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

8 My Mother Was Free-Womb, She Wasn’t a Slave: Conceiving Freedom

198 c h a p t e r e i g h t My Mother Was Free-Womb, She Wasn’t a Slave Conceiving Freedom ^& [My children] are taught nothing more than in olden times (if you will allow the phrase), like donkeys[,] to work to be useful to their Masters. —Ramona Oliva to Gobernador General, Havana, 9 August 1883 Jeronymo José de Mello, the Rio de Janeiro artisan whom the reader met at the beginning of Chapter 7, had owned at least two other women as well as his parda slave Gabriella, who used her newfound freedom to resist removal from the city of Rio de Janeiro. At the same 1886 emancipation ceremony in which Gabriella was freed, he also received compensation from the municipal council in exchange for freeing another young parda woman, eighteen-year-old Maria.1 Urban freedom, for Maria, surely held the kinds of significances it did for Gabriella—the ability to remain in the city; greater autonomy over her working and living conditions; enhanced chances to accumulate property; and bodily and sexual autonomy. Yet for Maria, all of these considerations had an added twist: she was the mother of an ingênuo child. Freedom offered her the possibility of avoiding one more of the mother-child separations that had become both an abolitionist rallying-cry on both sides of the Atlantic and a central concern in so many women’s quests for manumission. Once achieved, freedom might also allow Maria more scope to raise her child according to her own definitions of mothering—shaped by African cultural inheritances as well as European ones. This chapter returns to the theme of motherhood, which, My Mother Was Free-Womb / 199 more than any other, marked out women’s specific relationship with the law and with freedom. What were the links, for women like Maria, between visions of freedom and definitions of motherhood? What visions or expectations about freedom did such women hold for their children? And what would be the impact of those visions upon the changing societies in which the last generation of enslaved women lived? “the right to be a mother”: maternity and the meanings of freedom In October 1885, Rita, an enslaved parda woman, made an appeal via her representative, Francisco Pinto da Silva, to Rio de Janeiro’s municipal council. The council was busily collecting the names of enslaved people—mainly women—to free at its next emancipation ceremony on 2 December. Rita, said her appeal, had been incarcerated by her owner at the Casa de Detenção, a prison used to punish slaves. However, she was “in an advanced state of pregnancy, that is, in the last stage.” Would she be left to give birth in prison? Rita, said the letter, “begs the beneficent protection of the Illustrious Municipal Council, under whose auspicious protection she humbly places herself,” and hoped for the “charitable granting” of her request.2 Rita’s appeal might hit home with councilors who had read the Gazeta da Tarde newspaper’s biting criticism only a month before of the continuing practice of forcibly taking enslaved mothers’ newborn infants away, in order for the mothers to nurse slaveholders’ children. Freeing Rita might grant her something that the article said was still being denied to enslaved women despite 1871: “the right to be a mother.”3 Even as such mother-child separations continued to occur, nonetheless the 1870s and 1880s undoubtedly saw increased legal and social currency for this idea of the “right to be a mother” for enslaved and freed women—pushed, of course, by women like Rita as much as by anyone else. Yet the existence and quality of such a “right” was, as we have seen, deeply contested. Only a year previously, discussing the school for Rio’s ingênuas, councilor Fernandes Couto had argued that ex-slave parents had nothing to teach their children except their own “imperfect” habits .4 Indeed, the womb-based transition process was subjecting the very definition of motherhood for ex-slave women to considerable controversy . How did Rita envisage her relationship with her soon-to-be-born child, the “fruit” of her legally “free” womb? How might their relationship change if she gained freedom? While councilors weighing up her petition 200 / Conceiving Freedom had very different understandings of mothering from her own, there was also enough overlap between the different notions for the...