Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil by Robert E. Conrad Review by: A. J. R.

Russell-Wood The International History Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Aug., 1985), pp. 452-455 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40105504 . Accessed: 28/01/2013 07:22
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Reviews

Robert e. conrad. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xxvi, 515. $50.00 cloth; $16.50 paper (us). On 2 January 1826, police of a major American city were paid to administer 2,900 lashes to 16 slaves, including four women. In 1758, a Catholic priest noted that the preferred method of cauterization of bruises was drops of melted sealing-wax. Elsewhere, salves of cayenne, pepper, and salt were applied to wounds 6-8 inches in diameter and half an inch deep. Novenas of one hundred lashes each day for nine successive days were not unusual. Slaves suspected of stealing sugar cane had their heads encased in tin masks. In September 1878, eighteen-year-old Manuel was lashed with a twothonged leather whip and then put to work picking coffee with a neck-piece and chain to which was attached a tree stump weighing 64 pounds; at least three slave women received identical treatment. Loads of 160 pounds crippled the lower backs, thighs, and knees of coffee carriersin a city, seat of the imperial court, and minor concessionsin terms of load were made for female slaves suffering from elephantiasis. Slave caravans of the 1880s included pregnant women whose babies were discarded as soon as they had been delivered. This was Portuguese America, and such was the lot of the survivors. Others had succumbed to the Middle Passage by jumping overboard for fear of being fattened up only to be eaten by their captors; women bellydown on the decks of the slave ships had been flogged to death. Some had endured watching their legs being amputated over the ship's rail to save the use of irons, others suffered from virulent ophalmia, and many had been so weakened that they had to be carried ashore on arrival in the New World, only to be exhibited as cattle would be in the notorious Valongo slave market of Rio de Janeiro.

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Reviews These are not scenes from Dante or figments of the imagination of an Hieronymus Bosch; they are pieces in a mosaic of a trade in human flesh and misery which lasted for four hundred years, and of a slave system which was only abolished in Brazil in 1888. Incredibly, contemporary and later * commentators, both national and foreign, created a white legend'. Some echoed Richard Burton's aphorism that, in Brazil, slavery had little of that gall which characterized the institution elsewhere; others attributed exceptional tolerance on the part of the Portuguese and other races to protracted exposure to non-Europeans in the Iberian peninsula. The Brazilian Gilberto Freyre and the North Americans Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins contributed to the myth of the friendly, humane, and philanthropic owner in Brazil, so much more benign than his North American counterpart. Here was the Land of the True Cross where a Catholic clergy shielded their flock from physical abuse and provided spiritual succour. Scholars who should have known better found in a higher rate of manumission evidence for greater 'mildness', and pointed to plantation owners who adopted as their own the illegitimate offspring of sexual alliances with black and mulatto concubines. In short, the foundations had been laid for the creation of a second myth - that Brazil was a land devoid of interracial tensions and was a true racial democracy. Despite the revisionist essays of Charles Boxer for the colonial period and Florestan Fernandes for the modern era, there are still those willing to subscribe to these myths. Such obduracy has been facilitated by the absence of texts available in English; by the publication of these 117 documents translated from the Portuguese, Robert Conrad has removed any reason for ignorance, for they represent an unrelieved chronicle of the oppression of one race by another. About one fifth of the documents pre-date 1800. Emphasis on the national period reflects the compiler's own research interests but serves to underwrite limited access to education or literacy by persons of African descent in Portuguese America. Conrad, already well-known for his authoritative Destruction of Brazilian Slavery 1850-88, an invaluable Brazilian Slavery: An Annotated Research Bibliography, and his translation of Joaquim Nabuco's Abolitionism, has cast his net wide. Sources include British consular reports, travellers' narratives,newspaper advertisements,sermons,regional laws, Jesuit accounts, records of the Brazilian house of deputies, and reports by a select committee of the British house of lords and personal correspondence. Of special interest are seven documents attributable to persons of African descent. These include a portion of the autobiography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a native of the Upper Volta shipped to Brazil in the 1840s; burlesque rhymes of the mulatto ex-slave, Luis Gama, on mixed bloods; statements on the precarious existence of freedmen; statements on colour or

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Reviews the sale of children by their parents; petitions for protection from owner excesses; and an 1806 letter, previously published by Stuart B. Schwartz, in which rebellious plantation slaves demand an equitable settlement. At least four other documents were penned by descendants of Africans who gained prominence in colony or empire, namely the Jesuit Antonio Vieira, the engineer Andre Reboucas, Senator Francisco Salles Torres-Homem, defender of the Free Birth Law, and the mulatto editor and abolitionist, Jose do Patrocinio. This selection is a major contribution to the literature and is required reading for students of Brazilian history, of comparative colonialism and colonialism in the Americas, and of systems of slavery. Students of the LusoBrazilian world will find in this fine anthology evidence to support some of the views advanced by A.G. de CM. Saunders in his recent A Social History of Black Slavery and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555 or by this reviewer in The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil. Those whose prime interest lies in Anglo-America will find here a worthy complement to the documentary histories of Herbert Aptheker, Willie Lee Rose, and John Blassingame. Regardless of differences of national origin, Europeans in the New World resorted to remarkably similar solutions when faced with the problem of developing to the full the raw potential of their colonies. Although plantation systems and recourse to African slavery were not limited to the tropics and subtropics, such similarities of and close parallels to economic development between North and South America cannot blind one to the essential differences between the two societies. The one was virtually exclusively export-oriented,while the other witnessed the concurrent development of plantation and settler colonies. Further, greater numbers of whites in the overall population of North America contrasted with the white minority to be found in many regions of Brazil. Metropolitan interests and close supervisionby the crown did not allow New World Portuguese and Brazilians that independence which characterizedtheir counterparts in the English colonies who, in turn, appear more politically motivated and sophisticated than their Brazilian neighbours. Scarcity and the high cost of food in Brazil led to extensive malnutrition, dietary inadequacies, and high mortality among slaves in Brazil. The combination of sexual imbalance and physical duress contributed to the failure in Brazil of a natural growth in the slave population. This collection is arranged topically and chronologically. Sections treat the slave trade, slavery in rural and urban Brazil, the stance of the Catholic Church on slavery, relations between the races, slavery and the law, corporal punishment, ambiguities attendant upon being black, slave response (running away or revolt) , and the struggle for abolition. Documents have been selected for inherent interest; and, on controversial issues, Robert Conrad

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Reviews has sought to seek balanced representationof different viewpoints. A general introduction precedes each section and Conrad succinctly sets the scene for each document by placing it in a broader context. Illustrations enhance the value of the volume, reinforcing and complementing the text. Of the thirty illustrations,only two, a leaflet advertising a runaway slave and propaganda against the Free Birth law, are of Portuguese or Brazilian provenance. Conrad has presented a portrait of a colonial society of priests, slaveowners, merchants, royal magistrates,lawyers, and miners. Although not the subjects of a single section, women - both as slaves and free persons- are interspersedthroughout the narratives, and no reader can doubt their contribution to the society and economies of Portuguese America in their roles as wet nurses, washerwomen, personal servants, shopkeepers, and on the plantations or in the commercial life of towns and cities. Their contribution was no less, nor was their suffering less, than their male counterparts. While remaining discreetly behind the scenes and allowing the documents to tell their own story (mercifully at lengths commensuratewith their importance), Conrad has amply documented his own view that the physical lot of slaves in Brazil was substantiallymore precarious than that of their counterparts in the English colonies or later United States. These documents reinforce the belief that this generalization held true across the length and breadth of Brazil, for rural and urban areas, for the mines and plantations, and for colony and empire. No reader can read these moving testimonies without arriving at the conclusion that for the person of African descent in Brazil, God's fire may, as claimed by Antonio Vieria, s.j., indeed have brought the light of the Faith, but also left the indelible imprint of slavery.
A.J.R. RUSSELL-WOOD, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Stephen kern. The Culture of Time and Space: i88o-igi8. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Pp. 372. $25.00 (us).

Cambridge,

Whatever else one may conclude, it must be said that Stephen Kern has written a thoroughly interesting book. He has drawn together into a novel interpretive framework an immense amount of fascinating material on such diverse topics as the standardization of time, new modes of late nineteenthcentury transportation, early cubist art, and the diplomatic crisis of July 1914. The volume and its argument are bold and daring. In a world filled with safe, pedestrian, and narrow monographs, there must be preserved a place for such books. Kern argues that, between 1880 and 1918, European and American life underwent a set of technological changes that transformed people's perceptions, experience, and interpretation of time and space. Kern then organizes

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