Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

5 I Wish to Be in This City: Mapping Women’s Quest for Urban Freedom

123 c h a p t e r f i v e I Wish to Be in This City Mapping Women’s Quest for Urban Freedom ^& I beg Your Excellency that, since the Junta where I reside expelled me, denying me my rights, taking advantage of the ignorance in which I have been raised, and presuming I do not know the Law, which is true, you will allow [ . . . ] the case [ . . . ] to be opened at the Junta de Patronato in Havana. —Ramona Oliva to Gobernador General, Havana, 9 August 1883 With these words, Ramona Oliva’s appeal argued that, although she did not live in Havana, she ought to be able to make her claim for her children ’s freedom in the colonial capital. Ramona had traveled some sixty miles from the small settlement of Bolondrón in Matanzas. Her appeal reminds us that both the legal struggles over slavery and the public wrangling over emancipation that have been the subject of previous chapters were framed by a specific context. It was in the cities, and above all the capital cities, where these processes found their most fervent expression. Yet Ramona’s life and struggle do not fit neatly into divisions between “urban” and “rural” slavery. Instead, individuals’ struggles for freedom were underscored by movement. The threat of being moved against their will, or the determination to move of their own volition, underpinned the urban strategies of many others who arrived in the cities of Havana and Rio de Janeiro. This chapter maps both their journeys to the cities, and, once they arrived, the close connections between urban living and the quest for freedom. 124 / Seeking Freedom “the august temple of justice”: journeying to the cities Ramona’s complaint about the difficulty of gaining a fair hearing in her small town would have been familiar to her contemporaries, in Brazil as well as in Cuba, as the case of Mathilde and other fazenda slaves in Guaratiba near Rio de Janeiro, discussed in Chapter 3, reveals. As the case unfolded, the lawyer for the owner’s heirs made a common argument. The group, he said, had not made the claim themselves, but had been “incited by the philanthropy of someone who wished to exploit their services.” The curador, Carlos Busch e Varella, countered what he called this “malign insinuation” thus: Who can be unaware that poor oppressed people, isolated in a rural parish, with no means or resources, would never reach the gate of the august temple of Justice, if someone, taking pity on their misfortune, did not help them, bringing them by the hand to the authorities which can and should protect them, hearing their laments, and upholding their contested rights?1 The fact that the claimants had had outside help was legitimate, in other words, because it was common knowledge that their isolation would otherwise prevent them from accessing the “august temple of Justice.” Indeed, the fates of rural and urban slaves were often conceived of as being worlds apart. In November 1885, regulations were issued for the registration of slaves provided for by the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law passed earlier that year. Outraged by a provision that slaveholders did not need to register slaves’ family origins, urbanite mulatto abolitionist José do Patrocinio blustered in his Rio newspaper: If a mulatto slave of Mr. Antônio Prado [minister of agriculture in the new Conservative government and inveterate slaveholder] were to die—a slave more or less of the age of the mulatto who writes these lines—and I should have the misfortune to pass by the plantation of the illustrious minister . . . I would have no means of proving that I am not the slave of that great lord . . . The official would look at me, and comparing me with the register, would say: mulatto, thirty-odd years old, born wherever you like, son of whoever you like!2 Writing from a city that, like other Brazilian cities, was pulsating with abolitionist fervor, Patrocinio imagined a scene on a rural plantation. Thus he highlighted the centrality of geography to the relative power of I Wish to Be in This City / 125 enslaved and enslaver. Once away from the city, with its greater access to the mechanisms of law, identity frauds were far easier to commit. Enslaved and enslavers alike had long conceived of transferal from urban to plantation labor as a form of punishment. Cuban writer Antonio Zambrana, in his 1873 novel...