Book: Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century

Furtado, Júnia F. Chica da Silva: A Brazilian slave of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

There are multiple accounts of Chica da Silva in print, film, and television, many of which are sensationalistic and mythologize the "lascivious mulatta." Using a combination of resources, but heavily reliant on estate records and court documents, her history is released from a sensationalistic narrative. What it loses in narrative, it gains in substance, and the book is rich with information that includes chapters on Tejuco, the village she lived in, her own story, the diamond market and the mining community surrounding it, what daily life looked like, and finally it traces her estate and family as far as possible.

Furtado states, "This book aims to get to know her, not as a curiosity nor as an exception, but to use her as a medium through which to shed new light on the women of her period and therefore bring them into history. Only thus can they be freed from the stereotypes that have been imposed upon them over time" (xix). One of the misconceptions about slavery the book confronts head on is the relative power that freed women had in the 18th century in the town of Tejuco. First, manumission was much easier for women than men; men and women were both likely to be able to earn money outside of their regular requirements, but because concubinage was so common, women were able to take advantage of their sexual bodies and either buy or earn their freedom. Often they were manumitted in wills, ergo the use of estate records to identify women who were freed. The wills that manumitted most often had stipulations about years of service or other caveats prior to freedom, making sure that the enslaved person had to work for the deceased person's family for some time.

Another interesting point is the complicated social hierarchy that made ownership of other people so appealing; one measure of a person's wealth was the by number of enslaved people he or she owned. Those enslaved would be used as concubines or be sent to work in mines or trades, and the product of their labor would represent income for their owners and their bodies, human capital. This is outlined very well in Zephyr Frank's Dutra's World, another book worth reading and one I will eventually get to posting here. Furtado emphasizes how "to work and live off one's own graft in a slave society was amounted to serious social dishonor" (18). In my mind, this would mean that working became tantamount to being a slave. Later on she discusses how unhealthy many slaveowners became because of their inactivity.

Furtado refers to Emília Viotti da Costa, who in her essay "The Myth of Racial Democracy" demonstrates how manumission was not a "point of departure for the construction of a black identity," but often the "beginning of a process whereby former slave women embraced the values of the white elite with a view to finding a place in that society for themselves and their descendants" (xxiii). Even though securing a position for their children was difficult because people were legally prohibited from marrying outside their class, allowing white fathers to deny their offspring, Furtado notes how the lack of documentation through regular marriage channels limited the number of stigmatizing evidence of color in official records (xxiv). I am not sure to what extent that helped the general public; in the case of Xica's grandchildren, for example, some were able to use this fact to erase (or at least blur) the color in their family line, but they also lived in a society where one had to arduously fight for one's status. She has a good chapter on brotherhoods that show the importance of social organizations bound together by religion; they form piece of the social capital of the society, as well.

The book is set within the context of a mining community, where the diamond market produced its own volatility because... because diamonds are quite common, it turns out. This created high taxes on production (people were charged a "head" tax for enslaved people, as well as all  to prevent too many smaller businesses from attacking larger interests) as well as periodic government halting of the trade until prices were able to drop again. Gold was also a commodity mentioned in the book, although little of Brazil's other exports were discussed.

The chapter on Chica da Silva is engaging; the other chapters give context surrounding it. It highlights infant mortality, the absence of what we would call "childhood" for most slave children, the importance of "honor" in society and the struggle for identity; her ability to adopt her last name is a sign of a battle won; many slaves only had first names and only began to be widespread in ht e late 18th century (51).

From the discussion of how blanqueamento (whitening) through sexual relations and legal means, to note how even within dusty archives, one can see the change from passive to active voice in Chica's will, which symbolically notes a change in her status from slave to wealthy slave owner, this book is a fascinating look into a life that, like so many others, was first ignored, then mythologized and used as a tool of subjugation of the Afro-Brazilian female body. More studies such as this one will add depth to archival research.