“Querino was also an artist and spoke about this population’s artistic abilities,” she continued. “He was concerned with showing African customs and traditions in Bahia. So he was a dissonant voice when everyone else was saying that those who came over as slaves were not capable of a more sophisticated style of work.”
I was stunned that I had never heard of this man. (I later learned that the hero of the novel Tent of Miracles, by Jorge Amado, is partially based on Querino. Amado can be thought of as the Gilberto Freyre of Brazilian literature.) Slaves were acknowledged as essential in many quarters. But Querino had argued that Africans were integral to Brazil’s cultural identity. For me, hearing about his life was like learning for the first time about W. E. B. Du Bois or Carter G. Woodson—two of my great personal heroes in African American history. I was absolutely riveted as Albuquerque began searching the archives’ copy of one of Querino’s essays for her favorite passages.
“Here it is,” she said, thumbing through a journal. “‘Whoever rereads history will see the way in which the nation always has glory in the African that it imported.’ It’s about how we should have pride in being the descendants of these Africans. Querino is the father of black history here—and also of black mobilization and of racial positivity within the black movement.”
Querino was a seminal figure in the black intellectual history of Brazil. And yet, as I learned from Professor Albuquerque, Querino’s pioneering ideas about race and racism largely died with him in 1923. Instead, the creation of Brazil’s official identity—as one of the world’s few truly mixed, supposedly racist-free nations—is credited to the work of one man: Gilberto Freyre.
Unlike his unsung counterpart Querino, Freyre is taught widely in schools, even in the United States, and is celebrated for recognizing the value and significance of Africans within Brazilian culture (I read his work when I was in college). But also unlike Querino, Freyre was white. He was born into a middle-class family in 1900, only twelve years after abolition. His father was a public employee, and his mother’s family owned a sugar plantation. Freyre spent his youth on plantations owned by his mother’s relatives. And plantation life served as the inspiration for Freyre’s most celebrated work, published in 1933: Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves; a better translation would be “The Big House and the Slave Quarters”). In that book, he argued that race relations in Brazil were quite fluid during slavery, in spite of the violence at the heart of the system. But slavery, he argued, was not solely defined by violence. He described Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, as the first place most likely to eliminate racism, because it was not a mainstream mentality of normal Brazilian citizens. Racial democracy was in process of being constructed.
Freyre argued that because blacks, whites, and indigenous peoples were all having sexual relationships and reproducing with each other—a mixing traditionally called miscegenation, a term of some baggage and controversy today—race relations were better in Brazil than they were in slave-owning cultures that were more rigidly segregated. I’d brought my copy of Freyre’s book with me and, as I traveled across Brazil, frequently looked over some of the key passages that had stuck with me all these years later. I found that they still troubled me, like this one:
The truth is that in Brazil, contrary to what is to be observed in other American countries and in those parts of Africa that have been recently colonized by Europeans, the primitive culture—the Amerindian as well as the African—has not been isolated into hard, dry, indigestible lumps incapable of being assimilated by the European social system. . . . Neither did the social relations between the two races, the conquering and the indigenous one, ever reach that point of sharp antipathy or hatred, the grating sound of which reaches our ears from all the countries that have been colonized by Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The friction here was smoothed by the lubricating oil of a deep-going miscegenation.
Freyre claimed that whites and blacks not only had sex but sometimes married, with the church’s blessing (though live-in arrangements were suitably “damned by the clergy”). He argued that this racial mixing constituted the core of Brazil’s identity. Like Querino, he maintained that Brazil wasn’t Brazil without Africans and their culture. But his work lacks any real sympathy or understanding of what it actually means to be a Brazilian of African descent.
I realized then that Freyre had, in many ways, taken Querino’s place in Brazilian history. He’s credited with the first view of Brazil as a nation that should take pride in its mixed-race heritage. But did he articulate anything beyond an essentially primitivist or romantic view of race relations during slavery?
Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries out in him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike . . . the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the aborigine or the Negro. . . . In our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism, which so delights the senses, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs—in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence.
When Freyre wrote these words, in 1933, US blacks were under the boot of Jim Crow. Segregation was the order of the day, and many whites in the United States were fighting to keep it permanent. And yet Freyre asserted that black Brazilians and white Brazilians were bound together by blood and destiny. He argued that they had created each other, that they mutually constituted each other. Many people who read Freyre in the United States—he was actually educated at Baylor and at Columbia—during these years of Jim Crow must have thought he was either dangerously radical or else insane. Who alive here then would ever have dared claim that the United States could be the world’s model racial democracy?
When I first read Freyre, I remember faulting him for being overly romantic, even naïve. Masters raped slaves. Many long-term sexual relationships were the result of coercion at best. Respect between peoples comes with social equality. And, obviously, when one person owns another, there can be no equality. Period. But I had to acknowledge the impact that Freyre’s writing is said to have had on Brazil. Some scholars argue that it changed the way whites looked at blacks, and it also changed the way blacks thought about themselves, though it is difficult to imagine a work of scholarship having this much social impact. Freyre, drawing on mid-nineteenth-century Brazil legend, was nevertheless one of the first scholars to argue more or less cogently that Brazil—its culture and its identity—was created by the blending of three equal races: Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Africans. We cannot overestimate how novel this idea was in its time, or how eagerly liberal and progressive academics, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, seized on it—at least for a time—in their attempt to undermine de jure segregation in the United States.
Traveling north from Salvador, I was greeted warmly by Gilberto Freyre Neto, the grandson of the writer, at the writer’s home in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco and the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Brazil. After Bahia, Pernambuco was Brazil’s second-largest center of sugar-plantation slavery in colonial Brazil. Recife’s airport is named for Freyre, surely a first, or at least one of the very few times that an airport has been named for an intellectual! I told him I was honored to meet him after having studied his grandfather at Yale. And I relished my personal tour of Freyre’s house, where he lived from 1940 until his death in 1987. Neto showed me his grandfather’s medals of honor, the desk at which he sat and wrote his books, and even a first-edition copy of Casa Grande e Senzala.
Neto’s life is dedicated to keeping his grandfather’s work alive, so he was happy to sit with me and dig into Freyre’s writings. I started by asking him how attitudes toward black people changed after his grandfather’s 1933 masterpiece was published.
“I think the book was a real turning point in the 1930s,” he told me. “Gilberto raised the Brazilian blacks to the same cultural standing as the Portuguese. He equated them. He said Brazil only became Brazil when African culture, which was often
superior to Portuguese, became culturally miscegenated. From that moment on, we had a ‘complementariness.’ We became an ideal meta-race.”
At the time Casa Grande e Senzala was published, Germans were rallying behind Hitler and his calls for Aryan purity. Freyre took the completely opposite view, arguing that its racial mix was essential to bringing Brazil to the height of its cultural and societal potential. Whitening had been a mistake.
“His studies were based very heavily on experiences that my grandfather lived through and information that he was able to gather from sources that were curiously trivial,” Neto explained. “A lot of the time, they were not even considered academic. He drew from newspaper cuttings, interviews with elderly people, knowledge that was gathered mostly from interactions. So my grandfather inhabits the dichotomy of either ‘Love Gilberto Freyre’ or ‘Hate Gilberto Freyre.’ Some academics think of him as a novelist, while others think of him as one of the most profound analyzers of Brazilian society.”
Novelist, sociologist, neither, or both, Freyre’s impact really can’t be overstated. His writings changed attitudes about race across the entire nation. Many of Brazil’s leaders, no matter what their politics were, sooner or later embraced his ideas. They overturned institutionalized policies that overtly discriminated against blacks. Brazil’s official whitening process came to an end. And Freyre fixed, in its place, the concept of “racial democracy”—the idea that Brazil was so racially mixed that it was beyond racism.
Beyond racism. I sat back for a moment. I was beginning to feel something romantic toward Brazil—as Freyre had always felt. Even today, Brazil boasts of its racial harmony and its multicultural identity. And I could almost see it. While the United States was busy policing the racial boundaries with Jim Crow, Freyre was arguing, Brazilians were busy embracing one another! The joyous celebration of Carnaval became a globally recognized symbol of Brazilian brotherhood across racial lines. Racial democracy certainly seemed to lie at the heart of Brazilian identity.
But could it be real? What about Brazil’s extensive poverty, especially among blacks? What about Ile Aiye and Olodum, which rose in the seventies from a need to reassure blacks (and to educate whites) that it is glorious to be descended from Africa? Like any reasonable person—black or white—I want to believe we live in a world where a society beyond racism can exist, not just in theory. But I need to see evidence of this progress to believe it. And in the restaurants where I ate and in the hotels where I stayed, in upper-class residential neighborhoods, on the covers of magazines at city newsstands—virtually everyone in a position of power looked white.
Neto was adamant in response to my questions. If racial democracy isn’t real already, he assured me, it is becoming real. He read once more from his grandfather’s works: “I think we are more advanced in solving the racial question,” he quoted, “than any other community in the world that I know.”
I left Neto with as many questions as answers and headed south to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s most famous city—and its cultural and intellectual capital. I’d managed to secure a meeting with Zezé Motta, the actress who played Chica da Silva in Brazil’s famous film, which premiered in 1976. As a black actress, I thought, she must have had strong feelings about playing this character, and I was hoping she could help me clarify my feelings about this so-called racial democracy.
What I didn’t expect—and what I got—was a meeting with a most thoughtful, articulate artist. Chica da Silva may have personified racial democracy, but life for Zezé Motta has been quite different. “Before I became successful,” she said, “I took pictures for advertisements, and the client did not approve them, saying, ‘This client is middle class and wouldn’t take suggestions from a black woman.’ And on TV, I played various roles which were actually always the same one: the maid.”
“I was always defending Chica da Silva,” she explained. “I would say, ‘Chica da Silva did what she had to do. Don’t demand Angela Davis attitude from her.’ Her merit lies in the fact that she was born a slave, but she could not accept this. She turned the game around and became a queen.”
Perhaps paradoxically, at the same time she defended Chica da Silva for being complicit in her own whitening, Motta discovered how connected she was to her own blackness.
“It’s very hard for a black person in Brazil to have a career as an actress,” she confided, “but in the case of Chica da Silva, it had to be a black woman. The producer didn’t want me because I was too ugly—until very recently, in Brazil, the black people were considered ugly. The producer preferred her to be a mulatta, a lighter actress. But the director didn’t budge. It had to be a black woman.”
Who wouldn’t want Chica da Silva—a black woman—played by this great, and stunningly beautiful, black actress? I kept listening.
“After the film, I was considered a Brazilian sex symbol,” she laughed, “because the character became very present in the male imagination. At that time, there would never be a black person on the cover of the big magazines, because they’d say, ‘The cover sells.’ But as I had become the queen, the sex symbol, an important magazine put me on the cover. And someone high up in the magazine said that if it didn’t sell, the person who signed off on it would be fired!”
Motta’s portrayal of Chica da Silva made her a star, overnight. She enjoyed the recognition that came with her fame, and she was certainly proud of her work. But her new status brought her new experiences along Brazil’s ever-moving color line. And those experiences revealed to her Brazil’s antiblack racism—a racism that her country claimed did not exist.
“I traveled to sixteen countries promoting the film, including the United States,” Motta continued. “And I started to think, ‘There are so few black actors in the Brazil media. Where is everybody?’ This country has a debt toward its black people.”
I thought about Motta’s words as I traveled to my next meeting. I’d arranged to sit down with one of my heroes, a truly great man who has spent his life advocating for Afro-Brazilians: Abdias do Nascimento. I had wanted to meet him for a very long time; Nascimento is one of the gods of the international black-intellectual tradition. He is now ninety-six years old, but the grip of his handshake is still firm and his mind razor sharp. He’s been fighting the good fight for three-quarters of a century, as a senator, a university professor, and a writer. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he founded the Institute of Afro-Brazilian Studies in Rio and is widely recognized as the country’s greatest black activist. Some people even call him the Nelson Mandela of Brazil.
I was honored to be in his presence, and I told him so. He accepted me graciously, with the calm and dignity of a leader naturally born. An exquisite gold statue of Exú, the messenger of the gods, stood on a china cabinet near Nascimento’s dining table. I asked him about the status of black people, politically and socially, in all aspects of contemporary Brazil. Was racial democracy an ideal or a reality? Had it ever existed? Could it ever blossom?
“This is a joke, which has been built up since Brazil was discovered,” Nascimento replied with conviction. “And Brazil likes to spread this around the world. But it’s a huge lie. And the black people know that. The black people feel in their flesh the lie that is racial democracy. You just have to look at the black families. Where do they live? The black children—how are they educated? You’ll see that it’s all a lie.”
He listened patiently while I recounted my recent visit with Gilberto Freyre’s grandson. Nascimento didn’t buy plantation life as whites and blacks holding hands in the sunshine, either. He told me he found the idea “sentimental.” And if you don’t accept that picture, he pointed out, you can’t accept racial democracy. Interestingly enough, in the late forties, Nascimento published a short-lived magazine called Quilombo, in which Freyre and other white intellectuals published essays in a column entitled “Racial Democracy.”
“There is the myth that slavery in Brazil was very gentle, very friendly, even,” he said. “These are all fabrications.
Slavery here was violent, bloody. Please understand, I am saying this with profound hatred, profound bitterness for the way black people are treated in Brazil—because it’s shameful that Brazil has a majority of blacks, a majority that built this country, that remain second-class citizens to this day.”
He spoke so passionately but without bombast, his convictions firm, well considered, strong. In his eloquence, he reminded me of the Nigerian Nobel laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka. As I continued to listen, somewhat in awe, Nascimento explained how formal racism in Brazil had been replaced by an equally dangerous informal racism. Racial democracy was a mask, a public face that Brazil put on for the world, he explained. Day-to-day, real-life Brazil was still hostile to blacks, still trying to “whiten away” vestiges of African culture.
“My parents never talked about African gods,” he lamented. “I researched them, but the African gods were hidden. The only gods that appeared in public were the Christian gods, the Catholic ones. But the gods of those who lived in little huts, who were ashamed or afraid to reveal their true beliefs?” He shrugged his shoulders and held out empty hands. “It was not a law. It was an unwritten law that one shouldn’t really talk about African gods. It’s only now that African gods are talked about openly.”
“I was the first black senator who was conscious of being black,” he said, proudly. “And I ripped the fantasy of the Senate apart. Every single session, I would start by declaring, ‘I invoke the orixás! I invoke Olorum! I call Exú! May Exú give me the power of speech! Give me the right words to get at these racists who have been in power for five hundred years! The right words to tell Brazil, to tell the world that the black people are aware, that the black people are awake!’” I could only imagine that scene, the horror on the faces of his fellow senators as he declaimed about the Yoruba gods, invoking my favorite of the lot, Exú, messenger of the gods, the god of interpretation, rather like Hermes in Greek mythology. I glanced at his statue. It was almost as if the lovely, nine-inch gold statue of the trickster broke into a smile. We both burst into laughter.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 68