Urban Slavery and Social Mobility
Working in the city offered enslaved men and women an array of opportunities to amass money. In Salvador, for example, there are curious cases of enslaved individuals who themselves owned slaves.62 According to one historian, in a period between eight to ten years, enslaved men who hired out their services in Salvador could save enough to purchase their freedom.63 Once emancipated, several freedmen and freedwomen became slave owners.64 Take the example of Joaquim, whose original name was Gbego Sokpa.
Born in Hoko, a town in the Mahi country in the Bight of Benin in present-day Republic of Benin, he was enslaved during the reign of King Adandozan and transported to Brazil, where in 1814 he became the property of the slave ship captain Manuel Joaquim de Almeida, with whom he sailed to the coasts of Africa. In 1830, Joaquim was emancipated and adopted the last name of his former owner.65 As a freedman, Joaquim de Almeida became a prosperous slave trader himself and continued to travel back and forth between Bahia and the Bight of Benin. His will, drafted in 1844, fourteen years after obtaining his freedom, shows how wealthy he had become. His assets included large sums of money, 25 percent of the cargo of a slave ship, and real estate. Moreover, Almeida owned thirty-six slaves in Havana and twenty in Pernambuco. He was also the owner of nine enslaved Africans: Marcelino (Jeje), João (Nagô), David (Nagô), Feliciano (Mina), Maria (Jeje), Jezuinina (Nagô), Felismina (Mina), and Benedita (Nagô), all of them identified with nations of the Bight of Benin. As Almeida certainly did not need all these bondspeople working for him in his household, we can assume several of them worked as street vendors. Yet, as his will gave instructions to free Felismina and Benedita for the good services provided, it is also possible to conclude that at least these two enslaved women worked performing domestic service.66As in Salvador, enslaved workers were found performing all kinds of activities that required manual labor in the streets of Rio de Janeiro as well.
Their presence was noted by European visitors, such as the young Édouard Manet who, before becoming a famous painter, left France and spent several months in Rio de Janeiro between 1848 and 1849. Like several other travelers, Manet was not able to distinguish whether the Black workers he saw toiling in the streets of Rio de Janeiro were freeborn, freed, or enslaved, and therefore claims that all Black persons in the city were enslaved.67 But in a letter to his mother he emphasized that the only residents visible in the streets were Black people.Manet also observed clothing patterns among the enslaved population of Rio de Janeiro. According to him, enslaved men wore pants and sometimes fabric jackets. Yet, he emphasized that enslaved women were naked to the waist and that some wore neck scarves falling to the chest. Like other nineteenth-century European travelers, although describing enslaved women as ugly, he also underscored how other ones were beautiful and dressed “very gracefully. Some make turbans, others arrange their frizzy hair very skillfully, and almost all of them wear petticoats decorated with ugly flounces.”68 Despite these general remarks, Manet provided accurate observations about the ways bondspeople were dressed in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. As pointed out by one historian, most enslaved individuals in Rio de Janeiro “wore a plain loose-fitting shirt with short or long sleeves,” but their outfits varied over time and according to the social positions of their owners.69
Still, a minority of enslaved persons wore richer outfits. In Rio de Janeiro, similarly to Salvador in Bahia and other Latin American cities such as Lima, Mexico City, and Santiago de Chile, wealthy slave owners provided enslaved women who performed domestic service with fine clothes, shoes, and even jewelry.70 For example, French mariner Jacques Proa, who disembarked in Cap Français in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1777, observed in his journal that Black women were elegantly dressed and covered with jewelry, even though these travelers were rarely able to distinguish free, freed, and enslaved women.71 Portuguese and Brazilian public authorities attempted to prevent Black women from wearing luxurious outfits, jewelry, and shoes.72 At the middle of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese crown issued a decree to prevent enslaved women from wearing jewelry and fancy clothes in order to maintain the social distance between them and “respectable” white women.73 But in practice, the law was never enforced.
And the very existence of these ordinances confirm that enslaved women resisted and continued to wear refined clothing and jewelry in Brazil.Eighteenth-century observers described enslaved women walking the streets of Salvador with their female owners, wearing rich satin skirts and embroidered blouses.74 In the nineteenth century, British consul James Wetherell, who resided in Salvador between 1843 and 1857, described the elaborate outfits of Black women, enslaved and freed, who also had their arms “covered with bracelets of coral and gold, beads... the neck loaded with chains, and the hands with rings.” He also noticed one particular garment; a shawl made of “coast cloth... thrown over the shoulder.” As shown in nineteenth-century Bahia’s newspapers, these cloths called panos da costa were imported from the Bight of Benin.75 These textiles were “woven in small stripes of coloured cotton from two to four inches wide in striped or checked patterns, and the slips sewed together form a shawl,” and were especially coveted by African-born women.76
A few eighteenth-century visual images featured Black women wearing beautiful dresses and jewelry as well. For example, one watercolor produced by Carlos Julião, a Luso-Italian military officer who spent time in Brazil in the second half of the eighteenth century, shows two Black women wearing necklaces and bracelets, presumably in gold and silver (figure 8.6).77 An image alone is often not sufficient to determine whether these women were still enslaved or already freed. But both are bare-breasted and barefoot, and because Julião represented other Black women wearing shoes, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the artist represented two bondswomen in this image. Likewise, wills and postmortem inventories of freedwomen list a variety of clothes in sophisticated fabrics, jewelry, and objects in gold, silver, amber, coral, and pearls, which suggests that it is possible that these women may have started acquiring these items prior to their emancipation.78
Figure 8.6.
Carlos Julião, “Noticia summaria do gentilismo da Asia com dez Riscos iluminados. Ditos de Figurinhos de Brancos e Negros dos Uzos do Rio de Janeiro e Serro do Frio. Ditos de Vazos e Tecidos Peruvianos” (“Summary news of Asian gentility with ten illuminated Risks. Sayings of Figurines of Whites and Blacks from the Uses of Rio de Janeiro and Serro do Frio. Sayings of Peruvian Vases and Fabrics”), c. 17––, plate XXVI. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Figure 8.7. Marc Ferrez, Sister of the Sisterhood Boa Morte, Cachoeira, Bahia, 1885. Photograph. Courtesy of Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany.
Such a hypothesis can be corroborated by the case of Domingas Pereira, an eighteenth-century African-born woman who lived and worked in Mariana, a gold mining town in Minas Gerais. Before her emancipation, she already owned four slaves.79 To purchase her freedom, she paid her owner with two pounds of gold and one additional slave, suggesting that at least in this region, enslaved women already had access to gold items. Nineteenth-century photographic portraits of freedwomen in Bahia, for example, show them wearing amazingly extravagant gold necklaces and bracelets (figure 8.7).80 African-born women’s taste for jewelry and luxury textiles may have emerged before the Middle Passage. In the late eighteenth century, West Central African women in the kingdoms of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango, in the region north of the Congo River, greatly appreciated jewelry in silver and coral, items that were increasingly introduced into Atlantic Africa by European slave traders.81 In nineteenth-century Portuguese-controlled Benguela in West Central Africa, dozens of wills of enslaved, freed, and free women showed a similar trend in which women purchased and wore fine clothes and jewelry to publicly display their social status.82
European observers who visited Brazilian cities during the period of slavery often repeated that enslaved people were forbidden to wear shoes.
Take Debret, for example. The French artist commented that upon his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, he was surprised at the large number of shoemakers’ shops spread all over the city. Soon he understood why. White Brazilian women wore silk shoes to walk the streets, but the city’s rough granite sidewalks quickly damaged the delicate shoes, which did not last for more than two day trips. As a result, women purchased new pairs and needed shops to repair the old ones. However, Debret noted that not only slave owners wore shoes. Because Latin American societies were driven by notions of honor and respectability, white women never ventured outside alone. This precaution was intended to ensure that if they were still single, they would remain virgins, and if they were married, they would not engage in extramarital sex. Hence, in their nearly daily visits to the church, the richest women were followed by their enslaved maids, who, like their owners, wore shoes. But despite being a luxury product, more modest women, including freed and freeborn Black women, also valued owning a pair of shoes, as Debret pointed out: “A well-appointed mulatto wants to put on a fresh pair of shoes every time she goes out, [and she does the same] for her children and her Negress. The wife of the poor craftsman almost deprives herself of necessities in order to wear new shoes to all parties; and finally, the free Negress ruins her lover to meet this expense repeated too often.”83Like fine clothes and jewelry, in Brazil and in other Portuguese colonies in the South Atlantic, wearing shoes was a symbol of social status that distinguished freed and freeborn Black individuals from their enslaved counterparts. At the end of the eighteenth century in Angola, Portuguese officials complained about the many individuals who were wearing shoes “to become nominally whites.”84 Therefore, urban bondspeople were not officially prohibited from wearing shoes, but it was customary for most enslaved people to go barefoot in Brazilian cities.
Some historians have emphasized that enslaved men and women who were owned by rich individuals, especially enslaved workers who performed domestic service (including maids, cooks, nannies, pages, valets, butlers, and wet nurses), were well dressed and wore shoes.85 Still, several of Rio de Janeiro’s Black male and female street vendors whose legal status as enslaved, freed, or free is uncertain are portrayed barefoot in staged studio photographs (e.g., figure 8.8) in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Figure 8.8. Christiano Junior, Studio Portrait: Female and Male Street Vendors with Baskets on Head, Brazil, 1864–66. Albumen silver print, 3.4 × 2.1 inches. The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2017. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States.