Machado de Assis, slavery, and slave-catching - not all of them liked being beaten

In the novels of Machado de Assis, or at least the four I have read so far, Brazilian slavery is taken for granted.  I have been startled, at times, by the lack of criticism of slavery.  See the episode in the center of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, for example, where the narrator comes across a man beating a slave in the street, and the violent master turns out to be a slave freed by the narrator!  There is an irony here, but more about human nature than slavery.  Is it relevant that Machado had grandparents who were slaves?

Machado is working on voice and psychology in the novels and his great subject is egotism, not so well suited to social crusading or even to Huckleberry Finn.  His short stories are different, and there is one, “Father versus Mother,” where the tone is a little more critical.  Just a little:

Slavery brought with it its own trades and tools, as happens no doubt with any social institution.  If I mention certain tools, it is only because they are linked to a certain trade.  One of them was the iron collar, another the leg iron.  There was also the mask of tin plate.

That’s the first paragraph of the story.  He sounds like no one so much as Victor Hugo.  Machado spends five more acidic paragraphs on these tools and their purpose:

A half-century ago, slaves ran away frequently.  There were many slaves, and not all of them liked slavery.  It happened sometimes that they were beaten, and not all of them liked being beaten.

The story is about a poor man who makes his living catching runaway slaves, “one of the trades of the time,” in Rio de Janeiro.  He marries when times are good, but his wife is pregnant when times are bad.  Perhaps the couple will have to “carry the child that was soon to be born to the Wheel of abandoned babies.”

Machado squeezes  as hard as he can.  The father, the slave catcher, gets a hot lead on a high-reward runaway while carrying his baby to the foundling hospital.  The runaway slave is, he finds, pregnant.  Thus, the cruel dilemma – which baby to save? – except that there is no dilemma, even as the story takes a worse turn.  The slave catcher saves his own baby; the slave catcher catches the slave.  That’s that.  What else did I expect?

Again, it would be strange, out of place, to hear the self-absorbed narrators of Machado's novels worry much about justice or abolitionism.  But those narrators are not Machado.

 “Father versus Mother” led Machado’s 1906 short story collection, but was presumably also published earlier.  Quotations are from the Helen Caldwell translation, available in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories and Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story.  Another version is in A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories.

We promise not to look at their tails or incisors when they come into company - Emerson on the Fugitive Slave Law

"We shall never feel well again until that detestable law is nullifed in Massachusetts & until the Government is assured that once and for all it cannot & shall not be executed here. All I have, and all I can do shall be given & done in opposition to the execution of the law." (p. 420)

This is Emerson on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Emerson's journals contain plenty of politics, mostly regarding abolitionism, but nothing before 1850 had got him so worked up. Emerson in His Journals, the selection I'm reading, has five pages, basically all of April and May 1851, of nothing but anger and bitterness and first-rate rhetoric.

Note that the use of the word "nullified" is pretty radical, a reference to the Nullification Crisis, when it seemed possible that President Jackson would use the Federal military to enforce a tariff law in South Carolina. Emerson is playing with the idea of the breakup of the United States. He's prescient, and in despair.

"Let Mr Webster for decency's sake shut his lips once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan." (p. 421)

Senator Webster was not just a hero of Emerson's - Emerson thought Webster was a Carlyle-style Great Man of History. But not after Webster supported the compromise that included the Fugitive Slave Act:

"Against this all the arguments of Webster make no more impression than the spray of a child's squirt. The fame of Webster ends in this nasty law." (p. 422)

Unususally scatological for Emerson. He may have had Jonathan Swift on his mind. Here he is a few days later, playing with Swift's "Modest Proposal" - slavery is cannibalism, and slave-owners are devils:

"It was a little gross, the taste for boiling babies, but as long as this kind of cookery was confined within their own limits, we could agree for other purposes, & wear one flag... though they had tails, & their incisors were a little long, yet it is settled that they shall by courtesy be called men; we will make believe they are Christians; & we promise not to look at their tails or incisors when they come into company." (p. 423)

Emerson here acknowledges that slavery was an evil with which he had to some degree made his peace - as long as it was kept down there. The Fugitive Slave Law returned the evil to his hearth, and shook him out of his complacency. His journals are rarely so fiery. This reminds me of what I was trying to say about Roberto Bolaño. Emerson is forcing himself to gauge his own hypocrisy. How unpleasant and difficult; how often do I do that?

Perhaps often enough, actually. Too much of that sort of thing and a person could hardly function. Tomorrow, then, Emerson the comedian.

All page references are to Emerson in His Journals, 1982, ed. Joel Porte.

La Maison des Esclaves - The House of Slaves

On Gorée Island, a short ferry ride from Dakar, one can visit the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves. The building, a merchant's house, is small and pink. A series of cells on the ground floor held a variety of cargo, including slaves.

This is the view from outside one of the mens' cells. There's nothing in it now. As a guess, at its most crowded it held 20 to 25 adult men. The slit in the back is a window.






Here I am standing in the corner of the men's cell, looking into the courtyard. The room is very small. I also went into different, essentially identical chambers reserved for women, and for children. I did not take any pictures of those. Squeamishness?




Yes, quite possibly. Under the two central, symmetric, staircases are storage holes that were used as punishment cells, perhaps for up to six slaves. I took a photo of the stairs, not of the cell itself. A guide told us that Nelson Mandela entered one of the cells and fainted. The guide was subtly warning us away from the punishment cells. If you have endured the sufferings of Nelson Mandela, feel free to enter. No one did.

The punishment cell just to the right has air slits. This one does not.

The way out. One has to imagine the now absent dock, and a longboat, and, further off, a one- or two-masted ship, possibly a slaver, but more likely an ordinary cargo vessel, picking up a few slaves for the trip to Brazil or Bermuda or Georgia. One must also imagine the packed bodies, the odors, the chains, the misery. The relief of the air and sun, the bewilderment of the ride to the ship, the horrors of the trans-Atlantic passage, the lifetime of chattel slavery.


The House of Slaves is itself an act of imagination, created by its "conservateur au chef" Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye. He has pasted messages, admonishments, penseés, here and there throughout the building. A strange kind of historical curation. But the House of Slaves is now as much a memorial to the human costs of the slave trade as a historical site. The building itself was part of the slave trade for less than thirty years (off and on from 1780-1810, say), and Gorée Island was never an important slaving center. Maybe a few thousand slaves passed through this building, perhaps many fewer.

The smaller scale is probably useful for most visitors. This is just a house. Yet how much suffering was there at this minor outpost of the slave trade? Then try to imagine the giant slave markets on the banks of the Gambia, or in Ghana. Impossible, but we keep trying.

Every American should visit the House of Slaves - it is part of our heritage. Every citizen of Brazil, Holland, Jamaica, France, etc., as well, I suppose. I know, the list of places we should all visit is an unfeasibly long one.

Oddly, the island itself is one of the most charming places in Senegal, a great relief from the activity and bad air of Dakar. It's also the symbolic center of Senegalese feminism because it was the home of Mariama Ba. There is now a free boarding school for girls that bears her name, and a Museum of the Woman. A complicated place.

Gorée Island is a UNESCO World Heritage site. So click the link for better photos than mine.

The ethics of Dead Souls - how many of you are crowded in here?

A corrupt minor official and con man, Chichikov, wants to buy the legal rights to serfs who are deceased but still on the tax rolls (one set of “dead souls” in Dead Souls). He enters a provincial town and visits local landowners, buying their recently deceased serfs. People grow suspicious, and Chichikov flees. That’s the story of Dead Souls.

Dead Souls is overpopulated. A short novel (250 pages or so), it is stuffed with incidental characters. The first page, for example, introduces not just Chichikov, but four other people, only one of whom is ever seen again. There’s a fellow, for example, who wears a bronze pin, shaped like a pistol. Two others have this conversation as Chichikov rolls by:

"'Look at that, will you?' said one muzhik to the other. 'What a wheel! What do you think, would that wheel make it to Moscow, if need be, or wouldn't it?'

'It would,' answered the other.

'But it wouldn't make it to Kazan, I'm thinking - or would it?'

'Not to Kazan, it wouldn't,' the other answered.

And with that the discussion ended."

The novel is so full of people that they spill over into the metaphors Gogol uses to describe anything and everything – see the examples from the last two days. The parody of the epic simile, this abundance of humanity, is directly tied to the ethics of the novel.

Dead Souls is a novel about slavery (other things, too, sure). A later generation of Russian radicals saw it as a realistic attack on the social conditions of serfs, suggesting that they did not actually read the novel. Nevertheless. The plot is about the buying and selling of people, even if the particular people are dead. Chichikov’s attempts to buy dead serfs deeply confuse most of the other characters. The Public Prosecutor and other officials spend most of Chapters 9 and 10 trying to figure out what Chichikov is up to. Some conclude that he is a famous bandit, others that he is Napoleon in disguise, while the women all understand that the “dead souls” business is just a trick to distract the men while Chichikov elopes with the Governor’s daughter.

This confusion is the ethical heart of the book. If Chichikov were buying live serfs – actual people, slaves – to be resettled in a wilderness a thousand miles away, there would be no confusion. Everything would be perfectly legal, and everyone would approve, and even celebrate. They actually do celebrate, in the great scene where the bear-like Sobekevich eats an entire sturgeon (except for the “inedible tail”).

The “reality” of the characters who emerge from the metaphors is just as strong as the reality of most of the characters who exist in the world of the book. In exactly the same way, the dead souls have as much reality as anyone else. They’re not just legal fictions, but actual (“actual”) people.* At the beginning of Chapter 7, Chichikov looks over the list of his purchases:

“All these details imparted a certain air of freshness: it seemed as if these muzhiks had been alive only yesterday. As he gazed long at the names, Chichikov’s spirit was touched and, with a sigh, he uttered: ‘Good heavens, how many of you are crowded in here! What my hearties, have you done in your time? How did you get along?’” (p. 131)

Is this passage about dead souls, or about Dead Souls?

* One could also take this in an entirely different direction. The "actual" characters are no more real than the metaphorical ones. What is a novel if not a long, complicated metaphor?