Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Among the seventeen families that could be traced to Graciliano and Januária in the year 1855, the highest position achieved by any member was that of an army corporal serving in the far west on the Rio Madeira. The most prosperous Cavalcante was the pilot of a barca on the São Francisco. The most educated was a young man of Chico TicoTico’s generation who’d had three years at primary school.

  If one of Graciliano Cavalcanti’s descendants had prospered, as vaqueiros occasionally did, by building up his own herd with his annual share of new calves, he would have had difficulty finding land to purchase. For decades already, most of the 6oo,ooo square miles of the semi-arid northeast sertão had been in the hands of families like the Ferreiras or held by absentee landlords at the coast. With a passion rivaling that that had possessed the lord donatários of Brazil three centuries ago, these poderosos do sertão believed in the splendor and the glory of owning immense territories. Nothing could be more injurious to their estate than to permit the sale of small patches of land where men of the lower classes might plant homesteads. Nothing could be more threatening to their control than to offer tenants contracts to remain permanently on their property.

  Chico TicoTico’s father, Modesto Cavalcante, was the only descendant of Graciliano still working as a vaqueiro at Fazenda da Jurema. Modesto had a wife and seven children, a mud-walled house, a dozen cattle, seven pigs, and a tame parrot. He had made many trips taking cattle to Recife, but his world lay essentially within the boundaries of the Ferreira lands, where he served the patrão with blind loyalty.

  This day, when the Portuguese inspected Antônio Paciência and the others, Modesto Cavalcante was with the vaqueiros watching the slaver.

  Chico TicoTico stood in front of Modesto. “Antônio Paciência is so young,” he said, turning to his father. “Why does the senhor want to send him away from the fazenda?”

  “He won’t be a child forever. A few years and the boy will be big and strong. He’ll work with the blacks on the plantations.”

  “Why can’t he work at Jurema?”

  “He’s the child of a slave. He belongs to Senhor Heitor. It’s for the senhor capitão to decide what he wants to do with his property.”

  “Antônio Paciência will be taken from his mother?”

  Modesto looked in the direction of Mãe Mônica but didn’t respond. “Antônio Paciência was born at Jurema,” Chico TicoTico added. “His family is here. This is his home.”

  Modesto had difficulty dealing with his son’s concern for the child of the slave Mônica. It was common knowledge that Antônio Paciência had been fathered by one of the senhor capitão’s five sons. Which one was responsible was of no importance to Modesto; he knew that Mãe Mônica was the mother and she was a slave of unclean stomach. Had she been of clean stomach — barriga limpa — she would have delivered a light-skinned mulatto instead of this dark one, this prêto. Senhor Heitor might have been less inclined to sell the bastard if Antônio Paciência wasn’t quite so black.

  Modesto was extremely color-and class-conscious in the feudal-like society to which he belonged. Fazendeiros like Heitor Ferreira and the owners of the engenhos at the coast were the great men of the earth, the rich. Modesto had yet to see one of the ricos who was not a branco, a white, or a branco da terra, a white of the earth — a qualification indicating that though there was evidence of color, the senhor was of sufficient prestige or wealth to be accepted as white.

  When Modesto did not respond to Chico TicoTico after a long silence between them, his son said, “All the times we played with Antônio Paciência, we never thought of him as a slave.”

  Modesto replied quickly: “His brother, the prêto with the goats and the other one with the blacksmith — in a few years, you’d have seen Antônio Paciência serving with them. Now he must find his place among the great herd of slaves in the south. But he’ll be all right. There, among the coffee groves, he’ll forget hard, dry Jurema.”

  The Portuguese bought Antônio Paciência for three hundred milreis, the equivalent at the time of 150 dollars, a good price for a slave boy in the northeast sertão, though the Portuguese expected to receive double this amount when he sold the boy at São Paulo. The slaver was Saturnino Rabelo, a man in his mid-fifties. Previously involved in the African slave trade, for the past four years Rabelo had been engaged in a lucrative traffic of slaves from north to south Brazil.

  Rabelo told one of his slave drivers to take the new purchases to the column at the jurema trees. They were to leave immediately, heading toward the Rio Pajéu and the road to the south; Rabelo would follow when he had eaten the meal the Senhor Capitão offered him.

  “Come! Come, little burros!” the driver said, and grinned, showing his dark, decayed teeth. He was known as Tropeiro, for he had been a mule driver before working the slave columns.

  “Mãe Mônica!” Antônio Paciência shrieked. “Mãe Mônica! Help me! Save me!” His mother broke away from the other women. Clasping her skirt, she ran to the Senhor Capitão, João Montes, and Rabelo, who were still on the veranda. “Senhor! Senhor, my child. . . .”

  Heitor Ferreira looked sadly at Mãe Mônica but said nothing.

  “Antônio Paciência is sold,” João Montes announced bluntly.

  “Ai! Je — sus! Ai! Santissima Virgem! No, Senhor João! Mercy, senhor!” She fell to her knees in the dirt and held her head in her hands, moaning loudly.

  “The fazendeiros of the south need boys like Antônio Paciência,” João Montes explained. “He must go to them. They are good men of great wealth. They’ll treat him well.”

  “My Antônio? Oh, Master João, my obedient Antônio?”

  Senhor Heitor was embarrassed by Mãe Mônica’s outburst in front of Saturnino Rabelo. He heaved himself out of his chair. “You still have two sons and a daughter at Jurema,” he said irritably. “Thank God, Mãe Mônica, that they weren’t also sold.” Turning to Rabelo, he beckoned that they should enter the house.

  João Montes waved to Modesto Cavalcante, who quickly crossed to him, removing his hat as he approached the veranda. “Take Mãe Mônica to the boy and let her bid him farewell.”

  “Yes, senhor.”

  Quickly then, João Montes left the veranda.

  Isabelinha, Mãe Mônica’s daughter, had been standing with her mother during the slaver’s inspection and now she went to their hut for Antônio Paciência’s clothes. She added to the small pile an old leather hat that belonged to Antônio’s stepbrother, the blacksmith’s helper, and a new gray blanket that she herself had bartered from the peddler for vegetables from the garden the senhor capitão allowed the slaves to keep.

  Antônio Paciência saw Mãe Mônica and Modesto Cavalcante coming toward the jurema trees, where the drivers were assembling the column, snapping their whips and cursing the lazy and listless among the 167 slaves. But the drivers ignored Antônio Paciência when he ran to Mãe Mônica and clung to her legs.

  “Oh, my Mother! What did I do?”

  Mãe Mônica clasped her son’s bony shoulders, rocking her body and sobbing.

  “Get dressed, child,” Isabelinha said, holding his clothes for him. “You have a long, long way to go.”

  “Aiieee!” Mãe Mônica wailed. “How can it be? Our Antônio, carried off with these black devils!”

  Isabelinha pulled Antônio Paciência away from his mother and hurriedly dressed him. She was putting on his shirt when a slave driver shouted for him to join the column.

  The final parting was swift and confused. Antônio Paciência was begging, again and again, to be left at the fazenda. Isabelinha offered prayers aloud to the Virgin for his protection. Mãe Mônica lamented at the jurema trees like a very old woman crying for the dead.

  As the column started forward, Isabelinha dashed over to Antônio Paciência. She had forgotten to give him the blanket and the hat, which she jammed on his head. “May God go with you, little brother.”

  “Isabel —” Suddenly his tears flowed again. A slave behind him swore and shov
ed him forward.

  “Antônio Paciência!”

  He saw Chico TicoTico wave weakly. He made no attempt to return the greeting, so ashamed that Chico TicoTico and other boys of Fazenda da Jurema should see him not as one of them but as a slave child. He lowered his head and the wide-brimmed hat blocked his view, except for the feet of those walking near him.

  Dust-covered feet. Feet with open wounds from cuts and gashes. Feet with old scars, calluses, corns, and suppurating blisters. Bare feet of slaves rising and falling, day after day, week after week, as the column marched south through the backlands.

  From Antônio Paciência’s first night away from Fazenda da Jurema as he lay wrapped in his sister’s blanket, weeping, until journey’s end three months later, the boy was rarely spared sorrow and fright. Sometimes there would be a dull unreality without fear and he would play with other slave boys when the column rested at night, but it took no more than a sharp word from Tropeiro or another driver to start him crying for Mãe Mônica and the world he had left behind at Jurema.

  Many sights on the long march awed Antônio Paciência, none more than the Rio São Francisco, which he first glimpsed from the Pernambucan bank opposite Joazeiro, where the river was 2,500 feet wide with banks rising twenty-five feet above low water. When he saw that they were to cross by ferry, he had shaken with fright, but once on the water, he had enjoyed the crossing. Saturnino Rabelo left the column several times to take a barca or a canoe upstream, but the slaves made the entire journey on foot.

  The column marched soon after dawn each day, through storm and rain, cold wind and hot, thick white fogs rising from the river, burning suns. They would rest at noon, the length of this break depending on the mood of the drivers, then on again until sundown. They were given two meals a day of corn porridge and dried beef and beans, a diet varied by occasional finds of wild fruits. Once a week, the men would be given cachaça and a twist of tobacco on the order of Saturnino Rabelo, who promised this generosity so long as all behaved themselves.

  Once, the rations of cane brandy and tobacco had been suspended for two weeks after five slaves attempted to flee into the sertão. Caught and returned to the column, these fugitives were flogged, the lashings administered in a way least damaging to their flesh. Instead of one flogging of ninety lashes, which Rabelo determined they deserved, on nine successive days, at each evening’s halt, the runaways were given ten lashes.

  Seven slaves died from sickness during the march. And twice Antônio Paciência had watched as holes were scratched in the sand beside the road to bury infants born to slave mothers as the column rested at night. But the column was not reduced by these deaths: Saturnino Rabelo acquired seventeen additional purchases from fazendas along their route.

  About half the slaves had been born in Africa. They told the boy that they had dreamed of returning to their families, but each day farther out on the ocean, they had realized this would never be. “It is hopeless to long for the past,” he was advised. “Forget everything but that you were born to live as a slave in the lands of Dom Pedro Segundo.”

  Antônio Paciência had heard Mãe Mônica and others talk respectfully of this Dom Pedro Segundo, a poderoso do sertão with power over not merely one fazenda but all Brazil. Hearing more about this powerful patrão served to increase Antônio Paciência’s curiosity.

  “Are these his soldiers?” he would ask the older slaves at a town or village.

  “Every soldier in Brazil serves Pedro Segundo.”

  “Is this his fazenda?” he asked at a big ranch where Saturnino Rabelo had sought further purchases.

  “No. Pedro Segundo has a grander house at Rio de Janeiro. Ask Policarpo to tell you about it.”

  The slave Policarpo had been bought by Rabelo at a fazenda in the Pernambucan sertão, but several years earlier, he had belonged to a Recife merchant whom he had on occasion accompanied to Rio de Janeiro. Policarpo told Antônio Paciência that he had seen not only the palace but also Dom Pedro Segundo himself, riding along the rua Direita in an open carriage with eight cream-colored horses plumed with green feathers.

  “‘Long live Dom Pedro Segundo! Long live our emperor of Brazil!’ I shouted,” said Policarpo, his face radiant.

  On a bright morning in mid-September 1855 as the slave column marched up the valley of the São Francisco, some 750 miles to the south at Rio de Janeiro, a black man stood for inspection by his master as obediently as had Antônio Paciência at Fazenda da Jurema. His name was Rafael and he was in his early fifties. He smiled as his master scrutinized him.

  “No, Rafael, I do not want you to smile. Relax your face,” the master said.

  Rafael was standing in the middle of a patio. His master was about ten feet away.

  “Fold your arms, Rafael.”

  Rafael obeyed.

  “Good, Rafael. Turn your head slightly to the right . . . Yes!”

  Rafael watched his master step over to a brass instrument mounted on a tripod. His master bent his tall body to peer through a peephole at one end.

  “Excellent, Rafael. Keep your eyes toward me. Bend your head back ever so slightly . . . Yes! Don’t move, Rafael . . . Don’t move!”

  Rafael heard his master give instructions to an assistant whom Rafael knew to be in a room off to the right, where, bright though the day was, the man worked by candlelight behind black drapes. His master unscrewed the back of the brass instrument, removing a round glass screen. The assistant hurried over to him with a circular wet plate, which was substituted for the screen.

  “Steady, Rafael. Steady, now . . .”

  Rafael did not blink an eyelid as Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil, took his photograph.

  It seemed to Rafael that no sooner had the emperor told him to be steady than the picture-taking was over and Dom Pedro and his assistant had removed the circular plate and rushed into the workshop with it.

  Rafael waited outside the dark room. He heard the two men talking animatedly, and though he understood little of what was being said, he remained attentive. Rafael derived great satisfaction from serving his master, to whom he was devoted. No ruler on earth was wiser and more just than His Majesty, Dom Pedro Segundo of Brazil.

  Even today, sixty-three years after the event, there were some older citizens of Rio de Janeiro who vaguely remembered Joaquim José da Silva Xavier as that “madman who had come down from the mountains of Minas Gerais with the crazed notion of making himself king of Brazil.” This idea was all the more laughable today, since here, along streets where the Tooth-Puller had taken his last walk to the scaffold and dismemberment; the people often raised their voices exultantly to greet the carriages of true royalty.

  For their subjects, nothing was so uplifting as the sight of an emperor and his family, in whose veins flowed the noblest blood of Europe.

  Insane Maria I of Portugal had remained queen, with her son, João, carrying out her royal duties as regent. Dom João would have preferred nothing more than the peace of the monastery at Mafra. Instead, he had to make some of the most painful decisions ever thrust upon a prince of Lisbon.

  On August 12, 1807, France and her ally, Spain, had demanded that Portugal declare war on England, close her ports to English ships, and imprison English residents and confiscate their property.

  Instead of waiting for the inevitable defeat of Portugal’s small, ill-equipped army, Dom João and his ministers considered a daring plan: Why not move the court to America? From late September until mid-November 1807, Dom João and his ministers had engaged in a dangerous game of diplomacy. They offered to sign a secret treaty with the British to compensate them if they had to be denied access to the ports of Portugal. In return, England would provide an escort to Brazil for the Braganças if flight became imperative. This treaty had been signed in London on October 22, 1807.

  Two days earlier, Dom João had informed the French that Portugal was closing her ports to the British. But Napoleon still demanded the detention of English residents. Dom João and his council had agre
ed to this, but several days before the proclamation, England’s minister at Lisbon, Lord Strangford, was forewarned so that English residents could depart safely.

  For a week, with a British squadron off the mouth of the Tagus, Dom João had waited for the French response to his decree against the English residents. Napoleon’s answer came on November 23: General Andoche Junot and his army crossed the northern border of Portugal. And from Paris had come news of a pronouncement from Emperor Napoleon himself: “The House of Bragança has ceased to reign in Europe.”

  The Principe Real, carrying Queen Maria, Dom João, and his sons, had made its landfall at the Bay of All Saints on January 17, 1808. Within four days of Dom João’s arrival, the prince regent had agreed to open Brazil’s major ports to friendly nations and to permit free trade between his vassals and foreigners, thus demolishing the cornerstones of Lisbon’s three-hundred-year-old policy of monopolizing and exploiting the wealth of Brazil.

  The proclamations aimed at improving conditions in Brazil had not ceased. At Rio de Janeiro, where the House of Bragança had quickly taken root in its lush tropical domain, along with more than twelve thousand refugees, reforms that had been unthinkable at faraway Lisbon were magnanimously granted. Royal edicts abolished all restrictions on manufacturing and industry, and printing presses were permitted; schools of medicine and surgery and academies of higher education were established; a Bank of Brazil was founded; foreigners were welcome.

  Within ten months of the Braganças’ departure from Portugal, a British force defeated the French. Dom João could’ve returned, but the French had overrun Spain, and the prince regent thought it wiser to stay in Brazil while the Iberian Peninsula remained a battlefield.

  On December 16, 1815, Dom João elevated Brazil from a colony to a kingdom coequal with Portugal. Three months later, Dona Maria died. Dom João became king —João VI of Portugal, João I of Brazil — and still he refused to return to Lisbon.

  From his vantage point at Rio de Janeiro, Dom João had observed the beginnings of the disintegration of the Spanish viceroyalties, and deemed it inadvisable to return home until his kingdom of Brazil was safe from contamination by the revolutionary turmoil beyond its borders. Besides, there was a conquest on which His Majesty had set his heart since arriving in America: the Spanish province of the Banda Oriental, east of the Rio Uruguay and extending south to the Rio de la Plata.