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

2 The Law Is Final, Excellent Sir: Slave Law, Gender, and Gradual Emancipation

47 c h a p t e r t w o The Law Is Final, Excellent Sir Slave Law, Gender, and Gradual Emancipation ^& The law is final, Excellent Sir, and it must be obeyed, and for he who refuses[,] may the punishment indicated for offenders fall upon him[;] may he be obedient and respectful. —Ramona Oliva to Gobernador General, Havana, 9 August 1883 With these words, Ramona Oliva’s petition claimed freedom for her five children from her former owner, Manuel Oliva. The unusually passionate wording of the document vividly evoked the efforts of countless other ex-slaves to bring their understandings of the law’s new provisions to bear on their former owners. In small towns, like the one where Ramona initially made her claim, powerful individuals found it particularly easy to use their personal sway to ignore such initiatives. Convinced that existing local mechanisms of access to law would not give her a fair hearing, Ramona had undertaken a journey of some sixty miles to the colonial capital , filing her claim at the office of the governor general. Given the extremely unequal power relations between former owners and former slaves captured so well by Ramona’s petition, why should she think she had any chance of success? Who drafted this document in the name of a woman who explicitly discussed in it her own illiteracy, and can we consider any of these words to be “hers”? Why did so many women like her make claims like this one? This chapter traces the gendered evolution of the law of slavery and emancipation in Cuba and Brazil. The law’s development was marked, in each case, by the collective impact of struggles by the enslaved themselves, in which women had played an 48 / Gender, Law, and Urban Slavery important, specific part. As their wombs became the instruments through which gradual emancipation would occur, women sought to uphold the new laws and influence their interpretation. enslaved people and the law In the early 1990s, delving into the collections in the basement of the Brazilian national archive, Brazilian historian Keila Grinberg began to work with a collection of legal cases of enslaved people who, throughout the nineteenth century, had made claims for freedom that reached Rio de Janeiro’s appeals court. Although their existence was known about by other historians of slavery at the time, they had not been systematically analyzed before. On working with them, Grinberg found some surprising results. In this largest and oldest of slave societies, not only had these appeals been heard, but almost half had been decided in favor of the slave.1 This realization echoed the notion, analyzed by other Brazilian historians who had already worked with first-instance legal cases, of the law as an arena for social and political struggle that could be accessed by the enslaved or their freed relatives—even if only by a minority and on unequal terms.2 The legal claims also suggested that enslaved people did not simply participate in the ways the laws were implemented. Their tendency to seek legal redress meant that—although gradually and in limited ways—their demands and priorities filtered into the very process through which legislation was drafted in the first place.3 These discoveries have prompted an ongoing wave of interest in the relationship between law and slave agency across Brazil, as scholars unearth still more ações de liberdade (legal suits for freedom), as they are collectively termed, filed at diverse local and regional courts across this vast country.4 The Brazilian developments have fascinating parallels with research for Cuba, where Rebecca Scott’s groundbreaking work revealed how enslaved people’s initiatives collectively helped speed the emancipation process itself.5 Other scholars of Cuba have delved back across the nineteenth century, revealing how the evolution of law and jurisprudence in the colony was influenced by the engagement of the enslaved with the legal arena.6 In each setting, a series of official provisions anticipated at least some access to the law for the enslaved, although the usual means of doing so differed. A slave with a grievance could approach the courts, usually through an official representative, called a síndico procurador (or simply síndico) in Cuba, and a curador in Brazil. In Brazil, the surviving evidence we have of these struggles mostly comes from court records themselves. The Law Is Final, Excellent Sir / 49 These include...