Throughout the ceremonies, Celso Cavalcanti had kept close to Fábio. Celso’s role in the flight of the fifty runaways from these valleys had not been revealed, a mercy for which he continued to thank God. Although proud that he’d led the slaves of Santo Tomás to Itamaracá, he wished he had the courage to tell his father.
During this difficult time for Celso, there had been one joyous event: On July 23, 1886, Rosário had declared itself free of slavery. The owners of the last seventeen slaves in the city had finally agreed to accept generous compensation for them. Rodrigo had attended the Associão Libertadora’s celebration and put his name to a telegram sent to His Majesty, but still regarded the abolition of plantation slavery as a separate problem.
Toward three o’clock in the mill yard, the guests invited to the banquet at the Casa Grande began to leave for Santo Tomás. Rodrigo rode in a carriage with Fábio, his son Duarte, and Dr. Cicero de Oliveira on the old Rosário road, which had been repaired and widened. On the left of the road lay the tracks for the small locomotive and cars of the usina railway, which had three branches: this one to Engenho Santo Tomás; one to the north and a siding beside the Great Western; and a third into the valley where the usina had been built. The third line passed two engenhos belonging to relatives of Vinicius Costa Santos, the illfated promoter of the East Pernambucan United Sugar Milling Company’s engenho central. One of the Costa Santoses had attended the inauguration, but the other would have no part of it and was one of four owners who refused to send their canes to the mill.
“Give them a few seasons and they’ll come to the usina,” Rodrigo said as they passed the plantation of one who declined to do business with the Cavalcantis.
Fábio remarked, “And if they value their independence, even above the prospect of greater harvests?” He had not forgotten his brother’s past declaration that to surrender one’s engenho and become a fornecedor of cane to a central mill ultimately could lead to the loss of one’s lands.
“I promised we’d break with fatal routines of the past, and we will, with our modern usina. But the men of Santo Tomás have always preserved the unity of these valleys —”
“We have a covenant with them, Pai!” Duarte Cavalcanti interjected.
The barão de Jacuribe gave his son a look of the greatest affection. “Yes, Duarte!” he said passionately. “Forever!”
It was almost time for the banquet to begin at the Casa Grande. Rodrigo Cavalcanti moved among his guests, graciously accepting their congratulations. As five o’clock approached, he was in one of the big reception rooms just off the entrance to the Casa Grande, and showed no hurry to have the guests ushered to the upstairs parlors for the banquet.
While Rodrigo spoke with a group of planters — dressed almost to a man in dark frock coats, black vests, and silk cravats — his glance roved the room. There was Fábio, off in a corner with Dr. Cicero; his brother, for whom he had deep admiration despite their differences. Across the room, Renata Cavalcanti was as lovely as ever in a mauve evening dress with her waist drawn in like an hourglass. Renata stood beside a love seat occupied by Dona Eliodora Cavalcanti and Rodrigo’s wife, Dona Josepha, now the baronesa. None had been so pleased as Dona Eliodora at Dom Pedro’s award: She sat here now with all the airs of a grand duchess, beaming with pride as she took gentle puffs of one of the dainty little cheroots to which she was addicted. Glancing around the room, Rodrigo was looking for one of his sons in particular. Duarte was here, Gilberto, the teacher, too, who had traveled from Rio de Janeiro for the occasion. But Celso, whom Rodrigo sought, was not in the room. After a few minutes’ conversation with the planters, Rodrigo excused himself and went in search of this son. He had a good idea where to find him.
The chapel doors stood open. Rodrigo stepped forward softly and stood framed in the doorway. Though it was many years since the engenho had had a resident priest, the small sanctuary was well maintained; its woodwork varnished, the walls immaculately white, and the altar gilded. There had been two padres after Eugênio Viana, but the last one had left in 1847 and not been replaced. From time to time, a priest from Rosário officiated at the engenho chapel.
Celso was kneeling at the first row of benches in front of the altar, his head bowed.
Rodrigo saw Celso look up at the crucifix on the altar, and he started to walk toward him.
“Celso . . .”
It seemed as if Celso had known all along that his father was there. He showed no surprise at hearing his name, but rose calmly to his feet.
“I came to give thanks to our Lord for this day, Senhor Pai.”
“I thank God, too, for His blessings.” He stood opposite Celso now, and there was a change in the tone of his voice. “I know everything, Celso. Fábio told me.”
Celso blanched. “O my Jesus.”
But Rodrigo said calmly, “Yes, my son. Fábio told me how you have agonized over approaching me. You know my bitterness toward the Church and why I feel this way. I opposed the bishop because we have only one ruler in this land — our emperor. But it’s not for me, Celso, to oppose the will of God.”
“Oh, Pai . . . Pai,” Celso said, breathless with relief that his father knew nothing about the runaways.
With tears in his eyes, Celso embraced Rodrigo, and as he held his father, his gaze fell on an image in a niche just behind Rodrigo Cavalcanti.
The little Santo Tomás had been beautifully restored by the same mulatto responsible for the portrait of Dom Pedro Segundo in the entrance hall of the house. The image’s cheeks had been delicately painted with a faint blush. The saint’s cassock was gold with a red floral design, its girdle brown with gold knots; the sandal straps, too, were carefully painted across the small feet. But the stumps of the arms, which had been hacked off by a Dutch soldier in 1645, remained jagged, the wood dark and encrusted with age.
“May God bless you, my son, as He has blessed your father this day.”
They walked from the chapel and out to the long veranda in front of the Casa Grande. Near the front door, they paused silently, father and son, gazing out across the lands below the hill, green and gold in the setting sun. Neither said a word. Arm in arm, they entered the Casa Grande.
In July 1886, at Paraíba do Sul, a town in a coffee-growing valley below the Mantiqueira Mountains ninety miles north of Rio de Janeiro, a jury sentenced four slaves guilty of assaulting an overseer to three hundred lashes each. Two of the four died from the beatings.
Joaquim Nabuco revealed the details in a column he wrote for O Pais, a liberal daily newspaper at the Corte. By October, the outcry it provoked led to the passing of legislation prohibiting the whipping of slaves by public authorities.
With the abolition of the public lash, desertions from the coffee fazendas began to increase. In the city of São Paulo, a secret group of militant abolitionists calling themselves “caiphazes,” after the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, aided runaways. Their leader, Antônio Bento de Souza e Castro, who belonged to a planter family, rallied them with Caiaphas’s adjuration to the Sanhedrin: “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.” Runaways who made for São Paulo came alone or in small groups, which could be sheltered by the caiphazes; those who fled into the countryside hid in quilombos deep in the forests.
In the first half of 1887, from district after district, reports of desertions and rumors of mass slave uprisings reached the Paulista capital. By July 1887, with two thousand runaways squatting in a camp outside Santos below the Serra do Mar, where no capanga dared enter, and an unknown number scattered in quilombos in the backlands, the provincial authorities appealed to Rio de Janeiro for help: A warship was dispatched with a small landing force; troops were sent overland.
The 1887 coffee harvest had been under way since April, and the Paulista planters were confident that this season’s berries would reach their drying terraces. But, with the mounting crisis, many fazendeiros were worried, not only about the next harvest, but also abou
t the planting season that was to begin in October.
Resolutions passed by district agricultural clubs — the planters’ response to groups such as the caiphazes — condemned the urban anarchists’ assistance to runaways, but increasingly accepted the inevitability of an end to slavery. A resolution adopted by fazendeiros of the município of Tiberica at a meeting on July 9, 1887, suggested five years as the absolute minimum required to prepare for a free labor system.
The meeting of Tiberica’s fazendeiros had been stormy.
One old fazendeiro spoke of bringing Chinese to harvest the coffee, but was shouted down with cries that the importation of Asians would mongrelize the population. Another speaker reminded the meeting that the provincial assembly had approved funding of full-fare subsidies for European immigrants in 1886. The agents of the São Paulo-based Sociedade Promotora de Imigracão were already actively recruiting the peasantry of Italy. A few of the planters felt that the employment of masses of Italians was fraught with the danger of strikes.
In the end, the fazendeiros of Tiberica could agree only on the need to slow the pace of emancipation to five years.
When the meeting broke up, some of the planters stood talking in small groups outside the câmara on the east end of Tiberica’s central praça. The câmara was diagonally opposite the parish church, the bell tower of which was still incomplete. A new market stood on the south end of the square, the big store of Silva & Sons on the west, flanked by smaller shops and several tabernas. The praça had been planted with trees and a patchwork of gardens between circular stone-paved paths, a favorite place for “footing,” the evening promenade of the town gentry and their young.
Finally, two of the planters started across the Praça in the direction of Silva & Sons. The older of the two walked with a slight limp and carried a slender cane, which many of the taberna customers knew to be topped with a diamond worth a small fortune and set in gold. The fazendeiro was not yet fifty, but had thick silver-gray hair. His small mustache was dark, his chin clean-shaven. The young man was striking-looking, with jet-black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a high forehead. He was of medium height and slightly stocky, but had a light, easy step. He had returned to Tiberica two years ago after many years’ absence in Europe, and had amazed the locals with a contraption he’d brought from England, “The Rover,” the first bicycle seen in Tiberica.
The older man was Firmino Dantas da Silva, walking with a limp from his leg wound at the battle of second Tuyuti. Firmino had returned to Fazenda da Itatinga in January 1868, a month short of three years after marching off with Tiberica’s voluntários, and deeply ashamed of his lack of courage. Ulisses Tavares had died in 1871, believing his grandson had served with honor in Paraguay.
Firmino Dantas and Carlinda Mendes, the sister of Baronesa Teodora Rita, had been married in 1868, the year of his return. Apothecary August Laubner and his wife had attended the wedding with no idea that the extreme friendliness shown them by the barão’s grandson was a reflection of his secret passion for their daughter, Renata. August Laubner had prospered, and the profits from his pharmacy had enabled him to buy a coffee fazenda, which was run by his son, Maurits — “Mauricio,” among his fellow planters.
Firmino and Carlinda Mendes had three children — Evaristo, Delfina, and João. It had not been a happy marriage. Carlinda was loving and attentive to him, but they had little in common. Carlinda had become plump, domestic, and deeply superstitious. She rarely left the mansion overlooking the Rio Tietê, where she lived like a grand dona of the past, reclined on lace-edged satin cushions, attended by her slaves. Her special delight was sticky cakes, which were baked daily. And she was obsessed by the Catholic saints, and by the saints of the senzala. Carlinda Mendes lived in terror of the evil eye of Exú. With the aid of a sorcerer, a free black woman whose husband was a mulatto overseer at the fazenda, she had resorted to black magic. From babá Epifánia — “babá,” like “ama,” was an affectionate address for a woman who served as nursemaid — Carlinda Mendes obtained a constant supply of toad parts, feathers, herbs, and candles to ward off malady and misfortune.
Firmino Dantas knew that his wife dabbled in superstitious practices — he often detected strange aromas floating in the rooms of the mansion, and he had found tiny feathers and crushed herbs in his pockets — but he had no idea of the intensity of Carlinda’s obsession. What was important to Firmino was that she left him free to pursue his own interests.
Ulisses Tavares had died in 1871 and Eusébio Magalhães, Firmino’s father, just four years later, leaving Firmino Dantas in control of the plantation. Firmino had completed his experimental coffee mill, which had gone into operation in 1872, but it rarely functioned for long without breaking down. But in 1876, Firmino Dantas da Silva accompanied a delegation of Paulistas representing the province at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia and stayed on for eight months in the United States, buying machinery that turned the fazenda into one of the most modern in the province.
Thousands of acres had now been cleared on those twelve square miles within the great bend of the Rio Tietê. The coffee groves now held 750,000 trees, 500,000 of which were fully matured. There were pasturelands with herds of white-humped cattle, a crossbreed between zebus from India and local animals; a sugarcane mill, sawmill, and countless workshops; stores to supply the needs of 500 agregados, and slave quarters for 370 blacks and mulattoes.
Two years after the barão’s death, Teodora Rita had gone to live in Paris, where the forty-four-year-old baronesa was a vivacious belle among a small colony of Brazilians, many of them nobles, sheltering in cool luxury away from the tropics.
The young man crossing the praça with Firmino Dantas was Aristides Tavares da Silva, the son of Ulisses Tavares and Teodora Rita. Aristides had studied the humanities at the Sorbonne. He had traveled widely in Europe, particularly Italy and Greece, and had lived in London for a year.
In London, Aristides had met Joaquim Nabuco at a banquet at the Brazilian legation in Grosvenor Gardens. The young da Silva was awed in the presence of Ambassador Francisco Moreira’s guests, among them Baron Alfred de Rothschild, whose family were official bankers of Brazil and who himself was a personal friend of Nabuco’s.
Nabuco, known in London as a Brazilian abolitionist leader, had taken Aristides under his wing at the banquet, introducing him to Baron Alfred. Subsequently, Aristides had been invited with Nabuco to Exbury, the bachelor Rothschild’s country estate, where Aristides had beheld the amazing spectacle of Baron Alfred wielding a jeweled baton to direct his private symphony orchestra.
“Where is your home, Aristides? Is it Paris? Is it London?” Nabuco had asked that night, not waiting for an answer. “I love London above all cities I’ve visited, but my heart is in Brazil. You must choose, Aristides, and choose soon. You can spend years loitering in Europe or you can go home, back to a land that is one of these days going to be free. Home, Aristides, to Brazil, where you belong.”
A year passed before Aristides Tavares da Silva sailed for Brazil. Baronesa Teodora Rita had delayed him in Paris through the winter, for she had her eye on a wife for him, nineteen-year-old Anna Pinto de Sousa, daughter of a Portuguese viscount who preferred Paris to old Lisbon, a city glorying in the past. Aristides fell madly in love with the girl. He had feared Anna Pinto would dread the thought of living in Brazil, but when he told her of his decision, she had said, “I would follow you to the end of the earth, my love.” They were married in Paris on June 10, 1885. Eight days later, they had sailed for Rio de Janeiro and Santos.
Firmino Dantas and Aristides had got on well from the start, strange though their relationship was. Firmino, the forty-seven-year-old, was the grandson of Ulisses Tavares; Aristides, the twenty-seven-year-old, was the son of the old barão and his child bride, Teodora Rita.
It had pleased Firmino Dantas to discover that Aristides shared many of his interests, including mechanics. Aristides had spent months mastering every aspect of the enormous da Silva enterprise, l
oathing only the contacts with the slave quarters but accepting the continuation of slavery as a temporary evil. He knew Firmino Dantas would have released many more slaves than the elderly but for certain considerations, one being the mortgage held by the fazenda’s bankers, for which 147 slaves were security.
On this July evening in 1887, as Firmino Dantas and Aristides strolled across the praça at Tiberica, they spoke of one particular subject debated at the meeting: Italian immigration.
“There’s no hope in Italy for the peasants,” Aristides said. “When I toured the country I saw the depth of poverty. God only knows, but the families who land at Santos can hope for a life better than they’ve ever known.”
“I still think we should wait until we’re better prepared to receive them.”
“Twenty families, Senhor Firmino — they’ll use the old coffee store as a dormitory. It will only be for a month or two.”
Firmino paused beside a fountain that he had donated to the town in memory of the barão, and poked with the end of his cane at some weeds growing up against the base. “When will you leave?”
“I’d prefer to leave tomorrow. Senhor Martinho Prado expects me in the capital on Wednesday. We’ll go together to Santos.” Prado was an organizer of the Sociedade Promotora de Imigracão. “He’ll help me select our workers.”
Firmino started walking again. “I rely on you to make the best choice, Ari.”
Aristides laughed. “Clear eyes! Good muscles! Strong hands! Like an old slaveocrat inspecting his stock?”
Firmino ignored this remark. “What happens with the colonos at Itatinga will influence others in the district.”
“I understand, senhor. I’ll bring only those who show a willingness to settle down and work hard.”
“The work is hard, but they’ll be treated fairly at Itatinga. You can promise them this.”
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