[In the following excerpt, Sayers discusses Brazilian abolitionist novels written between 1850 and 1888, many of them thematically influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.]

The period from 1850 to 1888 is marked by great development in the technique, subject matter and quality of Brazilian fiction. From the first tentative fumblings of Teixeira e Sousa and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo before the midpoint of the century, the novel traversed the stages of Indianism, historical fiction, and regionalism, which were still of only national interest, to join the contemporary currents of realism, represented by Machado de Assis, and naturalism, which is seen in the work of Inglês de Sousa and Aluízio de Azevedo. With these writers the novel achieved international stature, if not recognition, as Brazilian music and painting were to do in the twentieth century. The predominant current at first was that of romanticism, but after 1870, when Machado de Assis began to publish his short stories, various forms of realism rapidly came to the fore. However, certain aspects of romanticism did not disappear at once. If after 1870 there were produced almost no Indian novels, historical and regional fiction remained vigorous, and the popular taste continued to be satisfied with melodramatic feuilletons, many of which, though romantically conceived, dealt with the great social problems of the day.

The Negro appears in almost every kind of novel except the Indian. The early feuilleton romances, if they dealt at all with Brazilian life, contained Negro servants, Negro villains and sometimes Negro heroes. Since the romantic novels of the historical school, like the Indian novels, were an expression of nationalism, an attempt to glorify the Brazilian at the expense of the European, they dealt with themes and subjects in which Negroes might be expected to have some part. The novels dealing with social problems were more often than not a sensational response to the public's interest in that most sensational problem of all, slavery. The realistic novels with their studies of the psychology and the social relations of members of the middle and upper classes could not fail to portray the Negro, who was a member of every Brazilian household. The naturalistic novels, which were principally studies of the more scabrous aspects of human existence, abounded in Negro types. In the novels of the romantic group the Negro, like all the other characters, tended to be a development of one of the stereotypes that had already appeared in poetry, but as the century wore on the number of different types of Negroes even in the romantic novels increased greatly. Meanwhile in the realistic, psychological novel of Machado de Assis the Negro emerged as an individual, and in the naturalistic novel, all phases of his existence were depicted and analyzed and the number of situations in which he was photographed was infinitely multiplied.

The attitude of the novelist toward the Negro and toward the question of slavery varied as the century passed and according to the school of fiction to which he belonged. Since the novelists of the historical school were pre-occupied with other problems, in general they did not take a stand with regard to slavery although they included Negro characters in their books. Yet even they were to a certain extent influenced by the anti-slavery movement, especially in the last decade of slavery, and José do Patrocinio's Motta Coqueiro, is a strong indictment of the institution. However, in other genres the influence of anti-slavery sentiment appears earlier and is more marked. In fact, just as in the theater, a whole literature of social protest sprang up around the theme of slavery. This literature has its romantic aspect in that the novelists, in their zeal against the institution, painted it in violent, exaggerated tones, but it helped to prepare the public for the realistic attention to the life of the slaves and the free Negro that was to characterize the work of writers of the naturalistic school.

Besides the influence of current political thought, the most important single influence upon this literature of social protest was that of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was translated into Portuguese in 1853,¹ two years after its appearance in English, and which had another translation no later than 1856, as we learn from a contemporary book jacket, which carries the advertisement: “Cabana (a) do Pai Thomas, ou a Vida dos Negros na America, por Mistress Harriet Beecher Stowe, Traducão de A. Urbano Pereira de Castro, Segunda Edição, Livraria Viuva Marques e Filho, Lisboa.”² It was advertised on book jackets for years after its publication in Portuguese,³ and there were continual references to it in works of literature. Machado de Assis mentioned it in his review of Mãe,⁴ and Macedo has a scene in his As Vítimas Algozes in which the children of a slave-holder weep as they read the book aloud at night.⁵ In 1855 and 1856 Joaquim D'Aquino Fonseca in his three reports on sanitary conditions in Pernambuco attested to the popularity of the book when he declared that the picture it painted was less gruesome than the Brazilian reality.⁶ João Francisco Lisboa (1812-1863), the most famous journalist of the Province of Maranhão, prepared the outline of an anti-slavery novel after he had spent some time studying the laws on slavery, but he says that he did not complete it after he had read Mrs. Stowe's book because he found that she had expressed many of his ideas and had accomplished the purpose that he had in mind for his own story.⁷ The chief importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin was probably that it encouraged the anti-slavery novelists to strike boldly at slavery. Most of the situations and characters that Mrs. Stowe described were familiar enough aspects of the Brazilian scene, and since they had already begun to make their way into literature, it was inevitable that they would sooner or later have assumed a position of prime importance, even if there had never been any Uncle Tom or Simon Legree. It is a fact, however, that only after the appearance of Uncle Tom's Cabin does Brazilian literature become thronged with cruel overseers and virtuous slaves. The famous flight of Bernardo Guimarães' Isaura from Minas to Recife was probably suggested by Eliza's flight across the Ohio's ice floes to freedom in the North and ultimately in Canada. There were fugitive slaves in Brazil, but their havens were quilombos, not distant lands, except during the last few years of slavery.⁸ Brazilian topography and means of communication being what they were, it is hardly likely that Guimarães found his inspiration for the flight in reality. …

THE ANTI-SLAVERY NOVEL

Almeida was a very gifted writer who would have added luster to the literary reputation of any country. Other feuilletons, however, have much less artistic value, if they have any at all. Yet some are interesting because they contain the first notes of abolitionist sentiment, and because their melodramatic descriptions of the slaves and their living conditions set the patterns for the anti-slavery novel. Mrs. Stowe may have thought that she represented both sides of the slavery picture favorably and that perhaps her book was overfriendly to the slave-holders, but the same is not true of most of the abolitionist novels in Brazil, whether they appeared first as feuilletons or as bound novels. With one notable exception, Macedo's As Vítimas Algozes, they are tales of constant and horrible suffering. Apparently the first of these anti-slavery novels is Pinheiro Guimarães' O Comendador, which was serialized in the Jornal do Commercio of 1856.⁹ This early work by the author of A Historia de uma Moça Rica is like other feuilletons in its plot and main characters, which are grotesquely exaggerated. It deals with the romance of Emilia and Alfredo and the vicious Comendador's attempt to destroy it. The man is represented as one of the petty tyrants of the nineteenth century who exercised unlimited powers over their estates, families and slaves. The importance of the book rests neither in the fact that it is an early work done by one of the best known nineteenth century dramatists nor in any literary qualities which it may have, but rather in its being the first novel to depict the lives of the rural slaves. As such it covers ground already broken by the pioneer local color poet, Trajano Galvão,¹⁰ but being a work of prose it is characterized by detailed descriptions of those aspects of slaves' lives that could only be suggested by the poet. In these descriptions the writer anticipates the method of the naturalists, although the whole novel is romantic in its conception.

The senzala in which the slaves live is described as an incredibly filthy group of thatched cabins built around a sort of patio with a rubbish heap in the center. Each of the cabins has room for one hundred inhabitants who sleep on bare cots without covers even in the cool nights of winter. All through the year when the slaves have gone to bed the windows and doors are locked and the only source of air is the cracks in the roof. The clothing of the slaves is of the meagerest. Twice a year the men are given a pair of pants and a shirt of coarse cotton, and the women receive a skirt and a blouse of the same material. Women are treated as harshly as men and are forced to perform the same labors. They return to the fields three or four days after child-birth, and they are permitted to nurse their children only in the night and the morning. In one scene two slaves are found lingering behind the others to feed their babies. Even though they explain that they have delayed because the night before they had no milk to give their children, they are stripped, tied to posts and whipped—while the Comendador watches them over his coffee.¹¹

The food of the slaves is always the same: cornmeal and dried beans cooked without lard. The result is a pitiful mass of wretched, starved humans. The author describes them as they appear in the morning to receive the Comendador's blessing before they go off to the fields:

Nenhum delles apresentava o aspecto de força, de saude; pelo contrario dir-se-hia que todos elles tinhão sahido de um hospital, tal era a debilidade que nelles se podia perceber.

Alguns estavão por tal modo magros que parecião esqueletos, cujos ossos estivessem cobertos unicamente por uma pelle negra, que encarquilhava-se toda, e formava pregas, como se estivesse por demais larga; outros, opilados, apresentavão uma obesidade doentia, tão repugnante de certo como a magreza dos primeiros. Muitos tinhão as carnes roidas pelas bôbas, outros mal podião encostar os pés no chão, em razão dos vermes que os devoravão; enfim, todos mostravão nos peitos, nas costas ou nos braços cicatrizes mais ou menos recentes produzidas pelos barbaros castigos que havião soffrido. Porém o que mais impressionaria ao espectador não habituado a essas scenas, era a profunda tristeza, o grande abatimento moral que se lia nas feições de cada uma dessas creaturas maceradas pela dôr.¹²

Unpleasant as these pictures may be, the author says that he has tried not to paint them “com côres muito carregadas.”¹³

The next anti-slavery serial is Francina, a romance which was published in 1861 in O Jornal do Recife. Its interest for the American reader lies in the fact that although it is attributed to a Brazilian, Xavier Eyma, it tells of the slaves of Louisiana. Although the author seems to write with such conviction about the bayous of that state that one almost feels he must have lived there, he makes various observations about the American character that a citizen of this country could never have made. He says, for example, “A narração pinta, além disto, por miudo a sociedade americana onde a indifferença mais completa pela sorte do seu vizinho é o caracter dominante.”¹⁴ The most important aspect of the book is not its plot, which concerns the substitution by a slave of her child for her proprietor's daughter so that her own infant may receive an inheritance, but rather the characterization of the supposedly mulatto heroine and the depiction of the lives of a band of fugitive slaves. The latter are a stalwart group who are willing to fight to the death rather than be returned to their masters, and they defend their quilombo, their forest redoubt, with fury even against the attack of the capitães do mato, who hunt them, armed to the teeth with revolvers, rifles and large hunting knives, and accompanied by bloodhounds. Francina, the heroine, is the first slave heroine of a Brazilian novel, as Almeida's Vidinha had been the first mulatto heroine. Francina is the beautiful octoroon who is also refined and educated. She has, in fact, no Negroid characteristics—because she is not a Negro but a changeling. She has been educated with her white mistresses, so that she is as cultured as they, but she is also far more beautiful. In one scene she is described as she appears on the auction block:

Sob seus traços de uma delicada finura, parecia haverem-se extinguido, mais que do costume, pelo cruzamento das raças, todos os traços de origem africana; o seu nariz era aquilino, os seus labios estreitos, suas faces pareciam antes queimadas do sol que ennegrecidas pela natureza, e as maçãs do seu rosto, salientes como as de todas as mulheres do novo mundo de qualquer origem, enrubesciam-se por instantes de um sangue rosado.¹⁵

This pure white girl, because of her supposed Negro origin, was put up for sale at auction, and the readers although they probably did not approve of the situation accepted it as possible.

The most sensational of all these anti-slavery novels of feuilleton was written by the prolific Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, who for twenty-five years had been publishing romances and plays about the life of the upper and middle classes of Rio de Janeiro in which the Negro was hardly mentioned. In all of them his only Negro character of even secondary importance except for the moleque in A Moreninha, was the faithful slave in O Cego.¹⁶ Then in 1869 he brought out As Vitimas Algozes, a two volume collection of three anti-slavery novels, “Simeão, O Creoulo,” “Pai Raiol, O Feiticeiro,” and “Lucinda, A Mucama.” These stories aroused a great deal of comment, some of which was unfavorable because of the representation of immoral aspects of the relation between masters and slaves.¹⁷ In the introduction the author predicts a social crisis which will lead to the inevitable emancipation of the slaves in spite of all opposition, for only Brazil “is branded with the ignominious seal of slavery.”¹⁸ He goes on to say that he himself is unable to suggest any means of bringing about the end of the evil, but that as far as he can he will contribute to eliminating it. There are two paths, he says, that a propagandist may follow in attacking slavery; the first is to paint “o quadro do mal que o senhor, ainda sem querer, faz ao escravo,” and the other is to paint “o quadro do mal que o escravo faz de assentado proposito ou às vezes involuntaria e irreflectidamente ao senhor.” He proposes to paint the second picture, that of “o escravo de nossas cases e de nossas fazendas, o homem que nasceu homem, e que a escravidão tornou peste ou fera.”¹⁹

Thus he presents the slave as a fera, a beast of prey. In the three novels there is no slave who is not dishonest and vile; even those who do good have an evil motive. Voluntarily or involuntarily all bring unhappiness to their masters. They are the vítimas, it is true, but they are also the algozes, the torturers of their owners. “Simeão, O Creoulo,” is the story of the spoiled slave of the family of Domingos Caetano. He repays kindness with treachery, neglecting his old master and killing the master's wife, son and son-in-law, for as the author says in a concluding chapter, “perversity and ingratitude are the rule among slaves.”²⁰ The second story is “Pai Raiol, O Feiticeiro.” Pai Raiol is a witch doctor who feels such tremendous hatred for all the white race that he sets about destroying his master, his family and his property. He poisons the cattle, sets fire to the fields of sugar cane and persuades the cook to seduce the master and separate him from his wife and children, whom she poisons. The third story, “Lucinda, A Mucama,” depicts the evil that a mulatto lady's maid can do. Lucinda, presented as a companion at the age of eleven to little Cândida, teaches the latter the secrets of sex long before she is mature enough to know them, and then later she helps to bring about the seduction of the white girl by a Frenchman whose mistress she herself is.

With all their probable exaggeration the three stories contain a great deal of information about the slaves and their relations to each other and to their masters. We are shown their promiscuousness, their ignorance and their power, and we are given complete portraits of such typical characters as the mucama, the feiticeiro and the pampered mulatto house slave. About the sexual life of the slaves Macedo says:

Sabem todos o que é o amor entre os escravos: a condição desnaturada d'esses exilados da sociedade, d'esses homens reduzidos a cousas, … materializa neles sempre o amor. Sem o socorro da poesia dos sentimentos que alimenta o coração e o transporta às regiões dos sonhos que se banham nas esperanças de santos e suaves laços, os escravos só se deixam arrebatar pelo instinto animal, que por isso mesmo, os impele mais violento.²¹

Macedo feels, then, that the passions of a slave are those of an animal; in fact, all his Negroes have extremely sensual, animal-like natures. The men are not faithful to any one woman, and the women take many lovers, both white and black. The treacherous Esmeria in “Pai Raiol,” although she is clean and intelligent, is “possessa do demonio da luxuria.”²² She gives herself freely to other slaves and even after she has become the mistress of her owner, she admits other men to her room and goes to the hut of the repulsive feiticeiro. Although she prefers the men of her own race, her vanity makes her ashamed of them, and she tries to forget them for her white lover. All the details of the amatory life of the slaves are disgusting to Macedo. They make love philtres by pouring bath water into the victim's coffee, soup or favorite dishes. … And their caresses “são ultrajes escandalosos na vida civilizada. Pai Raiol acariciou desse modo a creoula que facil se abandonava.”²³

Lucinda, the mucama, is intelligent, but she is also sensual, selfish, ungrateful and cynical. She is the product of what might be called a school for mucamas, somewhat like that described by Machado de Assis in his “O Caso da Vara.”²⁴ From her seventh to her twelfth year she lived with a widow in Rio de Janeiro who taught children, both slave and free, to sew and embroider, and who also trained the slaves to be lady's maids. After five years Lucinda has learned her trade well, but five years of living and sleeping in close proximity to many other girls, some of whom are much older than she, are enough to teach her a great deal of evil which she is able to transmit to her innocent mistress. To the latter's inquiries about how she has learned so much she responds that she knows all that she does because, since she is a slave, her purity means nothing; slave girls do not have to marry:

—E' por isso e porque sou negra escrava; com as escravas não precisa haver cuidados, nós não temos de casar-nos …

—Porém tu, … que sabes tanto, Lucinda?

—Eu sou negra, e escrava; n'isto sou livre … não corro perigo, respondeu a mucama de treze annos de idade.²⁵

The spoiled, petted house slave is portrayed in “Simeñao, o Creoulo.” As irmão de leite of his young mistress, that is, as the child of her wet nurse, he is brought up almost as a member of the family. Until he is eight he sleeps in the same room as his master and mistress and eats at their table with them. He is not taught to work and therefore does not learn the “absoluta submissão of the slave.²⁶ Yet he does not attain the dignity of a free man. All that he can hope for is his master's death and a bequest of freedom. Everything about his upbringing helps to destroy his character. Not only is he not expected to work, but he is also given too much money. He desires things that he cannot purchase with his allowance and he begins to steal. When he is discovered one day, he reacts insolently, and on being whipped, plans his revenge, which leads to the murder of his benefactors and his own death. Simeão is a more depraved cousin of Alencar's moleque, who is depicted as being rather mischievous than evil, but Macedo does not cast all the blame on the slave, for in his concluding chapter he says:

Simeão foi o mais ingrato e perverso dos homens. Pois eu vos digo que Simeão, se não fosse escravo, poderia não ter sido nem ingrato, nem perverso.²⁷

One of the most interesting sections of the book is the study of Pai Raiol, the feiticeiro. He is presented romantically, as a hideous, grotesque but abnormally strong creature, the mainspring of whose existence is his hatred for the whites. It is this hatred which makes him plot the destruction of the family that owns him, which gives him absolute power over the other slaves, and which makes him capable of any crime, even against members of his own race, if it is necessary to the carrying out of his plans. Macedo endows him with almost supernatural powers; he can kill birds with a glance and serpents obey his whistle. He is a real peril, Macedo says, for he is the “Negro herbalist,” “the practical botanist” who knows the plants that can debilitate or kill his enemies or drive them insane. He has learned his art in Africa “and has sharpened his intelligence in order to do evil, since he sees that he is a slave.”²⁸ He is the first complete study of the feiticeiro, evil, intelligent and somewhat deranged mentally, who becomes a familiar figure in later novels about Negroes. He is unlike Teixeira e Sousa's Laura in Maria for he represents evil, and he has genuine powers over animals and other people, whereas she is a fraud without evil intentions.²⁹

Like other writers who have already been mentioned,³⁰ when Macedo describes a macumba ceremony, he is unable to connect it with any religious impulse or any motive except that of mystification, the purpose of which is to produce money for the feiticeiro. The fetishes to him seem absurd; the dances are merely frenzied and convulsive. This age-old religion, practised in Africa for centuries by millions of people, is obscene, not spiritual. Yet his description, aside from the unnecessary epithets, is probably a reasonably accurate account of a macumba or a candomblé as it might have been performed eighty years ago, for in its general outline it does not differ too much from the gegê-nagô worship described by Artur Ramos in O Negro Brasileiro.³¹ Macedo perhaps had investigated or studied many such ceremonies before writing about them.

O pagode é de ordinario uma casa solitarìa; o sacerdote é um africano escravo, ou algum digno descendente e discipulo seu, embora livre ou já liberto, e nunca falta a sacerdotisa da sua igualha; o culto é de noute à luz das candêas ou do brazeiro; as ceremonias e misterios de incalculavel variedade, conforme a imaginação mais ou menos assenhada dos embusteiros.

Pessoas livres e escravas acodem à noute e à hora aprazada ao casebre sinistro; uns vão iniciar-se ou procurar encantados meios para fazer o mal que desejam ou conseguir o favor a que aspiram.

Soam os grosseiros instrumentos que lembram as festas selvagens do indio do Brasil e do negro d'Africa; vêem-se talismans rusticos, simbolos ridiculos; ornamentam-se o sacerdote e a sacerdotisa con penachos e adornos emblematicos e de vivas côres; prepara-se ao fogo, ou na velha e immunda meza, beberagem desconhecida, infusão de raizes enjoativas e quasi sempre ou algumas vezes esqualida; o sacerdote rompe em dança phrenetica, terrivel, convulsiva, e muitas vezes, como a sibylla, se estorçe no chão; a sacerdotisa anda como douda, entra e sáe, e volta para tornar a sahir, lança ao fogo folhas e raizes que enchem de fumo suffocante e de cheiro activo e desagradavel a infecta sala, e no fim de uma hora de contorsões e de dança de demonio, de anciedade e de corrida louca da socia do embusteiro, ella volta enfim do quintal, onde nada vio, e annuncia a chegada do genio, do espirito, do deus do feitiço, para o qual ha vinte nomes cada qual mais burlesco e mais brutal.

Referve a dança que se propaga; saracoteia a obscena negra e o socio; interrompendo o seu bailar violento, leva a cuia ou o vaso que contém a beberagem a todos os circumstantes, dizendo-lhes: “toma pemba!” e cada um bebe um trago de pemba immunda e perigosa. Os doentes de feitiço, os candidatos á feitiçaria, os postulantes de feitiço para bons ou máos fins sujeitam-se ás provas mais absurdas e repulsivas, ás danças mais indecentes, ás praticas mais estolidas.³²

Although As Vítimas Algozes is a collection of three highly melodramatic stories with totally improbable Negro characters, the book contains much interesting background material that helps to give it a certain tone of reality and to make it almost a forerunner of the naturalistic novels, to one of which, A Carne, it has some resemblance.

Pinheiro Guimarães had already written a novel that contained realistic descriptions of scenes of Negro life, and Alencar and other playwrights had done dramas in which the central characters were mulattoes, but Macedo was the first novelist to make rural Negroes and mulattoes the main personages in a novel. It is true that these characters are impossible creations which move in the romantic world of murder, torture and seduction that seems to have been the special province of the magazine serials of the time. However, with his attention to details in the naturalistic manner and his insistence upon his thesis of the evil of slavery, Macedo greatly broadened the scope of the novel and prepared the way for both the regionalists and later anti-slavery novelists. Immediately after the appearance of As Vítimas Algozes writers of both schools published novels. Some, which were without any propaganda intent, were undoubtedly influenced by his treatment of rural life. There are, for example, Alencar's Til, with its description of rural life in São Paulo, and Bernardo Guimarães' Lendas e Romances, in one of which all the characters are Negroes, and the locale is chiefly a quilombo in Minas.

Among rural novels in the anti-slavery tradition there is Os Homens de Sangue ou os Soffrimentos da Escravidão by Vicente Felix de Castro.³³ Of little artistic value, it has a place in literary history because it continues the study of the life of the rural Negro begun by Pinheiro Guimarães and continued by Macedo. From the former comes the character of the villainous Comendador Almeida, whose cruelty toward his slaves is at least as great as that of Pinheiro Guimarães' Comendador. His Negroes, like those of Pinheiro Guimarães, are fed only beans and cornmeal, and in the winter they too are forced to sleep on cots without blankets. On buying slaves the Comendador examines them carefully, looking into their eyes and pressing their livers, and then after the purchase has been complete, he shows them that he is their master by striking them a blow with full force. He has a friend, the Barão do Taquaral, who is a master at tortures, one of which is the wheel. In one part of the book he has an old Negro mutilated and killed on it. Castro's feiticeiro, Pai João, is different from Macedo's Pai Raiol. Like the other Negroes in the book and unlike Macedo's characters, this Congo Negro is good; he even saves the wicked Comendador twice from death. Denying that he is a witch doctor, he insists that his magic is beneficial or harmless, for it consists of giving medicinal herbs to sick slaves and calling snakes with a whistle. There is also an account of a Negro secret society, the Irmandade de S. Miguel das Almas, which is supposed to be able to practice magic and which is implicated in the mysterious deaths of different slaves.

One of the most famous of the nineteenth century novelists, Bernardo Guimarães (1825-1884) is generally considered to be the creator of the sertão tradition in literature because of several novels set in the interior of the province of Minas. However, as Veríssimo says, his themes are regional but his treatment of them is not.³⁴ Thus in “Uma História de Quilombolas,” he tells a story of fugitive slaves without giving us any genuine information about their lives in the quilombo. In the same way his historical novels lack background and deserve the name only because of the few actual historical characters introduced into the plot. Since his most famous novel, A Escrava Isaura, deals with a contemporary social theme, that of slavery, it should be correct to class it with the anti-slavery novels. In fact, it was compared on publication to Uncle Tom's Cabin.³⁵ It has one excellent local color scene, almost the only one in all Guimarães works. Yet the book is well within the current of romanticism because of the coincidence and absurdities that characterize the plot and because of its typically romantic characters, the chaste and beautiful Isaura, the virtuous and noble Alvaro, the kind hunchback Belchior and the thoroughly villainous Leôncio. However, the theme is an attack upon slavery and the subject matter is manipulated only with that end in view.

In brief the plot is concerned with the misfortunes of a beautiful white slave who is the daughter of a Portuguese father and a mulatto mother and who, to escape the attentions of her already married master, flees from Campos to Recife, where a millionaire socialist or republican—the author is not sure about this point—falls in love with her. Betrayed by a mercenary villain, she is returned to her owner in São Paulo and about to be forced to marry the hunchback, Belchior, when Alvaro appears on the scene, announcing that he has caused the financial ruin of Isaura's owner, Leôncio, and is ready to marry her.

There are many Negro characters, some of whom are rather well developed. There is Rosa, the vain, jealous mulatto who resents having been displaced in Leôncio's affections by Isaura and who lies about Isaura to her mistress. There is André, the lascivious mulatto house slave, who is anxious to be Isaura's lover, but who is kindly disposed to her. The other Negroes, who are friendly to Isaura, are described only in one interesting scene in the spinning house on the plantation. They sit in the crude room with its spinning wheels and its loom, and they gossip about the master's cruelty to Isaura and the probability that he will begin to grow coffee on his plantation. Their Portuguese is simple and natural and in strong contrast to that of the other characters, and they breathe a temporary air of reality into the book.

However, from the point of view of this study the most interesting aspect of the book is the character of the white slave, Isaura. Isaura was not the first such personage that the Brazilians had met. There were Cora, the heroine of Barbier's French play which had been adapted to Portuguese by Biester, and Francina the heroine of Xavier Eyma's romance, both of whom were from Louisiana,³⁶ and three years before the publication of A Escrava Isaura there had appeared in Alagoas a short novel by Julio Cezar Leal, Scenas da Escravidão, which was also about a white slave, Ignez.³⁷ However, Isaura is the most completely portrayed of all the white slaves. She is probably suggested in part by the melancholy slave women of poetry whose prototype was Gonçalves Dias' escrava in his poem of that name, for she is melancholy and long suffering, and she even sings a song similar to that of her unhappy sisters, but as the heroine of a novel she is painted at full length. She is in every way the extraordinary heroine of romantic fiction. Her beauty is breath-taking and she has a voice that makes her the rival of the greatest opera singers. Because she has been educated with her young mistress, she is refined and cultured. Yet she is a devoted though illegitimate daughter of her humble Portuguese father, and except for her insistence upon preserving her virtue, she is always the obedient slave. These qualities bring her both misery and happiness. She is loved and persecuted by a married man, but she finally earns her just reward, a handsome millionaire husband. The myth is absurd, but the Cinderella theme is perennially popular, and the book is one of the most loved of Brazilian romances.³⁸

Two beautiful mulattoes are the heroines of another romance by Bernardo Guimarães, Rosaura a Engeitada, which is set in São Paulo in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has some interesting descriptions of life in that academic city; for example, the students' república or cooperative boarding house is well presented. Unfortunately the two women are uninteresting, undeveloped characters, cut on the same patterns as Rosa and Isaura. Adelaide, who is like one of the mulattoes of the local color poets, is the self-willed, spoiled child of a well-to-do mule dealer. Her impetuous, sensual nature causes her to forget her virtue. The result of this misstep is Rosaura, who is abandoned at the door of a brothel which is also a sort of breeding place for young slaves. Although Rosaura is brought up in these unfavorable surroundings, she is protected from vice by her own superior nature and the good offices of Nhá-Tuca, the bawd who owns it:

Pôsto que vivesse no meio daquela escola do vício e da abjeção, Rosaura, graças à índole privilegiada, e também ao cuidado que Nhá-Tuca, por exceção de regra, tinha tido de esquivar-lhe aos olhos as cenas de devassidão que se davam em sua casa, havia conservado até ali pura e intacta a inocência de sua alma. Se era uma fada pela formosura do rosto e pelo airoso porte de seu corpo esbelto, era um anjo pela candura e pureza do coração.³⁹

Her reward is that by some coincidence her mother's husband purchases her and takes her to his home. There she shows her talents at cooking, embroidering and taking care of children; she is one of those precocious mulattoes that we first meet in Macedo's “Lucinda.” Then when her mother's husband discovers Adelaide's past, the poor man dies of shame, and Adelaide is able to marry her first love, Conrad, and give her child a name.

This happy conclusion to the trials of Rosaura and Adelaide, like the happy end of Isaura's misery, proves Guimarães' belief that one's color or previous condition of servitude should not injure one's chances of happiness or success. He believes, in fact, that the genuine Brazilian should be of mixed blood. In A Escrava Isaura one of his characters exclaims on seeing the lovely slave that she is “… uma perfeita brasileira,”⁴⁰ and in Rosaura he expresses his own opinion directly:

Em nossa terra é uma sandice querer a gente gloriar-se de ser descendente de ilustres avós; é como dizia um velho tio meu; no Brasil ninguém pode gabar-se de que entre seus avós não haja quem não tenha puxado flecha ou tocado marimba. …⁴¹

Guimarães' other Negroes are almost all portrayed as good people, but they are uninteresting characters because of the flat plane in which they are conceived. In his historical romance, Maurício⁴² and its sequel, O Bandido do Rio das Mortes,⁴³ which are about the early days of gold mining in Minas he presents a herculean slave who, in spite of his strength, for a long time patiently stands the mistreatment of his avaricious Portuguese owner. When this master finally outrages him beyond measure, he strikes him, killing him, and then flees to organize a band of fugitive slaves who support the cause of the Brazilian settlers, the paulistas, against the Portuguese. There is a good Negro, too, in O Garimpeiro, a novel which deals in part with diamond mining in Minas. Simão is a slave who is faithful even after the death of his master, and at the end of the novel he acts as a kind of deus ex machina to set things right for his master's young son and his bride.⁴⁴

Although all the characters in “Uma Historia de Quilombolas” are Negroes or mulattoes and the story purportedly takes place in a quilombo in the western part of Minas Gerais, there is neither local color nor convincing treatment of Negro character in the story. The Negroes are the personages of a white romance disguised in dark skins; for that matter the mulatto hero and heroine are as light in color as whites. Florinda is described conventionally as having all the loveliness of a Caucasian and all the grace of a mulatto.⁴⁵ However, she does not have the strength of character for good or evil of other beautiful mulattoes, of Almeida's Vidinha or Macedo's Lucinda. Instead, in this story of abduction and revenge she behaves as a white heroine might be expected to, fainting at appropriate moments and begging for mercy for her persecutor when he is in danger. The hero is strong and resourceful and a fair fighter who might be the brother of any of Guimarães' white heroes, just as the villain, also a handsome mulatto, might be the brother of any of Guimarães' other villains. The most interesting of the characters is the Zámbi or chief of the quilombo, who is depicted as a colossal Negro with a face that is both sinister and intelligent. He emerges from the tale as a clever but ruthless leader who is fair toward friends and enemies but merciless toward traitors. And he too is not endowed with any of those qualities that other writers associate with Negroes—he is not the sensual African, the faithful slave, the treacherous mulatto. In this story, as in most of his others, Guimarães can hardly be said to draw any color lines in his description of his characters. Except for the sensuous and indiscreet Adelaide, none of the Negro characters has any racial characteristics; in general the color of their skin is an accident which may well be disregarded. …

Notes

1. Samuel Putnam, op. cit., p. 247. This version, which was published in Paris, was by Francisco Ladislav d'Andrada.

2. On the jacket of the play A Ultima Carta, Lisboa, Livraria Viuva Marques e Filho, 1856.

3. E.g., it is advertised on the cover of the play Comedia em Casa, Lisboa, Livraria Campos Jr., 1858.

4. Vide supra, p. 149.

5. Rio de Janeiro, F. Briguiet, 1937, Vol. II, p. 88.

6. Relatorio do Estado Sanitario da Provincia de Pernambuco durante o Anno de 1853 … durante o Anno de 1854 … durante o Anno de 1855, Recife, Typographia de M. F. de Faria, 1855-56, vol. I, p. 19.

7. Pedro Lessa, “João Francisco Lisboa,” Revista da Academia Brasileira de Letras, vol. V, n^o 10. Julho-Outubro de 1912, p. 305.

8. An interesting account of a mass flight from the plantations of São Paulo to the famous quilombo of the anti-slavery city of Santos is found in the novel of Afonso Schmidt, A Marcha, Romance da Abolição, Editora Anchieta Limitada, S. Paulo, 1941.

9. Reprinted by Pinheiro Guimarães Filho [Pinheiro Guimarães na Esfera do Pensamento Brasileiro], op. cit., p. 371-496.

10. Vide supra, p. 93.

11. Gilberto Freyre cites as true an even more extreme case: “Brandão Junior refere o fato de um fazendeiro no Maranhão que obrigava as escravas negras a deixarem seus filhos, crianças ainda de mama, no tejupabo, metidos até o meio do corpo em buracos para esse fim cavados na terra”, Casa Grande e Senzala [6th ed., 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1951], vol. II, p. 602.

12. [Guimarães Filho, Pinheiro] Pinheiro Guimarães na Esphera do Pensamento Brasileiro [Rio de Janeiro, Typographia I. Amorim & Cia., 1937], p. 460.

13. Ibid., p. 462.

14. Jornal do Recife, Jornal Semanal, vol. III, n^o 108, 19 de Janeiro de 1861, pp. 17-18; n^o 112, 16 de Fevereiro, pp. 48-49; n^o 114, 2 de Março, pp. 68-69; n 116, 16 de Março, pp. 84-85; n^o 121, 20 de Abril, pp. 123-124.

15. Ibid., p. 17.

16. Vide supra, pp. 82, 145.

17. Innocencio Francisco da Silva, Diccionario Bibliographico Portugues, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional, 1858-1923, vol. XII, p. 104.

18. As Vítimas Algozes, Rio de Janeiro, F. Briguiet & Cia., 1937, vol. I, p. ix.

19. Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.

20. Ibid., p. 116.

21. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

22. Ibid., p. 150.

23. Ibid., p. 167.

24. Vide infra, p. 205.

25. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 36, 42.

26. Ibid., vol. I, p. 17.

27. Ibid., p. 116.

28. Ibid., pp. 131-133.

29. Vide supra, p. 168.

30. Loc. cit.

31. P. 71.

32. Macedo [, Joaquim Manoel de. Obres Dramaticas, 3 vols., Rio de Janeiro, Garnier, 1863.], op. cit., pp. 127-128.

33. 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro, Typographia Cinco de Março, 1873.

34. Op. cit., p. 286.

35. Basilio de Magalhães, Bernardo Guimarães, Esboço Biographico e Critico, Rio de Janeiro, Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, 1926, p. 174.

36. Vide supra, pp. 144 and 172.

37. Typographia do Jornal do Penedo, Penedo, Alagoas, 1872.

38. A Escrava Isaura, preface by M. Nogueira da Silva, 11a edição, Rio de Janeiro, Briguiet & Cia., 1941, p. 6.

39. Bernardo Guimarães, Rosaura a Engeitada, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Moderna, 1944, p. 224.

40. P. 25.

41. P. 106.

42. Mauricio ou os Paulistas em S. João d'el Rei, Rio de Janeiro, Briguiet & Cia., 1941.

43. São Paulo, Monteiro Lobato, 1922.

44. “O Garimpeiro,” Quatro Romances, São Paulo, Livraria Martins Editôra, 1944, pp. 243-357.

45. “Uma História de Quilombolas,” Lendas e Romances, São Paulo, Coleção Excelsior, n.d., p. 22.