Still another white American, C. S. Cooper, offers Brazil as an object lesson in democracy to the United States. He says, “The amazing wonder of all (especially to a North American less familiar with European races and holding decided views concerning color lines, etc.), is the manner in which this country is slowly and apparently with harmony and democratic social and racial relations evolving a distinct Brazilian type. The salient characteristics of what is becoming to be known as the true Brazilian character include the aristocratic culture and high intelligence of the old family Portuguese stock at once Latin and Moorish by inheritance, the exaltation, daring and passion of a vigorous aborigines blood softened by the affectionate emotional strain of the African especially of North Brazil—the whole shot through with the typical modernity and enterprise that marriage and general contact with European races have afforded. With such elements the national home of Brazil is being compounded. Knowing its ingredients one is not surprised to find its members at the summit of society, the qualities of imagination, intuition, courtesy, alertness of mind, statement, a conservatism that is Eastern, a love of beauty that is Latin, and a tropical hospitality and simplicity as generous and charming as Brazilian sunshine.”41
In the making of Brazil the Negro and the mulatto have been given the first place by several writers. Roy Nash says, “Negroes carried upon their well-muscled backs, the full weight of the Portuguese Empire in the eighteenth century as they alone carried the weight of the Brazilian Empire for the first half of the nineteenth century.”42 Calogeras says, too, “It is only fair to recognize that from the material and economic point of view the Negro constitutes the chief factor in the building of Brazil,”43 while Preston James points out that the African was already a skilled iron-worker when he came to Brazil, and says, “The Negro foreman on the plantations, or later in the gold mines, knew more about the technological processes than did many of the Portuguese owners. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, agricultural and mining enterprise in Brazil owed a large debt to the Negro laborers and technicians.”44
Koster mentions one of these Negro foreman—a slave, Nicolau, who was in charge of a great plantation belonging to the Catholic Brothers of Olinda, and who offered a large sum for his freedom but was told by the priests that “the estate could not be properly managed without him.” He was, however, treated in all other respects like a white man; he could sit in the presence of his masters and had married a woman of the convent; his horse and his appointments were of the finest but he would not be given his liberty even though he offered two of his own slaves for himself.
MIXED BLOODS OP BRAZIL.
XVI. Nilo Pecanha, President of Brazil, 1908-1910.
To the economic and the technical contributions of the Negro to Brazil we must also add the artistic. Rio de Janeiro is one of the most beautiful cities on earth.
The future of Brazil lies, too, in the hands of this mixed race which, today, seems to constitute the majority of the population. The present Negroid population is usually estimated at from one-third to one-fourth but there is no way of knowing the exact proportion. Since 1889, census-takers have been forbidden to take any notice of race. But even before that the idea was ridiculed. Codman said in 1872, “Some years ago when a census was to be taken, it was proposed to divide the classes of the community and to enumerate separately the white, black, and mixed. The Brazilians themselves laughed at the imbecile who wasted his ink in the suggestion. ‘Mixed.’ There is black blood everywhere, stirred in, compounded over and over again, like an apothecary’s preparation. African blood runs freely through marble halls as well as the lowest gutters, and the Indian blood swells the current. There is no distinction between white and black or any of the intermediate colors, which can act as a bar to social or political advancement.”45
Yes, Brazil is Negroid, especially Northern Brazil. In the state of Bahia are hundreds of thousands of unmixed Negroes, many of whom are of Islamic faith. Rio de Janeiro, too, is largely Negroid. Ruhl said of that city in 1908, “You feel as though you were walking through a deserted white man’s city held by a black army of occupation.” He said he went to a great ball given at the palace of the Minister of Foreign Affairs “and gliding about in the waltz, as well-dressed and at ease as any there, were young men who showed almost plainly enough to be called mulattoes, the marks of their Negro blood.”46
Zahm wrote in 1916, “Here, indeed, where the earth is ever bathed in sunshine the little Negroes and half-breeds were so numerous that one could almost fancy them springing up like the Athenians, or originating, according to the legend of Deucalion, from the stones of the earth.”47
A French visitor to Rio de Janeiro, in 1928, records his impressions thus also, “The traveler who lands in Brazil for the first time is struck by the importance of the colored population. It is of all shades and is very varied from shiny black to ash-grey or to chocolate with all the intermediate shades. Besides these tonal elements, frankly Negro, appears the whole gamut of race mixtures. There are even elements, which at first sight, appear as white, but which are not long in revealing themselves as having indisputable somatic signs, as brightness of skin; fullness of certain features as the lips, for instance; shape of the eyes and fixity of the look; and woolly and abundant hair—all in all a mixture of blood such as would not deceive a North American for an instant and which would cause him to experience before these self-styled whites, the irresistible repulsion that the sight of an octoroon or even the descendant of a mixed-blood in whose veins flow even one-thirty-second part of African blood, inspires in him.”48
Gilberto Freyre, Brazil’s leading sociologist and a white man, goes even further. He says that not only is there a predominant Negro strain in the Brazilian but that the Brazilian, even when white, is psychologically Negro. “Every Brazilian,” he says, “even the white with the blond hair carries in his soul, if not in his body, the mark of the Negro. In tenderness, in excessive mimicry, in Catholicism, that delights the emotion, in walking, speaking, singing little lullabies, in all that is a sincere expression of life, we bear the unmistakable stamp of Negro influence. We had it from the sinhama (slave woman) who lullabied us to sleep, who gave us suck and fed us; from the negra velha (old mammy) who told us our first amazing tales; from the mulatto girl who gave us such pleasure digging out the first bicho de pe; from those who initiated us into the art of physical love and brought us to the first complete sensation of what it means to be a man; and from the muleque (personal slave of the young Brazilian master) who was our first playmate… .
“We (whites and blacks) are two fraternal halves mutually enriched with diverse values and experiences; when we shall become a whole, it shall not be achieved by sacrificing one element to another.”49
Bahia, not Harlem, is the real Negro paradise. Here the colored woman is at her best. For centuries, Negroes in this province have enjoyed fortunes made in gold, diamonds, and rubber. Some of the Brazilian women are among the most captivating on earth, for those who have eyes to see. Henderson says, “We, Northerners, cannot yet understand the beauty of the pure Negress but a whole continent has fallen before her, and a good part of another. It may be that African sculpture will reveal the mystery to us. Not all Brazilian Negresses are washerwomen. Some of them are very wealthy, indeed.”50
In American beauty contests, only white women are considered. Not so in Brazil. Inman writes, “In a recent Rio de Janeiro beauty contest, the state of Rio Grande was represented by a perfect type of German, while the charming