Among other eminent Brazilians with a Negro strain were John VI, King of Portugal60 and Brazil, who left Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars and established his royal seat at Rio de Janeiro. John VI was about five-eighths Negro; his son, Pedro I of Brazil, founder of Brazilian Independence, and brother-in-law of Napoleon, was consequently of Negro ancestry, also. This, in turn gave a Negro strain, though attenuated to the latter’s son, Dom Pedro II, one of the handsomest, most intellectual, and most enlightened rulers in all history. Carlos Gomes, the first man of the New World to write an opera that received highest European recognition, was of mixed Negro. Caucasian, and Indian ancestry. Pradez, writing in 1872, when Gomes was still alive, said, “The first extraordinary musician that Brazil ever produced is found to be a colored man.”61 Gomes was sent to Europe to study at Dom Pedro II’s expense. Antonio C. G. Crespo (1846-1883), mulatto, born in Brazil, was one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers. He married Maria Amalia de Carvalho, white, also a celebrated writer. Another very noted mulatto was Jose de Patrocinio, son of a Portuguese-Indian priest and a Negro women. Patrocinio, who was known as “The Abolition Tiger” led the fight for the emancipation of the slaves through his brilliant and biting articles in La Gazeta de la Tarde. Machado de Assis, another mulatto, was for a long time Brazil’s most eminent literary figure. Nilo de Pecanha (1867-1922), another mulatto, was president of Brazil, while General Deodoro de Fonseca, usually called Deodoro, the founder of the Brazilian republic and its first president was colored.62 Brazil has had not less than five colored presidents.
As for the distinguished colored men of Brazil—writers, engineers, scientists, statesmen, soldiers, journalists, merchants and others—the list is too great to be given here. Arthur Ramos has a partial list of them.63 One of the greatest of all the Brazilian poets was Joao Cruz e Sousa (1862-1898), son of a Negro slave. There was at least one Catholic archbishop, too, Silverio Pimenta.
In conclusion, one thought, which though not entirely germane to the subject, is important. Why is Brazil though larger and older than the United States behind her in development? The tendency of some is to attribute it to race. The more truthful answer is, I think, climatic environment. Northern countries are more favorable for industrialization than southern ones. In the United States, itself, the industrial North is far ahead of the agricultural South. In Italy, too, one finds the same situation. Now Northern Brazil is even more southern in climate than the South of the United States. In fact, most of Latin America is still either agricultural or the producer of raw materials. It is the manufacturing nations, not the agricultural ones, which make big profits. Race has nothing to do with it, or the people of England would still be at the foot of the ladder.
Will Latin America ever be industrialized? Probably. But then it will be largely goodby to its charm, spirited music, and courtesy. Today the Latin American meets you with much less of the profit motive in his mind than the Anglo-Saxon American.
Brazil has ever stood out as the most truly democratic nation in the New World. As Gilberto Freyre says of the United States, “What democracy have you to defend? What you loosely call democracy is, in fact, a representative system that makes no sincere move towards the social democracy we have here (in Brazil). You don’t tolerate blacks in your theatres, restaurants, and even in your fashionable churches. In Brazil they go where they like; admitting them is not even a gesture but a perfectly unconscious procedure.”
There is, as was said, a good deal of the Old World caste of color in Brazil, but it will vanish in time. The defeat of the white man in Asia, and the ruin that will follow in Europe after this war is going to take much of the gilt off merely being born white, thereby restoring pre-colonial human values, which were based not on skin color, but on innate worth.
To paraphrase Picasso, using “democracy” where he uses “love: Demoracy must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts, not what one has the intention of doing.”
Indeed, we could even let the word “love” stand. For what else is true democracy but love of one’s fellow-man?
Note: In Sobrados y Mucambos, Freyre has many references throughout the book to Negroes and mulattoes. Chapter VIII is devoted to “The Rise of the Bachelor and the Mulatto.” James W. Ivy, who prepared a short review of it for me, says, “It is rather hard to make appropriate quotations from this chapter because out of text these quotations might be misleading. Briefly, the thesis of the chapter is that the college-trained man, the bachelor, and the mulatto, many of whom had received the best college-training offered by Brazil and Europe, began gradually to usurp the powers and privileges of the old slave-holding aristocrat. Between a down-at-heel aristocrat and an up-and-coming mulatto bachelor from Coimbra the beauteous daughter of some old family would much prefer the mulatto bachelor. Prodded by ambition, lowly birth, and their complexo de inferioridade because of their Negro blood, these mulattoes, like the Jews in Western Europe, gradually forged to the front rank in education, the professions, politics, and the sciences. Freyre calls them the new-whites—brancos-novos. Many illustrious mulattoes because of their economic and intellectual ascendancy soon became officially white—tornaram-se officialmente brancos. Among these men are some of the most illustrious names in Brazil…”
* * *
Other quotations from Freyre on this subject, are:
“Perhaps another factor [in the rise of the mulatto] was the marriage of elderly white men from illustrious families, descendants of barons and well situated in life, with beautiful mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons who carried themselves like fine white ladies and gave evidence of a sexual ardor beyond the ordinary from the mere fact of their being mixed-bloods.” (p. 337)
* * *
“One can in the meantime affirm the truth that the Portuguese preferred the brown woman, for physical love at least. The light woman had come into fashion, a fashion limited to the upper classes, primarily as a result of the reaction against outside influence rather than as an expression of genuine national taste. In respect to Brazil, the popular saying, “A white woman for marriage, a mulatto woman for sexual intercourse, and a black woman for work,” shows that along with the conventional social superiority of the white woman and the inferiority of the black, there was a sexual preference for the mulata. Moreover, our love lyrics reveal no other tendency except this glorification of the mulata, the cabocla [mixed Indian-white blood], the brown woman celebrated for the beauty of her eyes, the whiteness of her teeth, for her femininity, her amorous charm; for she was so much more enchanting than the ‘pallid virgins’ and the ‘blond demoiselles.’ This theme surges through poem after poem, and popular song after popular song, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” (p. 9).
“The mulata, whether au naturel or decked out and sophisticated by the art of the French coiffeur, the English bootmaker, the Parisian modiste, or the European parfumeur (and we believe no people in the world have been so extravagant in their use of European perfumes as the Brazilian mulatto, perhaps to combat that Negro body odor so highly appreciated by certain white voluptaries) has always had her amorous attraction, her “it,” for the white man. The Brazilian mulatto man has likewise exercised an equal charm over the white woman; if not always au naturel (for tradition preserves the memory of those rare crimes, all the more terrible, because white mistresses surrendered themselves in a moment of great passion to their mulatto slaves) at least when the mulatto had been ‘aristocratize’ by education, and especially by a European education, as in the case of Dr. Raymund in the romance [O Mulato] of Alusio.” (pp. 335-36. 1938. 3 ed.).
Mr. Ivy who is an authority on Latin American literature, has also prepared for me a list of 105 leading Brazilians of Negro-Caucasian ancestry—engineers, statesmen, jurists, physicians, etc. He adds, “It is extremely difficult in Brazil and Latin America to identify a man’s racial origin because of their habit of lumping the light-complexioned mulattoes, if they have class, with the upper-class whites. You can sometimes read bales of stuff about a man without once running across reference to the fact that he is a Negro, unless he happens to be coal-black.”
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rocha Pombo, J. F., Historia do Brasil,