SLAVE, MULATTA

Chica da Silva, born between 1731 and 1735, was the daughter of Maria da Costa, a black slave, and Antônio Caetano de Sá, a white man. Although various documents have helped shed light on her origins, some questions remain unanswered. A slave from birth, this condition and her later status of freedwoman were always associated with her name on the known records.

Born in the village of Milho Verde at a time when her mother was still a slave to Domingues da Costa, Chica da Silva declared herself to be, in her own words, “the daughter of Maria da Costa and an unknown father, born and baptised at the chapel of Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres (Our Lady of the Pleasures) …in the parish of Vila do Príncipe.” Many years later, her grandson Lourenço João de Oliveira Grijó affirmed in more general terms that she had been born in Vila do Príncipe, under whose administrative jurisdiction the previously mentioned village fell.

The village of Milho Verde was a small urban cluster on the banks of Fundo Creek, some six kilometers from Tejuco on the road to Vila do Príncipe. The village was built upon a small plateau perched between two steep slopes along which the stream flowed almost level, though winding in and out among the rocks, earning it the local name lajeado, a term for a creek on a rocky bed.