‘Uteis a si e a sociedade’1

 1. ‘Useful to themselves and to society’. All translations in this text are my own and taken from the will and testament of Lourença da Cunha Pereira (October 28, 1840, Parish of Nossa Senhora da Penha, Salvador da Bahia), Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEB), Secção Judiciária (Sec. Jud.), Livro de Registro de Testamentos (LRT), no. 28, folhas 169–71. All subsequent quotations from Lourenca's will and testament appear in translation only.

or a brief guide to creolisation in nineteenth-century Brazil: black women, mobility, marriage and markets in Salvador da Bahia (1830–1888)

Abstract

In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation. These markers are read as statements about belonging on the part of formerly enslaved women and their female descendants in a racially based slave society that was also formally and informally patriarchal in structure and Catholic in culture. The historical sources are used to provide a measure of the momentum of mobility engendered by manumission and passed down through the generations of freed and free black women, and reveal the limitations of mobility made possible either economically through occupation or socially through marriage. Analysed collectively, the wills and testaments of these women provide insights into the ways in which race and gender shaped the contours and confines of freedom in Salvador in particular and Brazilian slave society in general and reveal how perceptions and experiences of the limitations of integration shaped their versions of creolisation as well as their visions of freedom.

Keywords:

• creolisation
• urban slavery
• gender
• race
• slave ownership
• marriage
• markets
• Brazil
• Salvador da Bahia
• nineteenth century

Notes

 1. ‘Useful to themselves and to society’. All translations in this text are my own and taken from the will and testament of Lourença da Cunha Pereira (October 28, 1840, Parish of Nossa Senhora da Penha, Salvador da Bahia), Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEB), Secção Judiciária (Sec. Jud.), Livro de Registro de Testamentos (LRT), no. 28, folhas 169–71. All subsequent quotations from Lourenca's will and testament appear in translation only.

 2. The term ‘da Costa d'Africa’ described the origin of Lourença's father. When used in Brazilian slave society this usually referred to the West African coast and included what was then known as the Gold Coast and Slave Coast. Andrade, A mão de obra escrava em Salvador, 1811–1860, 99. In contrast to the terminology used in the rest of Latin America, in Brazil crioulo/crioula referred to Brazilian-born blacks, male and female respectively.

 3. For an overview of the slave trade to Bahia see Nishida, Slavery and Identity, 12–17. For figures and destinations of the slave trade in general see Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. On the population of the nineteenth-century Salvador see Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil, 4–7; Andrade, A mão de obra, 28–31; Mattoso, Bahia, Século XIX, 100–14.

 4. The choice of words used by Lourença to describe her working arrangements does not translate easily into English. She stated that ‘I am currently helping (assistindo) in the home of Senhor Vital Prudencio Alves Monteiro’, assistir meaning to attend to or help. She does not describe herself as a servant or an agregado, a form of household dependant commonly found in urban Brazilian households. In addition, although the length of the surname of the Monteiro family suggests this was a white family, the location of their home would place them at the lower end of the middle sector. Even though the majority of the residents were free in this parish, there were no elite whites. See Nascimento, Dez freguesias da cidade do Salvador, 93.

 5. Nascimento, Dez freguesias, 93.

 6. On slave prices in Salvador see Andrade, A mão de obra, 163–86 and 209–11.

 7. See note 4.

 8. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 6, has estimated the population of Salvador for 1835 to have comprised enslaved Africans comprised 26%, freed Africans 7.1%, enslaved Brazilians 15.5%, free coloureds 22.7% and whites 28.2%.

 9. Some of the key texts on North America and the Caribbean include: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Mintz and Price, The Birth of African American Culture.

10. For Brazil see Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, especially chapters by Elizabeth Kiddy and Robert Slenes. See also Slenes, “‘Malungo ngoma vem!’África encoberta e descoberta no Brasil”; Kiddy, “Congados, Calunga, Candombe”; Reis, Slave Rebellion; Sweet, Recreating Africa; Parés, “O processo de crioulização no recôncavo baiano (1750–1800)”.

11. For an overview of the tension in the scholarship between Africanisation and Creolisation see Parés, 93–7.

12. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic world, 1400–1800; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, especially chapters 7 and 8.

13. The Portuguese terms Africana and Africanas (female African/African females) and Brasileira and Brasileiras (female Brazilian/Brazilian females) are employed throughout. The latter includes all black (crioula) and mixed race (parda, mulatta, cabra) Brazilian women.

14. Klein and Luna, “Free Colored in a Slave Society”.

15. Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: the struggle for a science of culture (Walnut Creek, CA.: Altamira Press, 2001).

16. The studies of manumission in Brazil are too numerous to mention here. Studies of Bahia include, Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: 1684–1745”; Mattoso, “A propósito de cartas de alforria. Bahia, 1779–1850”; Nishida, “Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery”; O Liberto, 21–31.

17. Lauderdale Graham, House and Street, 31–6 and 40–5.

18. My research of letters of liberty for the city of Salvador for the period 1830 to 1871 found that 308 children were freed and in 90% of these cases the mother remained in captivity. APEB, Sec. Jud. LRT da Capital, 1830–1831, 1840–1841, 1851–1852, 1860–1861, 1870–1871. The Livro de Notas da Capital for 1850–1851 was not available for consultation at the time this research was conducted as it had been taken out of circulation for restoration. Higgins's findings were similar for Minas Gerais. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-mining Region, 163 and 159–70.

19. Although re-enslavement of Africans was particularly widespread during the phase of illegal slave trading (1831–1850), from 1850 onwards all libertos and free people of colour were vulnerable to the threat of re-enslavement. See for example, Freitas, “Slavery and Social Life”.

20. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 6. See Mattoso, Bahia, 115–26 for a more complete analysis of the population of Salvador in the nineteenth century.

21. Salvador's female slave population became and remained predominantly Brazilian after 1853. Andrade, A mão de obra, 115–18.

22. According to the first national census of 1872, 11.6% per cent of the population of Salvador remained enslaved. Mattoso Bahia, 120. At the same time there were approximately 60,000 free-coloured in the city of Salvador, representing 57.3% of the city's total population. Nishida, Slavery and Identity, 142.

23. Mattoso, Bahia, 124.

24. The figures for the freed population are: São Pedro 51%, Sé 53%, Santo Antônio 53%. Mattoso, Bahia, 111 and 121. For 1855, the three parishes with the highest female populations were São Pedro (59%), Sé (59%) and Santo Antônio (55%). Nascimento, Dez freguesias, for São Pedro see 81–3, Sé, 68, and Santo Antônio, 77–8; on housing see 43.

25. Karasch, A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850, 119. Lauderdale Graham, House and Street, 186, found 90% of all enslaved women worked in domestic service in 1870 Rio de Janeiro.

26. Andrade, A mão de obra, 129–30. It should be noted that the most commonly cited occupation for both enslaved men and women was serviço da casa and serviço doméstico, at 16% and 40% respectively. In terms of occupational concentration, the top four male occupations accounted for 45% of all enslaved men and in the case of enslaved women they accounted for 80%.

27. Andrade, A mão de obra, 130. Of the 16 occupations Andrade lists for enslaved females five could be considered skilled: cook, lace-maker, sweet-maker, cigar-maker, and embroiderer. Among enslaved male occupations, 78 out of a total of 82 were either skilled, semi-skilled or artisan trades.

28. Andrade, A mão de obra, 147–48. Findings here are similar to those for Rio de Janeiro. Karasch, A vida, 1808–1850, 116–20.

29. For an example of the ways in which the activities of African men in particular were policed and regulated after the 1835 Malês uprising see Reis, “The Revolution of the Ganhadores”. See also Reis, Slave Rebellion, Part IV, The Anti-African Backlash.

30. Oliveira, O Liberto, 32; Karasch, A vida, 470–4.

31. Oliveira, O Liberto, 42–3.

32. Klein and Luna, “Free Colored”, 916–41.

33. A similar situation prevailed in the urban mining centres of Minas Gerais as well as in the then capital city, Rio de Janeiro. See Furtado, Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes, and Faria, “Sinhás Pretas, Damas Mercadoras”.

34. Mena, “Stretching the limits of gendered spaces: black and mulatto women in 1830s Havana,” Cuban Studies (2005): 91.

35. Soares, “As ganhadeiras: mulher e resistência negra em Salvador no século XIX,” Afro-Ásia 17 (1996): 71.

36. For a descriptions of ao gahno working arrangements see Soares, “As ganhadeiras”, and Reis, “Os ganhadeiros.” The census figures are from APEB, Colonial e Provincial, Escravos Assuntos, Maço 2898, Relação dos Africanos libertos existentes nesta freguesia (Santana, 1849). In terms of African ethnicity, the majority of Africans in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century were Yoruba in origin. See Reis, Slave Rebellion, chapter 8, on ethnicity among enslaved Africans in nineteenth-century Salvador.

37. Reis, Slave Rebellion, Part IV, ‘The Anti-African Backlash’.

38. Reis, “The Revolution”.

39. Nascimento, Dez freguesias, 72; Mattoso, Bahia, 157.

40. Oliveira, O Liberto, 57. For Rio de Janeiro see Karasch, A vida, 384.

41. Mattoso, Bahia, 163.

42. Nascimento, Dez freguesias, 130–33.

43. Mattoso, “Slave, Free and Freed Family Structures in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,” 76.

44. Mattoso, “Slave,” 82.

45. Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Chapter 8. Aufderheide, Order and Violence, 1–21.

46. Furtado, Chica.

47. Aufderheide, Order, 15, notes how upward mobility for free women of colour was possible ‘so long as they had informal liaisons with white men’.

48. See note 12 for explanation of terminology. The term Brasileira as used here describes black and mixed-race Brazilian women, but not white.

49. Oliveira, O Liberto, 8–9. All but three of these were found for the period 1790–1850.

50. Oliveira, O Liberto, 9.

51. Parés, “O processo,” 95.

52. Initially the search was done on a five-year basis, but the difficulties encountered in locating wills and testaments for black and mixed-race Brazilian women meant that the search was extended to years either side of the quinquennials simply to find any at all (see Table 1). The same years were researched for both Africanas and Brasileiras. APEB, Sec. Jud. LRT and Testamentos e Inventários, 1830–1888.

53. The levels of West African women found in this study are comparable to those found by Eduardo França Paiva for Minas Gerais and Faria for the south-east of Brazil. Paiva, Escravos e Libertos nas Minas Gerais do Século XVIII Faria, Sinhás.

54. Aufderheide, Order, 4, 11, and 217, describes how women gained social recognition through their husbands.

55. Although marriage patterns indicate mixed-race marriages were not the norm, Mattoso found numerous inconsistencies between 1872 census materials for Bahia in categories of both race and gender, which indicates a strong tendency for passing among both men and women, black and mulatto. Mattoso, Bahia, 97–8.

56. Mattos, Das Cores do Silêncio. Significantly, the colour of free women did not disappear from prison records or from civil and criminal court proceedings. See Pinto, Criminalidade feminina na Bahia de século XIX.

57. Karasch describes free women of colour as ‘the most invisible group in colonial Brazilian history’. Karasch, “Free Women of Color in Central Brazil, 1779–1832,” 234. The lack of scholarly attention to free women of colour in Brazilian history in general is also commented upon in Barickman and Martha, “Ana Paulinha de Queirós, Joaquina da Costa and their neighbors.” 170.

58. Narratives of identity were not always linear. Joana da Cruz Gama, described as crioula in her will and testament of 1837, described her mother, Maria da Silva, as “cabra forra”. APEB, Sec. Jud., LRT no. 33, folhas 8–10.

59. APEB, Sec. Jud., LRT, no. 37, folhas 92–93.

60. APEB, Sec. Jud., LRT no. 24, folhas 57–59.

61. Barickman and Few, “Ana Paulinha,” 175–6, used 1835 parish census material for rural Bahia, and found that among free coloured women pardas were more likely to be ever-married than black women, that black women were more likely to be single heads of households than pardas, and that as single heads pardas were more likely than black women to have children in residence. Rates of marriage among Brazilian-born blacks and Africans were found to be similar.

62. Oliveira, O Liberto, 65–6, also found a significant proportion of freed couples who remained childless as well as higher numbers of children among unmarried women than married.

63. For Brasileiras, 90% of all living children belonged to three ever-marrieds (the term refers to married, separated, divorced or widowed, but in this study it only includes married or widowed women as no other categories were identified). For Africanas, the three married mothers (18% of all African mothers) had 42% of all living children. Africanas as sole mothers comprised 65% of all African mothers and had 38% of all living children and 63% of all deceased children.

64. On the extent of poverty in the city see Filho, Mendigos, moleques e vadios na Bahia do século XIX, chapter 1.

65. Items of jewellery, particularly gold, silver and coral, were symbols of powers of acquisition and wealth but held ritual and religious value too, especially for members of brotherhoods. See Oliveira, O Liberto 47; Santos, ‘“Incorrigíveis, afeminados, desenfreinados’,” 6–7, 28. For a discussion of inheritance practices among freed and free blacks in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais see Dantas, “Inheritance practices among individuals of African origin and descent in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais)”.

66. Oliveira, O Liberto, 41, 36, found levels of ownership and the proportions of those owning slaves were greater prior to 1850. For a comparison with slaveholding among free blacks in the United States see Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 70–9.

67. Klein and Luna, “Free Colored,” 935–7, identified similar patterns for São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Hanger Bounded, 75, found that in colonial New Orleans ‘free black women owned more slaves than free black men did and that libres owned more female than male slaves’.

68. Higgins (1999), 82–3, found that in a slave register for 1720, ‘three-quarters of the ex-slaves who were slave owners … were women and comprised 70 per cent of all women slaveholders at that time’. Similarly, inventories for the period 1760–1808 revealed how forras constituted 50% of the women who owned slaves. Karasch, “Free women,” 249–50, found that pardas in Goias owned more slaves than free black women.

69. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty”, 82.

70. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty”, 83.

71. One of these women owned 16 crias (children of enslaved women).

72. APEB, Sec. Jud., LRT, no. 19, folhas 194–99.

73. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty”, chapter 5.

74. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 141–61. See also Karasch, “Free women,” 249–50.

75. APEB, Sec. Jud., LRT, no. 27, folhas 148–50. There is no mention of the value of her assets in her will and testament and her inventory has either not survived or not been catalogued.

76. Mattoso, “Slave,” 70, notes how ‘[m]ixed marriages among free people were not numerous (8.4 per cent of marriages) and never involved blacks’.

77. A ‘casa terrea’ describes as house built directly on and made out of the earth. A ‘casa taipa’ describes one made of adobe. The correspondence between the number of enslaved couples and number of homes owned by Roza Maria may well be a coincidence, but it is an interesting one that lends support to the idea of her slave ownership being based around nuclear-type enslaved families.

78. Only two of these crioulos, Cosme (6) and Francisco (6) were noted as being children of the adult female slaves, respectively, Felicadade and Rita. APEB, Sec. Jud., Testamentos e Inventários, 04-1906-2377-02.

79. Margarida's age was noted as 50 and Rita's as 49. APEB, Sec. Jud., Testamentos e Inventários, 04-1785-2255-03.

80. On black brotherhoods in Brazil see Kiddy, “Congados”; Kiddy, “Ethnic and Racial Identity in the Brotherhoods of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830”; Scarano, Devoção e escravidão; Mulvey, “Black Brothers and Sisters: membership in the black lay brotherhoods of colonial Brazil”.

81. Pinto, Criminalidade, 55, 63.

82. Karasch, “Free women,” 257. See also Barickman and Few, “Ana Paulinha”: 193, where they take up the question of independence versus poverty raised by Donald Ramos in his study of women in Vila Rica, Minas Gerais. Ramos, “Single and Married Women in Vila Rica, Brazil, 1754–1838”.

83. Faria, “Família escrava e legitimidade. Estratégias de preservação da autonomia,” 121–22, found the marriage market restricted for crioulas in general and higher levels of illegitimacy among crioulas than Africanas in rural parishes of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Parés, “O proceso,” 124, has drawn similar conclusions for nineteenth-century rural Bahia.

84. Paiva, Escravos, chapter III, especially 120–6.

85. Brügger, “Legitimidade, Casamento e Relações ditas Ilícitas em São João del Rei (1730–1850)”; Faria, Sinhás. Both scholars make a case for freed Africanas rejecting marriage and opting for single status so as not to have to divide their wealth with spouses.

86. Mena, “Stretching”.

87. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 158.

88. Parés, “O processo,” 93, in reference to personal comment made by João José Reis. The term ladino or ladina here describes acculturated Africans who spoke Portuguese, and ladinização the process of becoming acculturated in this way.

89. Soares, “As ganhadeiras,” 61.

90. Whale meat is mentioned in the context of slave diets and deficiencies in Kiple, “The Nutritional Link with Slave Infant and Child Mortality in Brazil,” 638. The uses of whale meat are also mentioned in Schwartz, “The “Mocambo”: slave resistance in colonial Bahia,” 316, and Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 138.

91. Whale meat was highly seasonal, only available between June and September and therefore potentially a very lucrative business. See Soares, “As ganhadeiras,” 64; Ubiratan Castro de Araújo, “1846: um ano na rota Bahia-Lagos. Negócios, negociantes e outros parceiros,” Afro-Ásia 21–22 (1998–99): 22. On whaling in nineteenth-century Bahia see Catellucci Jr, “Pescadores e baleeiros: a atividade da pesca da baleia nas últimas décadas dos oitocentos Itaparica: 1860–1888”. On the whaling industry in general during the colonial period see Alden, “Yankee sperm whalers in Brazilian waters, and the decline of the Portuguese whale fishery (1773–1801)”.

92. Mattoso, Bahia, 546–51.