The oil painting Redenção de Cã (The Redemption of Ham, 1895) figures prominently in the life work of the prolific Spanish-born, Brazilian-naturalized artist Modesto Brocos y Gómez (1852–1936).Footnote ¹ Originally exhibited with the title Redempção de Cham,Footnote ² the handsomely sized (199 × 166 cm), signed and dated oil-on-canvas won the grand prize at the 1895 Brazilian national salon held at the National School of Fine Arts (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, ENBA), where Brocos held various teaching posts between 1891 and 1934. An instant success, Redenção was acquired by the Brazilian government at the urging of influential voices in the Brazilian intelligentsia.Footnote ³ For the past seventy-five years, the work has been part of the permanent circuit of the Brazilian national art museum.Footnote ⁴ In various retrospective exhibits, in textbooks, and online, Redenção commands outsize influence in Brazil’s visual vocabulary, at home and abroad.

A landmark in Brazilian visual culture, the painting has nonetheless been dismissed for its troubling allegory of race mixture. The notoriety of Brocos’ treatment of an enigmatic Old Testament tale commonly known as the “Curse of Ham” (Port.: Maldição de Cã) conventionally turns on the troubled history of racial thought in the immediate aftermath of slave emancipation. In a 2011 popular history piece about the canvas, Brazilian anthropologist Giralda Seyferth succinctly captures the dominant interpretative framework: “O futuro era branco” (The future was white).Footnote ⁵ In scholarly literature and in the popular imaginary, Redenção da Cã (see Figure 13.1) serves as the touchstone illustration of the intersection of the ascendant racial “sciences” of the latter half of the nineteenth century and an ideology of whitening and Black erasure that informed early twentieth-century Brazilian thought and social policy. In recent scholarly publications, such as Tatiana Lotierzo’s Contornos do invisível (2017), and in the global imaginary, the canvas stands as emblematic of race and racism in Latin America, notably during the heyday of eugenics.Footnote ⁶

Figure 13.1 Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Redenção de Cã, 1895. Oil on canvas, 199 × 166 cm, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro.

The burdens of Brazil’s racist past (and present) have often confined readings of Redenção to its allegory of a Blackness disappearing into whiteness. Nonetheless, the painting has been the object of some important reappraisals. Historian Heloisa Selma Fernandes Capel has put the painting in dialogue with Brocos’ theoretical tracts, A questão do ensino de Bellas Artes (1915) and Retórica dos pintores (1933), to understand how the piece works in dialogue with the artist’s evolving sense of fine art.Footnote ⁷ Art historians Heloisa Lima and Roberto Conduru have discussed the painting in relation to other works about Blacks produced within the ambit of the ENBA and its predecessor, the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Imperial Academy of Fine Arts).Footnote ⁸ Brazilian historians Ricardo Ventura Santos and Marcos Chor Maio grappled with a geneticist’s use of the image to “prove” the racial heterogeneity of the Brazilian genotype.Footnote ⁹ In 2013, anthropologists Tatiana Lotierzo and Lilia Schwarcz delved into the gendered visual economy of the canvas, setting Redenção within a nineteenth-century white male gaze.Footnote ¹⁰ The ugly history of anti-Black thought continues to weigh heavily in these alternate analyses, but fresh eyes have chartered approaches to Brocos’ most well-known work that may not settle solely on the author’s “scientific” appraisal of Brazil’s white future.

Paradoxically, Redenção remains thinly contextualized in the historical setting of slave emancipation, a process completed a few years prior to Brocos’ first rehearsals of the themes later assembled in the notorious allegory. Capel has casually observed that Brocos registered a disdain for enslavement, but how and what Brocos knew of slavery and emancipation have remained largely unexplored in the scholarship. This chapter looks anew at Redenção, its author, and their multiple audiences in the temporalities of slavery’s final decades in Brazil. Its goal is to resituate the notorious canvas within the complex transitions from bondage to freedom that began in the 1870s and lingered through the 1910s. Arguing that Redenção is a painting just as much about a nineteenth-century Black emancipationist past as it is about a twentieth-century post-emancipation whitened future, I will first briefly examine the Biblical story that inspired the canvas, before turning to the painting’s reception and circulation. The final third of the chapter situates Brocos and Redenção in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state, a physical and social landscape quietly transformed by slave emancipation. Throughout, we probe the history of interpretation that has been reluctant to interrogate what is to be made of the Black characters in the canvas and how Brocos, whose contact with Afro-Brazilians began in the 1870s, during his student years, and intensified after 1890, drew from direct contact with the formerly enslaved to paint his enigmatic portrait of bondage redeemed.

Brocos and the Curse of Ham

Redenção de Cã takes direct inspiration from a strange episode in the Book of Genesis, chapter 9. After the Great Flood, Noah gets drunk on wine and falls asleep naked in a tent. The patriarch’s youngest son Ham reports the scene to his older brothers, Shem and Japheth. The two enter the tent and cover their father, making a deliberate effort to avoid seeing him unclothed. Once awakened from his drunken slumber, Noah – enraged – condemns Ham’s son Canaan to servitude. Gen. 9:25 reads “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”Footnote ¹¹ The following passages describe Canaan’s miserable fate and the divine grace extended to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.

The curious episode at Noah’s tent invites questions that have challenged theologians, Biblical historians, and the faithful since antiquity. What was the offending nature of Ham’s transgression? How could Noah be so intemperate? Why is the seemingly innocent Canaan condemned for the sin of his father, Ham? There have been no clear answers to such questions, but Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians of the ancient and medieval worlds found explanations for human bondage in the Hamitic Curse.Footnote ¹² The idea of servitude gradually came to be attached to black skin, and a scriptural curse of enslavement without explicit reference to skin color evolved into a sacred plan for Black captivity and, more specifically, the subordination of corrupt Africans descended from Black Ham to the righteous non-Blacks who descended from Ham’s brothers.Footnote ¹³ In the age of the transatlantic slave trade, the contorted story of Noah, Ham, and Canaan – with occasional admixtures of other figures from Genesis, including Adam and Eve’s son Cain and Canaan’s eldest brother Cush – figured in numerous tracts on bondage and interracial relations. By the nineteenth century, the Curse had come to serve as a useful agitprop for justifications of Black enslavement and white slaveholding throughout the Atlantic, most notably in the United States South.Footnote ¹⁴

Although the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil endured into the 1850s and Black bondage was not abolished until 1888, the Hamitic Curse had a weak uptake in Portuguese America. Nonetheless, variations on the Curse circulated in nineteenth-century Brazil. Castro Alves’ poem “Vozes da África” (“Voices of Africa,” 1868) and Perdigão Malheiro’s monumental tract on slave law A escravidão no Brasil (Slavery in Brazil, 1866–1867) both reference the sorry fate of Ham and his descendants.Footnote ¹⁵ Debate on the floor of the Brazilian Parliament and published traveler accounts of the era invoked the Curse as shorthand for Black enslavement.

Brocos’ motives for selecting the Curse for his submission to the 1895 salon are thinly sourced. Press coverage registered merely elliptic references to the backstory of the canvas; Brocos did not exert much effort documenting his creative process. There exist, however, some suggestive clues. It’s well known that Brocos painted from life models, and he knew people of color to be integral to the fine arts (including the modeling stand) since his days as an art student in the 1870s.Footnote ¹⁶ His ongoing association with Black models is confirmed by Carlos de Laet, whose write-up of the 1895 Salon includes the snide observation that Brocos was the subject of idle gossip when seen traveling with an aged Black woman who served as his model.Footnote ¹⁷ Many years later, memorialist Rodrigo Otávio Langgaard de Meneses (1866–1944) wrote that his fair-complexioned son was the model for the child at the center of the composition.Footnote ¹⁸ The remarks about models from contemporaries establish the context in which Brocos painted and often offer a vantage point onto the social networks that Brocos accessed to construct a pictorial narrative of racial types.

The appeal of whitening was undoubtedly in the air in early Republic, and the newly reorganized national art school, which Brocos joined in its infancy, was in dialogue with the era’s scientific and policy debates on race. In early January 1895, Brocos’ contemporary Carlo Parlagreco referenced preliminary drawings exhibited in private that might soon develop into “a true work of art that will personify, set within our milieu, one the most incontrovertible principles of American Ethnology.”Footnote ¹⁹ That passage certainly lends credence to the notion that Brocos was familiar with ongoing debates on racial types and mixture, though it does not speak directly to Brocos’ relation to any given strain of racial thought. Galician scholars Fernando Pereira Bueno and José Sousa Jiménez situate the canvas within a wider post-abolition immigration policy that was resolutely anti-Black.Footnote ²⁰ Yet the artist’s specific attachments to immigration policy remain opaque, and it’s difficult to corroborate the implication that the anti-Black undercurrents of Brocos’ social utopia novel Viaje a Marte (1933) directly inspired a painting completed nearly forty years prior.Footnote ²¹

Our best clue to the painting’s inspiration is its obvious Biblical referent, which can be substantiated in a brief passage in A questão do ensino (1915).Footnote ²² Sometime during his studies at the Imperial Academy (April 1875–April 1877), Brocos was assigned the theme of Noah’s drunkenness for an exercise about canvas composition.Footnote ²³ That student work (and the Academy records for that period) have been lost, but it can be confirmed that the Hamitic Curse figured directly in Brocos’ artistic vocabulary. In a more general sense, there is ample evidence that Brocos took inspiration in Biblical subjects, including his 1883 prize-winning scene of Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well (Genesis 24) and La adoración de los pastores, a Nativity scene. A professed admirer of Doré’s illustrated Bible of 1866 (a work that contained the plate “Noah Cursing Canaan”), Brocos was conversant with dramatic interpretations of Biblical passages.Footnote ²⁴ Although Redenção is most often treated as a secular work in dialogue with nineteenth-century “scientific” thought, Biblical characters and themes surely animated the artist.

Biblical inspiration notwithstanding, the work exhibited at the 1895 Salon stepped far outside Scripture, shifting attention from the scene of drunken and angry Noah cursing Canaan to an arresting extratextual allegory of redemption. The drama at the tent is relocated to the threshold of a rustic house bathed in rich illumination and shadows. To the left of the canvas stands an elderly, dark-complexioned woman, her bare feet on unpaved ground. She wears a long-sleeved, dark brown coat with tattered sleeves, a long plain skirt, and a stamped headscarf. Palm fronds gently arch over her head, adding an Orientalist touch to a scene that is non-specific in place and time.

Next to the aged Black woman sits a younger adult female figure, of fine features and brown skin tones, who points with her right hand to the old woman while looking at a child sitting in her lap. A golden wedding band is visible on the younger woman’s left hand that emerges from a striped blue shawl draped over a pale pink blouse with tiny polka-dots. The tip of a blue shoe peeks out from under a long, patterned skirt that falls just above the last of the stone pavers. The seated woman gently supports a chubby young child, perhaps one-and-a-half years old, dressed in a stark-white tunic with delicate blue ribbons adorning the sleeves and lacy neckline. The fair-complexioned toddler holds an orange in the left hand, modeling the familiar posture of Christ and the Orb.Footnote ²⁵ The young woman and child each motion toward the old Black woman, who raises her hands to the heavens as if in thanks for a gift of divine grace. To the far right, seated and leaning against a wooden doorframe, is an adult male, Mediterranean in facial features and coloration, who looks on dispassionately with a slight smile. Hands clasped over the right knee, the muscular man is dressed in an off-white short-sleeved shirt, checked trousers, and simple leather footwear. In the shadowy background inside of the humble dwelling appear a table and a line of laundry hanging out to dry. Although the home’s darkened interior is in sharp contrast to the child’s stark white covering, the scene emanates warm luminous gradient tones of sunlight and earth, rough-hewn wood and stone, and weathered sunbaked clay.

Redenção is a fine example of Brocos as colorist, but in its compositional choices the painting might be more readily associated with the painter’s lifelong interest in the stages of the human life cycle. Titles such as Retrato de anciana (Portrait of an Aged Women, 1881), Retrato de joven (Portrait of a Youth, n.d.), Niño con piel de cordero (Child in a Sheepskin, n.d.), El joven violinista (The Young Violinist, n.d.), Niña cosiendo (Girl Sewing, n.d.), and Albores (Beginnings, ca. 1888) demonstrate the affinity for capturing subjects of various ages that developed in the years before Brocos took up the Ham canvas. The painter had also developed an eye for themes of intergenerational dynamics. The prime example (see Figure 13.2) is Las cuatro edades (The Four Ages, 1888), also known as Las estaciones (The Seasons). Executed in Rome, two years prior to Brocos’ relocation to Rio de Janeiro, Las cuatro edades shared with Redenção the composition of a humble setting where four rustic individuals of progressively increasing age, from the infant to the elderly, enjoy a moment of domestic intimacy. A similar four-figure composition of unknown dating, La familia (The Family, n.d.), featured a young child sitting in his finely dressed mother’s lap reaching out to another adult female, perhaps a nursemaid, while a bearded male adult in a workman’s apron looks on.

Figure 13.2 Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Las cuatro edades (also known as Las Estaciones), 1888.

Etching after oil on canvas, Almanaque Gallego (Buenos Aires) I (1898): 5.

Engenho de Mandioca (Manioc Mill, 1892), Brocos’ most significant work of intergenerational relations painted prior to Redenção, is in direct dialogue with the 1895 redemption allegory (see Figure 13.3). The 58.6 × 75.8 cm canvas was first exhibited at a break-out show organized at the national fine arts school about two years after Brocos relocated from his native Galicia, Spain, to take up residence in the Brazilian capital. In a remarkable shift in Brocos’ aesthetic attentions from the European peasantry to Afro-Brazilian folk people, Engenho presents an assembly of young and old Black females seated on an earthen floor in a large tiled-roofed structure familiar to the Brazilian interior. In the background stand more adult women as well as an adult male and a boy of perhaps ten years. The main drama unfolds as these figures peel, grate, press, and cook cassava tubers to make manioc flour. At the work’s first public exhibition, Brazilian poet and art critic Adelina Amelia Lopes Vieira favorably noted how the painting included a wide range of figures – the older woman exhausted by work, a proud mother and her nursing infant, a smiling Black woman, a youth at work.Footnote ²⁶ Engenho de Mandioca was, undoubtedly, an important rehearsal of a major canvas about intergenerational family relations.

In its close attention to a play of light and shadow, the material culture of rural life (woven baskets, wood furnishings, slip-on footwear, a straw hat), and the exuberant landscape that surrounded Guanabara Bay (referenced through the open window on the left), Manioc Mill sealed Brocos’ standing as a respected artist of the national fine arts school. The careful detail of the facial expressions and body positioning of the Afro-Brazilian laborers signaled Brocos’ quick study of an adopted homeland and its lifeways of rural production. The praise of Gonzaga Duque Estrada (1863–1911), an influential critic of the period, was especially important for establishing Brocos as an interpreter of Brazilian social types. Gonzaga Duque proclaimed Brocos a “pintor de raça,” a subtle word play on the painter’s natural-born talents as well as his innate aptitude to paint “race,” an obvious code word for the Afro-Brazilians who filled Engenho de Mandioca and the actual manioc mills of the late nineteenth-century countryside.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 13.3 Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Engenho de Mandioca, 1892. Oil on canvas, 58.6 × 75.8 cm, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro.

Boosted by accolades from the likes of Gonzaga Duque, Brocos intensified the embrace of themes and tones that prominently featured Afro-Brazilians. A 1893–1894 trip to Diamantina, a colonial-era town located in the north-central part of Minas Gerais state, was formative for fixing a Black Brazilian cast on themes of rural peoples previously rehearsed in northern Spain and southern Italy. In Diamantina, Brocos experienced the daily life of a mountainous region deeply rooted in the experiences of people of color living among spent mining fields. His earlier studies of the Iberian and Italian peasantry informed new works on Afro-Brazilian countryfolk. Evocative titles from the trip exhibited at the 1894 salon include Crioula de Diamantina (Black Woman of Diamantina), also known as Mulatinha (Young Mulata) (see Figure 13.4), and Garimpeiros (Miners).

Figure 13.4 Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Crioula de Diamantina (also known as Mulatinha), 1894. Oil on wood, 37 × 27.5 cm.

In short, Brocos was well rehearsed in a number of the thematic elements to be assembled in Redenção prior to taking up the preparatory work for the 1895 Salon. In addition to the interplay of age, family, and agrarian lifeways, he experimented in the tonalities of the soil, flora, and natural light of the Brazilian countryside. Brocos had acquired the critical respect of a “painter of race.” The prize-winning canvas of 1895, nonetheless, demonstrated important innovations in the strategic choices of subject. Chiefly, Redenção elevated the local conditions of an interracial post-emancipation society to the center of artistic expression. The freshness of slave emancipation and the destruction of captivity were the subtext for a composition ostensibly about the “redemption” of the familial order mysteriously violated in Noah’s tent.

In this perspective, the Biblical Curse of Ham is wholly upended. In the place of an infuriated Patriarch damning his grandson to bondage, a pitch-black woman stands before a male/female couple and their infant child. The young woman wears a wedding band, underscoring an observation made by various critics of the 1895 salon that the group forms a family.Footnote ²⁸ Rather than Ham crouching in fear of his father’s scorn, the adult figure in the center of the canvas – a young woman of color – sits upright and calmly points toward her elderly mother (a figure Azevedo described as “the old African macerated by captivity”), who raises her hands in thanks for the deliverance of a self-evidently sinless grandchild. Noah’s enigmatic curse of servitude and the degraded Blackness that came to be attached to it had been redeemed into sacramental interracial marriage and a fortunate, legitimate birth.

Reception, Circulation, and Repercussions

The Rio intelligentsia registered concerns about various technical and thematic elements in Redenção de Cã when the painting was first publicly exhibited in 1895. Nonetheless, the canvas was generally well-received by influential voices in Brazilian letters. Playwright Arthur Azevedo (1855–1908) declared Redenção a “national painting” (o seu quadro é um quadro nacional).Footnote ²⁹ Poet Olavo Bilac (1865–1918) declared it to be a “most beautiful grand canvas.”Footnote ³⁰ Novelist Adolpho Caminha (1867–1897), though underwhelmed by the painting’s qualities, conceded that “it has been a long time since a work has received so much praise.”Footnote ³¹ The favorable remarks from these influential writers bolstered efforts by Brocos’ contemporaries at the ENBA to have the work acquired for the national collection.Footnote ³² Such praise also guaranteed that Brocos would not be treated as an artist-traveler but rather as a painter of “national” focus.

In its quick passage from the salon to the national art collection, Redenção entered into the wide-ranging conversations about interracial relations in post-emancipation Brazil. That conversation followed two complementary registers. On the first, the central scene was taken to be an illustration of the fortuitous path toward racial “improvement” via miscegenation. Azevedo made the explicit case that an alternative title could be “The Perfection of the Race” (O Aperfeiçoamento da Raça).Footnote ³³ A decade later, Sylvester Baxter, an American newspaper writer from Boston passing through Rio, echoed Azevedo, characterizing Redenção as a fine allegory of “the development of the Brazilian race.”Footnote ³⁴ These statements conditioned the long line of interpretation about the painting as an allegory of racial “improvement” through the science of race-mixing.

On the second register, Redenção furthered an imaginary of the Black race’s disappearance into whiteness. Carlos de Laet characterized the painting as “a genealogy in which by two generations the Ethiopic element becomes white. An old Black woman had a mulatinha daughter who shacked up with a rube [labrego] and gave birth to a child that exhibits all of the characteristics of the Caucasian race.”Footnote ³⁵ Adolpho Caminha disputed the implication that whitening might be accomplished in just three generations, but the author of the contemporaneous Bom crioulo (The Black Man and the Cabin Boy, 1895) manifested confidence that the end product of miscegenation would spell the end to the Black race in Brazil.Footnote ³⁶

Most famously, João Batista de Lacerda (1846–1915), the prominent anthropologist and director of the Museu Nacional, included a reproduction of the Brocos canvas in the French-language print edition of his presentation to the Universal Races Congress held in London in July 1911.Footnote ³⁷ Lacerda’s paper, “The Métis, or Half-Breeds, of Brazil,” envisioned the progressive disappearance of the Black race and the victory of civilized whiteness over darkness. Although Lacerda made certain concessions for the positive contributions of mixed-race people, the “science” of his presentation was patently anti-Black. The caption to the accompanying illustration encapsulated the message of Black disappearance, reading: “Black becomes white, in the third generation, through the mixing of races” (“Le nègre passant au blanc, à la troisième génération, par l’effet du croisement des races”). Such a postulation was hotly disputed in Brazil, and official census numbers and racial self-identification disproved the argument that the Black race was disappearing into whiteness.Footnote ³⁸ Nonetheless, the caption was consistent with the appeals to racial “improvement” through whitening that had circulated since 1895 and framed what was to be made of Redenção for later generations.

The Brazilian eugenics movement, and its attendant dim view on the racial health of nonwhites, began to lose luster in the 1930s, a period of great ferment when artists and intellectuals, social thinkers, popular musicians, and politicians turned away from the fantasies of Black erasure.Footnote ³⁹ Redenção, accordingly, lost much of its relevance and retreated into relative obscurity. Between 1937 and the 1970s, the canvas continued to hang in the National Museum of Fine Arts, but mention in the popular and arts press most often came in relation to Engenho de Mandioca, elevated to the status of Brocos’ most important work.Footnote ⁴⁰

When the ideology of “racial democracy,” consolidated in the postwar period, faltered in the mid-1970s, Redemption grew increasingly discredited as a shameful example of the long history of racial prejudice in Brazil. Brocos himself was generally spared charges of personally harboring racist beliefs, whereas his canvas was singled out as a deeply offensive emblem of white supremacy in a so-called racial democracy. In 1978, Afro-Brazilian activist Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011) condemned the painting for its “pathological desire, aesthetic and social, of the Brazilian people to become white, imposed by the racist ideology of the dominant elite.”Footnote ⁴¹ The arts world was less openly hostile to the canvas, but in an influential reference work on visual arts published in 1988, José Roberto Teixeira Leite characterized the painting as “one of the most reactionary and prejudiced of the Brazilian School.”Footnote ⁴²

North American academics played a central role in fixing the transnational repudiation of Redenção. Thomas Skidmore’s pioneering Black into White (1974) situated the painting as an accessory to Lacerda’s 1911 presentation in London. Skidmore’s observations were picked up by Brazilian anthropologist Giralda Seyferth and North American historian of science Nancy Leys Stepan, both placing the canvas in the wider history of eugenics and anthropological sciences.Footnote ⁴³ Scholarly monographs by Werner Sollors, Teresa Meade, Jennifer Brody, and Darlene Joy Sadlier also touched on the canvas’ racist context and content. Several textbooks for the North American higher education market – by E. Bradford Burns, John Chasteen, Theresa Meade, Kristin Lane and Matthew Restall, and Henry Louis Gates – popularized the reading that the painting is an exemplar of the ideology of whitening.Footnote ⁴⁴ Online journalism and most especially social media have extended the work of these academics, repeatedly presenting Redenção as an illustration of the persistence of anti-Blackness in Brazilian racial relations.Footnote ⁴⁵ Redenção has become shorthand for Brazilian racism.

Redeeming Ham, Once Again: Brocos and the Destruction of Slavery

In a 2011 piece of popular history, anthropologist Giralda Seyferth summarized the enduring understanding of Redenção as a symbol of scientific racism and whitening: “O futuro era branco” (The future was white). The fair-complexioned child at the center of the canvas – white, young, and innocent – is the primary symbol of that white future. The limitations of such an interpretation include the casual disregard for one of the most self-evident elements of the painting: the velha preta (the old Black woman), a figure who evoked a very recent past of slavery’s destruction in the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas, as well as her mulata daughter, a symbol of the experience of the children of slave mothers born in the last decades of the slave regime. In privileging the white future, interpreters place the agency of dynamic change on the male white figure and his even whiter child, leaving the elderly Black woman and her light-skinned daughter to be little more than bit players, objects of the voyeuristic (male) gaze. The prevailing inattention to these women as protagonists of their recently won freedom is striking, as Brocos’ biography and artistic output in the 1890s indicate that he held a fascination with the formerly enslaved, especially women.

In this section, I consider how those stand-ins for the descendants of Ham – embodied in the two female characters, one allegorizing the Black African and the other the Brazilian-born mulata – are to be read as active agents in the reversal of the Hamitic Curse and the “redemption” of the Brazilian race. I also explore how Brocos acquired the knowledge to situate women of color as the central actors of an image that throws off the shackles of Black captivity.

The approach is informed by two provocations by Brazilian art historian Roberto Conduru. The first departs from the proposition that people of African descent were constituent elements of the progressive stages of modernization in Brazilian fine arts, from the latter decades of the nineteenth century through the 1930s. People of color were artists proper, representing themselves and the experiences of Blackness in a society ridding itself of its slave past.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simultaneously, Conduru asserts, Afro-descendants were the object of study and representation of white artists.Footnote ⁴⁷ Brocos and Redenção fall into the latter category. Linking Redenção to other paintings by white artists that feature noble Black subjects (e.g., José Correia de Lima, Retrato do Intrépido Marinheiro Simão, ca. 1854; Belmiro de Almeida, Príncipe Obá, 1886; Pedro Américo, Libertação dos Escravos, 1889; Antonio Parreiras, Zumbi, 1927) and well as commonfolk of color (e.g., José de Almeida Junior, Negra, 1891; Lucilio de Albuquerque, Mãe Preta, 1912), Conduru plots a fine arts tradition that does not conform to the aspirations of unidirectional whiteness and whitening. Conduru comes to no definitive conclusions, but his interventions invite us to look at and to look for the origins of the protagonism of Blacks (what he terms “Afro-modernity”) in the fine arts (and, implicitly, in multiracial Brazilian society).

The second inspiration draws from Conduru’s contextual reading of Brocos’ Mandinga. First exhibited at the 1892 one-man show organized by the national fine arts school, Mandinga (then known as Feiticeira, or Sorceress) was re-exhibited alongside Redenção de Cã at the 1895 salon (see Figure 13.5). The principal subject is a seated dark-skinned sorceress who sits before a serpent, while another woman of olive complexion leans on a table. The eyes of both women appear closed. Conduru asks not merely what is going on in the image but how Brocos might have come to know about Afro-Brazilian religion and its practitioners. “Contrary to what one might think, this image could be quite faithful to what the artist would have encountered in the streets of the Federal Capital [Rio] at the time, especially if it is compared alongside the observations of João do Rio [author of As religiões do Rio (The Religions of Rio), 1906] and Nina Rodrigues [author of O animismo fetichista dos negros baianos (Fetishism among the Blacks from Bahia), 1896].”Footnote ⁴⁸

Image 13.5 Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Mandinga (also known as Feiticeira), 1895.

Oil on canvas, 45 × 34 cm.

In making a case for a fidelity to the “real” and the documentary, Conduru’s method calls for a closer consideration of what Brocos knew of Afro-Brazilian life in the post-emancipation context. He challenges the reader to consider the artist’s ideological and visual education in the laboring and spiritual lives of women of color who formed part of urban daily life in Brocos’ adopted homeland. Conduru does not discard the notion that the social milieu in which Mandinga circulated was rife with anti-Black racism, but he does speculate on the ambiguity of intent and an openness to reading Brocos’ other works as products of the artist’s direct interactions with laboring people of color who become objects and subjects of fine-arts production. Conduru’s suggestive thoughts lead us to explore what Brocos knew of slave “redemption” and how that knowledge informed his artistic output.

The reader is to be reminded that Brocos himself registered precious little about the inspiration for Redenção; any argument about his racial thought draws largely from indirect evidence and imputed motivation. Posthumous interpreters, nonetheless, help fill in the gaps. In the introductory essay to the catalog of a 1952 retrospective organized by the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, J. M. Reis Junior said of the canvas that “[it] raises the issues of an artist concerned with a theme of social import.” In 1977, Quirino Campofiorito, another of Brocos’ former students, wrote of the painting: “With a certain touch of humor, the fusion of the races in Brazil develops in the passage of four well-placed characters. Both paintings [Redenção and Engenho de Mandioca] speak to the social conditions that stimulated the artist’s sentiments.” In an early draft to the preface of the catalog for a 1952 retrospective, MNBA curator Regina Real directly raised the artist’s engagement with thorny questions of race and color in Brazil: “[Brocos] approached difficult racial themes [temas difíceis raciais] in Redenção de Cam and the evolution of age in Estações [Las cuatro edades].” The catalog’s final printed version read slightly differently: “The Brazilian setting, the landscapes, the racial types, take hold of the artist and he reproduces them with interest and fidelity. We have family portraits of [son] Adriano and [wife] D. Henriqueta, scenes of Soberbo and Teresópolis, and the Blacks and their tribulations of liberty” (os negros e seus problemas de libertação).Footnote ⁴⁹ With a certain echo of Duque Estrada’s 1892 characterization of the pintor de raça, Real’s attention to Brocos’ relationship to temas difíceis raciais and Blacks’ problemas de libertação pointed to the very proximate but generally overlooked relations to emancipation and freed peoples that the painter knew personally.

That experience began with the Free Womb Law (September 1871), passed eight months before Brocos first arrived in Brazil for a five-year period of study and freelance work as an illustrator. The law had envisioned a slow, largely natural process of abolition that would stretch into the twentieth century. Instead, prolific litigation and radical antislavery mobilizations progressively rendered gradual abolition untenable. Living in Rio just prior to the emergence of popular abolitionism, Brocos accompanied the demographic decline and geographic redistribution that set captivity on an inexorable path to obsolescence. Yet the demise of slavery was hardly sudden, and students including Brocos continued to interact with current and former slaves throughout their daily lives as residents of Brazil’s largest slave city. Their professors grappled with disentangling the Academy from a culture of slaveholding that had been part of the institution’s foundational years.Footnote ⁵⁰ Outside his formal studies, Brocos worked within a world of print that became deeply engaged with the abolitionist cause, notably in the work of the Italian immigrant Angelo Agostini.Footnote ⁵¹ In short, Brocos had opportunity to preview the contours of the “tribulations of liberty” that fueled the collapse of Brazilian slavery during Brocos’ extended absence from Brazil between 1877 and 1890.

Such contours conditioned the post-emancipation social landscape in all corners of Brazil, including a reorganized national arts school that Brocos joined as teaching faculty in 1891. This acclimation to post-abolition Brazil took place within a social network that linked Brocos’ family residence in Rio’s Catumbi neighborhood to the Fazenda Barreira do Soberbo, a rural estate located in Guapimirim, a small hamlet in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state, near Magé. Located in the upper reaches of the Guanabara Bay watershed, Guapimirim (1890 population: 3,414) attracted sculptor and director Rodolpho Bernardelli (1852–1931) and his brother, painter Henrique (1857–1936), to make an artists’ retreat at the foot of a verdant escarpment leading to the mountainside town of Teresópolis. Shortly after 1891, Brocos joined the Bernardellis as a frequent visitor to Guapimirim (see Figure 13.6).

Figure 13.6 Visitor Center and Museu von Martius (formerly the Fazenda Barreira do Soberbo), Parque Nacional Serra dos Órgãos/Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade. Elizabeth Bravo. Undated.

In the shadow of the towering pinnacles of the Serra dos Órgãos, Brocos shared with the younger Bernardelli and other artists, including the Italian-Brazilian landscape painter Nicolau Antonio Facchinetti (1824–1900), an idyll of temperate air and spectacular scenery. Late in life, Brocos described his retreat on the Soberbo River as a place of great inspiration, where isolation and solitude released a creative spirit often held up by the interruptions of everyday urban life.Footnote ⁵² His artistic output, especially in his first decade of residence in Brazil, confirms his later statements about the inspiration drawn from the clean air, light, dramatic landscape, and flora of the Soberbo watershed. An untitled study of the Teresópolis countryside and Dedo de Deus (both exhibited 1892), Paineira and Mangueira (Silk Floss Tree and Mango Tree, ca. 1900), Cascata na Barreira do Soberbo (Waterfall at Barreira do Soberbo, 1903), and Recanto do Soberbo (Soberbo Retreat, ca. 1903) document the inspiration taken from a grand natural landscape located within a half-day’s train ride from Rio de Janeiro yet situated far from the bustling city’s rapid social and economic modernization.

In Barreira and environs, Brocos also developed an intimate relationship with a human landscape deeply marked by slavery and its recent destruction. In 1895, the painter married Henriqueta Josepha Dias (1859–1941), heir to a large estate adjacent to the Soberbo River established by her father, Henrique José Dias (1819–1904). A one-time model plantation for the cultivation of cinchona (quina), an Andean tree used for the manufacture of antimalarials, the 1,500-hectare farm had been battered by declining yields and the unraveling of the slave regime throughout the interior of Rio province.Footnote ⁵³ When Brocos first arrived in the vicinity of his future wife’s estate, around 1891, cinchona cultivation had given way to manioc and other basic staples of the rural diet that also had markets in urban centers. Black family subsistence labor was at the center of agrarian production in and around the post-emancipation Barreira estate.Footnote ⁵⁴ Brocos was clearly smitten with this laboring landscape turned over to manioc, and his first major work painted in Brazil, Engenho de Mandioca (1892), is a testament to his rising attachments.

In the absence of a comprehensive catalog of Brocos’ opus, the titles, media, and dating of many of the works produced in this period cannot be treated as definitive, but it is clear that Brocos’ visual vocabulary of the Afro-Brazilian post-emancipation rural peasantry sharpened in Soberbo between 1891 and 1895. Engenho depicts Black peasant families working manioc in a setting that looked very much like post-emancipation Guapimirim. Registries of titles of contemporaneous works – Alegria, Libertação dos Escravos (Happiness, the Liberation of Slaves) and Marcolina, Ex-Escrava da Barreira (Marcolina, Ex-Slave of Barreira) – prove that Brocos circulated among the former slaves of his father-in-law’s estate.Footnote ⁵⁵ The portrait of Marcolina and a contemporaneous work, Vista da Senzala da Barreira do Soberbo (View of the Slave Quarters of Barreira do Soberbo, 1892), present direct evidence that Brocos came to know the faces of older Black women and the post-emancipation built environment of the daub-and-wattle walls, earthen floors, and open windows featured in Redenção. Although these obscure works are now known solely in catalog listings, several of Brocos’ contemporaries observed how Redenção was exhibited alongside several other works that featured Black female figures. That is, the notorious allegory of a racial future was shown alongside documentary explorations of present Brazilian “reality.” The titles, moreover, provide important clues that Brocos developed his work in dialogue with a recent history of Black women’s struggles to redefine their legal, family, and work identities in the context of slavery’s demise around Barreira.

The demographic history of Magé, the township in which the Fazenda Barreira was located, adds additional context for understanding the realities of rural life that Brocos studied in the early 1890s. Chiefly, Marcolina’s counterparts had largely conquered freedom years before final abolition, without miraculous intervention. In the 1872 slave census mandated in the Rio Branco Law, 312,352 slaves were counted in Rio province. That population continued to grow, via the internal trade and natural growth, to 397,456, registered on September 30, 1873. Yet, by the new census completed on March 30, 1886, the number of enslaved in the province had declined by more than half, to 162,421. In Magé, the rate of decline had been much more pronounced. As of September 30, 1873, there were a total of 8,268 slaves (4,658 males and 3,610 females) counted. Between 1873 and 1883, 274 additional males and another 286 additional females had entered the township, whereas 2,481 males and 1,978 females had departed. With the deaths of 658 men and 764 women, and the emancipation of 135 men and 178 women, the municipal slave population on June 30, 1883, stood at 2,941 (1,658 males and 1,283 females). As of March 30, 1887, that figure had continued to drop to 1,244 (651 men and 593 women), about 15 percent the figure for 1873.Footnote ⁵⁶ This precipitous drop in captives – in absolute and relative terms – took place largely in the absence of assistance from the emancipation funds, established under the Free Womb Law of 1871, and other gradualist measures associated with the legalist path to abolition that culminated in the Golden Law of May 13, 1888.

This demographic transition from slavery to freedom also transpired without the presence of white immigrants, who were disinclined to settle among poor rural Blacks. In a 1898 response to a questionnaire submitted by the central government to the municipalities of Rio state, the Municipal Chamber of Magé responded: “The population totals 26,300 inhabitants, almost all nationals (Blacks, whites, and their mixed offspring); there are few foreigners and those that are here are European.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Local leaders were undoubtedly open to foreign immigration, informing the state secretary of public works of their fair weather and conditions favorable to white immigrants, preferably from Portugal and Italy. Nonetheless, the southern European immigrant played a minor role in the social formation of the Rio state interior near Guapimirim in the period contemporaneous to the execution and exhibition of Redenção.

The absence of white immigration in the agrarian landscape transited by Brocos offers some corrective to the notion of agency that is embedded in a wide strain of interpretation about Redenção that presents the painting as a didactic prescription for the “improvement” of the Brazilian race through the reproductive union of immigrant male laborers and Brazilian mulatas. Whereas critics like Azevedo and Caminha saw the male figure as the transformative actor, the demographic data tells us that rural slavery in Magé was largely undone without new white arrivals. These demographic indices underscore the fact that the countryside that Brocos came to know after 1890 was populated by agriculturalists who had experienced abolition as a gradual and local process, rather than some abrupt end to an enduring labor system undone by humanitarianism, providential fortune, or foreign arrivals. It was largely a Black story.

The specific resonance of demographic trends in the lives and life arcs of the former slaves and free people of color at Fazenda Barreira shall require close reading of property and civil registries, particularly those found in local archives in Guapimirim.Footnote ⁵⁸ A spectacular find would be the registry of Marcolina’s manumission and the family dynamics involved in her decision to remain at the Fazenda Barreira, quite possibly to live in the former slave barracks that Brocos would later paint. But even the more mundane records of the meia-siza, a tax on sale of domestic-born slaves, documents the lives of slaves engaged in rural work (escravo de roça), domestic service, boating, and skilled trades including tailoring and stone masonry.Footnote ⁵⁹ The surviving records, corresponding to the years 1863 to 1883, held at the Arquivo Publico do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (AEPRJ), heavily favor transactions of single Brazilian-born ladinos (described as crioula/o; de nação; natural da província) matriculated in the slave census of 1872. However, the APERJ also included records of the sale of slave mothers accompanied by their children. For example, in 1873 the tax was levied on the sale Leopoldina, a thirty-five-year-old Black agriculturalist, unmarried, and her five-year-old son, Belmiro.Footnote ⁶⁰ By the time Brocos came to know the region of Barreira, Leopoldina would have been in her mid-fifties, and Belmiro would have been an adult. Both would have been manumitted for some time, perhaps as long as two decades. Nonetheless, both would bear with them the experience of slavery and its often brutal dynamics of sale and dislocation, and also the dynamics of abolitionism, including the prohibition against the break-up of slave families imposed in the Free Womb Law of 1871.Footnote ⁶¹ Such experiences might have influenced what Brocos came to see and render in the faces of liberty.

The meia-siza records are among the many registries that should yield further insights into the life experiences of the caboclinhas, morenas, mulatinhas, crioulas, and other racialized and gendered personages in Brocos’ artistic output who, under close scrutiny, bear the marks of a close, intimate history of the recent slave past. Future research will yield more granular understandings of the transitions between bondage and liberty in the rural hinterlands of Guanabara Bay and their translation into the visual output of Brocos and other artists who ranged far beyond the Academy. Nonetheless, the regional demographic evidence and comparative cases from other regions of Rio province already demonstrate that the children of Ham were “redeemed” from bondage within Black spaces, in Black families, and between Afro-Brazilian women and their children.Footnote ⁶²

Conclusion

Close attention to the commonly overlooked conditions under which Brocos conceptualized and then executed Redenção offers some tantalizing prospects for documenting the Black agency that remade the countryside allegorized in the canvas. Alongside the unmistakable resonance of embranquecimento embraced by a long line of thinkers from Artur Azevedo to João Baptista Lacerda (and critics such as Abdias do Nascimento), we must be attuned to the voices of formerly enslaved peoples who also give meaning to the canvas. The gendered dimensions of these voices are strong, and there is special attention due to rural women of color. The womb as a passage to freedom is an especially important frame for reading an allegory of reproduction; it is directly relevant to a painting completed twenty-four years after the passage of the Free Womb Law – about the same period of time that might be ascribed to the age of the young mother at the center of the canvas.

With these working propositions, we acquire a set of tools to look anew at the Brocos canvas. Black women, rather than white men, help coproduce the “redemption” of the slavish sons of Ham. Although an allegorical appeal to whitening is unmistakable (and well reinforced in a long history of reception), Brocos’ vision for the Brazilian race may not be so exclusively white. Without doubt, the elderly Black woman – by far the most imposing and active figure – is not to be easily erased from the post-emancipation order. A 2018 temporary recontextualization of Redenção, exhibiting the canvas among dozens of works about and by Afro-Brazilian artists held by the Museu Nacional de Belas Arts, suggestively relocates the female figure deep within a Black milieu that can be read for meanings constructed outside the white and whitening gaze of the historical permanent exhibition (see Figure 13.7).

Figure 13.7 Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil, “Das Galés às Galerias,” 2018.

In a reappraisal of Redenção that considers the real alongside the imaginary, the dramatis personae of the story remain largely the same as those seen by the apologists for whitening, but the dynamism of the view shifts from the right of the canvas to the left, from the figure of the largely passive white male toward the elderly Black woman – a former slave, possibly an African. Her posture may have less to do with the awestruck wonder for the birth of a “white” grandchild purportedly fathered by the immigrant son-in-law and more to do with the culmination of a long process of securing the freedom of herself, her offspring, and her race. As we look yet again at the canvas, the dark specter of racial sciences and a whitened future remain, but those “tribulations of liberty” and the alegria of slave emancipation that Brocos came to know intimately animate our interest in this enigmatic allegory of history-telling and race-making in Brazil.

Historians often scour the judicial archives in search of micro-historical evidence of everyday life and the dynamics of individual relationships, attuned to the possibility that such evidence might challenge normative narratives constructed by previous generations of social scientists. I expected, for example, that a close reading of lawsuits regarding paternity in Brazil would challenge the paradigmatic “traditional Brazilian family” famously constructed by Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 account of hierarchically structured relationships contained within colonial plantation households.Footnote ¹ According to Freyre, Brazil’s national character had been forged through myriad intimate relationships among members of the “Big House,” where the master’s family resided with various retainers and enslaved domestic servants, and the slave quarters, home to the families of field laborers. In Freyre’s account, sexual relationships between Portuguese-descended male patriarchs and Indigenous or African-descended women they held as slaves, together with bonds between white children and their black nannies, or black children and their white mistresses or masters, played crucial roles in the nation’s biological and cultural formation. These relationships, Freyre argued, not only produced a variegated population that occupied various rungs of the social ladder but also symbolized the sensual intimacy and affection that underlay the merger of Portuguese, African, and Amerindian cultures, moderating the hostility generated by the violence of colonization and slavery.

Already in the 1930s, intellectuals such as historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda soundly rejected Freyre’s nostalgic vision of Brazil’s slaveholding households, though without discarding his depiction of the hierarchical kin and patronage-based social organization and cultural values these households nurtured.Footnote ² For Holanda, the “patriarchalism” of colonial society had left a cultural legacy of authoritarianism and patronage that stymied the nation’s attempts to modernize and democratize. In the 1950s, sociologist and literary critic Antônio Candido celebrated the demise of the patriarchal family over the preceding 150 years – an uneven process that he attributed to urbanization – while emphasizing core elements of the Freyrean model and insisting that this type of family was the sole source of sexual organization and social identity in colonial Brazil. This patriarchal colonial family, Candido explained, had incorporated all but the “nameless mass of the socially degraded” who “reproduced themselves haphazardly and lived without regular norms of conduct.”Footnote ³

Since the early 1980s, Freyre’s conclusions regarding racial harmony and national character have been thoroughly discredited by overwhelming scholarly evidence of systematic racism and violence in both Brazil’s past and its present. Social historians have also rejected his (and Candido’s) monolithic view of colonial society, revealing instead an enormous variety of family and household arrangements throughout Brazil’s nearly four centuries of slavery, as well as social networks and norms that tempered patriarchal prerogatives.Footnote ⁴ While rejecting Freyre’s romanticism and exaggeration, historians have also refined some of his insight into cultural features and racial and gender dynamics of plantation households. Specifically, they have described the ways violence, patriarchy, and paternalism worked together to structure social and sexual reproduction, producing variegated hierarchies of domination.Footnote ⁵

Early-twentieth-century lawsuits by nonmarital children demanding legal recognition of paternity offer a unique ground-level perspective on the legacy of family structures that were shaped by slavery. This type of litigation was prohibited in 1847, then reintroduced by the 1916 civil code. Over the decade that followed, paternity investigations, generally as part of child support or inheritance disputes, became one of the most common types of legally contested civil cases. Most were filed by children, or their mothers or legal guardians in the case of minors, whose alleged fathers occupied a similar or slightly higher social position than their own. In a handful of cases, however, nonmarital children described their upbringing in rural households that bore resemblance to the “traditional” extended family model described by Freyre, in which their alleged fathers sat at the top, and their mothers the bottom, of a multitiered hierarchy. The children themselves held an ill-defined position somewhere in the middle. They usually claimed that their father had at least tacitly acknowledged paternity. They were incorporated into his family not as recognized kin, however, but as filhos de criação (literally, “sons/daughters by upbringing”).

This chapter recounts the experiences of two such filhos de criação, each born to enslaved mothers and raised in the households of white men who were allegedly their fathers at the end of the nineteenth century. Decades later, each of these illegitimate sons sued for the right to paternal recognition and inheritance. A host of individual circumstances and decisions explain the divergent paths that led one of them to impoverishment, alcoholism, and an early death, while the other enjoyed considerable social standing and economic success. Despite their contrasting fates, however, the two illegitimate sons’ life histories and experiences in court show striking similarities. Each boy was raised by his alleged father’s sister; both women were described as deeply religious and charitable. As their respective aunts’ filhos de criação, both boys were treated “like family,” while an unspoken promise of eventual recognition as family seemed to dangle elusively before them. When they grew up, the two plaintiffs were burdened by expectations of gratitude and fraught family relationships that reveal the fragility, and suggest the emotional cost, of their relatively privileged position within their households and communities.

Filhos de Criação “in the Time of Slavery”

The ubiquity among all social classes of the practice of child circulation – a term that encompasses the variety of ways children are incorporated temporarily or permanently in households not belonging to their biological parents – has been widely documented throughout Brazil’s history.Footnote ⁶ In Candido’s traditional family model, “the rearing of children of other parents” was commonplace, “a kind of exchange that indicates the broad structure of kinship and perhaps functioned to reinforce it.”Footnote ⁷ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslavers frequently used the term crias da casa or, more frequently, “my crias” to refer to enslaved children raised within their homes. Several historians have demonstrated that both female and male enslavers of diverse ethnic and class status commonly expressed special affection toward one or more of their enslaved crias. Close relationships between masters and crias, including bonds of codependency, were not uncommon, particularly when the social distance between master and enslaved was not great. For example, in her research on wills left by African-born freedwomen whose property included people held as slaves, Sheila Faria finds a common pattern in which, upon their death, these women freed most or all of the enslaved and, in a maternal gesture, selected at least one of the crias, almost always female, as a favored heir who would carry on the enslaver’s legacy. Testators often freed crias while leaving the children’s mothers enslaved. The well-documented expectation on the part of enslavers that formerly enslaved workers would remain tied to them for life through a debt of gratitude – an expectation that continued to nurture patron–client relationships well after the abolition of slavery in 1888 – was especially pronounced when the formerly enslaved had been crias da casa.Footnote ⁸

Filhos de criação were usually distinguished from the children of the enslaved. They might be biological kin or other children who shared a similar social status with the household heads, or they might be lower-status dependents or servants. Their relationships to their adoptive parents were rarely legalized. In fact, formal adoption was so uncommon that the author of Brazil’s first compendium of family law, published in 1869, remarked that it was pointless to even comment on it; it had “fallen completely out of practice here, as has occurred in all of Europe.”Footnote ⁹ This was not entirely accurate, as historian Alessandra Moreno has demonstrated by uncovering a handful of Portuguese and Brazilian adoption records from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The records reveal a complex bureaucratic procedure that included approval by the Supreme Tribunal in Lisbon and written consent of all of the adoptive parent’s legal heirs, since adoption could qualify a child for hereditary succession. It was certainly pursued by very few. Instead, adults who cared for filhos de criação generally created informal relationships that combined widely varying portions of labor exploitation, education, and loving protection.Footnote ¹⁰

As demonstrated in Chapters 4 and 6 in this volume, by Mariana Muaze and Maria Helena Machado respectively, enslaved or free women commonly served as “mothers by upbringing” (mães de criação) to the household’s children, including both the white offspring of the household head and various others. In the post-abolition period, nostalgic representations of the enslaved wet nurse (ama de leite), nanny, “black mother,” and “black old lady” (mãe preta, preta velha) transformed these figures into romanticized icons of the traditional slaveholding family.Footnote ¹¹ Many free poor women also nursed and cared for the children of others, often with the explicit or tacit expectation of compensation, either in cash or through the children’s labor once they were old enough to work.

As slavery went into decline in the late nineteenth century, and after it was abolished in 1888, legal guardianship contracts were increasingly pursued by men as a way to acquire child laborers.Footnote ¹² Guardianship contracts had long been drawn up for children who had been abandoned to the care of religious institutions. These children were frequently placed with families who agreed to provide for their education from age seven and to deposit a monthly stipend in a trust account once they reached the age of twelve, in exchange for their labor. These provisions mirrored laws requiring biological parents to provide for their children (whether legitimate or illegitimate), with mothers specifically charged with early childhood care and fathers responsible for the child’s “education” after the age of seven. In either situation, “education” meant socialization, schooling, or professional training appropriate to the child’s station.Footnote ¹³

Parents and guardians alike generally expected children under their tutelage to earn their keep and contribute to the household economy. Some, however, contributed more than others. In many cases, informal adoption or formal guardianship bore some similarity to enslavement, as is illustrated by competition for guardianship contracts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ The continuity between enslavement and tutelage of free children is seen most clearly in the 1871 Free Womb Law, which freed all children born to enslaved mothers from the date of its enactment. As compensation for the expenses of these children’s upbringing until they were eight years old, the law gave their mothers’ enslavers the right to either profit from the children’s labor until they were twenty-one or turn them over to the state in exchange for cash.Footnote ¹⁵

In Gilberto Freyre’s portrait of the Brazilian “Big House,” children born to enslaved mothers and fathered by a member of the slaveowning family invariably counted among the crias and filhos de criação. Indeed, in Freyre’s depiction, polygamy was a central feature of the traditional Brazilian family, a more-or-less open secret. Within their fathers’ households, non-marital children might be singled out for special favor or even treated as a member of the master’s family, even if their fathers did not offer legal recognition as true kin or the patrimonial rights that came with this recognition. This was the situation described by Gustavo Nunes Cabral when he filed suit to demand paternal recognition in Rio de Janeiro, in 1917, and by José Assis Bueno, when he did the same in Jaú, São Paulo, in 1929.Footnote ¹⁶

Filho Natural or Filho de Criação? Education, Status, and Affection as Proof of Paternity

Conclusion

The paternity investigations opened by Gustavo Nunes and José Assis Bueno offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. The practice of raising less-privileged filhos de criação in the household as family members, but unequal ones, remained a strong social norm, not only for the first generation to emerge from slavery but also for their children and grandchildren through the end of the twentieth century. These children seldom moved into the class status of the legitimate families that headed their households but instead often maintained lifelong, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Among these filhos de criação, the unacknowledged “natural children” of elite family members often occupied an elevated position. Yet the cases of Gustavo Nunes and José Assis Bueno suggest that if they tried to translate their elevated position into a legal claim to family rights such as inheritance, they might encounter a thicket of obstacles.

In the case of Gustavo Nunes, Dona Regina’s letters reveal the ways these adults “educated” children in manners, including showing gratitude and deference appropriate to their station and crucial for survival. Dona Regina’s limitations on the patronage and social connections she was willing to mobilize for Gustavo when he didn’t behave according to her wishes, and her decision not to transfer to him a share of the family patrimony upon her death, much less during her life, also illustrate the ways filhos de criação were commonly differentiated from filhos de família, or legally recognized children, even when they were blood kin. José Assis Bueno’s mãe de criação, Dona Teresa, followed another well-established, if less common, pattern, in which her filhas de criação and their formerly enslaved mother remained by her side, grateful and dependent, most likely working in her household and caring for her until her death, when they finally received a financial reward for their loyalty. The “education” provided to José by his father – again following long-standing patterns that had been solidified by colonial law – together with José’s gender and lighter color, placed him in a much higher position, that of trusted administrator with authority over the enslaved and, later, immigrant workforce. This placement (colocação), together with José’s apparent talent for business, permitted him to achieve considerable economic success but not equal membership in his father’s legitimate family. Yet although the courts did not grant either Gustavo or José filial rights, each of the lengthy proceedings (and the split appeals decision in José’s case) revealed continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.

The world of festivities and music has always opened a wide range of possibilities for understanding the Afro-descendant and slave experience in the Americas.Footnote ¹ Slave songs – understood here as songs, dances, movements, and genres developed by the enslaved – were, in Shane and Graham White’s felicitous expression, powerful “songs of captivity.” “Slave culture,” they write, “was made to be heard.”Footnote ²

Slave songs profoundly marked the history of conflict and cultural dialogues in slave and post-slavery societies across the Americas. They were part of the repressive disciplinary policies of slaveowners, police, and religious authorities, yet they also proved critical to enslaved people’s strategies of resistance, negotiation, and political action. The right to celebrate according to their own customs was – alongside demands for manumission, access to land, and family organization – one of the most important demands of the enslaved in their struggle for autonomy and liberty. The “sounds of captivity” – whether inherited directly from Africa or learned and recreated in the New World – were a constant in the senzalas (slave quarters), workplaces, plantations, cities, meeting places, and religious events of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.Footnote ³

But slave songs also had an impact far beyond the world of enslaved people and their celebrations. Slave songs became spectacles in social and religious events organized by slaveowners, who sought to impress visitors and demonstrate their dominion over slaves. In a depreciative and racist manner – often hovering between the grotesque, the ridiculous, and the sentimental – slave songs appeared in the blackface spectacles of minstrel shows in the United States and Cuba and were also performed by white artists and clowns in Brazilian revues and circuses during the second half of the nineteenth century. Slave songs – written here in italics to differentiate them from the songs sung by slaves during captivity – frequently took the form of coon songs, Ethiopian melodies, cakewalks, lundus, jongos, and batuques. These songs, though not necessarily their Black protagonists, enjoyed great success in the promising sheet-music market (see Figures 15.1 and 15.2), as well as in ballrooms, circuses, and theaters. They triggered memories of captivity and of Africa as well as racist images of Black people and cultures. As genres, they competed with waltzes, polkas, havaneras, modinhas, and recitatives and would eventually enjoy success in the phonographic industry.

Figure 15.1 Sheet music. E.T. Paull, “A Warmin’ Up in Dixie,” 1899. Historic American Sheet Music, Duke University. https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_b0158/.

Figure 15.2 Sheet music. Alberto Nepomuceno. Suite Brezilienne. Catálogo de Partituras. DIMAS, Biblioteca Nacional, M786.1 N-IV-59.

This chapter investigates belle époque slave song performance on the stage and in modern cultural circuits throughout Brazil and the United States, exploring its many dimensions and tensions. Focusing on two Black musicians, Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922), this chapter will examine these tensions in depth, revealing in the process the Black diaspora’s musical connections and links across the Americas and especially south of the equator.

Eduardo Sebastião das Neves was the first Black singer to make records in Brazil’s emergent phonographic industry during the first decade of the twentieth century. In previous works I had the opportunity to demonstrate how Neves linked his musical production to crucial political questions such as the valorization of Brazil’s republican heroes or Rio de Janeiro’s urban problems. His music, published in widely circulating songbooks and recorded in the nascent phonographic industry, represented a noteworthy form of politics. At the same time, Neves’ compositions also represented a musical connection to the slave past and the experience of Brazil’s post-abolition period, a fact that may have augmented his success. For his repertoire, Neves chose themes involving slavery, the conquest of freedom, the construction of Black identity, and the valorization of crioulos (Brazilian-born Afro-descendants) and mulatas. Eduardo das Neves proudly called himself “the crioulo Dudu” and was proud of his talent as a singer of lundus, a comical song genre heavily associated with Brazil’s Black population.

However, as my research advanced, I realized that an approach limited by national boundaries was increasingly insufficient. Eduardo das Neves was employed by an incipient phonographic industry that was based on multinational capital and had strong roots in and connections with the United States.Footnote ⁴ With that expanded perspective, I came to understand Neves’ production as part of the musical field of slave songs, which had established itself as a privileged space of entertainment and business in various cities in the Americas between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.Footnote ⁵ I thus soon came to suspect – and suggest – that Eduardo das Neves was not alone. His trajectory paralleled that of many Black musicians from other parts of the Americas. His repertoire and performance style, in turn, echoed a larger set of representations of Blacks and what was understood as “Black music” in the commercial circuits of musical theater and the phonographic industry across the Atlantic World. The circulation of recorded music – that era’s most modern cultural product – catalyzed the diffusion of musical genres identified with the Black population.Footnote ⁶

This chapter aims to deepen our understanding of this history, valorizing the agency of Black musicians in constructing what Paul Gilroy has already celebrated as the “Black Atlantic,” in this case south of the equator at the beginning of the twentieth century. Brazil’s musical historiography does not usually highlight Black musicians’ protagonism in the transformation of the musical field, much less their participation in international cultural circuits before the 1920s. Until very recently, Brazilian histories of music generally argued that Brazilian popular music was above all the space where a disparate nation united; that it constituted the cultural fruit of the intermixing of Portuguese and Black peoples. In interpreting Brazil’s twentieth-century musical production, Brazilians have widely employed maxims from the myth of racial democracy.Footnote ⁷

Atlantic Conflicts and Connections in the Post-Abolition Period: Black Musicians as Protagonists

Abolition was a political landmark in the nineteenth-century Americas, but it did not substantially alter the paths already followed by slave songs in Brazil and the United States. Slave songs did, however, substantially expand their reach during that time, due to the acceleration of commercial and cultural exchanges in the Atlantic – both north/south and east/west – and the emergence of the phonographic industry.Footnote ⁸ At the turn of the twentieth century, a transnational commercial entertainment network involving circuses, vaudeville, and variety shows stimulated the widespread circulation of styles and people between Europe and the Americas. One result was a magnetic new form of dance music based on genres and rhythms identified with America’s Black populations.

Complementarily, slavery’s end introduced new elements to the discussion of slave songs’ meanings and significance; across the Americas, emancipation opened possibilities for Afro-descendant participation in newly free nations and the extension of the freed population’s civil and political rights.Footnote ⁹ Even in the United States, where outsiders had begun to recognize the immense value of spirituals after they were “discovered” by northern progressive folklorists at the end of the Civil War,Footnote ¹⁰ debates about Afro-descendant musical contributions to national culture and identity became important to the agendas of musicians, intellectuals, and folklorists.Footnote ¹¹

Slave songs did not disappear with abolition, as some hoped and believed would happen. On the contrary, and not by chance, slave songs – renewed in diverse genres such as cakewalk, ragtime, blues and jazz in the United State, rumba and son in Cuba, calypso in the English Caribbean, and lundu, tango, maxixe, and samba in Brazil – invaded the modern Atlantic circuits of Europe and the Americas in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹² They attracted the attention of erudite musicians and European modernists,Footnote ¹³ as well as that of cosmopolitan businessmen and urban populations across the globe that thirsted for cultural novelties.

However, even as Afro-descendant music and dance achieved success on the world stage, free Afro-descendants’ access to venues for artistic expression, citizenship, and society itself were increasingly limited by beliefs about nonwhite inferiority that also circulated throughout the Atlantic world. Scientific racism, which posited the inferiority and degeneration of Africans, would eventually inundate the musical world.

In nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas, Black bodies and their movements came to be interpreted on the basis of racist theories of sex, gender, and culture; resignifications of Africa in the modern artistic field would further reinforce the inequalities of racial representations.Footnote ¹⁴ Newly valorized representations of slave and Afro-descendant music and dance could still naturalize, rank, and ridicule cultural, musical, and racial identities and differences. Characterizations of Black people and their musical genres – projected in theaters, through song lyrics, on the covers of sheet music, in concerts, on stages, and in musical recordings – helped create and disseminate post-abolition allegories about Afro-descendant inferiority and racial inequality.

The success of slave songs during the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century cannot be seen in isolation, nor as simply the fruit of French and European modernities, as the Brazilian historiography has often suggested. Nor can the slave songs be considered a “natural” or transparently “national” expression, as many folklorists once argued.Footnote ¹⁵ The slave songs’ popularity certainly did not indicate the existence of a flexible space that facilitated slave descendants’ visibility and social mobility. Their success instead needs to be researched through the deeds of the social actors who invested in the struggle for citizenship and visibility in the post-abolition world. The commercial ascension of rhythms, themes, and genres identified in some way with the Black population opened space for Afro-descendants who struggled for liberty and autonomy in order to construct new trajectories or fought successfully for inclusion in the modernity of nations that were not willing to fully accept them.Footnote ¹⁶

Although the slave songs’ Black protagonists did not necessarily accompany the new and modern musical genres as they traveled through global commercial circuits, work opportunities for Black musicians did expand throughout the Americas. And this certainly contributed to subversion in the artistic field of racial hierarchies reconstructed after the end of slavery. In musical productions across the United States and Brazil, Black artists such as Scott Joplin (1868–1917), Marion Cook (1869–1944), Ernest Hogan (1865–1909), Henrique Alves Mesquita (1830–1906), Joaquim Antonio da Silva Callado (1848–1890), Patápio Silva (1880–1907), and Benjamim de Oliveira (1870–1954) moved successfully between the erudite and popular spheres. And their presence made a difference; even if Afro-descendant performers were forced to negotiate the traditional stereotypes of blackface, forms such as ragtime, tangos, cakewalks, and lundus gained new dimensions and meanings when they were protagonized by these talented musicians.

Despite racism and commercial profiteering, the musical field also expressed Afro-descendant struggles for equality and cultural valorization. As Paul Gilroy has argued (and Du Bois perceived much earlier), it never stopped being an important channel for the expression and communication of Black political identity across the Americas. Throughout the diaspora, slave songs and their musical legacy were essential to the struggle against racial domination and oppression and opened pathways for social inclusion and citizenship after abolition. It was thus not without reason that the Black leaders of the United States and the Caribbean chose Black music as a symbol of pride, identity, and authenticity in the political struggle against racial oppression.Footnote ¹⁷

In my search for the slave songs’ Atlantic connections and points of tension, I have chosen to focus comparatively on the Black musicians Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922) (see Figures 15.3 and 15.4). This choice deserves some explanation beyond the fact that the two Black singers were contemporaries who left similar archival traces or the existence of a relatively abundant bibliographical literature devoted to Bert Williams.Footnote ¹⁸ Recognized for their lundus and cakewalks respectively, each man was a protagonist in the birth of the recording industry in his home country, and both found ways to benefit from slave songs’ popularity in the cultural marketplace. Their trajectories demonstrate the degree to which the musical field became an important space for Afro-descendant representation and for the discussion – and subversion – of racial hierarchies.

Figure 15.3 Bert Williams. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, 20540 USA. 1922 January 17. Photo by Samuel Lumiere. cph 3b12509 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b12509.

Figure 15.4 Eduardo das Neves. O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, January 6, 1917.

Histories comparing the construction of racism in Brazil and the United States have generally emphasized specificities and differences, highlighting the role of explicitly oppressive legislation and violent Jim Crow–era exclusion in North America.Footnote ¹⁹ Without ignoring these unquestionable specificities, I seek here to call attention to important Pan-American commonalities in the experience of racism within in the musical field. Studies of the slave family, of enslaved peoples’ visions of freedom, and of freedpeople’s struggles for citizenship have already fruitfully explored Pan-American approximations; adapting this approach to the musical field helps us to better understand not only the actual history of slave songs in the so-called Black Atlantic but also that music’s place in national imaginations and the experience of racism after the end of slavery. The musical field in the southern Black Atlantic is a new and fertile field of historical study.

Although they moved in different worlds and genres, Black musicians such as Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams faced similar obstacles in their quest to find space in the musical universe; they were dogged by racist attitudes throughout their careers; they had to deal with the derogatory images that illustrated the sheet music and playbills of the works they starred in; they had to respond artistically to maxims about the racial inferiority of Africans and their descendants wherever they travelled and performed; and they often had to resist pressure to give up their African cultural inheritance. Although he lived far from the Jim Crow laws, Eduardo das Neves also faced racism during his life and suffered from the numerous limits imposed on men and artists of his color in Brazil.Footnote ²⁰ Like Bert Williams, he left perceptible traces of his political activism in the struggle against racial inequalities.

Even though they were in constant dialogue with racist iconography – and even though they often incorporated prejudicial representations of Africa and slavery – Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams embodied forms of Black identity and musical expression that were no longer imprisoned in the masks of blackface or circus clowns. These artists radically negotiated, resignified, and subverted the powerful canons of blackface. Both men inverted and played with representations of Blacks and with the meanings of the masks of blackface, using their critical artistic sensibility to reinterpret the legacy of slave songs and racist theatrical conventions that identified Afro-descendants with stereotypical propensities for music, joy, naivety, indolence, and easy laughs.Footnote ²¹

Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams were artists who knew how to find humor in difficult racial situations. Neves specialized in lundus, a musical genre full of humorous and ironic stories involving mulatas, love, and the everyday norms of Black social life. Williams, according to a New York Times obituary from March 4, 1922, was not seen as a “great singer,” but “he could ‘put over’ with great effect a song that was really a funny story told to music.”Footnote ²²

Neves and Williams were born in the same year, 1874, and died not too far apart, in 1919 and 1922 respectively, a little before new genres such as samba, jazz, and blues began to be disseminated as national cultural emblems and celebrated as the musical expression of “Black people.” It is unlikely that they met personally, although they could have heard of each other through their managers or through their own exposure to transnational music. Cakewalk was part of the catalogs of the phonographic industry and circulated widely in concert halls in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The two artists also became public successes at the same time, between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Although the modernities of New York and Rio de Janeiro diverged significantly – and although New York mobilized far more capital for cultural pursuits – both cities epitomized urban culture within their own national contexts. Williams and Neves rose to the top ranks of the recording and theatrical industries and were much applauded in their own time, generally by white audiences; and yet both men fell quickly into oblivion after their deaths.

Neves made his name in the circus and gained recognition through his prowess on the guitar, in theatres, and in musical revues; Williams began as a vaudeville performer. Williams also participated in films, and Neves edited collections of popular songs. Due to their success, they later became stars in the nascent phonographic industry, with an ample and varied repertoire that touched on a wide range of everyday themes but which also always engaged with the question of race.

Williams, it seems, had access to education and was born into a family with some resources. He also received international recognition during his visit to England, and after 1910 he was part of the Ziegfeld Follies, one of the most refined musical theatrical companies in New York. Neves never could have dreamed of such applause and recognition beyond the reputation he built from his phonographic recordings. He performed mainly in circuses, in charity balls, in variety shows, and in concert halls in Rio de Janeiro.

Despite these differences, I seek in this chapter to illuminate the parallels between the two men’s choices and actions. Their commonalities show how much Black artists across the Americas shared comparable experiences and constructed similar responses to the problems and challenges imposed on Black peoples during the post-abolition period. In a time marked by debates about the possibilities and limits of Afro-descendant citizenship and national belonging, men such as Neves and Williams took advantage of the nascent phonographic industry to expand opportunities for Black artists and widen the scope of theatrical representations of Blackness. No less importantly, their presence and protagonism helped ensure the ascension of their rhythms and tastes in the modern musical market.

Bert Williams, a Black Artist on Broadway

Although he was identified as an Afro-American and labeled himself a “colored man,”Footnote ²³ Bert Williams was born in Nassau, an island in the English Caribbean. He arrived in the United States as a child and began his artistic life in California. From a young age he had been seen as a great artist and imitator, especially of Afro-American customs. He learned to play banjo early on and took part in minstrel shows all over the country, alongside both white and Black artists. After his first successes at the beginning of the twentieth century, Williams moved to New York.

In the 1890s he began to share the stage with George Walker, a young Afro-American from Kansas; their artistic partnership continued until Walker’s death in 1910 (see Figure 15.5). The duo toured the United States, presenting Black songs and dances, which were great attractions for the minstrel shows’ white audiences. In 1900 the two artists were already recognized as talented comedians and disseminators of the cakewalk, both in theaters and in the international phonographic industry.

Figure 15.5 Williams and Walker. “My Little Zulu Babe.” https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/my-little-zulu-babe/12247.

In George Walker’s memoir about these early times – published in 1906 by Colored American Magazine – he revealed that the duo recognized and discussed all the wounds, persecutions, and prohibitions that plagued the professional life of Black musicians.Footnote ²⁴ They were especially concerned with the success of blackface and the tunes known as coon songs. William and Walker made fun of these attempts at imitation, which they considered “unnatural.” But when they accepted the moniker “the two real coons,” they probably did so with the intention of showcasing Black talent and artistry.Footnote ²⁵ When they reached New York, they found their first success with blackface performances in vaudeville and variety shows. Yet they always sought to present and represent – in a multifaceted and polysemic manner – Afro-Americans’ “true” and “authentic” artistic and musical abilities. Walker believed that white comedians were ridiculous when they converted themselves into “darkies,” painting their lips red and acting out exaggerated mannerisms for ragtime’s artificial scenarios.Footnote ²⁶

Williams and Walker both achieved public recognition for their identification with Black musical and theatrical genres, although Williams enjoyed even greater success than his companion. According to a Washington Post article from November 10, 1898, Bert Williams “is one of the cleverest delineators of negro characters on the stage, and has no trouble at all in keeping his audience in roars of laughter.”Footnote ²⁷ This success led the Victor recording label to invite Williams to record his repertoire at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Williams’ commercial recordings also had a longer life than Walker’s. Tim Brooks attributed Williams’ greater success to his unique vocal style.Footnote ²⁸ Among the songs located by Martin and Hennessey from the first phase of Williams’s musical recordings (1901–1909), the standouts are comic takes on everyday troubles, such as lack of money, and satires of female behavior. Nevertheless, the songs’ titles immediately suggest that, when staged, many – some authored by Williams, some not – made what were probably meant to be humorous or ironic references to Africa, the “racial question,” the world of slavery, and the nature of Black men (this last theme was especially prevalent in the “coon song” genre): “My Castle on the River Nile,” “African Repatriation,” “My Little Zulu Babe,” “The Ghost of Coon,” “I Don´t Like de Face You Wear,” “Skin Lightening,” “She’s Getting More Like the White Folks,” “Where Was Moses When the Light Went Out” (a spiritual from the nineteenth century), and “The Phrenologist Coon.”

In the early 1900s, Williams and Walker also managed to produce their first pioneering Broadway musicals, which starred exclusively Black artists, breaking free of the limitations imposed by the ragtime “darky” style.Footnote ²⁹ In 1903, In Dahomey opened; afterward came Abyssinia (1906), in which Bert Williams also participated as a composer and lyricist, and Bandanna Land (1908). The songs, librettos, and song lyrics – some of which had already been recorded – were authored by Black composers such as Will Marion Cook, Paul L. Dunbar, J. A. Shipp, and Alex Rogers. All were part of the artistic world of Harlem, where intellectuals, artists and musicians from the United States, the Caribbean, and beyond came together to transform the city of New York into the greatest center of Pan-African arts in the United States.Footnote ³⁰ As Walker put it in his memoirs, Harlem was the rendezvous point for artists from “our race.”Footnote ³¹

Although these shows came in for their share of criticism, they were reasonably well-received by the general public. In Dahomey even traveled to London and gave a highly praised command performance for King Edward VII. Bandanna Land was even more successful: Theatre Magazine especially praised the singers’ performances and the show’s lack of vulgarity.Footnote ³²

According to Walker’s 1906 memoirs, In Dahomey introduced a US audience to the novelty of “purely African” themes. Williams and Walker were, by their own account, pioneers in introducing “Americanized African songs” such as “My Little Zulu Babe,” “My Castle on the Nile,” and “My Dahomian Queen.”Footnote ³³ However, despite this quest to expand the limits of Black representation, they could not avoid ending the show with a cakewalk, a convention that was considered obligatory for ragtime spectacles featuring “darkies” and “coons.” By the early 1900s, despite its subversive origins among nineteenth-century plantation slaves, the cakewalk evoked a certain nostalgia for old Southern plantation life and also guaranteed success to any Broadway show. The duo of Williams and Walker had made their name by performing cakewalks in the 1890s.Footnote ³⁴

In Dahomey and Abyssinia showed once again the degree to which Williams and Walker engaged artistically with their era’s racial politics. They showed great familiarity with international debates and discussions among Black leaders in the US about the role of Africa and the African past in the history of Blacks across the Americas.Footnote ³⁵ In Chude-Sokei’s synopsis, In Dahomey (1903) was about a dishonest group of Boston investors who proposed a great opportunity in Africa for the oppressed Blacks of the United States.Footnote ³⁶ Walker, masquerading as the “Prince of Dahomey,” tries to convince hundreds of Floridian Afro-descendants to explore the wonders of his purported homeland. The song “My Castle on the River Nile” musically reinforced these dreams of wealth and power.Footnote ³⁷ Abyssinia, from 1906, told the story of two friends (Walker and Williams) who, after winning the lottery, resolved to visit the land of their ancestors with some fellow African-American tourists. They had many adventures en route, even coming into conflict with Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia and being condemned in an Ethiopian court.Footnote ³⁸ Not all the songs from these shows were recorded, but some from Abyssinia, such as “Nobody,” “Pretty Desdemone,” “Let it Alone,” and “Here it Comes Again,” were eventually distributed by Columbia.Footnote ³⁹

In 1909 George Walker fell ill, and in 1911 he died. Bert Williams, after creating a few other shows with his troop of Black artists, embarked in 1910 for a career in the famous Ziegfeld Follies revue. In this company he worked for almost ten years among white artists, specializing in the original comic sketches that brought him his greatest success. In the Ziegfeld Follies he adopted the clothes that would become his visual trademark: a top hat, high-water trousers, and worn-out shoes. In general, he performed comic roles, poking fun at the misfortunes of taxi drivers, train porters, and poker players. He also touched on subjects of wide popular relevance, such as Prohibition and the question of US participation in the First World War.

During these years, Williams left most material related to Africa behind, but representations of slavery and race relations remained in his comic sketches and in a series of monologues based on folktales from the Afro-American tradition. Bert Williams seems to have continued to be a sui generis “real coon,” but he now performed the role solo in an outstanding Broadway company. Among his Columbia recordings from this phase, some dealt with Afro-American questions, such as those that recounted the history of a “trickster” called Sam; told of a slave who had made a pact with the devil (“How? Fried”); parodied the alleged superstition of Blacks (“You Can’t Do Nothing till Martin Gets Here”); and portrayed preachers and religious doctrines (“You Will Never Need a Doctor No More”).Footnote ⁴⁰ “Nobody,” written at the time of Abyssinia, continued to be Williams’ greatest hit. Among his skits, “Darktown Poker Club” stands out because it allowed him to touch directly on racial stereotypes.

In the final phase of his life, between 1919 and 1922, Bert Williams continued to record discs and appear in shows, although he had by then left the Ziegfeld Follies. In his final years, despite widespread recognition and success as a recording artist (he was named a “Columbia Exclusive Artist” a little before the jazz boom), he also left indications of darker moments, due largely to the isolation he appeared to feel in the white artistic world.Footnote ⁴¹ In an autobiographical text, published in The American Magazine in January 1918, Williams reported that he was often asked “if he would not give anything to be white.” He had the following response:

Louis Chude-Sokei’s work highlights the fact that Bert Williams’ actions were not restricted to his stage successes. He also supported education and community development projects in Harlem, including the creation of the first Black National Guard in 1911 and the projected but never realized “Williams and Walker International and Interracial Ethiopian Theatre in New York City.”Footnote ⁴³

Critical response to Bert Williams’ musical corpus was not unanimous, and observers have understood his contributions differently over time. Until recently, many observers and scholars criticized Williams for reproducing white stereotypes of Blackness. That interpretation does much to explain Williams’ relative obscurity after 1920, when Black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance began to embrace another aesthetic that idealized the “new negro,” free of the masks of blackface. Other authors, however, argue that Bert Williams pushed the boundaries of prejudice and even transcended his racial condition, becoming a universally recognized comedian on the stages of the United States in defiance of prejudice and racial restrictions.Footnote ⁴⁴

Williams’ Black contemporaries often saw him in a different and more positive light. Leading intellectual and activist Booker T. Washington, for example, wrote that Bert Williams had “done more for the race” than he had. James Weldon Johnson, a star of the Harlem Renaissance, recognized the global importance of ragtime and cakewalk, because they were Black genres that had conquered the United States, France, and the Americas. According to Johnson, Black artists such as Bert Williams had transformed blackface into the greatest performance genre in the United States. Even W. E. B. Du Bois recognized Williams as a great comedian and a “great Negro.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Most modern scholars view Williams as a pioneering Black star of musical theater on Broadway and one of the most important architects of Afro-American theater. According to his best-known biographer, Louis Chude-Sokei, Williams knew how to transform the blackface space of representation, becoming the most famous “Black blackface.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Through this “Black-on-Black minstrelsy,” he transformed the meanings of both the mask and the musicals themselves, introducing new themes and forging paths for many other Black musicians and artists such as Josephine Baker.Footnote ⁴⁷

When worn by Williams, the mask of blackface was layered with other masks. It hid the artist and constructed a composite “negro,” divulging often-problematic notions about Blackness and Black identity.Footnote ⁴⁸ But Williams managed to challenge and subvert both white representations of Blackness and Black self-depictions, thus inverting many of their meanings. According to Chude-Sokei, the blackface mask gained unprecedented political dimensions in the hands of powerful artists such as Williams, who played with what were seen as natural markers of Blackness and redefined the field of representation for US Afro-descendants.

A Black Brazilian Singer at Odeon Records

Eduardo Sebastião das Neves, later known as Eduardo das Neves or simply “Dudu,” was born in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1874.Footnote ⁴⁹ I have never managed to locate concrete data about his family background. Only his lyrics and stories allow us to establish some degree of connection to Brazil’s slave past and to social struggles such as abolition. Like Williams, Neves was popular among white and Black audiences and was admired by contemporaries,Footnote ⁵⁰ although neither historians and musical memorialists nor leaders of Brazil’s Black movement have done much to preserve his memory for posterity.

In one of Neves’ first songbooks, he proclaimed himself the Trovador da Malandragem (“Trickster Troubadour”) and “The Creole Dudu das Neves,” which was also the title of one of his compositions.Footnote ⁵¹ The terrific lyrics of the unrecorded song “O Crioulo” can be read as a type of autobiography, in which Neves inverted the often pejorative meaning of the word crioulo, subverting racial stereotypes by confidently affirming his musical abilities and his capacity to attract the attention of mulatas, moreninhas, and branquinhas (all of whom served as muses in his songs).

“Dudu,” like various other musically talented Black men from his social background, started working at an early age, finding employment with the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil Railroad and Rio’s Fire Department. He only dedicated himself fully to an artistic career after he was fired from both workplaces for bad behavior (which included participation in a strike and playing guitar while working). He began in the circus and made his stage debut at the Apolo Theater during the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Neves’ trajectory, like Bert Williams’, demonstrated considerable entrepreneurialism. He organized collections of popular songs and owned the Circo Brasil (a small circus); he also appeared as a performer at bars, theaters, charity parties, and cinemas.Footnote ⁵² With the title “Crioulo Dudu,” he cut an elegant figure, according to his sympathizers, in blue tails and a top hat. Many other Black musicians who gained commercial success took similar care with their offstage appearances.

In 1895, Quaresma Publishers released Eduardo das Neves’ first songbook, O cantor de modinhas brasileiras (The Singer of Brazilian Modinhas). The book referred to Neves as an “illustrious singer” and included lyrics for his repertoire and that of baritone and Black composer Geraldo Magalhães (who was well known for his maxixe performances in Paris). An advertisement for the Circo-Pavilhão Internacional, set up in Rio’s well-to-do Botafogo neighborhood at the end of 1897, shows that Neves was already a success in the circus ring, especially with a popular type of syncopated Afro-Brazilian music known as the lundu: “The premier Brazilian clown will provide the night’s delights with his magnificent songs and lundus, accompanied by his plaintive guitar.”Footnote ⁵³

Other songbooks followed, and after 1902 Neves began his commercial recording career; he would also perform in many other circuses, revues, cinemas, theaters, and clubs. In the always crowded Parque Fluminense amusement and exhibition hall, he was advertised as the “Popular Singer Eduardo das Neves” alongside tenors, sopranos, and assorted curiosities and variety acts.Footnote ⁵⁴

Neves’ songs, whether published or recorded, were part of a political and aesthetic idiom shared by music producers and the urban public at large. Like other Rio musicians, Neves recorded lovelorn modinhas, waltzes, serestas, choros, marchas, cançonetas, sambas, chulas, comic scenes, and especially lundus. He used music to promote republican political campaigns, paying homage to various national heroes. But he also made politics of music, writing songs that dealt humorously and ironically with topics such as the Canudos War, urban social tensions (“Carne Fresca” and “Aumento das Passagens”), obligatory vaccination campaigns, the proliferation of rats that spread bubonic plague, and the popular festivals of Penha.

Neves’ choices indicated an unquestionable awareness of the most important national and international topics of his day (he even wrote at one point about the Boer War in South Africa). In various statements, he expressed indignation at white Brazilians’ inability to recognize a crioulo’s capacity to discuss politics, elections, national customs, urban problems, and foreign policy. Neves proudly proclaimed his authorship of many of the songs he published or recorded. But among his successes, none could touch the song he wrote in honor of aviator Santos Dumont upon his arrival in Paris in 1903, when the entire city gave itself over to celebration.Footnote ⁵⁵

Nevertheless, like Bert Williams, Neves also had the opportunity – and the choice – to articulate and enact slave songs, whose content and lyrics were directly linked to Black history, values, and customs. In the midst of Brazil’s national commemorations, Eduardo das Neves affirmed his identity as a Black man – “the crioulo Dudu.” His songs touched on racial identity and criticized racial inequality, in ways that indicate a desire to affirm the place of Black people and Black experiences in Brazil’s musical and theatrical worlds. Although his personal links to the experience of slavery are not clear, Dudu made a point of not forgetting Brazil’s slave past, consistently singing, recording, and publishing songs about enslaved people’s struggles for manumission, the abolition of slavery, and even the possibility of amorous relationships between Black men and white women. Beyond commemorating national heroes and exploring the everyday quirks and politics of urban life, Neves also touched with great irony and humor on Brazil’s Afro-descendant culture and history. Africa was not directly present in his repertoire the way it was in Bert Williams’. But African heritage appeared in recordings of musical forms such as jongo or in references to the dialects of African elders important in popular folklore and religion, such as Pai João, Pai Francisco, and Negro Mina. In his musical representations of slaves, Eduardo das Neves often appeared to wear the mask of the preto velho (literally the “old negro,” a term that could imply a stereotypical subservient slave). But in Afro-descendant religious and popular tradition, pretos velhos could also be storytellers, emblems of suffering and resistance, and carriers of African and Afro-descendant memory. And even as Neves mimicked their language and mannerisms, he also proudly broadcasted the musical innovations of their descendants.

Many of Neves’ songs touched on race relations in ways that could at once reinforce stereotypes and challenge racist theories or hierarchies of race and gender: examples include songs that recounted amorous relationships with iaiás, iaiazinhas, and morenas; the flirtatious provocations of crioulos; the superiority of the color black; and the cunning and ironic wit of Pai João (an iconic preto velho).Footnote ⁵⁶ The recordings he made at the Casa Edison often include raucous laughter, shout-outs for crioulos and crioulas, and joyful banter among the musicians and other colleagues, who were known as baianos or baianos da guerra.Footnote ⁵⁷

Among Neves’ songs, some of the most astonishing verses involved amorous relationships with iaiás (young girls, usually white) and morenas (women of mixed race) or odes to mulata enchantments. In Neves’ songbooks Mistérios do violão (Mysteries of the Guitar) and Trovador da malandragem (Trickster Troubadour), mulata and morena muses appear in “Carmem” and “Albertina.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In “Roda Yáyá,” a mulata enchantress with links to the devil casts a spell on the protagonist – probably Neves himself – leaving him “captive and dying” from thirst. In musical response, Neves – calling himself a turuna (a strong, powerful, brave man, often a practitioner of capoeira) – proclaimed that the mulata would “fall into my net, and never escape from its mesh.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As I have discussed elsewhere, Neves’ compositions, like most erudite lundus, deployed the mulata as an emblem of beauty and sensuality.Footnote ⁶⁰ But in an important reversal, Dudu’s mulatas fall into the nets of cocksure crioulos rather than those of white slaveowners.

The crioulo’s flirtatiousness was even more astonishing in the verses aimed at sinhazinhas (young white women on the slave plantations). Assuming that Neves himself composed these verses, it is remarkable that a Black musician could depict himself directing seductive versus to a sinhazinha. It could be that such an exchange was considered so absurd that it was – in and of itself – the heart of Neves’ joke: the impossibility or improbability of such a situation made everyone laugh. At the same time, when Neves sang such songs, the sexual and racial inversion of the classic relations of dominance that had always paired white men with Black women gave such laughter undeniable political significance.

In Eduardo das Neves’ Casa Edison period (between 1907 and 1912), many of the lundus he recorded for the label revisited the theme of Black involvement with sinhazinhas, though the recording studio listed the songs’ authorship as “unknown.” In “Tasty Lundu,” Neves sung that he would go “to Bahia to see his sinhá” and “eat her dendê oil.”Footnote ⁶¹ The lundu “Pai João” paired similar temerity with an interesting resurrection of the preto velho, a literary figure already familiar in many songs and stories in both Brazil and the United States. The loyal preto velho never ran away – but in Neves’ rendering he also never lost his strength and audacity.Footnote ⁶² Neves’ Pai João refused to open his door to anyone while his wife Caterina was sleeping – not even to the police chief or his officers. But in a verse about Sundays, the singer seems to laugh as he sings that “when the master went out” he (Pai João) “took care of the beautiful iaiá.”Footnote ⁶³

The preponderance of lundus in Eduardo das Neves’ recorded repertoire is especially interesting. The lundu was a musical genre especially associated with slave songs, usually performed for laughs in circuses or in phonograph recordings. But Neves’ appropriation of the form can also be understood as an original and powerful strategy to affirm Black artists and bring discussion of the racial question to a broader public sphere. It is important to remember that, during that time, Dudu’s comic and ironic style might have been the only possible way to discuss the Black experience and the problem of racial inequality in Brazil’s musical and artistic sphere. Just like the cakewalks and ragtimes of US blackface, the lundus had earned the affection of white audiences in the nineteenth century; they were part of a kind of blackface clown repertoire, were printed as sheet music, and appeared in malicious satirical verses published by refined authors in respected publications long before the advent of recorded music.Footnote ⁶⁴ Because the lundu was understood as a form of comedy, it may – like its counterparts in the United States – have created a very particular way of projecting Black artistry into the field of entertainment, eventually constituting the form that came to be accepted and understood as “Black music.”

All the same, to extend Paul Gilroy’s observations south of the equator, Brazilian Afro-descendants could transform their performances on the stage and in the recording studio into an important form of political action.Footnote ⁶⁵ Lundus provided Neves with commercial success and applause, but their intense polysemy also allowed him to invert and subvert the narrow and stereotypical roles traditionally allotted to Blacks. As Chude-Sokei observed about Bert Williams, Eduardo das Neves’s lundu performances were double-edged. On the one hand, he presented his audiences with visual and sonic images of comic, simple-minded Black slaves; on the other, he enacted clever, cunning, streetwise Black malandros, who seduced women of every color and articulated shrewd political and racial critiques. Even though Eduardo das Neves never incorporated the classical disguises of blackface – red lips, bulging eyes – he resembled Bert Williams in his ability to manipulate masks and embody contradictory double-meanings, thus subverting the norms imposed on Black performers who were identified with the cultural heritage of slavery.

Eduardo das Neves’ recordings of so-called gargalhadas (laughing songs) also had important points of intersection with blackface. Dudu’s most successful gargalhada was probably “Pega na Chaleira” (literally “Grab the kettle”), which satirized the kinds of political bootlicking and exchange of favors common in Brazil’s high society. Raucous, tuneful laughter (literal gargalhadas) appeared throughout the song. As it turns out, this genre was probably adapted from “The Laughing Song” and “The Whistling Coon,” which were recorded in the United States by George W. Johnson. A formerly enslaved man from Virginia discovered on the streets of New York, Johnson was likely the first Black musician to record for the phonographic industry in the 1890s.Footnote ⁶⁶ Johnson’s “The Laughing Song” became a worldwide hit in the 1890s, eventually producing a remarkable 50,000 records that were sold in various parts of Europe and the Americas.Footnote ⁶⁷ Johnson was also the author of a number of other international hits, including “The Whistling Coon,” “The Laughing Coon,” and “The Whistling Girl.” Johnson’s recorded laughter appears in a 1902 catalog from Casa Edison in Rio de Janeiro, in a recording entitled “English Laughter.”

According to the musicologist Carlos Palombini, the songs recorded by George W. Johnson made fun of Black people, just like blackface shows and “coon songs.” The gargalhadas recorded by Dudu, which were also cataloged as lundus, might have been inspired by Johnson’s style, but they expanded the satire to include the high politics of Rio de Janeiro. Regardless, the gargalhadas indicate that Eduardo das Neves knew Johnson’s recordings and sought to imitate them.Footnote ⁶⁸ This suggests that he had heard of Bert Williams and understood the cakewalk’s multiple meanings.Footnote ⁶⁹

Even after launching a recording career and embarking on very successful tours across Brazil, Neves never distanced himself from the circus. He achieved success with “singing pantomimes” in a wide variety of theatrical circus spectacles, showcasing a repertoire of happy, comical, patriotic ditties, many of which drew from the experience of slavery. Neves was certainly one of the best performers in this genre, along with Benjamim de Oliveira, another Black artist who had been born in slavery. Together – along with Black composer and conductor Paulino Sacramento – they produced multiple works, including a 1910 farce entitled A Sentença da Viúva Alegre (The Sentence of the Happy Widow), which was performed in the Cinematógrafo Santana. The cinema was located on Santana Street, near the famed Praça Onze, which was at that time Rio’s cultural ground zero for carnival groups and Black dance associations – Rio’s equivalent of Harlem. The “Sentence” was a parody of the operetta The Happy Widow by Franz Lehár, which had successfully opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1909, after its 1905 Vienna debut.Footnote ⁷⁰

According to the music historian José Ramos Tinhorão, both Benjamim de Oliveira and Dudu used to paint their faces white in order to portray certain characters. In The Sentence of the Happy Widow, they did so while playing the rich widow’s suitors.Footnote ⁷¹ It would have been difficult for them to entirely control the audience’s reactions to Black men in whiteface, but there is no doubt that both men intentionally manipulated masks and stereotypical representations of whiteness and Blackness in order to elicit laughter from their audiences and irreverently invert racial hierarchies. Judging from newspaper advertisements, theirs were the star attractions among the farces and parodies performed in circuses across the city (see Figure 15.6).

Figure 15.6 Benjamim de Oliveira. Sheet music. In Herminia Silva, Circo-Teatro: Benjamim de Oliveira e a teatralidade circense no Brasil. Ed. Altana, São Paulo, 2007, p. 241

(foto da autora).

As noted previously, songs protagonized by Pai João (or some other Pai) probably circulated widely in various post-abolition artistic and social circles.Footnote ⁷² Such songs were funny and ironic, but they allow us to perceive a figurative game of hangman in which the slaves’ desires (and possible those of the iaiás) became evident even as the slaves’ masters and future employers sought to prevent them from assuming their full shape. Based on these verses, we can surmise that poets such as Dudu used their music to explore the meanings of the slave past and the post-abolition struggle and to redefine race relations and Black identity. Beyond the artistic world, there are indications that Eduardo das Neves – like Bert Williams – cared deeply about defending the value of Black people and their history. He knew pioneering Black political figures of his generation, such as Federal Deputy Manoel Monteiro Lopes, and during civic commemorations of abolition he participated in events paying tribute to Afro-descendant abolitionists such as José do Patrocínio.Footnote ⁷³ He fought for his rights when faced with racial prejudice and sought to claim his rightful place in the public sphere, most directly toward the end of his life when he sought entry into an important association of performing artists.Footnote ⁷⁴ Neves’ most famous composition was a tribute to Santos Dumont, considered in Brazil to be “the father of aviation”; when its sheet music was published, the cover displayed not only the Eiffel Tower but also an image of Neves in the upper left-hand corner. Although the picture is small, it testifies that Neves sought to portray himself as a Black man who was modern, elegant, handsome, and thoroughly Brazilian.

But perhaps Eduardo das Neves’ commitment to the history of the Black population emerges most fully in his recording of the song “A Canoa Virada” (“The Capsized Canoe”).Footnote ⁷⁵ A kind of popular ode to the abolition of slavery, the song musically commemorated the conquests of 1888, at least twenty years after the fact. The song used strong language that might have been unsettling for some of Neves’ contemporaries: the time had arrived “for the Black population to bumbar,” a verb that could mean both “to celebrate” and “to beat” or “to thrash.” Neves referred to May 13, “the day of liberty,” as a great moment of real change and dreams of freedom. Slavery was represented as a fragile vessel, a canoe that had literally capsized, ending its long Brazilian journey. The song ironically satirized the “haughty crioulos” who would no longer eat cornmeal and beans, and the “Blacks without masters” who were typical of many lundus – but it also celebrated the fact that “the day of liberty” had arrived, and there were no more reasons for “the Bahians to cry.” Black people, everywhere in Brazil, had longed for – and won – their “day of freedom.”

Eduardo das Neves also seemed unintimidated by crude and racist commentaries on his repertoire and personal style, even those written by well-known Rio intellectuals such as João do Rio and José Brito Broca. João do Rio wrote that he had seen Neves in the middle of the stage, in the midst of enthusiastic applause, “sweaty, with a face like pitch, showing all thirty-two of his impressively pure white teeth.” In Brito Broca’s prejudiced memoirs, the success of the popular Quaresma publishing house, which printed Neves’ songbooks, depended a lot on the “inventiveness of that flat-faced negro.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Despite great success in his lifetime and the support of some intellectuals concerned with street folklore – including Alexandre Mello Morais Filho, Afonso Arinos, Catullo da Paixão Cearense, and Raul Pederneiras – Eduardo das Neves did not have his work recognized in posterity. Opinions about him, like those about Williams, are far from unanimous. In the Black movements that emerged in Brazil after the 1920s, Neves was scarcely remembered, perhaps due to his complicity with stereotypical representations of slaves and their descendants. Historians of music, in their rush to elevate the supposedly “modern” and “national” genre of samba in the 1920s – granted him no greater role. He was simply seen – or frowned upon – as an interpreter of comical lundus and jingoistic songs about republican heroes.

The only exceptions were a few of Neves’ contemporary Black intellectuals, who seem to have viewed Neves’ work and trajectory with admiration. For Francisco Guimarães, known as Vagalume, an important journalist and patron of sambas and Black Carnival groups, Neves had honored the “race” to which he was proud to belong. Vagalume called Dudu the “Black Diamond” and considered him to be a “professor” among samba circles.Footnote ⁷⁷ There is also some evidence that Sinhô (1888–1930) and João da Bahiana (1887–1974), who would become samba stars in the 1920s, began their artistic life in Neves’ company. João da Bahiana, in an interview with Rio’s Museum of Image and Sound, declared that he had worked in Neves’ circus, leading the boys who animated his skits. Sinhô, who was anointed the “King of Samba” in the 1920s, accompanied Eduardo das Neves carrying the Brazilian flag during a famous tribute to Santos Dumont in 1903. Later, Eduardo das Neves would record three sambas attributed to Sinhô, before Sinhô was made famous with “Pelo Telephone” (“By Telephone”) which is remembered as Brazil’s first recorded samba. Neves’ final recording, released on April 10, 1919, was “Só por Amizade” (“Just for Friendship”), another samba by Sinhô. It was evident that new generations sought out Neves and that he, like Bert Williams, participated in the formation of future Black musicians.

Thanks to the work of the historian Felipe Rodrigues Boherer on Black territories in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, we know a little about Neves’ tour to that city in 1916. Although he suffered some uncomfortable embarrassments during his stay, Porto Alegre’s Black newspaper O Exemplo gave Neves a place of honor in its coverage.Footnote ⁷⁸ The newspaper did not hide its pride in the singer, calling him a “countryman” and giving him the title of the “Brazilian nightingale” during his run at the Recreio Ideal Theater and the Sociedade Florista Aurora (a recreational association founded by the city’s Black population). Neves was part of a “chic program, featuring the very best of the esteemed artist’s repertoire,” accompanied by an orchestra and a society band.Footnote ⁷⁹ The day after the opening, the paper announced that the presentation had been much appreciated and that the audience had not held back their “applause for the popular singer and countryman.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In May 1915, during one of his tours through the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, the “Gazeta Teatral” column in Gazeta de Noticias stated that “Eduardo das Neves is an ingenious crioulo, the Monteiro Lopes of the guitar, the Cruz Souza of the stage, the Othello of the modinha.”Footnote ⁸¹ Like Bert Williams, Eduardo das Neves effectively “conquered” the public with his talent and his performances, leaving his mark on stages throughout Brazil.

Conclusion

Black musicians across the Americas may have made enormously varied musical choices. But the life experiences of Bert Williams and Eduardo das Neves indicate that neither the problems they faced nor the paths available to them were so very different. They both experienced profound continuities with the slave past even while surrounded by the novelties of the modern entertainment industry, grappling with old and enduring racist stereotypes about slave songs, Black music, and Black musicians. In seeking to transform both the legacy of the past and their place in post-abolition societies, Williams and Neves (re)created both the meaning of their music and the contemporary musical canon itself. In the midst of sorrow, prejudice, and forgetting, they won applause and recognition. Their very presence on the stage and in phonograph recordings was an important victory. Williams and Neves expanded the spaces available to Black musicians and actors, allowing them to become ever more visible in the circuses, bands, theaters, and recording studios that formed the backbone of the modern commercial entertainment industry.

The musical field thus occupied a fundamental space within the politics of Afro-descendant representation, exclusion, and incorporation (real or imagined) in America’s post-abolition societies. Representations of Black people and the meanings attributed to their music – in festivities, through carnivals or costumes, on the covers of musical scores, in sound recordings, or on the stage – could shore up the racial inequalities that reproduced themselves after the end of slavery. Inversely, however, they could also subversively amplify Black struggles for equality and cultural recognition, highlighting the cultural contributions of the descendants of slaves to modern American societies.