This rich, adventurous, challenging book examines the final decades of slavery in Brazil and the first decade after emancipation. Correctly noting the tendency of much of the previous literature to focus on the coffee plantations of São Paulo state, Hebe Castro proposes to examine the rural areas of Rio de Janeiro, along with neighboring parts of Minas Gerais and São Paulo. These were areas based on coffee and sugar cultivation, as well as production of foodstuffs for local markets.
On the family farms and smaller plantations of this area, slaves lived and worked in closer contact with free laborers than they did on the larger plantations of São Paulo. As they observed and interacted with those workers, Castro argues, slaves developed their own understanding of what freedom meant, based on three core elements: spatial mobility (freedom to move), property (freedom to own things, including, of course, themselves), and family (freedom to form living units based on kinship). In court cases, wills, and manumission documents relating to the region’s slaves, Castro finds abundant evidence of these aspirations and the slaves’ efforts to achieve them.
Slaves also identified another important meaning of freedom: not having to work. This was hardly surprising, given the degrading quality of physical labor under slavery; indeed, owners purchased or rented slaves precisely to avoid having to perform such labor. On the other hand, slaves and free workers alike recognized that neither property nor family was attainable without work. Following emancipation, libertos did not flee from labor but instead entered into intense and often difficult bargaining with former masters over the terms under which work was to be carried out. The results were a dramatic redefinition of working conditions in the region and the creation of a spectrum of new labor arrangements based on varying combinations of day labor, tenancy, and smallholding.
Castro also argues that while slaves and free workers were reshaping the economic character of rural society, they were reshaping its racial categories as well. Racial designations from court cases and other documents suggest that over the course of the century, pardo came to mean not a person of mixed race but a freeborn nonwhite, either black or brown. The terms preto and negro referred either to slaves or to former slaves, black or brown, who had acquired their freedom. These terms thus indicated not race or color but rather the individual’s relationship to slave status. Both labels, however, as well as branco, were used less and less in legal and other records as the century went on. This “silence” concerning color, Castro argues, suggests a growing “indiferenciação entre brancos pobres e pardos livres,” and the formation of a rural working class in which race had little influence as a social signifier.
A short review cannot begin to do justice to the wealth of topics Castro raises and explores in interesting and provocative ways: slave resistance, conditions of life and work on the fazendas, family-based manumission strategies among slaves, the effects of the internal slave trade, and the final breakdown of slavery in the late 1880s, among others. One does not have to agree with every point the author makes to recognize her book as a major contribution both to nineteenth-century Brazilian historiography and to the history of Atlantic slavery.
