“Born Under the Cruel Rigor of Captivity, the Supplicant Left it Unexpectedly by Committing a Crime”: Categorizing and Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830–1897

No presídio [de Fernando de Noronha] o bandido [Zé Moleque] criara fama de boa pessoa, de trabalhador. Os seus roçados de farinha eram sempre os maiores e nunca estivera em cela, nunca dera o que fazer aos diretores.¹

José Lins do Rego, A Usina, 1936

In José Lins do Rego’s 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous utopia. The novel’s young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return, he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penal-colony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender relationship he had had with the former black bandit Zé Moleque, the respected convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazil’s northeast coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice, indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the 1920s. Although fictional, Lins do Rego’s depiction of Zé Moleque, a homicide convict who became a respected penal colony worker, is not fanciful. On a distant Atlantic island frontier where a small garrison watched over far more numerous convicts, well-disciplined inmates who worked hard could become respected community members and even trusted convict administrators.

This article focuses on a group of Zé Moleque’s nonfictional precursors, slave convicts who served their sentences on Fernando de Noronha in the nineteenth century. Slave convicts presented the imperial Brazilian penal justice system (1822–1889) with dilemmas. How should this class of bonded human beings who did not enjoy citizenship be punished under a constitutional monarchy with liberal airs? Persistent ideas of social, gender, and racial hierarchy, erected in part to buttress slavery’s legitimacy, clashed with liberal ideals of broad enfranchisement, equality before the law, penal rehabilitation, and uniform sentencing. Law made slaves pariahs in the imagined and tangible national community, but it also afforded them accommodation, not the least of which on Fernando de Noronha. Since the island gathered slave, free civilian, and military convicts from almost every province, it offers a unique panarama of imperial crime and punishment.²

The prosecution of slave crime has received attention in regional studies, but none have followed Brazil’s slave criminals into prisons to examine in detail how authorities enforced their sentences.³ In 1881, the Justice Ministry ordered the penal colony’s director to conduct a detailed survey of the island’s slave convicts. The director interviewed 264 slave convicts and recorded data that, along with other records, make it possible to sketch their collective biography and assess their place in the mostly decentralized imperial penal system.⁴ A simultaneous qualitative interrogation of survey categories explores the “ideological assumptions and political concerns” that prison authorities “brought to bear in enumerating, classifying, and ordering” a slave convict population.⁵ The survey itself became part of a bureaucratic struggle over how to punish slave convicts on this Atlantic archipelago. This struggle is the focus of the next section which analyzes the fates of slave convicts during the tumultuous 1880s when slavery was abolished and an army coup promulgated a republic. Like José Lins do Rego, I employ Fernando de Noronha in my conclusions as a foil to explore life, death, segregation, and injustice on Brazil’s mainland and other parts of the slave-holding Atlantic world.

Slave Convicts, Fernando De Noronha, and Brazil’s Penal Justice System

One might assume that slave criminals, especially murder suspects, would have been summarily executed. There is anecdotal evidence of Brazilians lynching suspected slave criminals, but the available data indicates it was not widespread. Law accorded slave defendants the right to a trial by a regular jury of citizens...