Travel Report

[Excerpt from travel report written by James Sidbury]

From the first morning that I woke up in Rio, everything was great. We started by going to the Museu do Pontal, a folk art museum in the city. Among the sculptures of people working in Rio in the 19th and early 20th century, there was one small piece (maybe  3-5 inches high) of a dentist pulling a tooth. The string was coming out of the patient’s mouth, the dentist was stretched out in a V shape pulling on the ends of the string, and he had his foot planted firmly in the patient’s midsection. It was a pretty powerful look at how painful dentistry was in the old days. We went on from there to a number of interesting portrayals of work, to beautiful and interesting portrayals of Orishas, the most interesting being the Orisha of the sea who is a light skinned mermaid figure. Then there were some cool pieces in which the artist had carved urban structures—essentially midrise apartment buildings—into one of the huge roots of the local trees. There were other interesting works, culminating in a hallway with animated carnival sculptures, including performers, crowds, etc., on both walls going to the exit.

From there we went the Tijuca Forest, a national forest that surrounds Rio. It’s located on what was coffee plantation land in the nineteenth century. The slopes had apparently been completely denuded of trees in order to turn the land into a plantation. Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century the city (or perhaps the state?) of Rio realized that the destruction of the forest had lessened the amount of water absorbed by the land and thus entering the aquifer, and as a result it decided to reforest the land. Much of the initial work was done by state slaves—the generally accepted narrative, as I understand it, has been that all or most of the work was done by slaves, but Bruno has uncovered clear evidence that the reforesting lasted well into the 20th century, so much of it must have been done after emancipation.

Lynne joined us at lunch in the park, which we ate at a cool place that was built to serve those working to work in the park during the (I think) early-to-mid twentieth century. We sat on the patio surrounded by the forest canopy and in the midst of what was a kind of formal, semi-English garden look. After lunch, the five of us (Lynne, along with me, Daniel, Molly and Hermann) went on a long hike through the forest.

The forest is spectacular—a remarkable example of nature regenerating after human destruction. One wouldn’t mistake it for old growth—there was one tree that had, presumably, survived the plantations, and it was marked off and stood out as different from the others. But the land was lush and green and full of enormous trees and healthy-looking undergrowth. There were some cool, raccoon-like animals (coatis), and I’ve no doubt there was lots of other wildlife that chose not to show itself to us. There were also several waterfalls, one moderate one that we hiked up about a mile to see and then a spectacular one near the exit from the park. Bruno had told us that Afro-Brazilians sometimes go into the woods to hold sacred rituals, and toward the end of our hike we saw a group of people dressed in white seemingly participating in a religious ritual.

We left pretty early the next morning in a rented van to drive down to Bracui. We arrived at the Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracui around mid-day and were greeted, first by the daughter of the leading quilombola, and then, after the daughter steered us in the right direction, by the community’s leader, Matilda Adriano Souza. She offered us a kind welcome and began by sitting down with us outside her house and telling us the basic history of the quilombo. She noted at the beginning that scholars had been visiting them to reconstruct the quilombo’s history, but added that they knew their own history and did not need scholars to tell it to them. She then proceeded to tell a story that revealed to me how distorted my view of quilombos in contemporary Brazil was.

I had assumed that modern quilombos were composed of people who were or claimed to be descendants of members of runaway slave communities—that they were, in essence, the descendants of maroons. The story that Matilda Adriano Souza laid out did not fit this assumption at all. The origins of her community stretch back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a very wealthy slaveholder died and left those who worked on that estate the land that they had been working. The community had, in fact, told their story to a Catholic priest in the 1970s, and he and a sympathetic lawyer had gone into the archives and found the original will. We later saw a facsimile of part of the will on a poster during our walk through the quilombo grounds. This quilombo was, so far as I can tell, a rural free black community that came into being when they were manumitted during the mid-nineteenth century, and they had remained on the land ever since. Their original grant of land extended to the coast, but the development of tourism and second homes for the wealthy had led to the coastal land getting appropriated by developers and they were now focused on establishing clear title to their land in the valley up from the coast and stretching to the mountains. They had declared themselves a quilombo during the 1980s or 90s in response to the twin stimuli of the Black power movement and the 1990s law recognizing “traditional” communities’ claims to their land—it seems as if that law was directed toward indigenous communities and quilombos, which led to the expansion of the category of quilombo beyond maroon community to embrace other Black communities with longstanding continuous residence on specific land. Matilda Adriano Souza’s account of the community’s history initiated our ongoing discussion of the unexpected complexity of the category of quilombo in modern Brazilian society, an issue that surely affects the ways that Afro-Brazilians remember the place of slavery and the meaning of freedom within their communities.

It may be worth thinking more generally about the ways that categories of meaning change and become arenas of contestation in battles over memory and history. When phrased that generally it is nothing more than an obvious commonplace. What the case of quilombos raises that’s a variation on familiar debates, at least for me, is the way that legal changes in the present can lead descendant communities to reconfigure the meanings of words that had different meanings in the past. The way in which many Afro-Brazilian communities have apparently come to understand themselves as quilombos in the wake of the 1990 law is a new twist, at least for me. And I’m really curious how quilombolas who live in communities that were understood to be quilombos before emancipation feel about this development.

Following a lunch that was served in Ms. Souza’s house and that centered around food grown on the quilombo—from chicken that was presumably raised there, to beans, heart of palm, rice, and freshly squeezed fruit juice—we were given a tour of the grounds of the quilombo, a tour that helped bridge, at least for me, the difference between what I had expected a quilombo to be and what we found at Quilombo Santa Rita. The first part of the tour was led by a young man named Emerson Ramos who grew up on the quilombo, went to the Rio state agricultural university, and has returned to meld what he learned there with traditional practices in enhancing the agricultural production of the community. He was a charismatic and welcoming person who showed us the garden plot in which he was experimenting with different mixes of crops. He then led us through the woods where we saw the remarkably lush and productive grounds that seemingly produced food everywhere. There were enormous banana trees throughout the forest, interspersed with cacao trees, different kinds of palms, and multiple citrus trees. The forest seemed wild at first glance, but it quickly became obvious that it was, in fact, an enormous garden producing food everywhere. He ended his tour by showing us the Candomblé house that he was constructing, a culmination that brought together the seemingly-pragmatic agricultural work that he was doing with the seemingly-spiritual work—I say “seemingly” because this distinction is clearly one that I am imposing rather than one that reflects the holistic approach that he takes to the relationship between the material and the spiritual.

That holistic vision is what bridged (for me) the expectations I had of quilombos with the different reality that we were finding at Santa Rita. The differences in the origins of the community (free black community whose origins lay in manumission rather than one whose origins lay in escape and military resistance) are, no doubt, important. But the vision of the land infused with meaning through its ties to ancestors and full of different kinds of spiritual forces is one that resonates with a lot of the recent maroon-based literature on Haiti (I’m thinking specifically of Johnhenry Gonzalez’s Maroon Nation and Jean Casimir’s The Haitians). Emerson’s effort to bring Candomblé to the devoutly Catholic quilombo makes the story more complicated. Matilda made clear, that there was some resistance to his efforts in that regard. It may be that this is less a case of the traditional meanings of agriculture, the land, and the sacred to the community of Santa Rita than a case of a fundamentally Salvadoran conception of the relationship between the material and the spiritual being imported to Bracui under the sign of tradition.

After Emerson’s tour, we took a walk with Matilda. She showed us the displays that have been developed in cooperation with scholars, took us to the river, and gave us a general sense of the battles with developers to gain clear title to their land. As I understand that process, the will had granted the community all the land from Santa Rita over to the coast, but the land on the coast has been taken by developers and is now composed of vacation homes and hotels (including the one we stayed at). But the interior land remains at least in significant part in the community’s possession, and it seems as if the courts are moving toward recognizing title, though the multitude of parties with claims to different portions of the land have resulted in a slow and drawn-out process. One of the interesting things we learned from her about this process is that a coalition of indigenous and Black groups has been formed to defend area claims to land. This “rainbow coalition” is almost surely a post-1990 reality, since prior to that law it would seem almost certain that Black and indigenous communities would have been pitted against one another in their struggles to gain control of land that whites thought too marginal for economic development. Many of the posters that had been put up as part of the scholars’ engagement with the quilombo showed significant wear and tear—not surprising given their exposure to the elements—and it seems worth considering a donation to the quilombo to pay for new posters to be printed and put up. Matilda made what seemed pointed comments about scholars arriving, getting what they needed, and then disappearing and that might be a way of repaying her and their willingness to share their history and present with us.

After that tour, we went back to her house and waited for members of the community to congregate to perform jongos for us. The jongo was organized with the drummer at the center of what was a line, though I suspect it would be a circle if we weren’t there as spectators, and a leader, usually Emerson, would begin a song at which point one participant would begin dancing in the center of what would have been the circle. The performer would then dance up to someone of the opposite sex and invite them in to dance. The two would dance for a time—the amount of time varied—and then the original dancer would step back into the circle, and the person they chose would pick another partner. The jongos were revitalizing for all of us.

We then went to a hotel, one of the hotels that Matilda had identified as “part of the problem,” though we had not, of course, known that going in. It was on the site of and owned the ruins of a mid- to late-nineteenth century sugar mill. After dinner that night, we woke up the next morning and went into the ruins. I noted that they reminded me of a picture of a Cuban sugar mill in Tomich, Bivar Marquese, Funes Monzote, and Venegas Fornias, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. We speculated on how the cane was transported to the mill, how the mill was designed (e.g. where the smokestack would have been, how the water was brought in, etc.). It was a huge structure.

After wandering through the ruins and taking lots of pictures, we checked out, got back in the van, and headed to Sahy Beach, where we met Miriam Bondim, the Director of the Museu Municipal de Mangaratiba, who showed us the ruins of a 17th century fort that was turned into a receiving point for the illegal slave trade after 1830. The beach was gorgeous and created a sharp contrast to what had clearly existed in the 19th century. The forest reached down to the sand, and at the vegetation line the ruins began. The complex had clearly been enormous, with a big office—what must have served as the functional equivalent of a customs house for a trade which did not, of course, pay customs, and walls and stone structures reaching back a couple of hundred yards and much farther in each direction. Miriam Bondim explained what the different structures had been, including a set of slave quarters for enslaved people engaged in work at the fort, a more distant holding pen for captives who disembarked at the site, and various other structures. There were remnants of a small canal through which water had been brought into the buildings (or into the complex), there was an iron bar that she said had been used to tie ships as they unloaded, and there were many other structures. The ruins were largely overgrown, and Bondim explained that this was by design—that when cleared, too many beach goers had come into the ruins and grabbed stones to use for beach fire pits, and they had defaced the ruins as well (graffiti was evident). A small colony of monkeys kept a wary eye on us as we walked around the ruins.

Molly asked Bondim about the archaeological findings from the site and learned that they are housed at the Museu Municipal de Mangaratiba, so when we finished at the ruins, we drove into town to see them. The town was seemingly off the tourist beat and looked much more like an old fishing village, with 19th century (or perhaps earlier?) structures and a beautiful bay. Bondim generously took us to the museum and opened it especially for us, showing us the shackles and other kinds of implements tied to the illegal slave trade that had been unearthed at the site. After spending about an hour at the museum, we headed back to the van and returned to Rio.

On Wednesday, we began by making the long trip out to a working-class neighborhood on the relative outskirts of Rio where we visited a Candomblé terreiro. We met with three women, one of whom was the guiding priestess of the house, one of whom was her daughter (or granddaughter?). The third woman was the first person we met and she seemed to be more oriented to the non-Candomblé public; I’m tempted to say she was like a public relations or outward facing presence. We entered the enclosed courtyard of the terreiro and were asked to wait for a few moments. We then went inside, first to the hall in which the ceremonies take place, with its drum stand against one wall, a pole in the middle around which the adepts dance, and benches lining the walls. There were pictures and artifacts on one wall that commemorated the history of the house and congregation, including, if I remember correctly, a ceremonial sword that had been brought to Rio from Salvador. There were also pictures of the house as it was built and grew and of its founder. We were shown the spaces behind that of worship, including the kitchen, meeting rooms, the store where they sold merchandise, etc., and we were allowed to see but not photograph two rooms that house important spirits. They included the robes that adepts wore when preparing to receive Orixas and other artifacts. The grandest room—perhaps for the spirit of Shango?—included a big collection of ceramic pottery, all with a white glaze (the robes were also white), which hold objects that the priestess encounters and realizes are infused with spirits; apparently she gathers them and brings them to the room where they are stored in the ceramic containers. The priestess sat in what could reasonably be called a throne to receive us when we finished with the tour and posed for pictures, including one with Hermann. The women spoke of the terreiro’s connection to the community, their openness to all who are interested in learning about Candomblé, etc. At the end of the visit, they called a neighborhood cabdriver to get us back into the city.

We went to the Museu Histórico Nacional and the Instituto Pretos Novos, places that Molly and Hermann had been to on their second day in Rio, but that Daniel and I had missed because our flight from Houston to Rio was canceled. Unfortunately, neither was open, though we got limited entry to the Instituto. The disappointment was quickly forgotten, however, as we walked through the old-city neighborhood surrounding the museums, walking up to look at hanging gardens and across at what used to be the “little Africa” neighborhood during the nineteenth century. We also visited the Valongo and then went to the National Historical Museum to see their decolonization efforts.

Those efforts were, on the one hand, very cool, and, on the other, illustrated how much has to be overcome to bring traditional historical museums into line with current ways of thinking about history. One walks into the museum and is immediately confronted with a huge room of 19th century fancy carriages and then a courtyard full of cannon. The museum, in league with scholars, has placed different plaques along the way as one walks through the exhibits that are designed to bring forward the otherwise-erased histories of Afro-Brazilians. The texts are great and the initiative is a wonderful one, but it was hard to escape the feeling that most non-academic visitors to the museum would come away having gotten their fill of carriages, cannons, and portraits of (white) political leaders without having slowed down enough to read the critical texts providing a different context within which to interpret those things. It’s pretty easy for museums or plantation sites or other historical sites to create small nooks in which the “other” side of the story can be told, but it’s much less clear, at least to me, what the effects of what is written or displayed in those nooks is on the average visitor to the museum or site.

We spent our final morning on a great walking tour of downtown Rio, then returned to the hotel, went for a wonderful walk on the beach at Copacabana, and got a taxi to the airport.