the manumission of several slaves after her death. We understand more, however, from the words that follow: “I leave half of the lower part of my land to my slave Camilo and his family, because he deserves it by virtue of the good services he has rendered me.”Footnote ⁵ In 1883, Domingos Gonçalves da Costa ordered in his will that a house be purchased and granted to some of his slaves, who should also be freed: “Purchase from my assets a house worth up to about four hundred mil reis, for Joana to live in, and for Joaquim, Benedito and Felisminda to live in as long as they are alive, and when they are dead, it should pass to the Santa Casa de Misericórdia [a charity hospital] in this city. I want fifty mil reis given to the Black woman Joana and fifty mil reis given to Felisminda.”Footnote ⁶

The following passage from Antonio Ribeiro de Campos’s 1886 will gives us a good idea of the horizon of expectations that slaves might have held when their masters died and their wills and bequests were made public:

Regarding land, de Campos mentioned that he was leaving “the small-holding that belonged to Araujo’s sons and later to João Brinco to my slave Felipe, and to the freedman Geraldo, with Felipe enjoying in the usufruct of said small holding only after fulfilling the two years of work to which he is obliged, and with both men having only the usufruct of the small holding, usufruct which will pass upon the death of either man to the surviving one, upon whose death it will revert to my heirs and legatees.” He left to his slave Rita “a tiny small-holding annexed to the lands of Antonio de Souza de tal, which last belonged to Sebastião Brinco; she may dispose of that land as she wishes.” He left other freedpersons farm animals as an inheritance: Rita herself received “an old beast named Maquitola”; “the freedman Geraldo, a dark donkey with damaged hooves formerly owned by the Tram company”; and finally “to the slave Felipe the donkey Quero-Quero, which he can claim in two years.”Footnote ⁸

Itinerant Peasantries and Economic Practices

What did it mean for slaves and freedpersons to sometimes have access to land, by virtue of these kinds of conditional concessions and conquests? In various regions – each with its own sociodemographic specificities – slaves and freedpersons constructed economic practices that gave rise to close interaction among them. In many places, they attended local fairs and markets on Saturdays and Sundays – their customary “free days” – where they would set up quitandas (stalls) and sell products from their small farms or gardens. Debate about the meaning of these practices gained strength in Brazilian historiography in 1979 with the publication of a chapter by Ciro Flamarion Cardoso, “The Peasant Breach in the Slaveholding System.”Footnote ⁹ Building on the work of Sidney Mintz and Tadeusz Lepkowski (who coined the expression “peasant breach”), Cardoso considered the nature of Brazilian slavocracy, noting the presence of peasant economic activity. He summarized part of the intellectual debate about the Caribbean and elsewhere, stressing the “modalities of the peasant phenomenon under a colonial slaveholding regime.” In this conception there were “non-proprietary peasants,” “peasant proprietors,” “peasant activities of the quilombolas [maroons],” and the “slave proto-peasantry.” At that time, the debate was fundamentally ideological.Footnote ¹⁰ The crux of the matter was to find a way to recognize the economic congruity of slaves and peasants without compromising the concept of the “colonial slave mode of production,” which was their proposed interpretive foundation.

In 1987, Cardoso would return to the issue, incorporating evidence from new secondary sources and ongoing research and also responding to criticism from Jacob Gorender and Antônio Barros de Castro.Footnote ¹¹ He emphasized a wide array of evidence about the practice of granting slaves parcels of land to farm for their own subsistence. This was customary among the Portuguese on the island of São Tomé even before the colonization of Brazil; the practice would eventually become known in many slave regions as the “Brazilian system.” There is evidence of it in the Captaincy of Pernambuco as early as 1663. Royal orders and permits from the last decades of the seventeenth century instructed subjects about “rights” to time and land, established so that slaves could provide their own subsistence. In 1701, the well-known chronicler André João Antonil praised the “custom practiced by some masters in Brazil,” by which “they give [slaves] a day every week when they can plant and prepare their provisions.”Footnote ¹²

Despite seigneurial prohibitions and complaints, enslaved people sought to build their own economies and thus attain autonomy. In the Caribbean, there are many suggestive examples of slaves who sold produce from their small-holdings and supplied local markets. The Sunday markets that they frequented became spaces for socialization, attracting slaves and freedpersons from multiple plantations, many of whom travelled for miles to get there. The economic circuits created by those who managed to take their produce for sale in nearby towns and cities also allowed information and culture to circulate among slaves in urban and rural areas.Footnote ¹³ Enslaved people’s mercantile exchanges with maroons and closer relations with the free poor and freedpersons could also – though not necessarily – lay the ground for indirect attacks on slavery. The actions the maroons took to preserve their communities – veritable Black peasant villages – and the confrontational strategies employed by free people in their struggles for land use and possession helped change the world of those who were still enslaved.Footnote ¹⁴

What was going on with the free poor populations who lived on the margins of areas experiencing economic growth or who focused their production on the domestic market? In many parts of the Caribbean, the free Black population enjoyed a reasonable amount of economic autonomy, even during slavery.Footnote ¹⁵ There are still few studies in Brazil that accompany the experiences of freedpersons, documenting their expectations vis-à-vis land during slavery and post-emancipation.Footnote ¹⁶ A great many small-holdings may have been passed down through generations of families that were enslaved and later freed, resulting after 1888 in conflicts with their former masters.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet beyond this, studies of Brazilian slave economies have made little progress in empirically demonstrating the circulation of peasant agricultural production among slaves and sectors of the surrounding Black peasantry, including communities of freedpersons and even quilombolas.

One archival path that has not been explored is local legislation – which abounded after the mid-nineteenth century – that banned the purchase of products from slaves, as well as the functioning of taverns and like activities. When one accompanies recurrent municipal regulations for the province of Rio de Janeiro, there is a notable concern with commodities, mercantile exchanges, and even the circulation of money involving slaves or the Black population. In the municipality of Rio Bonito in 1876, for example, article 67 of Municipal Regulatory Decree no. 40 imposed fines on those who bought “any object from slaves unless the slaves present written permission from their masters to sell it.”Footnote ¹⁸ Interestingly, an annotation detailed exceptions to this law: “slaves who sell foodstuffs on Sundays and holidays in the streets quitanda-style.” Even so, it was forbidden for “sellers of beverages to sell spirits to slaves” or even to “open a business after the doors close to buy or sell goods from slaves.”

In 1859, the Municipal Regulations for Piraí contained more details along these same lines, imposing a fine or fifteen days in jail on any “person who buys coffee, corn or other agricultural product from slaves if those slaves do not present written permission from their masters or overseers.”Footnote ¹⁹ That same year, the municipality of Paraíba do Sul issued decree no. 1.167 which imposed fines on anyone who “allows slaves to linger in commercial establishments for more time than is reasonably necessary for them to make purchases” or who “negotiate[s] with slaves, buying from them or exchanging any object with them.”Footnote ²⁰ For the municipality of Barra Mansa, Title IX of the Municipal Regulations established penalties for “any person, whether or not they are a merchant, who buys items of gold or silver, or goods of any other kind (clothes, fabric, tools, coffee, or foodstuffs) from slaves without note or authorization from their masters.” Here again, “the provisions of this article do not apply to slaves who might sell foodstuffs on Sundays and holidays in the streets quitanda-style.” In the municipality of Santa Maria Madalena, the regulations were attentive to weights and measures, stating that that anyone who “buys food from slaves with a value that exceeds 2$ by weight, or 4$ by measure, or any object worth more than 2$, without written permission from those slaves’ masters, managers or overseers, will pay a 20$ fine.”Footnote ²¹ For the municipality of Capivari, the novelty was a ban on “buying any kind of agricultural products, dead or living animals, birds, or other objects from slaves, without written permission from their masters.” Beyond this, in “villages and hamlets” on “festive occasions” it was forbidden to “set up stalls without license from the municipal council to sell goods of any kind.” The penalties were “a fine of 20$ for free people, and for slaves eight days in jail.”Footnote ²² For Itaguaí the prohibitions applied to any “person who buys gold, jewels, fabric, coffee, foodstuffs, or any other objects from slaves without the permission of their masters.” In the 1880s in Campos dos Goitacazes the regulations stated that “only roceiros [small-holders] and their representatives were permitted to set up market stalls or sell food, crops … or animal products in the streets, squares or beaches of the city or municipality; they must prove their status as a small-holder to the municipal council with a note from their local justice of the peace.” Such attempts to control circulation of goods through municipal regulations open a methodological window through which we can begin to understand the commercial circuits of Rio’s Black peasantry.

Mobility and the “Specter of Disorder”

Another issue still calls out for further research. Displacement and collective migrations happened before 1888 and were already characteristic experiences among Brazil’s itinerant peasantry. The phenomenon was not tardy or isolated, nor was it simply an offshoot of radical abolitionism. What’s more, in the last decade before abolition, so-called retirantes – freedpeople who had been emancipated collectively – also entered the scene.Footnote ²³ Meanwhile, in various regions, governmental authorities, planters, and even abolitionists were trying to maintain control over the process of abolition.

In 1887 and 1890, Brazilian newspapers published numerous articles complaining about the abandonment of coffee fazendas by fugitive slaves, by freedpeople collectively manumitted before May 13, or by families freed by the Golden Law. After 1888, those complaints appeared in dialogue with others that discussed re-enslavement, vagrancy, and migration. In northern Rio de Janeiro province and the areas bordering on Espírito Santo, local papers were no different. In their very titles, many pieces – published in the crime section, as editorials, and even as letters to the editor – said a great deal about disputed imaginaries involving labor, social control, and conflicting expectations across all sectors of society regarding the immediate post-abolition period. The editors of the Jornal de Campos and the Diário da Manha received copious correspondence about these issues as early as 1889. One series, entitled “Collaboration – Letters from an Agriculturalist,” published a number of complaints about the supposed difficulties in which planters found themselves due to the impact of the May 13 law. One writer, who signed himself J. H., discussed “the adherence of agricultural laborers to new ideas,” calling on “companions of class and misfortune … [who were experiencing] the harshest privations.”Footnote ²⁴ Under the title “Gold Fever,” the following day’s column mentioned that “the nation” was “exhausted and disheartened” after May 13.Footnote ²⁵

Complaints, rumors, and expectations reverberated everywhere. Planters and urban residents from northern Rio de Janeiro province, southern Espírito Santo, and the Mata Mineira (a forested zone of Minas Gerais) connected with one another amidst the hopes and misgiving of the freed communities, quilombos, and enslaved people that surrounded them. One day later during that same October, also in the Jornal de Campos, an article entitled “Assault – Says a Telegram from Leopoldina” reported:

The watchwords in such articles were indemnization, vagrants, vagabondage, collective flights, and ruined and abandoned plantations. There was even talk of the need for agricultural aid (both direct investments and loans), and the shortage of “laborers” was a constant motto:

Commenting on what was interpreted as utter ruin for agriculture, a report mentioned recent large-scale global economic transformations, which were supposedly characterized “by a fabulous movement of capital” and could result in prosperity. However, in the face of the traumatic experience of abolition, this transformation could actually impede such progress and prosperity in Brazil, causing “backwardness in its industries, vacillation in its commerce, impoverishment in its artisanal activities, and the weakening of agriculture, which will require enormous work to recover from the hard and violent blow it has received from the loss of manpower.”Footnote ²⁸ Such critiques of the state in which agriculture had been left by the supposed lack of workers were accompanied by proposed solutions: “Without coercive labor laws and the constraint of rigorous penalties for the vagrancy – which is developing among us on a broad and terrifying scale, effectively aided by the goodwill of the laborious population – nothing can be achieved, and agriculture cannot count on those elements of production.”Footnote ²⁹

Debates about abolition’s ramifications would become entwined with the polemics and expectations of Brazil’s republican transformation in 1889. On November 25, ten days after the military coup that “proclaimed” the Republic, the Jornal de Campos published an essay by Oliveira Machado in which he expressed serious concerns about debates conducted in such an atmosphere because he figured that most republicans were agriculturalists harmed by the law of May 13 and was very afraid of them.Footnote ³⁰ That same day, an essay by Manoel de Paula was also published, glossing the context of debates “about political ideas and institutional reforms”:

Fears of re-enslavement had even greater repercussions. We still lack studies of the ways in which the political context of the late 1880s and early 1890s created divergent scenarios for different social sectors. Fear of re-enslavement was not just a fiction produced by the monarchists to pit freedpersons against the republicans. The matter took on real and symbolic dimensions, which require further study. In late 1889, several newspapers published a circular that had been issued by Rio de Janeiro’s secretary of police on November 27. It read:

More than just fear and trepidation, there was a real sense that freedpersons might perceive the change in political regime as an attack on the end of slavery. An article entitled “A Republica e os libertos” (The Republic and the Freedmen) reported that a military detachment had been sent to Cantagalo and Valença, where there had been “significant uprisings of freedmen opposed to the new regime.”Footnote ³³ In July 1890, with the headline “Reescravização” (Re-enslavement), the Gazeta do Povo in Campos charged that Alexandre Corrêa, the owner of a small-holding in Vargem Grande, São Fidelis, was privately imprisoning three black freedwomen on his property.Footnote ³⁴

The “specter of disorder” – a hyperbolic and often politically instrumentalized fear of free labor and the transformations it entailed – reared its head in diverse narratives and arguments during the inevitable but at the same time unpredictable end of slavery.Footnote ³⁵ Lana Lage’s studies of abolitionism in northern Rio de Janeiro were pioneering on this topic, as was Hebe Mattos’ research comparing the political and social dynamics of that same region with Minas Gerais. Mattos’ work, based in part on local periodicals, also focused on the local repercussions of events in São Paulo, which were often covered in the region’s papers. In general, however, Brazilian historiography has analyzed the events of these years through the lens of disputes over the memory of abolition and post-abolition.Footnote ³⁶ It is possible to propose an interpretation that goes further, connecting mass desertions, mobile quilombos, and especially the movements of newly emancipated slaves to create a history that can supplant the elitist memory of abolition that was constructed in the local press right into the first decades of the twentieth century. Although it was loudly proclaimed by the press, perhaps definitive and unconditional abolition and the transformations of the post-abolition period were not so much faits accompli as they were experiences that converged or diverged across Brazil’s heterogeneous regions.

Beyond this, there might have been a dialogic relationship between these happenings and a series of episodes that happened in Western São Paulo, which were widely reported in Rio de Janeiro and may have had an impact in the open borderlands of Rio and Espírito Santo. It is worth emphasizing a series of reports by Arrigo de Zetirry published in the Jornal do Commercio in the second half of 1894, which Sheila Faria and Hebe Mattos have already used extensively, regarding “Lavoura no Estado do Rio de Janeiro” (Agriculture in the State of Rio de Janeiro).Footnote ³⁷ In addition to Campos, these reports describe several municipalities with open borders in northern Rio de Janeiro state, such as Itaperuna, São João da Barra, and the villages of Carangola and Muriaé. The author, writing both as an observer and analyst, noted that, in “reporting on the current state of work and workers, agricultural labor and its products,” he would stress how the freedmen had abandoned the slave quarters and were seeking to negotiate new forms of labor, which included removing their wives and children from the agricultural workforce.Footnote ³⁸

Comparing working conditions in this region with those in São Paulo, where planters made use of an Italian immigrant workforce, Zetirry criticized the freedmen for refusing “family work,” predicting that “we will find Black men’s wives sitting in the doorway with their hands in their laps, women who are as strong as the men, completely inert.” Furthermore, the author added, “It seems that [Brazilian] nationals, especially freedmen, are unaware that the human heart can nurture a desire to change one’s life, to improve one’s social status.”Footnote ³⁹ The chronicler also touched on the abandonment of the plantations, the freedmen’s lack of ambition, their rejection of plantation labor in favor of their subsistence plots, and the ways in which labor regimes in this region compared with those involving contracted Chinese labor and with those in other parts of northern Rio de Janeiro state. Speaking of the region’s Black population, Zetirry observed that “the ranks of freedmen, who are still Itaperuna’s main source of labor, have been decimated, whether because other municipalities are attracting them by paying more, or because of high mortality and women’s complete abandonment of agricultural toil.” Noting that “freedmen generally have a major flaw,” he then listed several, among them the supposed fact that “they are content to enjoy the freedom to work or not as they please.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Zetirry also commented on agricultural conditions in the borderlands of northern Rio de Janeiro and southern Espírito Santo, where there was a “relative agricultural expansion” but “in small-holdings rather than large-scale production.” In terms of the general panorama, the “large properties that existed during slavery have been completely abandoned for years, or are tended by an extremely limited number of freed laborers, who produce a small amount of sugarcane and some grains and also exploit the excellent hardwoods that the remaining forests still possess.”Footnote ⁴¹ Regarding post-emancipation economic landscapes, Zetirry stressed that in northern Rio de Janeiro state, especially in Campos, “despite the lack of hands to cultivate sugarcane and exploit all the land suitable for it – and even though at least half the plantations in the municipality of Campos are completely abandoned and only one-third of the total are being tended with care – despite all of this, the municipality of Campos is not yet one of those in Rio de Janeiro state that has suffered the worst consequences of the law of May 13.” According to him, “fortunately those freedmen who are used to working on the sugar plantations have remained loyal.”Footnote ⁴²

The chronicler concludes by suggesting the following disheartening situation for large properties and sugar mills: on one hand there were freedpersons, individuals or families, who were either absent or scarce because they were being recruited by other municipalities offering better pay; on the other, there were colonies of freedpersons who entered into partnerships or sharecropping arrangements in order to devote themselves to family farming, thus ruining the sugar economy and nearby sugar mills. Regarding workers on a plantation linked to the Dores Sugar Mill, Zetirry observed: “The freedmen there, like most in this municipality, work as much as is necessary for their subsistence, showing neither interest in improving their status nor any love for saving.”Footnote ⁴³

We contend that part of this shortage of freedmen willing to work in regimented and iron-fisted disciplinary regimes – similar to slavery – was either motivated by or emerged from the unfolding of mass flights and the large-scale movement, displacement, and migration of slaves, retirantes, and quilombo members during the decade of abolition. This would lead to ever-denser migrations and dislocations during the post-abolition period. The Black peasant micro-communities that spread across the region, constantly migrating in search of work and land, were formed through a complex process about which we still know very little.

Memory, Autonomy, and Mobility

Even beyond expectations regarding land, questions of labor, autonomy, and spatial circulation mobilized the Black population in many parts of Brazil’s slaveowning Southeast. These issues could involve widely varying landscapes, characters, and settings. In less than a year, transformations in the worlds of work could bring about profound changes in people’s lives and everyday routines. One example – recorded in generational memories – comes from the municipality of Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, in the south of Espírito Santo. Cachoeiro was the area’s largest coffee producer, and in the decade of abolition it contained over 50 percent of the region’s enslaved workforce, according to registries from 1887.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet in this period images emerge of plantations deserted both by their owners – many of whom migrated to other towns closer to the center of the province or its capital city Victória, handing over the management of their property to sharecroppers or managers – and by a portion of the Black population, mostly families of freedpersons who took off in search of land, work, and liberty. Phenomena that some newspaper reports characterized as evidence of vagrancy, disorder, laziness, and ingratitude in fact signified chapters in long-standing, multigenerational processes of family migration. For many, running away or abandoning plantations en masse signified total rejection of inadequate wages, limited access to land, lack of autonomy, and subjugation to working conditions analogous to slavery. These were rendered even less tolerable because they were imposed in spaces – real and symbolic – where such families had been enslaved for two or more generations.

These narratives emerge clearly in the memories of descendants of the first generations of Black families that migrated within the region between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Amélia Gonçalves, a granddaughter of former slaves from southern Espírito Santo, described in detail some of the expectations held by her family, the first generation of freedpersons, immediately after May 13, 1888:

The wealth of detail in Amélia’s statement provides evidence that freedpersons were seeking autonomy – this can be seen in the ways that they exercised family control and spatial mobility to seek better working conditions and access to land. There is also another significant point: Amélia points to the existence of a community of freedpersons made up of members of the same family. Coffee was the only product that the community sold. The other crops they planted – “corn, beans, rice” – “were for our household, for the family itself.” She also added:

Autonomy over land – a legacy of land access gained through enslaved people’s own savings – went hand in hand with the availability of labor and inputs necessary for agricultural work. It seems probable that the owner who acquired that original slave – Amélia’s grandfather – also secured other family members, following in the generational logic of an imperfect labor market that was based on the Black family. Desire for family time, land access, and the chance to construct their own economies pervaded the age of emancipation and shaped expectations of freedom from the 1880s to the first decades of the twentieth century. In local memory, there are also indications that freedpersons left the fazendas but did not leave the region; this revelation sheds a different light on the images of decadence that are always reproduced in histories of the years immediately after abolition in Brazil’s slaveholding Southeast. Local journalistic agendas – which constantly emphasized disorder, desertion, and chaos – greatly influenced historiographical narratives, overshadowing local memory and hiding more complex historical experiences. Images of the “ruin” that set in months before abolition hid ideologies that sought to control both collective and family-based labor.

Based on a careful dialogic reading of narratives constructed from very different sources and archives – including juridical and print sources, but also local generational memory transmitted through oral history – we have argued here that the characterization of the post-emancipation period as a landscape of catastrophe and total disorganization functioned as part of a dialogue about normative expectations and policies. Euphoria – if it occurred at all – was localized and was the exception rather than the rule; after the celebrations of May 13 were over, at least in the south of Espírito Santo province,Footnote ⁴⁶ freedpeople attempted to reorganize their lives and return to the routine of hard work in the countryside.Footnote ⁴⁷ There, through disputes with a small local agrarian elite, they demarcated their space of autonomy in this new conjuncture. Unlike São Paulo, this was a region where former slaveowners did not have access to a sufficient number of European workers. Beginning 1887, immigrants did arrive to work on the large southern plantations. But they were soon lured by the former province’s vast unoccupied territories, either laying direct claim to them or moving to the settlement colonies created by the Espirito Santo government in the center-west. In southern Espírito Santo, the task of reorganizing labor relations in the countryside fell to Brazilian workers, many of whom were freedpersons.

For planters with little capital, or those unwilling to use their capital to pay their workers’ salaries, coffee growing through parceria (partnership) or meação (sharecropping) developed as a feasible way to organize work in rural areas post-abolition.Footnote ⁴⁸ Paulo Vicente Machado, born in 1910 on Fazenda da Presa in the municipality of Alegre (southern Espírito Santo), gives an interesting description of rural arrangements in that context:

In fact, the crop was not entirely the worker’s, because he had to share half the coffee produced with the landowner. But the fact that the freedman could work by his own rules seems to have been interpreted as an achievement. In the Mata Mineira zone, in Minas Gerais on the border with southern Espírito Santo, almost all of the municipalities adopted the partnership system after abolition. This labor relationship was attractive to landowners because it kept workers on the property, and it also served as a mechanism to reduce cash payments to the workforce. According to Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna, the reorganization of work in the Mata Mineira after abolition also depended mainly on Brazilian workers, “a broad category that in our view includes former slaves, who were the workforce that was key to the formation of a free labor market in that region.”Footnote ⁵⁰ We suggest that same hypothesis for southern Espírito Santo. In another statement from a descendant of freedpersons, born in 1928 in Córrego do Moinho), we have unearthed some details that suggest that partnership was also the predominant form of labor relations in southern Espírito Santo after captivity’s end:

Just as Lanna found in the Mata Mineira, fixed workers, whom the planter called colonos (settlers), lived on the plantation and tended the crops. In most cases, they could plant grains between the rows of coffee bushes or on land set aside for that purpose, which in general had already been abandoned by large-scale planters. In local memory passed down by freedpersons or their children (first generation), the idea of planting grain is associated with so-called lavoura branca (“white farming”), which, in addition to ensuring the worker’s subsistence, may even have rendered them better returns, since investment in coffee could take a very long time to produce a profit.

In the Mata Mineira, and quite likely in southern Espírito Santo as well, the big problem that landowners saw in the partnership arrangement was that the colono was more interested in planting grain than coffee.Footnote ⁵² Thus, in addition to the “partners” – who were generally permanent workers, fixed in place – there was also another category of fazenda workers: temporary, seasonal migrants who helped to harvest crops the partners had planted and tended. In other words:

Yet the possibility of migrant labor could cut both ways, especially in less prosperous regions. Analyzing the narratives constructed in Minas Gerais newspapers in the 1890s, Lanna touched on the open appeals of local farmers, who felt disadvantaged by the flow of workers headed to more dynamic coffee-producing municipalities at harvest time:

Still little studied, these seasonal migrations flowed toward the coffee-growing regions, in Minas and elsewhere, during harvest season (three or four months in the year). These movements and migrations occurred beyond the boundaries of the coffee-growing municipalities, and they may have had broad and intersecting significance. This was apparent in 1893 in responses given to a questionnaire in the district of São Sebastião do Rio Preto in Minas Gerais. The planters complained that “workers from Minas Novas were going to Espírito Santo.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The interesting thing about this movement is that it indicates that by this point the coffee economy of southern Espírito Santo was already attracting workers from a neighboring state. This shows that some sectors of the population in parts of Minas Gerais behaved in the same way as their counterparts elsewhere, migrating during harvest season in response to demand for field labor or in order to escape the control, domination, and power of former plantation masters after 1888. This suggests that such movement on the part of freedpeople and Black families can be characterized as a facet of post-abolition.

This recollection reveals that – just as we have seen in Minas Gerais – the southern region of Espírito Santo saw a process of generational migration and displacement, an intense mobility practiced by a labor force made up of freedpeople and Black agricultural workers descended from the rural free poor. This is also what emerges from the account of Ana Cândida, the daughter of Gabriel Monteiro dos Santos, a small-holder and seasonal coffee worker. “O Velho” Gabriel managed to buy an alqueire of land (a little more than an acre) in Vala de Souza, where the freed family of the formerly enslaved Vicente also owned property; this is where Vicente’s son Paulo Vicente Machado and Gabriel’s daughter Ana Cândida met and married in 1925.Footnote ⁵⁷ In southern Espírito Santo – an example drawn from oral history accounts – there really was a large concentration of colonos who began to cultivate lavoura branca for subsistence after slavery. This seems to have occurred in the former district of Vala de Souza, in the municipality of Alegre, and in the present-day municipality of Jerônimo Monteiro; various accounts refer to areas, places, villages, or small-holdings that were só de pretos (only Black). To this day, there is a Black community there called Sítio dos Crioulos (the farm of the creoles). “O Velho” Gabriel spent a short time in Vala de Souza, where he farmed subsistence crops, which Ana identified as lavoura branca. Gabriel later sold the property and got a job as a sharecropper on a plantation in São João do Muqui, also in the south of the state.

Conclusion

Mobility and autonomy allowed rural Afro-descendant people to produce intersecting significations from complex experiences of freedom, work, and access to land. Land grants in wills, villages of free Black peasants, and even itinerant quilombos created new rural configurations even during slave times, and these took on new and different meanings in the post-abolition era. For many freedpersons – as was true for a subset of dispossessed free men prior to 1888 – mobility was a facet of their expectations of autonomy, which was also based on family labor and mediated by preexisting or developing personal and family relationships.Footnote ⁵⁸

More fine-tuned analyses may offer comparisons – or even direct historical connections – with peasant migrations and settlements elsewhere; with Jamaican maroon villages, for example, or with the intense migration of Black communities in Colombia, who eventually reached free areas on the Pacific coast. In other contexts, such as South Carolina, freedpeople organized themselves as communities after emancipation, planning their work with the aim of gaining more control over various forms of agricultural labor. They wanted to guarantee the benefits they had already acquired as slaves, such the right to plant crops for sale and their own subsistence on Sundays and holidays. In that same region, agrarian movements organized by former slaves began to fight for changes in daily work routines, because in their view labor conditions there were a legalized continuation of slavery.Footnote ⁵⁹ They fully understood the meaning of freedom and the entitlements it sanctioned, and they fought to claim their rights.

The same happened in the Brazilian coffee plantation areas we analyzed in this chapter. Even though planters themselves sought to maintain freedpeople on the plantations where they had long worked as slaves, freedpersons’ pursuit of autonomy, in the form of control over the rhythms of work and access to land, eventually changed the geography of labor in those areas. In that sense, their experience was common to many societies across the Americas after abolition.