Caetana Says No

This 2002 book presents the true and dramatic accounts of two nineteenth-century Brazilian women - one young and born a slave, the other old and from an illustrious planter family - and how each sought to retain control of their lives: the slave woman struggling to avoid an unwanted husband; the woman of privilege assuming a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. But these women's stories cannot be told without also recalling how their decisions drew them ever more firmly into the orbits of the worldly and influential men who exercised power in their lives. These are stories with a twist: in this society of radically skewed power, Lauderdale Graham reveals that more choices existed for all sides than we first imagine. Through these small histories she casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male.

• No other book interprets the complex intersection between slavery and gender relations more compellingly than in these two divergent stories
• Qualifying familiar views of slavery and gender relations, these stories provide instructive comparisons with other times and places
• Brings into relief the early decades of coffee in Brazil, when elite families formed then fell into debt