Latin History

JOA~ O JOSE ́ REIS. Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodr ́e, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Translated by H. SABRINA GLEDHILL. (New Approaches to the Americas.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 357. $32.99.

Once upon a time, historians of slavery and emancipation in Brazil labored under the misapprehension that the ma- jority of the records pertaining to the enslaved had been lost or destroyed. Thus, they believed that it would be im- possible to write the sort of detailed histories about life and labor under slavery being published elsewhere. A handful of pioneering studies on plantation slavery in specific counties did offer a somewhat more intimate view of the slave-plantation complex, but most studies of slavery in Brazil published prior to the 1980s tended to be macro-historical or to rely heavily on the writings of polit- ical elites and foreign travelers.

Over the last few decades, a new generation of scholars of slavery and emancipation—most of them based in Bra- zil, a few in the U.S.—eager to move beyond the structur- alism of their predecessors, have succeeded in unearthing a remarkable range of sources, including notarial docu- ments, birth registers, trial records, letters of manumis- sion, tax and property rolls, and obscure periodicals, that have offered a far more granular view of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves, one that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of historians. And within this cohort of historical researchers, no one has done more to trans-

form the historiography of slavery and African culture in Brazil than Jo~ao Jose ́ Reis. Probably best known for his 1986 study of a Muslim-led slave revolt in Bahia, Reis has dedicated his career to researching and analyzing the worlds of slaves and freedpersons, most of them of Afri- can birth, in nineteenth-century Bahia, and its capital city of Salvador. His scholarship has not only greatly ex- panded the historical knowledge of his home region, but has helped make Bahia a crucial locale for any discussion of slavery in the Americas or the African Diaspora. One indication of the range and influence of Reis’s work in the transnational scholarly community is its wide avail- ability—the book under review here, Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodr ́e, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, is the third of his major monographs to be translated and published in English.

This book reflects what we might call the “biographical turn”; in its final pages the author references the growing corpus of “biographical studies of individuals who experi- enced slavery” (294). Given that, with few exceptions, the subjects of these biographical works were not previously well-known figures, the challenge for the aspiring biogra- pher is both to convince readers that the person whose

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STUART B. SCHWARTZ

Yale University

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story is being told lived a life extraordinary enough to merit an entire monograph, and at the same time can serve to illuminate a broader human landscape of disloca- tion, suffering, resistance, initiative, and cultural creativ- ity. In that regard, the encounter between the historical figure Domingos Sodre ́ and the historical researcher Jo~ao Reis was an especially auspicious one; even a mini- malist portrait of Sodr ́e’s life would encapsulate why he was worthy of a biographical study. At the same time, Reis’s deep familiarity with the archival sources in the re- gion and with the world in which most of Sodre ́’s life un- folded allows him to appreciate and elucidate the signifi- cance of this former slave’s personal trajectory in ways that I suspect would have eluded most other historians.

Reis tells his readers at the outset that “Papai Do- mingos” first came to his attention some twenty years ago when he chanced upon the record of Sodr ́e’s 1862 arrest on suspicion of receiving stolen goods from slaves in ex- change for divining sessions and “witchcraft,” which the police already referred to as Candomble ́—a religion based on spirit possession that is today one of the defin- ing features of Bahian culture. This is a perfect point of departure, not only because of the dramatic nature of the episode, but because it is a particularly acute example of the way both success and insecurity defined much of Sodre ́’s adult life. Moving backward and forward in time from this pivotal episode, Reis then recounts the process by which he reconstructed Sodre ́’s life and times, seeking answers for such basic questions as “when did he arrive in Bahia?” and “when did he become free?” Even though Reis observes that the amount of documentation on Sodr ́e uncovered in the local archives is substantial, the record still yields precious few details on his youth and early life, and there are significant stretches where the au- thor must compensate for the gaps in the evidence by re- constructing not Sodr ́e’s life, but rather the history of the plantation-owning family that purchased him and the se- ries of uprisings and armed conflicts that occurred while he would have been a resident on Colonel Francisco Sodr ́e Pereira’s sugar estate. Reis both acknowledges the limited connections he can draw between documented events and Sodre ́’s daily experiences, and informs us when an archival search proved fruitless. These moments of indeterminacy, far from impeding the narrative flow, heighten the reader’s (or at least this reader’s) admira- tion for Reis’s scholarship by demonstrating what it en- tailed to sketch the outlines of Sodr ́e’s story. It is as if a tailor or seamstress had crafted a garment in which the smooth, apparently seamless sections are interspersed with panels that expose the “underside”— stitches, cuts, seams, and inserts that made the flawless flowing exterior possible. In book form, this means the reader can simul- taneously enjoy Reis’s considerable storytelling and inter- pretive powers while also appreciating the almost arti- sanal effort that went into crafting this biographical study, and the inevitable role of conjecture in this process.

There are, of course, many things we now know about Sodre ́, thanks to Divining Slavery and Freedom, with near certainty. Like many Africans brought to Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century, he was from West Africa,

was Nagoˆ (the term used for the Yoruba in Brazil), and more specifically from the region around Lagos. He prob- ably arrived in Brazil between 1815 and 1820 when the re- gional sugar economy was in the final phase of a resur- gence generated by the disruption of sugar production in Saint Domingue/Haiti. And like so many of the Africans brought to Bahia, his first home there seems to have been a sugar estate in the agricultural zone known as the Recoˆncavo. Less clear is how the young Sodr ́e managed to make the enormous leap from life as a slave in the cane fields to one as a well-off freedman in the city of Sal- vador. One event that likely contributed to this was his service in a militia that fought with Portuguese troops at the time of independence. It is also possible that Sodre ́, early on, manifested a talent for divination and healing and, as a result, developed a position of respect and pres- tige within the slave quarters and maybe even beyond them. Of course, such knowledge and gifts could be dan- gerous as well, especially as whites in the region became increasingly anxious about the large African-born popu- lation in their midst.

Whatever the explanation, Reis believes that by the mid-1830s Sodr ́e was living in Salvador as if he were free, though he only received his formal letter of manumission in 1844—a sequence of events that indicates the frequent blurring (in both directions) of the lines dividing slavery and liberty in Bahia. Between the year of his manumis- sion and 1862, when he was arrested and briefly detained by the police, Sodr ́e made yet another huge leap—from recently freed slave to the head of a major manumission society and a leading practitioner of Candombl ́e in the provincial capital. He had become a “big shot” in Reis’s estimation. And what makes that leap all the more im- pressive is the gamut of laws, restrictions, and prohibi- tions under which the African-born labored in mid-nine- teenth-century Bahia. Already relegated to political limbo by Brazil’s founding constitution, African freed- persons in Bahia found themselves in the aftermath of the 1835 Mal^e Revolt banned from owning real estate, re- quired to pay fees for access to “public” space, and sub- ject to constant police surveillance and the ever-present threat of deportation.

The above-mentioned sources of Sodre ́’s prestige and income—his post as director of a manumission society and his fame as a diviner and healer in the Nagoˆ religious tradition—seem completely coherent with our twenty- first-century image of a proud, maybe even defiant Afri- can freedman surviving in a land where he was once a slave. But there are two other features of Sodre ́’s profile that complicate such an image. For one, there is consider- able evidence to show that he was a practicing, even de- vout Catholic. Perhaps more challenging for our a priori expectations of Sodre ́, especially if our main referent for slave societies is the antebellum U.S., is the fact that he owned slaves. Compared to wealthy whites, he was a small-time slaveholder who probably never had more than four or five slaves at a time. But well into the 1870s he continued to own slaves, as did most of the relatively successful African freedmen in his network of friends and associates, including one who Reis identifies as owning as

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many as twenty-seven slaves and engaging in the clandes- tine traffic.

For anyone familiar with the recent literature on slav- ery in nineteenth-century Brazil, Sodre ́’s status as a slave owner will come as no surprise. Due to the persistence of the transatlantic slave trade until 1850 (it was abolished on paper in 1831, but continued unimpeded for nearly two decades), the price of slaves remained low, making human chattel affordable even for Brazilians of modest incomes. In urban centers such as Salvador, these small- time masters either hired out their slaves or had them work as “earners” (escravos de ganho) who would turn over most of their wages to the master, but also set aside a portion toward a sum with which to purchase their free- dom. The majority of African men in Bahia who gained their freedom did so through self-purchase, sometimes contracting loans (with interest) from a manumission so- ciety such as the one headed by Sodre ́. In effect, not only slavery but manumission could be big business in Brazil, thanks to the prodigious efforts of enslaved people to ac- cumulate the cash needed to purchase themselves. Stud- ies of the “second slavery” emphasize the role of slave la- bor in the production of profitable global commodities (cotton, sugar, coffee), but in the world inhabited by Sodre ́, slaves were a valuable resource in and of them- selves, rather than as a means to produce something else. Meanwhile, I think Reis would argue that to expect Sodr ́e and his associates, who already labored under so many disadvantages, to eschew this ready source of income and security is, at the least, unrealistic.

In the final chapter, “Domingos Sodre ́, Ladino Man of Means,” Reis addresses these apparent contradictions in his subject’s biography. For Reis I think the bigger conun- drum is the evidence of both Catholic observance and Candomble ́ devotions, with the latter reinforcing the ties of “Papai Domingos” to enslaved Africans eager for a means—whether spiritual or medicinal—to propitiate their masters and diminish the harshness of their enslave- ment. The evidence of Sodre ́’s work in this regard, to- gether with his active role in the manumission society, is probably what leads Reis to describe Sodr ́e as “an instru- ment of slave resistance” (167). Carefully worded, this as- sertion does not require us to believe that Sodr ́e was ac- tively engaged in ending slavery as an institution, which surely he was not for most of his life. But his intimate con- nections to the world of enslaved Africans, and his knowl- edge of both material and spiritual methods to influence masters’ dispositions, allowed him to serve this purpose regardless of his intentions.

Crucial to performing this function was Sodre ́’s status as a ladino—an African in Brazil long enough to know the language and decode its cultural signifiers. Although Reis does not completely dismiss the concept of creoliza- tion, he sees it as inappropriate for understanding Sodr ́e’s position in Bahian society and prefers the notion of ladi- nization. Aside from the unavoidable connotation that

“creole” has in Portuguese of “Brazilian-born,” the term’s emphasis on blending does not capture the way in which Sodre ́ straddled different worlds and understood them on their own terms. Here the 1862 raid on Sodr ́e’s home provides the apt metaphor, with the police entering first a room brimming with Catholic images and artifacts, only to then encounter a second room full of objects asso- ciated with Candombl ́e. The rooms were in the same house but there was no evidence of blending between the two. Sodr ́e’s response to the arrest also demonstrates that he, an illiterate African, knew precisely how to “read” his situation and gauge its seriousness. He made a point of wearing his military uniform to the House of Correction and counted on the support of various friends and associ- ates, including white men of some prominence, and thus gained release after a brief detention and avoided the threat of deportation.

Despite Sodre ́’s triumph in this instance over police persecution, Reis reminds us again and again how precar- ious life in Bahia was for Africans—even those who had made a success of themselves. When Sodre ́ died in 1887, at the approximate age of ninety (and a year before the abolition of slavery), he had beaten the odds many times. He succeeded at getting his freedom, maintaining his na- tal religious traditions, assuming a position of prestige within the African community of Salvador, becoming a godfather to over a dozen children, slave and free, avoid- ing deportation, making a transition in investments from slave-owning to real estate when circumstances changed, and living to a ripe old age. Perhaps his only serious stum- ble was his failure to provide sufficient income for his widow, Maria Delfina de Con ̧cei~ao Sodre ́, who died a year later in abject poverty. But Sodr ́e lived a life that was remarkable enough to become the subject of a book by the region’s most gifted historian of slavery and African culture. We are all the beneficiaries of their encounter.

One last note: Sodre ́ was not literate, so even when we are reading the documents that he presumably dictated, such as his last will and testament, we cannot be sure we are hearing his words, and even less so his “voice.” Read- ers of Divining Slavery and Freedom will also not be read- ing Reis’s precise words, but because of the excellent translation by Sabrina Gledhill, I do think they will be hearing his “voice.” Throughout the book, Gledhill has succeeded in retaining Reis’s familiar register, which en- gagingly combines the authoritative with the colloquial. Every now and then I thought some additional clarifica- tion might have been in order; thus, when the author calls a hapless constable named Cordeiro “poor lamb,” it might have been helpful for the reader to know that his last name was the Portuguese word for baby sheep. But this is a quibble; the book is a pleasure to read and we can thank both Reis and Gledhill for that.

BARBARA WEINSTEIN

New York University