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>> 1 Introduction Something ’Bout the Name of Jesus: Racial Meanings and Brazilian Evangelical Musical Scenes The Way It Is I am in the home of Angélica, a gospel singer in her late twenties. It is late afternoon, and the light in her living room is dying, but neither of us is able to get up to turn on the overhead light, because we are in the vortex of a musical whirlpool, swept in circles by the recorded voice of Rance Allen. Angélica closes her eyes as Allen’s silvery baritone belts, There’s something ’bout the name of Jesus It is the sweetest name I know Angélica’s eyebrows rise and knit, as if she is asking a painful question. Allen’s voice on the CD continues, shifting from silver to gravel: Oh, how I love the name Jesus 2 > 3 what God was doing to me, filling me with the Holy Spirit, anointing me, I took pride in that. That gave me the courage to call myself negra.” That was in an earlier conversation. Today, memories of troubled years are coming back to her. Finally I say something. “Your father said you shouldn’t sing because you were a neguinha?” She nods. “Yes. I was the ugly one. My father, a beautiful branquelo [big white guy], was ashamed of how I looked, always asked my mother, how did I turn out to be a neguinha, did she sleep with someone? They would fight; she had always been faithful. My mother is even lighter than I am. You have seen her, you know. . . . My father treated me like a slave. My sister always got to go study in her room after dinner, but not me. I had to do the dishes.”2 Rance Allen’s voice is swelling to a crescendo. “But why, Angélica?” She looks at me. Allen’s voice comes crashing down. “Because she was lighter than me. I was the ugly one. I had bad hair. My features were ugly. And I didn’t understand. I would walk around the house with a little pocket mirror. I kept it with me. And when no one was looking, I would take it out, at the age of seven, eight, nine. I would take it out and look at it. And I would cry, looking and asking, ‘Why, God, why have you made me so ugly? Why did you give me this skin, this hair? Why didn’t you make me look like my sister?’ I wanted so badly to be beautiful. But I was ugly, so I did the dishes, while my beautiful sister got to study. That is the way it is.”3 A year before my conversation with Angélica, I had gotten to know Django, a dark-skinned negro in his forties, also in São Paulo, who had worked as a bank clerk for fifteen years and was a leading pastor at a Brasil Para Cristo church. One evening, seated in his brick house on an asphalt street in Tiradentes, a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the foot of a favela, he recounted to me moments that had been seared into his memory. As we sat in his living room, the television tuned to a soap opera, his two teenage daughters doing homework in the kitchen, his wife, Magali, preparing dinner, Django explained what had happened to him many years earlier. “Her family was not happy, I can tell you, about her marrying a negão like me. So I would go over to her house—” “My father couldn’t stand it!” Magali called from the kitchen. “He wanted me to marry a nice white guy.” 4 > 5 that the country’s long history of miscegenation had made its people characterologically incapable of racism (Skidmore 1993; Dávila 2003). The 1940s and ’50s saw efforts to challenge this ideology, including Abdias do Nascimento ’s Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater), but a military coup in 1964 drastically limited all contestatory politics (Hanchard 1994). With political problack activism shut down, Afro-Brazilians who wished to express their racial pride turned to seemingly depoliticized cultural activities. Thus, in the early 1970s, the Black Rio dance movement expressed black pride among young people in Rio and São Paulo, and the Instituto de Pesquisas da Cultura Negra (the Institute for Research on Black Culture) organized symposia about African religions and musical traditions (Alberto 2009; Dunn 2001; Moore 1989; Pereira and Alberti 2007...

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