The SS Pisa refilled its swimming pool, and Luanna learned to do the dog paddle. Five days later the faint smell of sulfur told us that we’d arrived in Rio de Janeiro.
Africa in Chains
I prefer to see my mother rot than sign a letter of liberty for my slaves.
Monito Campert, Brazilian coffee baron, 1888
SLAVERY AND COFFEE HAVE gone hand in hand since enslaved Oromo warriors brought the bean to Harrar. The bitterest irony of this relationship, however, must have been when Africans arrived in the New World and found themselves enslaved in the harvesting of a plant stolen from Africa just as they themselves had been. South American coffee plantations created a demand for slave labor that forever altered both Africa and the New World. Ten years after De Clieu brought his plants to Martinique, the French government began importing thirty thousand slaves a year with the goal of becoming the world’s leading coffee supplier. Half the captives died in the attempt, but France succeeded, until 1791, when the slaves of Haiti overthrew their oppressors and became the first free black nation in the Western Hemisphere.
For sheer quantity of slaves, though, Brazil takes the cake. Over a two-hundred-year period, about three million Africans were brought here to work in private coffee kingdoms. An additional five million were enslaved on sugar plantations. By comparison, only half a million total were brought to North America.
This plantation/slave social model remains the basis for modern Brazilian society. Ten percent of the people own 54 percent of the wealth. Direct slave descendants are ten times more likely to be illiterate or destitute. Although half of the citizens are from mixed marriages, most of the children sleeping in the gutter are noticeably dark, while the nubile things frolicking on the beach evince a lighter hue.
“Oh, this is true,” said Mario. “But still everybody is friends.”
We were sitting on Rio de Janeiro’s famous Copacabana beaches watching a game of volleyball. The players were typical Rioites—perfect physiques, skin the color of burnt butter—and although I couldn’t tell, Mario, a pale-skinned Brazilian, said that one of the players was pure African.
“You see, he is African, but who cares?” He pointed to a man in red Speedo briefs. “He might even be from the favela, a Speedo costs nothing, but it does not matter. The right to play volleyball is in our constitution.”
Favclas are hillside shanty towns that occasionally slide off onto the high-rise condos that line Copacabana’s beaches. Think Miami with Calcutta on top. Bikinis and leprosy.
“So you’re saying because this one guy is playing volleyball, there are no racial problems in Brazil?”
“No, no, of course there are problems. Black people are poorer. But for Brazilians, money isn’t everything. Look at your country,” he continued. “The black people are rich, like Michael Jackson and the General man [Colin Powell]. But still the black and the white people do not get along. That is because in USA, money is everything. Everyone always wants more. In Brazil, it is not money that is everything, and so people can get along. That is the difference.”
“Why do they play volleyball with their feet?” I asked. Our team was serving the ball with their feet, rallying and even slamming. The game, called footvolei, is an obsession unique to Rio. These guys were even adjusting radio volume knobs with their feet. “Don’t they know that the only difference between man and monkey is we use our hands?”
“Everybody in Rio plays like this,” he said. “It is the Rio way.”
“You too?” He seemed a tad out of shape for this kind of stuff.
“Everyone but me.”
I pointed to a dog who kept dropping a coconut into the middle of the court.
“Maybe the dog wants to teach the people to play a game just using their mouths,” I said. “That, he would say, is the dog way.”
Mario laughed. He thought I was funny. He spoke my language. He must be planning to rob me.
THE GREATEST OF THE EARLY COFFEE EMPIRES WERE IN THE countryside near Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where faziendas of two, three, four million plants were common. The plantation I wanted to track down had belonged to the notorious Baron Grão-Mogol, a Portuguese nobleman who had epitomized Brazil’s schizophrenic slave society, which, as Mario had said, “still let everyone have fun.”
The baron’s plantation was in the town of Rio Claro. Back then, Rio Claro was on the edge of the known world. Today it is a São Paulo commuter suburb, full of sulky teenagers aping American pop stars. And hot—Brazil was the hottest place I’ve ever been, averaging about 120 degrees Fahrenheit for most of my stay. Since my map of the area was a century old, my first stop was City Hall, where I hoped they might have something more up to date. There was a huge line outside the building, apparently for some kind of Lotto game. I asked a man where the planning department was.
“No planning department in this town!” he said. “Nobody plans anything here, I can tell you. There’s no plan in all of Brazil.”
I found the office and gave a lady named Linda a lie about how I was a student making a list of historical coffee plantations. I asked if she knew the farm belonging to Baron Grão-Mogol.
“Grão-Mogol? Yes, that’s Fazienda Angelique. The Rossi family”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“I think they live on the fazienda today.” She yelled out an order in Portuguese. “Someone is getting the map.”
There was a growing babble of voices coming from behind the counter. Apparently half the Rio Claro planning department was on the quest. I asked if the baron had any relatives left in the area.
“They are all gone,” she said. “Here, I will show you.”
The baron’s plantation, it seemed, still existed about seventeen kilometers down a mud road from a village called Ajapi. There were only three buses a day to the village, about twenty miles out of Rio Claro, and she suggested I catch the one at seven A.M. to avoid the heat.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very kind.”
“Of course,” said Linda. “If they still grow coffee, please come back and tell us. We’re supposed to be keeping track of these things.”
Ajapi turned out to be a single street, glowing white in the morning heat. My ride (I’d hitched when the bus never arrived) let me off in front of an open air café/bar/general store manned by a plump woman with glasses. I went up to the counter and asked for the Brazilian version of espresso, called cafézinho. The brew is made by pouring hot water through a sock-like bag containing ground coffee. You then take the resulting liquid and pour it again through the coffee grounds up to ten times, until you achieve the desired strength. The result is a refreshingly bitter brew—the French call it jus de chausette (“shoe juice”)—which the lady’s son, a twelve-year-old boy in a baseball cap, dribbled into a thick-handled demitasse half full of sugar.1
I asked the lady, Regina, if she’d ever heard of the baron.
“Oi,” she said. “His old farm is maybe five kilometers from here.”
“No, no,” interrupted her son. “It’s seven, maybe eight.”
I asked Regina the name of the family that lived there.
“Rossi, of course,” she said. “Everyone in Ajapi is a Rossi.”
According to Regina, there were about five hundred Rossis in the area. Her café doubled as a communal living room and town hall. There was an outdoor bocha (bowling alley) next door with a grill for steaks. On a fine evening you could take your cerveja on the faded turquoise bench outside, which also doubled as the village bus station.
“Must be hard having only relatives for customers,” I said. “Aren’t they always wanting discounts?”
She laughed. “Discounts? They’re lucky I don’t charge them double.”
The Rossis had come to Brazil in the mid-1800s during the coffee barons’ brief attempt to replace slavery with indentured servants from Europe. The Europeans, however, proved unsuitable. They refused to work the slaves’ fourteen-hour days. They built schools. Some even had the gall to
be better educated than the barons, most of whom signed their name with an X. To top it off, once they’d paid off their debt, these spoiled Euro trash had the gall to demand their freedom! The barons immediately returned to the civilized comforts of slavery, and most of the colonos headed back to Europe. Of those who remained, only one in ten managed to save enough to buy land.
“I think Pedro Rossi bought a hundred hectares,” said Regina. “That was when he bought the baron’s old house. Maybe 1920.”
She led me to a red mud road and gave me some directions. I asked her a question about the baron’s “insane” wife. She gave me a lengthy response. I can understand some Portuguese because I speak Spanish, but with Regina’s Paulista accent, it was almost impossible.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I didn’t understand your answer.”
Regina nodded contentedly. “That’s okay, I really didn’t understand your question.”
BARON GRÃO-MOGOL PROBABLY CHOSE THIS AREA FOR HIS plantation because dark red earth was thought to be the ideal coffee-growing environment. The best was called terra roxa, “purple earth.” The countryside reminded me of an England on steroids. From a distance it looked like manicured green lawns and shrubbery. What I took to be grass, however, turned out to be six-foot-tall palm-like leaves of soja. My “hedges” turned out to be towering avocado trees. Everything was such a bright shade of green it hurt my eyes. Poodle-size rodents scurried across the road. A horseman leading a mule appeared in the distance. I stepped into a bit of shade to consider the possibilities.
Kilometers and kilograms have always confused me. I know one is two times its American equivalent and the other is half. Only I just can never recall which is which. Regina had said the plantation was seven kilometers away. So I had either three miles to walk or fourteen, a considerable difference considering that the temperature was well over a hundred. Hence my interest in the approaching mule. There was also an historic angle. Until 1913, donkeys like this were the only transport out of Rio Claro. Tens of thousands of the beasts made the ten-day pilgrimage to the coffee port of Santos. Hundreds died in the pools of quicksand that formed in the rainy season. Others were killed by robbers. Many had their backs broken by their three-hundred-pound loads. Regular coffee martyrs, really, and I thought it would be a fitting tribute to these unsung heroes if I were to arrive at the baron’s plantation atop one of their descendants.
Man and mule finally reached me. I asked the man, who was dressed all in white, if he knew the Rossis. He did. I told him I was going for a visit.
“What a beautiful animal,” I said, pointing to his mule. “May I pet him?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”
“How far is it to the Rossi farm?” I asked, stroking the mule’s flank.
He told me. I expressed my surprise at the distance. I indicated how hot it was. I suggested I had a bad leg. I offered him ten dollars for a ride on his mule.
As we rode along, my friend ran me through the old who-what-where-why, much as if he were one of the baron’s soldiers who had roamed the area seeking runaway slaves. The man, who spoke some Spanish, was not a Rossi. But he had heard of the baron. Did I know, he said, that the baron pretended his wife was insane and kept her locked in the attic for twenty years? That he’d fathered hundreds of illegitimate children with his slaves? Had I heard about the sadistic orgies in the basement? The child slave harems?
I had. But the baron was more than a mere garanhoes fogosos de negralhada (fiery stallion of the Negress gang). He was also one of the more progressive slave owners and included fifteen of his illegitimate mulatto children in his will. He also made a point of “freeing” his slaves’ wombs. This noble declaration, which made children born to slave parents free at birth, came ten years after the government had freed all child slaves, however. The baron’s hypocrisy was still pretty minor compared to the nation’s largest slaver, who surprised everybody by “confessing” he’d been a closet abolitionist for the last twenty years. His hundreds of slaves, he explained, actually belonged to his wife; he had been merely “managing her estate.”
Mules may be fine for carrying coffee beans, but they are less good for transporting Stewarts. Aside from being ridiculously slow, the animal’s razor-sharp spine, combined with the gentle sawing motion, would, I felt, soon precipitate a mitosis. I persisted, however, and we soon came to a crumbling mansion on a hilltop.
“That’s where the baron lived,” he said. “You know, of course, that it is haunted?”
I think I had expected a structure like Rimbaud’s house in Ethiopia. The baron’s estate was crude by comparison, more fortress than home. Fifteen-foot-high windows, all closed with massive shutters, adorned the second story. The only way to enter the house was via a narrow stone staircase at the side of the building, an arrangement meant to optimize defense in case of a slave rebellion.
After a few moments of calling out from the gate, I entered the yard. What was the etiquette for this, I wondered? To one side of the mansion was a single-story modern house ringed with shrubs. There was also what I took to be a red clay tennis court, but was actually the traditional terreiro used to dry coffee beans. I saw a woman watching me from the eaves of the modern house. I waved hello, and she was instantly replaced by a teenage girl in shorts who introduced herself as Carolanne, the great-great-granddaughter of Pedro Rossi, who had bought the place from the baron’s descendants in the early 1900s. I told her I was a history student, and she took me inside the mansion.
Up close the house seemed shoddy. The walls were thin and, where the plaster had cracked, I could see they were made of nothing but mud and termite-riddled two-by-fours. The floor shivered underfoot. Shafts of sunlight spilled in through gaps in the red-tiled roof.
“It gets very wet in here when it rains,” said Carolanne. Until twenty years ago the Rossis had lived in the mansion. Only workers used it now.
The living room, about seven hundred square feet, contained a gargantuan, worm-eaten oak table that dated back to the baron’s time. The only other piece of furniture was a sixties-style, blue-glitter, Naugahyde lounge chair. Most rooms were empty. Carolanne took me upstairs to a claustrophobic attic room. This, she said, was where the baron kept his wife locked up. The sole window looked over the square where slave mothers whose children had died were required to apologize to the baron for not “taking care of his property.” It was also where the baron would lead his slaves in prayer.
“Look.” Carolanne opened a midget door that led only to a thirty-foot drop. Below were the baron’s sleeping quarters, now boarded up. She didn’t know why the door had been built. I asked Carolanne if she knew about the baron’s torturing of the slaves.
“Of course,” she said cheerfully. “Down in the basement.”
The basement was full of shattered glass, over which Carolanne walked barefoot.
“Here,” she said. “He tied the slaves here.”
The baron had used the central support for his home as his whipping post, a thick log sheathed in a heavy black metal casing. The roof, forty feet overhead, seemed to sag away on all sides from where the post touched it, as if it alone kept the house’s center from collapsing.
The baron’s henchman had been a freed African from northern Brazil who had lived with the Rossis after the baron departed. According to him, Grão-Mogol’s soirées were gastronomic, sexual, and sadistic orgies. First there would be a banquet. Then the guests, presumably all male, would descend to the basement to enjoy the favors of whichever female slaves the African freeman had captured and chained below. The baron was president of Rio Claro’s county council at the time, so one can be sure that society’s finest lights were on hand for the festivities.
I was much too delicate to ask Carolanne if she knew what kind of pain most pleased the baron. We know only that the preferred instrument of torture among the coffee barons was a five-pronged, metal-tipped whip, called the chicote. Up to four hundred lashes was not uncommon. Slaves were often whipped to death
, a criminal act, so their deaths were reported as a “fulminating apoplexy.” Those that survived had salt and vinegar rubbed into their open wounds. Many developed banzo, or longing for Mother Africa, which culminated in a slow suicide. Mothers often killed their own babies.
Three feet up the post hung a black iron ring where “he tied them up,” according to Carolanne. What a perverse world we live in, I thought, fingering the ring. The baron eventually made his slaves build a monument to him, as “thanks” for their freedom. It still stands. I did not visit. A more fitting monument is the town bearing the baron’s name, Grão-Mogol in Minas Gerais. It is the center of the recent rebirth of Brazilian slavery. Peasants are lured to Grão-Mogol with promises of high salaries, only to find themselves living in quasi-prisons and forced to work in coal mines for wages that ensure they will never get out of debt. Those who try to escape are beaten to death. Thanks to places like Grão-Mogol, Brazil now enjoys the highest slavery rate in the Western world, jumping from 597 cases in 1989 to 25,000 in 1996.
I felt something brush against my shoulder. It was Carolanne.
“Are you finished, señor?” she asked. “I need to go do my homework.”
SLAVERY WAS NOT THE ONLY THING COFFEE BROUGHT TO THE NEW world, because the Africans brought gods like Ogun, Oxumare, Exu, and, if my guess was correct, the coffee-loving Zar spirits of Ethiopia. This may seem unlikely at first glance. Brazilian slaves were from West Africa, while Zar is strictly East Coast. But hundreds of years before the slavers showed up, Sufi mystics had traveled across northern Africa and, in the course of spreading Islam, they’d seemingly carried the seeds of the Zar cults all the way to Nigeria. While the Nigerian religion, called Bori-Zar, could have existed prior to the Sufis’ arrival, the similar-sounding names, along with identical use of dance and trance, indicate a connection.
Nigeria, however, was where the Zar trail seemed to end. I’d consulted dozens of books in London and Paris, but despite the millions of Africans shipped to Brazil, and despite the abundance of Afro-Brazilian religions, there was no direct indication that the Zar cults existed in the New World. This seemed so absolutely illogical to me—I mean, wouldn’t the Zar spirits have recognized their beloved bean growing all about them and demanded a cup now and then? So after visiting the baron’s house I headed for a place called Valley of the Dawn, which I’d been told was a university dedicated to studying the connections among all the world’s religions. There, if anywhere, I was told, I would find my answer.
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