After hearing about the brutal working conditions of Bahia’s sugar plantations and Minas’s plantations and mining fields, this was rather surprising to me. I asked Furtado how this could have occurred at a time when Europeans considered Africans barbaric, uncivilized, and inferior. In the United States, after all, we had communities of free blacks in both the North and the South; about 10 percent of the black population in 1860 was free. But they generally didn’t live in integrated communities with whites.
“This place was very distant from everywhere else,” she explained, referring to the urban context in contrast to the life of a slave on a plantation or in a mine. “In the eighteenth century, it took months to travel here, so these people were pretty much apart from the rest of the world.” In other words, in Diamantina, blacks and whites could live outside social norms. What happened in Diamantina, it seemed, stayed in Diamantina. And quite a lot happened, especially at night. I asked Furtado how free blacks came to be free in the first place. She explained that many of these freed blacks were women, that white men in Diamantina frequently took African women as concubines and then freed them in their wills or on their deathbeds, while others allowed the women to work in the mines or as prostitutes, saving their money to buy their own freedom. “They had to live amongst themselves,” Furtado explained. “White men were the majority of the free population, and they needed women to have sex.”
The bachelor factor again, I thought, realizing that while, in some ways, Diamantina sounded downright progressive, hadn’t slave women always been forced to be concubines for white men throughout the slave trade and across continents in the New World? I asked Furtado what made the women of Diamantina so different.
“Women really achieved a superior social status here,” she asserted. “In 1774, around 50 percent of the houses were owned by black women. They possessed slaves. They were able to have a status very similar to the men they were living with.”
I found it hard to believe the church would put up with any of this. Furtado nodded with a mischievous smile. “Of course the church disapproved completely of this situation,” she chuckled, “but what we saw here was a kind of silence from the church. There were some visits from bishops, and all this sin was denounced. People would pay some amount of money and say, ‘I won’t do it anymore.’ But when the bishop left the city, everybody started living together again!”
The line, according to Furtado, was drawn at marriage. While couples could live together and trust everyone around them to look the other way, only “equals” received the sanctification of the church to marry. “White married white, freed people married freed people, black people married black people,” she stated flatly.
Furtado then offered to take me to the house once owned by the most famous black woman in Brazilian history, a woman named Chica da Silva, one of Diamantina’s most successful women in the eighteenth century. She’s an icon in Brazil. In the 1970s, her story was even made into a film starring the country’s first black female superstar, Zezé Motta. Few slaves in the history of the United States could imagine a life as complex as Chica’s. And the difference between slavery in Brazil and slavery in the United States lay in the essence of her story: Chica da Silva could almost escape her blackness.
Furtado told me that Chica da Silva was born in Brazil and came to Diamantina as a slave. Her master, a white diamond merchant, fell in love with her. “When he met her,” said Furtado, “he’d just arrived from Portugal. She had already one small boy with her former owner, a doctor, and he bought her from him. And I think it was a case of love—an immediate case of love, because he arrived in August, in December she already belonged to him, and he freed her on Christmas Day.”
“They stayed together for fifteen years,” Furtado continued, as we wandered through Chica’s impressive home. “They had thirteen children together, one after another. And she was buried in Sao Francisco Church, a very exclusive church for the white brotherhood.”
The thought of an African woman rising to such a height within a slave-owning culture seemed miraculous. But Furtado explained that this ascendance did not come without cost. Chica da Silva was black, yet her rise to power within the community was part of a conscious “whitening” effort. “She acted like she was a white woman,” Furtado explained. “She dressed like one; she was buried in the white church. What can I say? It was a way of integration.”
The consequences of Chica’s choice—the shedding of most vestiges of her black identity—echoed for generations in the lives of her children and grandchildren. “They really embraced the white,” Furtado said. “Because it was the way of social climbing in this society. The goal was to become white people.” Indeed, Furtado’s research shows that many of Chica’s sons moved with their father to his homeland of Portugal, settling in Lisbon and presenting themselves as whites in Portuguese society. There are even records that suggest that some of Chica’s descendants in Lisbon paid money to the Crown officially to erase their black heritage.
“We have the registers,” said Furtado, “of investigations of her blood because her sons and grandsons who wanted to take any position in the Portuguese society had to have their lineage investigated, their genealogy. Because having someone who was black or Moor or Jewish—they’re all problems. It was forbidden for them to enter in the Order of Christ or to enter in the university to apply for a job or a position. So they had to apply this way in Lisbon and then they had to ask for forgiveness to the queen for having a grandmother or a mother who was black. They had to pay money. And because of the money they had, in fact these children got good positions, good jobs, good places, even in Portugal.” They managed to erase their blackness bureaucratically.
This points to something crucial in Chica’s story. We shouldn’t think of hers as a case of a mixed person “passing” which is the analogy that we, as Americans, generally come to right away. It was much more complicated than that. Chica was definitely African descended, and no amount of European clothing or mimicked behavior could change that. But she wasn’t simply trying to hide that. Rather, she was doing something fundamentally different: she was advancing by class. After all, lower-class Portuguese who achieved wealth did much the same thing: they abandoned their country customs and took on the airs of the aristocracy, if they were able to. In the United States, in contrast, no amount of wealth or behavior would ever make a black-skinned person “white,” and that is a fundamental difference between the two societies. Class was fluid in Brazil, in a way that it was not for black people in the United States. The process, in other words, was always about class status first and much less about race per se, something very difficult for us to grasp in the United States.
I thought about this as we left the house. Chica da Silva’s transformation from a slave to a wealthy matriarch included a whitening process. Her star wouldn’t have risen if she had practiced Candomblé, worn traditional garments, and, well, stayed black. And her decision had an effect on her family for generations. I found this capacity of a female slave for social mobility fascinating, since it was so unlike the experience that this same person would have had in the United States, but I also have to say that I found it somewhat disturbing. And the more I thought about it, the more confusing the story seemed to me. I realized, with a start, that I was thinking about Chica da Silva in terms of “passing” for white in the United States, not in the way race was socially constructed in Brazil. Everyone in Brazil knew that Chica was black; money and manners “whitened” her socially only. In the United States, a drop of blood is all it takes to make a person “black”—and the history of passing is replete with tragedy, from the descendants of the abolitionist writer and physician James McCune Smith to the Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer to the New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard. But could blacks in Brazil choose a more nuanced racial identity than we can in the United States? Were the scores of racial classifications that Brazilians of color used to describe themselves neutral descriptors; or were these ways
to separate from the darkest, most “Negroid” aspects of the African experience in Brazil, and their connotations as base, inferior, and degenerate? Was I imposing a US interpretive framework on the subtleties of a society I was ill prepared to understand? Had Brazil’s long history of miscegenation created a complexly shaded social structure, from white, on one end, to black, on the other, which had managed, somehow, to escape the negrophobia that remains so much a part of US society? In other words, should we be celebrating the social fluidity that Chica da Silva enacted for herself and her progeny, rather than critiquing it? If so, should we, in the era of multiculturalism and mixed-race identities, look at Chica and people like her as prophets of the social construction of race, as harbingers of a new era in race relations?
Questions like this can quickly become abstract, academic, and impossible to answer. I’ve often found that the place to go for a reality check is the barbershop or the beauty shop. After all, black hair is a big deal—whether you embrace it, tame it, or straighten it with a hot comb or chemicals. I wanted to know how Brazil’s mixed-race culture dealt with black hair; I wanted to know what was hiding in “the kitchen.”
I headed to Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais. I knew there were concentrated Afro-Brazilian communities in the favelas there—the poorest areas. And that’s where, in the blackest part of Minas Gerais, I stepped into the beauty shop of Dora Álves to find out just how beautiful black is in Brazil. Álves does hair, but she also does politics, as a cultural activist. She told me that her customers often ask her to make their hair look straighter, less frizzy, less kinky . . . more white. Álves teaches them to take pride in their black hair and their black heritage.
“Sometimes, we’ll have someone arriving at the salon,” she told me, “and she is so depressed, with such low self-esteem. She thinks her hair is ugly, that her hair is terrible. Sometimes the mother still has her baby in a stroller, and she arrives asking me, ‘Oh, my God, is there any way to solve this hair?’ Sometimes we go into schools, and the teacher will come up with a child—he’ll whisper, just like this, into my ear, ‘Do you think there’s anything that can be done?’”
I shook my head, astonished at the idea of exposing the skull of a baby in a stroller to the torture of hair-straightening chemicals.
“I’ll say, ‘No, let’s have a chat!’” Álves went on, emphatically. “I sit down, I put the child on my knee, and I say, ‘Your hair is beautiful. You are beautiful. I’m organizing a fashion show, and you can be in it.’ And the child starts to relax, and the next thing you know, the child is strutting around. She’s all happy, all joyful, walking around like Gisele,” referring to Brazilian Gisele Bündchen, whom Forbes magazine recently said was the highest-paid model in the world.
Álves wants to reach kids early, so she regularly visits schools and community centers to promote black pride. It’s a big commitment, especially for a woman who runs her own business. But it drives her to distraction to see Afro-Brazilians trying to leave their blackness behind the way Chica da Silva did.
“Why do so many black women have low self-esteem here in Brazil if they have Afro hair?” I asked. Why would black people be so alarmed at having black hair in the world’s second-largest black nation?
“It’s a question of history,” Álves explained, shaking her head. “It’s also a question of the media, too. You see it in the advertisements, in magazines, on TV—you see that most of the women are white. If you go and count, there might be one black girl, just one. And the rest are white, with their hair straightened out. So black women can’t see themselves at all.”
They can’t see themselves at all, I thought, stepping out of the shop. I turned back to wave at Álves and thank her again. But my mind was spinning with questions. Black people were everywhere, but had they absorbed Brazil’s urge to whiten itself? And their history included characters like Chica da Silva, who had walked away from her blackness—and been idolized for it. In the United States, everyone just sees me as black, and that’s how I think of myself. But in Brazil, racial mixing had made things far more complicated, more graduated, more nuanced, perhaps?
So what is blackness in Brazil? And just how beautiful is white? As someone with a mixed-race heritage myself, I decided to ask passersby on the street what they thought of me. And I learned, quickly, that my color was in the eye of the beholder.
“If I lived in Brazil,” I asked one man, “what color would I be?”
“Caboclo,” he answered.
I asked another man, “What race am I, what color?”
“Pardo,” he said.
The answers kept coming, all different. “Light moreno.” “Mulatto.” “Cafuso.” Each was specific, as if describing a different color of the rainbow. It seemed objective—to a point.
“We’re all black, even though we’re different colors,” one man argued.
“I’m black,” another piped in. “He’s light moreno.”
“Black. He’d be black,” a woman said. “I’m not a racist, no.”
Her answer rung in my head. I couldn’t help noticing that those who called themselves black and identified me as black did so with a certain defiance, or apologetically. Many people wanted to be one of Brazil’s seemingly endless shades of brown, not black, and to assure me that I was brown, too. Were these categories, these many names for degrees of blackness, a shield against blackness? The mixing in Bahia, Minas Gerais, and other areas in slavery times and replicating itself since had produced Brazilians of a brown blend. But these many shades of black and brown clearly weren’t equal.
I called my friend Professor Reis and described my experience to him. He reminded me that there are in fact well over a hundred different words to describe degrees of blackness in Brazil: 134, in fact—a word for every shade. Very dark blacks are preto or negro azul (blue black). Medium-dark blacks are escuro. Preto desbotado refers to light-skinned blacks. If you’re light enough to pass for white and you seem to be trying, then you’re mulatto disfarçado. Sarará means white-skinned with kinky hair. The country’s focus on color, it struck me, bordered on obsession. The list went on, and on, and on, dizzyingly.
I decided to return to Salvador, Brazil’s black capital, to find out what in this country’s past made attitudes toward blackness so problematic—to learn more about Brazil after slavery, when degrees of blackness were already spread across the country. I met with Wlamyra Albuquerque, another historian who teaches at the Federal University of Bahia. We settled in the library at the Geographical and Historical Institute, carefully drinking cool glasses of water so as not to damage the fragile works in the archives. I asked her what the white ruling class had thought about African culture in Brazil after the abolition of slavery in 1888. “The elite reacted very badly to the end of slavery,” she replied. “What bothered them was how to deal with the large population of color. Various ministers who were a part of the government believed that in order for Brazil to become a civilized country, it had to undergo a process of whitening. The government invested a great deal in European immigration to the country.”
Abolition may have ended slavery, Albuquerque said, but it didn’t transform Brazil into the tolerant multicultural nation that so many blacks and white abolitionists must have hoped it would become. Between about 1884 and 1939, four million Europeans and 185,000 Japanese were subsidized to immigrate to Brazil and work as indentured servants. The process, a formal government program, was called branqueamento—which translates, literally, as “whitening.” Obviously, the white elite hoped to increase the number of whites reproducing among blacks to lighten the national complexion. But the effort was also aimed sharply at eradicating vestiges of African culture.
“The government told Brazilians that to be black was something close to savagery,” Albuquerque explained. “From that moment, they began to persecute practices that were seen as black—like Candomblé and capoeira—trying to convince people that these practices were barbarous and that it was a civilizin
g act to stop them.”
As I silently cheered for Candomblé and capoeira—African creations that survived the era of branqueamento—Albuquerque began to tell me about one black man, a pioneering intellectual, who had taken a bold, brave stand against the government’s racist ideologies. His name was Manuel Querino. He’s still little known even inside Brazil. His story is rarely taught in universities, much less in high schools. But he is an important figure nonetheless: a historian, artist, labor unionist, and black activist who deserves to be better known. You might think of Querino as a Brazilian mixture of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: he pushed for technical education for blacks and was a teacher at a trade institute, like Washington; but at the same time, he was a member of the exclusive Instituto Geográfico e Histórico (where I was talking to Albuquerque), as Du Bois would have been. But unlike Washington and Du Bois, he was also involved in trade unionism and local politics (he was an alderman), and he often allied himself with oligarchical politicians. Querino, in other words, was a rather complex man.
“Querino emphasized the role of the African as a civilizer,” Albuquerque told me. “He thought there was no need for the white immigrants, as Brazil had already been civilized by the Africans. He said the Brazilian worker was much more capable than the foreign worker of dealing with the challenges of Brazilian society.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 67