Growing Up Black in Brazil

[Carolina Maria de Jesus, Excerpts from Bitita's diary: the childhood memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus , Diary of a young girl growing up in a Brazilian favela or slum. Of the tens of millions of Brazilian descendants of African slaves, only one, Carolina Maria de Jesus, ever wrote and published about her life. Briefly famous when she was discovered by a newspaperman, who first serialized and then published in book form her diary entries, she died in nearly the same obscurity as she had lived, struggling to raise her children in an urban shantytown and living by scavenging in the trash of the city's streets. Here she reflects on being black in Brazil. Carolina was born in 1915 in Sacramento, a small, provincial city in the southern part of the state of Minas Gerais, near the border of adjacent São Paulo State. Like most places in the interior, Sacramento's social code placed whites at the top, mixed-race mulatos in the middle, and blacks at the very bottom of the status ladder. At birth, Carolina was cursed in multiple ways: for her skin color, her origins—she was the granddaughter of slaves, for her poverty, and for having been born illegitimate. In Sacramento's only Roman Catholic church, during Carolina's childhood and even for several decades thereafter, blacks were not permitted to worship alongside whites.]

[on Brazilian race relations] She scolded me! "So, it's you who's stealing my fruit. Lazy little black. Blacks are worthless." I answered, "Whites are thieves, too, because they stole the blacks from Africa." She looked at me with disgust. "As if I would go to Africa to bring you. I don't like monkeys." I thought Africa was the mother of the blacks. Poor Africa who, when she arrived home, didn't find her children. She must have cried a lot.

They went to tell my mother I was stealing Dona Faustina's mangos. My mother got a whip and gave me two lashes. I woke up and went running off, as if my legs were motorized. My mother was furious because I had put on her new dress. It was a cotton print dress. What torment when I walked down the streets and the children shouted, "Mango thief! Mango thief."

But those were incidents that passed. And children soon forget what they see and the days went by. I noticed that whites were more calm because they already had their livelihood. And for the blacks, because they didn't have any education, life was more difficult. When they found work, it was exhausting. My seventy-three-year-old grandfather picked up boulders for the stonecutters to make into the foundations of houses. Blacks, when they received their pittance, didn't know how to spend it on useful things. They spent it buying trifles. Blacks were terrified of the police, who harassed them. Those scenes reminded me of cats running away from dogs. The whites, who were Brazil's masters, didn't defend the blacks. They only smiled, finding it funny to see the blacks running from one place to another. Looking for cover, in order not to be hit by a bullet.

My great-grandmother Maria Abadia used to say, "The whites today treat blacks better. Now, they shoot to scare them, they used to shoot to kill them." And the blacks smiled saying, "Benedito ran like a rabbit when he saw the police." When the blacks said, "Now we are free," I thought, "But what kind of freedom is this, if they have to run from the authorities as if they were guilty of a crime? So, the world used to be worse for blacks. Then, the world is black for the blacks and white for the whites!''

When it didn't rain, the women got together and went on pilgrimages, to pray at the feet of the crosses, and wash the crosses, and ask God to send rain, they lit candles. My grandfather prayed the rosary. Whoever knew how to pray was treated with special deference. He received invitations to go pray in distant places. After the rosary, we drank pineapple liqueur, and there were various refreshments. Corn pone, manioc flour cookies. I was proud of being the granddaughter of a man who knew how to pray the rosary, convinced that we were important. I preferred rice pudding prepared with pure milk.

My grandfather's eight children didn't know how to read. They worked as unskilled laborers. My grandfather was disappointed because his children hadn't learned to read, and said, "It wasn't my fault. It's that at the time his children should have studied, schools for blacks weren't open. When you go to school, study hard and strive to learn." And we, the grandchildren, received Grandpa's words as if they were a kiss and a caress.

[grandfather recollects Brazilian slavery, which ended in 1888, and its aftermath] My grandfather was a shadow who had left the slave quarters broken and disillusioned, recognizing that he had worked to make his Portuguese master rich. Because those who were born here in Brazil were disgusted to live by exploiting the blacks. Grandpa said that the Brazilians were good men, pure of mind, like the clouds in the sky. "God help the men of Brazil," and he cried, saying, "The man who is born a slave is born crying, lives crying, and dies crying. When they kicked us off the plantations, we didn't have a decent roof over our heads, if we settled in some corner, that place already belonged to someone, the caretakers drove us away. When someone assisted us, we knew at once that that was a Brazilian soul. And we had faith: the men who fought to emancipate us will make a place for us, what we have going for us is that we all die someday, and, on the other side, there are no color distinctions, there, the good works we do here will prevail."

In the month of August, when the nights were hotter, we gathered around Grandpa to hear him tell about the horrors of slavery. He talked about Palmares, the famous quilombo, where the blacks sought refuge. Quilombos were small communities formed by runaway slaves. The largest and most famous one was Palmares, located in the interior of the state of Alagoas. Palmares reached a population of 200,000 inhabitants in the seventeenth century before being destroyed by Portuguese military expeditions at the end of that century. Zumbi was the most famous leader of Palmares and was killed in 1695. He intended to liberate the blacks. There was a decree: whoever killed Zumbi would earn two hundred thousand réis and the title of "baron." But, where did you ever see a hired killer get a title of nobility! A nobleman, to be worth anything, must have education and lineage.

But, with so much fuss around blacks, blacks were becoming important, blacks and gold were things of great value. And with the debates, emancipation or no emancipation, the Portuguese were becoming more friendly to the blacks. But they didn't manage to regain their trust, and they were already weakening. If they were hard on the blacks, they were criticized, losing their authority. The abolitionists incited the blacks not to obey the masters. Even if they wanted to start an uprising, they would be alone, they couldn't count on the cooperation of their slaves. They started to give presents to the slaves. They would pierce the little black girls' ears, they would offer them gold earrings with the intent of regaining their trust. But, there had already been almost four hundred years of suffering. Slavery was like a scar on the black man's soul.

There were blacks who died at twenty-five: of sadness, because they were sick of being sold. Today they were here, tomorrow there, as if they were leaves scattered by the wind. They envied the trees that were born, grew, and died in the same place. Blacks aren't immigrants, they are settlers. They don't dream of other shores. Sometimes, a man was sold and separated from his wife.

When a black man said, "I'm free!" nobody believed him, and they made fun of him. "A snake was going to bite my master, I saw it and killed it and my master said that I had saved his life and freed me. Now I'm the apple of my master's eye. I have lunch at the same table at the master's side, and I don't sleep in the slave quarters."

After emancipation, the Portuguese were terrified of the blacks. It was the other side of the coin for those who had been lions and were forced to become lambs. Thousands of people left the country and Brazil was adrift. "Since you are free, get off my land! Let's see if you manage to fill your bellies with freedom. Just imagine, having to give money to blacks! It's a sin!"

Grandpa looked at us with tenderness, "God protected them, helping them not to be born during the time of slavery." The freed blacks couldn't stay in the same place. They had to leave their cities. Some went to the state of Rio, others to the state of Minas, of Goiás, in order to be free of the curses of the former masters, and they repeated Castro Alves's words, "A black man is free when he dies."

I was five years old, I thought those antagonistic scenes were strange, my embryonic mind didn't help me to understand those conflicts. If a black man walked by with his head hanging down, the white man cursed! "Lazy black girl! I don't like this race! I used to have this race working for me."