introduction

No cit y feeds itself. Unlike a village or small town, a city de-

pends on a vast array of outsiders to grow or raise food, and most
essentially, on people to transport it, and on middlemen and -women
to buy and resell it to consumers. Salvador, Brazil—often called Ba-
hia—was a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth
century. It invites inquiry not only into such a commercial network,
but also into what its workings reveal about the city’s social makeup.
Street sellers, boatmen, grocers, butchers, cattle dealers, importers;
men and women; blacks, mulattos, and whites; slaves, ex-slaves, and
free—these are the actors here. Their actions helped forge the city,
and their dealings bring its social order, customs, ideologies, and con-
flicts into relief.
Salvador quintessentially belonged to the Atlantic World, where
Europe met Africa in the Americas. This city on the east coast of
Bahia province faces an enormous bay, making it one of the few great
ports of the South Atlantic. From the rich sugar-, tobacco-, and food-
stuff-producing lands surrounding the bay—collectively referred to
as the Recôncavo—arrived the goods that fed local people and were
exchanged for a great variety of overseas imports in the city’s bus-
tling center. Europeans, Africans, people of European and African de-
scent, and a few Indians met in Salvador, establishing tangled links
while simultaneously redefi ning the boundaries that separated them.
Governing institutions developed in Europe were here applied to a di-
verse population and reshaped to fit what must have seemed an exotic
place to its Portuguese administrators. People brought up entirely in
Brazil argued for or against economic principles or revolutionary doc-
trines elaborated overseas. Slavery and the slave trade deeply incised
the city’s social and political being, and its large black population de-

Graham-final.indb 1 6/30/10 10:31:42 AM

 2 fe edi n g the ci t y

map i.1. Brazil and Its Provinces in 1860

cisively influenced local habits, signs, and symbols. Religious beliefs

and practices displayed values derived from both Africa and Portugal.
By borrowing from and adapting to each other, city dwellers forged
a new culture with its own ways of being. In time the city became
unique, as different from other Atlantic cities as they were from it.1
Salvador played an important role for all of Brazil. It thrived as the
commercial entrepôt of the entire captaincy (later province) of Bahia,
and its merchants, large and small, also traded far beyond its borders.
When gold and diamonds were discovered in Minas Gerais, the ini-
tial supply route to that area originated in Salvador. Although its role
as capital and principal administrative center diminished after 1763,
when the Crown transferred the seat of the Brazilian viceroyalty to
Rio de Janeiro, its cadres of civil servants—attached to the governor

Graham-final.indb 2 6/30/10 10:31:42 AM

 in t r o d u c t io n 3

of the captaincy, to civil, criminal, and church judges, and to fiscal

offices—continued to exercise a powerful influence over an extensive
region. Until the 1750s Brazil’s only High Court sat in Salvador, and
it continued to hear cases from all the northern provinces until well
into the nineteenth century. Brazil’s archbishop had his seat there
and made Church policy for the entire country. Much of the city’s life
nevertheless remains uncharted terrain, still to be mapped.
The diet of Salvador’s inhabitants rested on two staples: manioc
meal, the major source of calories, and meat. Cattle were driven to
the city, but manioc meal came on boats from across a large bay, as
did the bulk of the city’s fruits and vegetables. Those who were bet-
ter off also consumed items imported from overseas in larger ships,
especially wine and olive oil, but also beer, cheese, wheat flour, and a
great variety of high-value, low-volume treats. At the other end of the
social spectrum, slaves often had little more than manioc meal and a
little dried or salted beef to eat. Africans deeply influenced the cook-
ing methods and spices used in most households, with a liberal use of
red palm oil, peppers, coconuts, and peanuts.
As we look at the city as it appeared during the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, the immense variety of its inhabitants,
along with their close and multifaceted interconnectedness, is espe-
cially striking.2 Those who distributed and sold food—whether hum-
ble street vendors or substantial grocers, butchers or cattle traders,
ordinary sailors or captains on boats bringing foodstuffs from across
the bay and from ports along the Atlantic coast—were connected to
practically everyone in the city. Their occupations were central to ur-
ban life but rarely mentioned in the many works on the region that
have dealt primarily with sugar planters, international merchants, or
slaves, while leaving everybody else unnoticed. People of a middling
sort, some better off than others, as well as some very poor and the
enslaved, all working hard, fi lled the city and made it hum. This ur-
ban setting allowed the formation of a large intermediary sector of
tradespeople with both vertical and horizontal ties to others.
The energy and movement of Salvador’s residents display how slave
and free, black and white, women and men, the poor and the not-so-
poor related to each other, simultaneously exemplifying the laddered
ordering of society and challenging our ready notions of how such a
society must have worked. Instead of seeing only exploiters and ex-
ploited, we find here negotiated encounters along a shifting terrain.
As a result, I take particular exception to those who portray blacks,

Graham-final.indb 3 6/30/10 10:31:43 AM

 4 fe ed i n g t he ci t y

slaves, and women to be, in their essence, just victims, and whites,
free persons, and men essentially as oppressors, rather than as per-
sons with multiple concerns and varied relationships, as complex hu-
man beings, even if some were privileged and many more severely
exploited. Such people occupied social positions along a continuum
rather than in sharply separated groups.
In exploring people’s lives across a great range of individual expe-
riences, I have looked for specifics, trying to grasp something of the
context within which they lived. By focusing on actual practices, a
broader notion emerges of how understandings of race shaped behav-
ior or were shaped by law and practice. Similarly, “slave” and “slav-
ery” are terms too blunt to do justice to the variegated experiences
they encompassed. There are categories that I, as a historian, impose
upon people who did not necessarily think of themselves as belong-
ing to them, but I try to avoid drawing a priori conclusions about in-
dividuals from such classifications. In emphasizing particular men
and women, and what joined and disjoined them, I look for adjectives
rather than labels. To emphasize the particularity of the people who
appear here, I often insist on naming them rather than referring to
their generic status, even if they surface only once.
The food trade fits within a larger context of concerns that went
beyond the question of how food got to people’s tables to matters of
government responsibility for protecting consumers, the proper place
of economic regulation, and debates on what makes a society good
and just. At least from medieval times, one of the tasks of city gov-
ernment in most of the Western world had been to ensure adequate
and safe food supplies at affordable prices to urban residents. Salva-
dor’s city council, following Portuguese precedents, took this respon-
sibility seriously. Attempting to apply a rational order to this task
led to the creation in the early 1780s of two publicly owned institu-
tions—a central grains market and a slaughterhouse—that crucially
touched on food traders’ work. Beginning at that very time, however,
some writers and public officials began to criticize the older view of
the state and its relationship to the individual, proposing a more free-
wheeling approach to the economic activity of food traders and less
attention to protecting buyers.
A turning point was the year-long war for Brazilian independence
from Portugal in 1822–1823, the outcome of which turned on an ulti-
mately successful siege in which boatmen cut off Salvador’s food sup-
ply. Not only did wartime disruptions themselves cause immediate

Graham-final.indb 4 6/30/10 10:31:43 AM

 in t r o d u c t io n 5

shifts in many people’s lives, disturbing the social order, but the re-
forms that ensued after independence, inspired by models borrowed
from across the Atlantic, had major long-term effects on the activity
of those engaged in buying and selling foodstuffs. These liberalizing
measures did not succeed in solving the subsistence problems of the
great mass of the population, and many of the new policies were re-
sisted, sometimes violently, and gradually watered down or entirely
abandoned. The debate on the new philosophy of government can be
read as residents reflecting and commenting on themselves and their
society, giving voice to their notions regarding its categories and de-
fending values they held dear.
Everyone is daily enmeshed in institutional frameworks with rules
that guide behavior, and some of them leave records that provide his-
torians with rich documentary lodes to be explored. Connections be-
tween historical actors are often vividly captured in seemingly un-
likely documents produced by impersonal government agencies, the
actions of which critically impacted thousands of individuals. The
institutions that oriented the food trade—the public grains market
and slaughterhouse—stand out especially in this account because
they influenced the actions of so many. Wills and estate inventories
crucially reveal exchanges between people placed in differing social
positions, without for a moment casting doubt on the existence or
tenacity of such divisions. They form another source on which I rely,
especially given the relative absence of diaries and personal letters
among Brazilians, and the fact that inheritance law—by forcing the
division of goods among legally prescribed heirs—touched even hum-
ble households. The opening phrases of last wills and testaments are
often formulaic, but from then on they vary enormously and shed
much light on affective ties, business connections, and understand-
ings and expectations about others’ behavior, as well as details about,
for instance, a favorite saint or the testator’s past.3 They speak of
friends and the children of friends, of concubines and godchildren, of
love and rivalry.
In the fi rst part of this book I write about the people who partici-
pated in the food trade, without much attention to alterations over
time, whereas the second part is specifically about change and ex-
plores the political context within which traders worked. In the
initial chapter I describe the physical, social, cultural, and political
setting of their lives. The next two chapters discuss street vendors
and grocers: Chapter 2 establishes who they were, what they sold,

Graham-final.indb 5 6/30/10 10:31:44 AM

 6 fe ed i n g t he ci t y

where they sold it, and looks at how they lived—that is, their hous-
ing, furnishings, and clothes; Chapter 3 concentrates on their social
world—their families, friends, and neighbors—as well as their busi-
ness contacts and how they fit in as patrons and clients, borrowers
and lenders. Chapter 4 focuses on the captains and sailors aboard the
boats and ships delivering foodstuffs to Salvador; their wealth or lack
of it; their legal status as free, freed, or slaves; the types of craft they
sailed; their cargoes; their special skills; and the implications of their
geographical mobility. The grains market where all the corn, beans,
rice, and manioc meal entering Salvador were required to be placed
for sale fi rst is the subject of Chapter 5. After discussing the market’s
creation and its staff, I turn to the traders themselves—women and
men, Africans and Portuguese—before examining the stevedores and
porters employed there who successfully struck in early 1837 over
newly imposed requirements that they found demeaning. In Chap-
ter 6 I examine the cattle and meat trade and its three nodes: the
stockyard, slaughterhouse, and butcher shop. The social positions of
those involved and, especially, the tensions that surfaced in their in-
teractions—culminating in a strike of slaughtermen defeated through
the use of slaves—are the central points of Chapter 7.
Whereas Part 1 presents close-up portraits of many individual trad-
ers and their work, Part 2 broadens the perspective to encompass,
fi rst, a major political event—a war—and, then, more broadly still,
conflicting ideas on governmental policy regarding the food trade.
It begins with Chapter 8, which focuses on Brazil’s War of Indepen-
dence from Portugal (1822–1823), recounting how the crucial issue
for both the insurgents and the Portuguese was how to secure food
for one’s own forces while denying it to the enemy—a demanding
and complicated task. In Chapter 9 I turn to the ways by which these
events caused a shock to the social system: fi rst by provoking an
enormous physical dislocation of residents, and then by weakening
notions about hierarchy, even among those at the top, by enhancing
the power of ordinary sailors and unsettling the expected ties be-
tween slaves and masters. Chapter 10 backtracks chronologically to
examine policy prescriptions developed before the war as leaders in
Portugal and Brazil slowly moved toward a conviction that releasing
the market from government control would benefit everyone. Chap-
ter 11 traces a movement in the opposite direction after the war, as
the application of those liberal principles failed to produce abundance
and lower prices, leading instead by the 1850s to riot and rebellion.

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 in t r o d u c t io n 7

When I began this project, I expected to fi nd a stable and rigidly

hierarchical society fi rmly glued together by a paternalistic culture
in which protection was exchanged for obedience. But, as I focused
on individuals, most of whom were far from the top ranks, I found a
remarkable stretchiness to social categories, with much nuance, ne-
gotiation, and flexibility. Salvador was at one and the same time a
city of orders and the locus of competition, rational decision making,
fluidity, and opportunity. Nothing was immutable, nor was change
unidirectional.

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THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
 Ch a pter 1

the city on a bay

On t h e e aster n coast of Br a zil and facing westward across a

magnificent bay lies the city of Salvador or, to give it its full name,
São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Holy Savior of the Bay
of All Saints). The city’s name eloquently recalls the bay as it is its
most defi ning feature. Its shimmering waters could be seen to the
west from almost any vantage point in the city, and in 1780 its inhab-
itants received most of their foodstuffs, except meat, by boat. This
enormous bay reaches inland for some 27 miles. It measures 22 miles
at its widest point, and 7 miles across at its mouth (see Map 1.1). A
traveler in 1809 marveled that in it “the united shipping of the uni-
verse might rendezvous without confusion.” Because the city sits on
a peninsula jutting southward, separating the bay from the Atlantic,
its port is protected from ocean storms while its inhabitants enjoy
almost constant sea breezes, keeping the temperature relatively mild
despite being only 13 degrees south of the equator. Charles Darwin
wrote that “no person could imagine anything so beautiful as the an-
cient town of Bahia; it is fairly embosomed in a luxuriant wood of
beautiful trees and situated on a steep bank [that] overlooks the calm
waters of the great bay of All Saints.”1 The city’s topography and built
environment, its social makeup, and its culture provided the setting
for the lives of the people I write about in this book and their dealings
in the local food trade.

the cit y

Nothing struck an arriving visitor more immediately than the rug-

ged escarpment separating the “lower city” from the “upper” one.
Rising some 200 to 350 feet and broken by numerous crevices, it still
impresses anyone viewing the city from the water. In the 1840s an

Graham-final.indb 9 6/30/10 10:31:45 AM

 10 feed i n g t he ci t y

American visitor admired the two “extended and curving [horizon-

tal] lines of whitened buildings . . . separated by a broad, rich belt
of green, itself here and there dotted with houses.” An extremely
narrow space separated the escarpment’s base from the shore, not
more than two or three short blocks in width and in many places
not even that, although many blocks long and heavily populated.2
The plateau beyond the high cliff is wider, but gives way to a net-
work of streambeds and marshes (since canalized and drained) out of
which rise other stretches of high ground onto which the upper city
had gradually spread across a connecting neck of higher land. At this
eastern edge of the city, in the words of a visiting Frenchman, lay a
“lovely” elongated lake called the Dique, with “cold and limpid” wa-
ter, surrounded by palm trees. The land beyond it, despite many hills
and valleys, gradually declines eastward to the ocean (see Maps 1.2
and 1.3).3

Graham-final.indb 10 6/30/10 10:31:46 AM

Graham-final.indb 11 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM
Graham-final.indb 12 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM
 t h e c it y o n a b a y 13

figure 1.1. Panorama of the city, 1861 (see also frontispiece)

The bluff that physically separates the two parts of the city served
to divide it socially, an organization of urban space reminiscent of
other Portuguese cities around the globe. Describing the lower city
with only some exaggeration, a contemporary noted that “all the
large merchants reside there with their houses, goods, and offices,
as well as all the shopkeepers who live . . . where they have their
stores.” Canoes and boats were pulled up on its beach to unload food-
stuffs brought from across the bay. An intense trade in African slaves
turned the lower city into an extended slave market. Wharf-side ware-
houses with jetties served the export trade in sugar, tobacco, coffee,
cotton, and hides, and handled the great bundles, barrels, and casks
of merchandise arriving from Europe and even India, including tex-
tiles, iron goods, spices, wine, olive oil, and salted codfish. Custom-
ers found ship chandlers, hardware stores, watchmakers, suppliers of
heavy equipment for the plantations, dry goods stores, toy stores, and
insurance company offices—all in the lower city. This was a place of
bustle and chatter.4
The central part of the upper city housed the governor’s residence
and offices, the High Court, the city council chambers and jail, the
cathedral and the archbishop’s residence, the principal monastic in-
stitutions, and the fi ne houses of the wealthy. Although the upper

Graham-final.indb 13 6/30/10 10:31:49 AM

 14 feedi n g the ci t y

figure 1.2. The lower city as seen from above, 1860

city was not without its share of narrow, crooked streets, many were
wider and certainly less crowded than those in the lower one, with
several squares. In 1818 a public garden was created overlooking the
bay, providing a place for ladies and gentlemen to enjoy an evening
stroll. In colonial times the most prominent people—those whose de-
cisions ultimately affected everyone who traded in food—lived rela-
tively near the headquarters of political and religious institutions, in
an area delimited by the Carmelite monastery to the north (Carmo),
the Benedictine one to the south (São Bento), and the Franciscan to
the east (São Francisco), with the Santa Casa de Misericórdia—the
city’s most prestigious lay organization—at the center. Most of the
prosperous sugar planters maintained houses in this part of town, al-
lowing them to carry on urgent business as well as attend festivities
and political celebrations.5 By the fi rst quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the upper city was no longer so exclusive, and a sprinkling of
cafés, pharmacies, a few inns, and retail stores could be found there.
By 1839 it included the Universo Hotel near the Benedictine monas-
tery, with a billiard room over a grog shop. Its decline had begun.6

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 t h e c it y o n a b a y 15

The city eventually grew beyond these early borders. After 1808,
with the arrival in Brazil of the Portuguese court fleeing Napoleon’s
troops and the opening of the former colony’s ports to ships from any
friendly nation, foreign merchants, especially British ones, moved in.
They shunned the lower city, preferring to live in the more appeal-
ing, and sanitary, upper one, and they settled in the area south of
the center, especially the section of town toward Vitória church (see
Map 1.2). The most successful Portuguese merchants had long set the
example, and Vitória became an exclusive neighborhood. An Ameri-
can traveler, expressing his prejudices, commented that “on Vitória
hill may be found the fi nest gardens that Bahia affords, the most
enchanting walks, and the most ample shade. Here too are the best
houses, the best air, the best water, and the best society.”7
The less affluent middle class residents lived to the north of the
central area, reaching to the church of Santo Antônio além do Carmo
(Saint Anthony beyond the Carmelites). The neighborhood included
grocery stores, tailor shops, the houses of civil servants and profes-
sionals, and the town houses of local farmers. Another middle-class
neighborhood eventually grew up beyond a valley to the east, around
the Santa Ana church, the Desterro nunnery, and the military ex-
ercise grounds (Campo da Pólvora), leading to the parish of Nazaré.
Further east was a semirural section dotted with small farms and
orchards, where an increasing number of people with city occupa-
tions lived, served by an occasional general store. From there a road
descended southeast to a fishing village, Rio Vermelho, famous as a
redoubt of runaway slaves and the delinquent poor.8

the people

It is impossible to determine exactly how many people lived in Sal-

vador from the late eighteenth into the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury. As a crown official reported with some disgust in 1797, “no one
knows for sure because the city council does not have a list of in-
habitants.” Yet various censuses attempted to count the population,
and in a general way we can trace the growth in the city’s population
from the 39,209 reported in 1780 [1779] to 51,112 in 1807 and 112,641
in 1872.9 To put these numbers in perspective it is worth noting that
Mexico City, with 180,000 inhabitants in 1810, and Havana, with
85,000, consistently outdistanced Salvador. Rio de Janeiro, Buenos
Aires, and Santiago overtook it during the period covered here, but

Graham-final.indb 15 6/30/10 10:31:51 AM

 16 f eedi n g the ci t y

Table 1.1. Origin, Legal Status, and “Color” of the Population of Salvador, 1835

%
Mulat-
% % tos and %
Origin and Legal Status Number % Slave Free Blacks Whites

Africans
Slaves 17,325 26.5 26.5 26.5
Freed 4,615 7.1 7.1 7.1
Brazilians and Europeans
Slaves 10,175 15.5 15.5 15.5
Free and freed mulattos 14,885 22.7 22.7 22.7
and blacks
Free whites 18,500 28.2 28.2 28.2
Total 65,000 100.0 42.0 58.0 71.8 28.2

Source: João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia,
trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Note: Numbers and percentages are estimates.

all other cities in Latin America, including Lima, remained smaller.

As for port cities in the United States, the largest one was New York,
with just over 33,000 people in 1790.10
Contemporaries classified Salvadoreans by their color (black, mu-
latto, white), their legal status (slave or free), and their place of birth
(Africa, Portugal, Brazil). Every one of these categories was repre-
sented among those engaged in the food trade. Historian João José
Reis has roughly calculated the distribution of the city’s population
in 1835 by geographic origin, legal status, and “color,” as shown in
Table 1.1. A provincial president that year was not far wrong when he
reported with alarm that “indubitably the class of blacks immensely
outnumbers that of whites.” A German later said that “everyone who
runs, cries, works; everyone who transports and carries is black.”11 It
should be remembered, however, that whites were certainly not all
well off, and the ranks of the poor included many of them.
With two-fi fths of the population made up of slaves, it is not sur-
prising that contemporaries found them everywhere, and slaves fig-
ured prominently among those engaged in the food trade. Salvador
had long been a major market for imported slaves, especially from
around 1580 when its hinterland supplied the bulk of the world’s
sugar. Even when the Caribbean put up sharp competition in the later

Graham-final.indb 16 6/30/10 10:31:52 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 17

seventeenth century, Bahian sugar exports, although not increasing,

continued strong, and so did the planters’ demand for fresh slaves
from Africa. After the Haitian Revolution of 1791 the Brazilian sugar
economy boomed again, and slave traders avidly exchanged Brazil-
ian cane brandy and tobacco for still more Africans.12 Even though in
1831 Brazil officially yielded to international pressure and outlawed
slave trading, African slaves continued to be imported into Bahia in
large numbers, just not landed on the city’s docks. The prohibition
on the importation of slaves was only sporadically and inadequately
enforced until 1850, when it was defi nitively forbidden. Estimates of
the number imported from 1786 to 1850 (see Table 1.2) should be un-
derstood as more suggestive than precise.13 Besides being the entrepôt

Table 1.2. Estimated Number of Slaves Imported into Bahia,

1786–1850

Dates Total Imports Yearly Average

1786–1790 20,300 4,060

1791–1795 34,300 6,860
1796–1800 36,200 7,240
1801–1805 36,300 7,260
1806–1810 39,100 7,720
1811–1815 36,400 7,280
1816–1820 34,300 6,860
1821–1825 23,700 4,740
1826–1830 47,900 9,580
1831–1835 16,700 3,340
1836–1840 15,800 3,160
1841–1845 21,100 4,220
1846–1850 45,000 9,000
Total 407,100 6,263

Source: David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the

Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford, 1987), pp. 243–245.
These totals were based on work then in progress and subsequently
published by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson,
and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database
on CD-ROM (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Subsequent revisions may increase the numbers in this table; see
David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave
Trade: A Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser., 58,
no. 1 (January 2001): Table 3.

Graham-final.indb 17 6/30/10 10:31:52 AM

 18 feedi n g the ci t y

for slaves destined to work the farms and plantations of the interior
or be transshipped to other captaincies, Salvador itself was the fi nal
destination for many. In a study of hundreds of urban estate invento-
ries dated between 1811 and 1860, one scholar fi nds the African-born
accounting for 62 percent of the city’s slaves.14
Although I refer to these slaves as “African,” they surely did not
consider themselves as forming a single group, and their buyers
recognized broad ethnic differences among them. Before the 1780s,
thousands had come from the Bantu-speaking interior areas of An-
gola and the Congo, as they would again after 1820. In the interval,
though, most came from the lands around the Bight of Benin. They
were sometimes called “Mina slaves” because they had been pur-
chased from the area near the fort of Elmina on the Guinea coast or,
with equal imprecision, “Guinea slaves.” The Yoruba speakers were
usually called Nagôs, and those who spoke Gbe\Ewé\Fon were called
Jeje. These two groups formed more than half the slaves imported
in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
the nineteenth, although there were a significant number of Hausa,
called Ussá, among them too. Salvador at this time received a far
greater proportion of its African slaves from a single region than any
other slave city of the Atlantic World outside of Brazil.15 And, as ur-
ban slaves, they frequently crossed paths with others from the same
area, unlike slaves on scattered plantations. As slaves together in a
foreign place, they readily extended the boundaries of their identity,
making it more inclusive and fi nding allies where they once would
have seen only enemies.16 Language formed a distinctive bond, and
non-Africans in Bahia sometimes remarked on how slaves conversed
with each other without using Portuguese.17 With the passage of time
in a country where they were constantly lumped together as “Afri-
cans,” some may have even begun to think of themselves as such or
to join with the Brazilian-born to adopt a racial and, later still, a class
identity.
Ownership of slaves was pervasive. Even former slaves, especially
women, owned slaves, not to mention those owned by many people
of very modest means who supplemented their meager income by
renting out their slaves or allowing them to fi nd their own work.18
Almost no white household seems to have got along without slaves,
not only for their labor but as proof of their owner’s social position. It
was a sign of “extreme poverty,” said a Brazilian lawyer, not to own
a slave, and one would suffer “any inconvenience” rather than that.

Graham-final.indb 18 6/30/10 10:31:53 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 19

A tax official questioned the accuracy of a postmortem estate inven-

tory, saying, “It is noteworthy that the deceased did not own a single
slave, and it seems absolutely necessary that the executor provide an
explanation on this matter.”19
The city also included a large number of former slaves, many of
them African-born, as well as free-born blacks. More than half of the
freed Africans were women (as were most of the owners who freed
them), and the bulk of freed women were of childbearing age. Their
children were born free.20 As the custom of freeing slaves was of long
standing, over the course of two and a half centuries thousands and
thousands of non-whites had been born free. Already in 1775 free-
born or freed persons of color made up nearly 24 percent of Salvador’s
population, making all the more credible the estimate in Table 1.1
that by 1835 they accounted for nearly 30 percent.21

the work

The city depended on the work of slaves, freedmen and freed women
(both Brazilian and African), and the free but poor descendants of
Africans. They were essential if others were to live as they thought
fit. They carried water from the fourteen public fountains, especially
from the two fountains with the best water at the extreme northern
and southern edges of the city.22 They cleaned the houses and public
buildings, washed the clothes, and removed the garbage and sewage.
They cooked the food and distributed provisions, delivering manioc
meal and meat to households and selling fresh fruit and vegetables
door-to-door.
Given its topography, the city relied on blacks to transport al-
most everything. One-fi fth of the streets in Salvador were steep
streets known as ladeiras, indicating the verticality of any locomo-
tion within the city. Moving things between the lower and upper cit-
ies presented a particularly daunting challenge. The “rocky escarp-
ment . . . rises almost perpendicularly [with] inaccessible precipices
that make going up impractical except by round-about ladeiras,” so
streets from the lower to the upper parts of the city “zigzag . . . along
ravines” or “slant across an almost perpendicular bluff.” They were
all too steep, narrow, and sinuous for wheeled vehicles and proved
difficult even for horses and mules, especially when the slightest rain
could produce “torrents” that dug deep trenches across them.23
Self-hired slaves and freed blacks, most of them African, made the

Graham-final.indb 19 6/30/10 10:31:53 AM

 20 feed i n g t he ci t y

city’s commercial life possible. As one resident recalled, “they moved

everything: chests, bales, large and small casks, furniture, construc-
tion materials.” He could have mentioned foodstuffs as well. Using
chains or ropes, they would attach heavy barrels, chests, or boxes to a
long thick pole and, with some in front and others in the rear, lift the
pole onto their shoulders and proceed chanting through the streets.
Some bore “huge calluses on their shoulders . . . produced by the pres-
sure of the poles.”24 A Frenchman reported that groups of these men,
often from the same region in Africa, worked together, “forming a
kind of fraternity”; they “met at the corners of certain streets, await-
ing the moment of being hired,” appropriating this bit of public space
for themselves. Such groups would choose captains to deal with po-
tential customers and summon them for particular jobs. They deter-
mined the tasks and how to handle them, and, by setting their own
rules, avoided any discipline imposed by others.25 And it was black
people, or at least those at the lower ranks of society, who did the car-
rying. Persons of higher status refused to carry even a small package
through the streets.26

crossing boundaries

The variety and complexity of social relations in late eighteenth- and

early nineteenth-century Salvador are remarkable. At fi rst glance it
appears to have been a typical society of orders with castes, corpo-
rations, and brotherhoods layered one atop another or arranged side
by side in multiple hierarchies. And indeed, most people seem to
have accepted that some, merely by the circumstances of their birth,
merited the higher status they enjoyed, and that hierarchical rela-
tionships are natural, even immutable. They did not greatly admire
upward mobility or speak of equality as a positive good. Yet the paper-
thin layers of this society allowed some people to move up or down
without challenging the structure’s overall legitimacy. Imagine an
individual as flowing like water through cracks in limestone strata,
without visibly eroding their solidity and only subtly and gradually
creating new layers or remaking old ones. Slaves became free without
endangering the institution of slavery. Countless persons of African
descent occupied positions far above slaves and even poor whites, yet
Salvadoreans continued to pay attention to variations of skin color
in locating people along a continuum of statuses. For some, newly
acquired wealth led to honors, titles, or public offices despite mod-

Graham-final.indb 20 6/30/10 10:31:54 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 21

est beginnings. In any case, the top-down ordering of society could

not be rigorously enforced on all individuals toward the bottom, if
only because of their sheer numbers. Although the ranking principle
sometimes penetrated to the lowest rungs, and did so brutally and
without leniency, most of the time it stood out more visibly at higher
levels. In the food trade, which is my concern here, the daily transac-
tions between hundreds of participants made it utterly impossible to
enforce discipline and deference rigidly. The social structure’s flex-
ibility was the secret of its longevity.
The practice of allowing, even encouraging, slaves to fi nd their
own work for wages displays the adaptability of the system and the
porosity of the boundaries that separated the free from the enslaved.
These slaves, known as ao ganho (or ganhadores), found their own
customers and set their own wages, and usually even lived indepen-
dently. They would turn in a set amount of cash to their owners at
regular intervals and keep the surplus, a practice much more com-
mon in Brazil than elsewhere in the Atlantic World.27 This type of
arrangement derived from two practical considerations. Relatively
few free immigrants came to Salvador compared to other cities of the
Atlantic World, and it was generally unprofitable to supervise and ad-
minister slaves constantly in an urban setting. For that matter, slave
owners in any city would be more likely to rely on persuasion and
incentives because so much of the work required skill and enterprise
rather than routine physical exertion. In such a setting too much
oversight or violence on the part of the owner as a way of enforcing
discipline could prove self-defeating.28
Yet even when they purchased their freedom, the bargain was one-
sided. Manumission was a concession on the part of owners, granted
to the obedient and loyal from whom gratitude was to be expected.
Still, at the time of a master’s death, when a probate judge divided
property among the heirs, slaves were generally considered to have
the right, although no law required it, to be granted their freedom if
they offered a token amount beyond their appraised value.29 The line
between slavery and freedom was blurred and permeable.
Although blacks, whether born free or freed, likely remained poor,
not all did. Some African-born former slaves who were engaged in
the food trade acquired substantial property and became relatively
prosperous. They often bought slaves of their own, sometimes per-
haps to display clearly their new status. The African Ignacio José da
Silva purchased his freedom and became a baker. According to the

Graham-final.indb 21 6/30/10 10:31:54 AM

 22 feed i n g t he ci t y

will he prepared in 1813, he freed his eight adult slaves and two of
their children, but by the time of his death four years later he had
acquired some more. Among his slaves he counted two male bakers,
one apprentice baker, one female who “sold bread,” and another who
kneaded bread. His other property included his one-story stone house
and, in its walled, tiled patio, his bread-making oven. 30
Skin color remained an important classificatory element even for
those who were born free, but not an essential and determining one.
The relative acceptance of mulattos as compared to other areas of the
Americas elicited much comment from travelers. They “are received
in society and frequently become very competent civil servants
whether in administration or the magistracy.” Some were ordained
as priests and commissioned as officers in the militia. 31 Using partial
manuscript censuses and other data from several parishes, historian
Anna Amélia Vieira Nascimento has estimated that in 1855 free mu-
lattos accounted for slightly more than a quarter of the city’s popula-
tion; if mulatto slaves and former slaves were included, their propor-
tion reached 29 percent. 32
Yet Salvador was hardly characterized by racial harmony. Slaves,
free Africans, and blacks had every reason to question their lot and
push against those of higher rank, who could easily feel threatened
by those below. Some Brazilian whites thought all blacks and mulat-
tos, whether slave or free, posed a danger to society. A group of mer-
chants in Salvador, probably Portuguese, reported with alarm in 1814
that “one sees gatherings of blacks in the street at night . . . talking
in their tongues about whatever they please.” Was their fear justi-
fied? Authorities in 1798 linked the appearance of handbills urging a
republican revolution and the abolition of slavery to a small group of
mulatto soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and artisans, along with
some slaves.33 Black conspiracies, revolts, and rumors of revolts, even
if unfounded, peppered the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century.34
Whites’ fear greatly increased after the January 1835 “Malê” re-
bellion of Africans, mainly freedmen, led by Muslim teachers and
planned to coincide with a major Catholic festival, when others would
not be paying attention. The police put it down within hours, perhaps
because, provoked by its discovery, the uprising began a day earlier
than planned, but the questioning of prisoners revealed unsuspected
cohesion among Africans and extensive networks of communication
into the countryside. It involved hundreds of blacks, and the authori-
ties prosecuted more than five hundred of them, executing some and

Graham-final.indb 22 6/30/10 10:31:55 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 23

sentencing others to hard labor. Outside Haiti, this was the largest
black rebellion to occur in the Americas. Not surprisingly, whites
were on edge for years afterwards. As a British consul put it in 1847,
“the white population are ever kept in a state of alarm by the fear of a
rising of the slaves.”35
In this culture of rank and favor, there was much room for negotia-
tion. Accepting the notion of a social pyramid as fair and normal did
not mean a person was content with his or her own position within it,
or did not question another’s claim to superiority. Those below seized
any opportunity to expand the orbit of their self-determination, just
as those above tried to augment their decision-making power. Every-
one was taken up in a constant process of mutual, if unequal, ex-
change, adopting varied strategies for coping with day-to-day chal-
lenges to one’s position. Status was in play and could be lost as well
as gained. To protect it required reassertion on an almost daily basis.
Slaves, free blacks, and the poor generally, despite being feared
and suffering discrimination and oppression, nonetheless exercised
a surprising degree of autonomy. Many found pride, self-respect, and
dignity in their work, opening avenues for self-assertion. Some oc-
cupations required geographic mobility, with people wandering the
city or traversing the bay, free of immediate supervision and able to
enjoy a certain independence. Being street vendors, butchers, or sail-
ors required skills and specialized knowledge, trading acumen, an
ability to size up those with whom they dealt, a willingness to take
risks, and keen business judgment, qualities that could breed self-
confidence and resilience. The restrictions present in a hierarchical
society floated above those who traded in food; although present and
taken for granted, they did not truly impinge on traders’ daily lives
and the vitality and energy of their entrepreneurship.
Women also found ways to assert themselves, and this was espe-
cially true for those engaged in petty trade. By law, all property was
held jointly by husband and wife unless there was a specific prenup-
tial agreement. At the death of a spouse the survivor kept half the
estate. Two-thirds of the property belonging to each deceased spouse
(eventually four-sixths of the total) had to be divided equally among
the children, male and female alike, leaving only the remainder to be
willed to a favorite. In terms of property rights guaranteed to women,
Brazil stood out when compared to most of Europe and Anglo-
America at that time.36 Women often acted independently. Some re-
mained single and, after reaching their majority, administered their

Graham-final.indb 23 6/30/10 10:31:55 AM

 24 feedi n g the ci t y

property freely. Some had their own businesses, lived independently,

bore children out of wedlock, and headed large households of chil-
dren and slaves. Women owned male slaves and hired free men, ex-
erting substantial authority. Some dealt with men in their business,
bargained with them evenly, and were fi rmly successful. Still, hus-
bands administered the family’s property (short of selling or mortgag-
ing it). Men monopolized the professions and most trades. They exer-
cised civil and military command and received more education than
women. Probate judges usually appointed men to be the guardians of
children left fatherless, and this happened even when a deceased man
had specified in his will that he wished his wife to act in this capac-
ity.37 So men obviously wielded more clout, but women were far from
powerless or ignored.

sacred worlds

Religious practice and performance—Christian, Muslim, and Afro-

Brazilian—both gathered people of various stations and fostered
distinct and conflictual identities with potentially disruptive and
destabilizing effects. The large number of magnificent colonial-era
churches in Salvador bear witness to a widespread Christian religios-
ity. On feast days, with the light of hundreds of candles on silver can-
dlesticks reflecting off the gold-leaf-encrusted walls onto elaborate
carved and polished woodwork and the baroque splendor of saints’
images, all enhanced by music commissioned from local composers
or imported from Europe, worshipers of all classes heard Mass sung.38
The frequency of Catholic objects in estate inventories reveals the or-
dinary place of religion in everyday life: rosaries, crucifi xes, crosses,
and saints’ images were common even in extremely modest house-
holds. Virtually every household had an oratório, a freestanding pri-
vate altar or a niche in the corner of a room, or, more commonly, a
small, upright traveling chest containing the image of Christ or of
a saint. An oratório could also be an entire chapel: in 1792 Inocên-
cio José da Costa, a wealthy Portuguese merchant, had been mar-
ried “in the oratório at my piece of land in Barris behind the Piedade
church.”39
Nearly everyone, regardless of class or color, belonged to a lay
confraternity, or irmandade. These sodalities, devoted to honoring a
particular saint, did charitable work, promised a properly attended
funeral for the deceased member, and, most important, guaranteed

Graham-final.indb 24 6/30/10 10:31:56 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 25

the saying of masses for his or her soul after death. Joaquina Maria de
Santana, a poor white street vendor, made a point of noting that she
belonged to the very proper confraternity of the Holiest Sacrament in
the church of Santa Ana, where she wished to be buried. One mulatto
fisherman belonged to eight sodalities. The immensely rich Inocên-
cio José da Costa also listed his membership in several.40 Besides the
preeminent Santa Casa de Misericórdia (whose tower appears at the
upper left in Figure 1.1), particularly prestigious were the Third (or
lay) Orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites. Because
property was willed to these orders over time, they became increas-
ingly opulent, able to lend money and rent out property.41 Since the
sixteenth century, sodalities had also provided a means for people of
color throughout Brazil—often from particular, though broadly de-
fi ned, ethnic groups in Africa—to forge solidarity. Like their white
counterparts, black and mulatto sodality members venerated a spe-
cific saint and performed charitable acts, but these organizations also
functioned as mutual aid societies. Several set up funds to purchase
the freedom of enslaved members.42 Sodalities usually had their seat
in an established church with a side-chapel dedicated to “their” saint.
In one case, however, a black sodality raised enough funds to build its
own church, Nossa Senhora do Rosário às Portas do Carmo (Our Lady
of the Rosary at the Carmelite Gate—see Fig. 3.1). Over the course of
the nineteenth century, these sodalities gradually lost their place as
central organizing institutions, at least for freed slaves (see Table 1.3).
But, for most of the period examined in this book, they offered every-
one the opportunity to extend personal connections beyond the reach
of family and neighborhood.
If city residents’ behavior did not always conform to the precepts
of Christianity as understood then or now, that does not lessen the
degree to which they believed in the veracity of Christian teaching,
the existence of a spiritual realm, the certainty of an afterlife, the
intercessory power of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic saints, and
the ultimate power of God to rule men’s fate. This placed God at the
highest point in an elaborate edifice, with authority flowing down-
ward from him to king and subject, from archbishop to priest and
worshiper, from husband to wife and child, and from household head
to slave.
But not all of the city’s residents were Christian. Well over half of
the slaves imported into Salvador sailed from the west coast of Af-
rica, brought from the interior by African captors. Whether Yoruba

Graham-final.indb 25 6/30/10 10:31:56 AM

 26 feedi n g the ci t y

Table 1.3. Membership in Sodalities Among Freed Slaves by Period and Gender
as Revealed in 482 Estate Inventories

Period Gender Belonged Did Not Total

1790–1830
Male 58 16 74
Female 66 15 81
Total 124 31 155
% 80 20 100
1830–1850
Male 19 19 38
Female 38 28 66
Total 57 47 104
% 55 45 100
1850–1890
Male 5 123 128
Female 15 80 95
Total 20 203 223
% 9 91 100

Source: Based on Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, O liberto: O seu mundo e os outros (Salva-
dor, 1790–1890), Baianada, no. 7 (São Paulo and Brasília: Corrupia and CNPq, 1988), p. 84.

or Gbe\Ewé\Fon or Hausa, a significant proportion of them were Mus-

lims—the clerics among them more literate in Arabic than many Bra-
zilian masters were in Portuguese. An English missionary in Salva-
dor observed that when being rowed back to his ship from the shore
in November 1805, “it was the commencement of the Hegyra and our
Mahomedan rowers, dressed in white, were singing hymns all the
way to the honour of Mahomet.” The testimony presented at the trial
of participants in the African rebellion of January 1835 revealed the
highly respected place of teachers and religious leaders within this
community, men born in Africa who held much authority over their
fellow religionists.43 And it is safe to assume that these Muslims saw
themselves and were seen by others as different and separate, with
their own dietary rules, their own prayers, their own theology. With
the end of the slave trade in 1850, the regular arrival of new Muslim
leaders ended, and their influence petered out.
Polytheistic religions, derived especially from Africa, coexisted
more easily with Christianity than did monotheistic Islam. Devo-

Graham-final.indb 26 6/30/10 10:31:56 AM

 t h e c it y o n a b a y 27

tion to spirits and spiritual forces—including those of one’s real or

imagined ancestors, or others associated with natural phenomena
such as the sun, moon, trees, rocks, lightning, and thunder—char-
acterized Indian and African peoples and influenced many in Salva-
dor, including whites. Communal ceremonies combined traditions
drawn from more than one African ethnicity. Marked by drumming,
call-and-response singing, and drawn-out dances, rituals known as
candomblés culminated in trances as a spirit “descended” and pos-
sessed the worshiper, transporting him or her to another level of be-
ing. The experience could resolve confl ict and restore interpersonal
balance, diminish anxiety, lead to a perfect sense of inner peace, de-
crease stress, or alleviate the fear of death. These ceremonies were
directed by priests or, more often, priestesses who commanded the
service with authority and great knowledge of the spiritual realm.
The beads around their necks, the clothes they wore, even their hair-
styles signaled authority, power, and direct access to the spirit world.
Leaders were assisted by others: drummers, always male, and spiri-
tual “daughters” and “sons” who gathered herbs, slaughtered sacrifi-
cial animals, and performed ritual ceremonies to attract holiness.44
Regardless of their particular faiths, religion wove its way through
every aspect of daily life for everyone, including street vendors and
storekeepers, butchers and bakers. As was true in much of the rest of
the world at that time, little conceptual space separated the secular
from the holy. Science had yet to make much impact on the world-
view of most people, whether educated or not, and folk-Catholicism,
folk-Islam, and African-derived polytheism all shared the belief that
worshipers could control natural phenomena by appealing for divine
intervention. Those who referred to certain practices as “magic”
nevertheless accepted the potential efficacy of the occult, attribut-
ing its force to the work of the devil and greatly fearing the power of
his agents.45 For protection, virtually everyone carried an amulet or
talisman. Catholics, men and women, wore bentinhos, described by
a British traveler as “printed prayers folded in a small compass and
sewn in a silken pad which is ornamented on the outside with a pic-
ture of the Virgin or some saint, or embroidered with emblems; they
are worn double, one hanging at the back and the other at the breast.”
Other scapulars, made of gold and bearing a saint’s image, were also
common among female street vendors.46 Muslims copied short texts
from the Koran, sometimes garbled, and folded these bits of paper
into small clay or wooden tubes strung on a necklace. Polytheists

Graham-final.indb 27 6/30/10 10:31:57 AM

 28 f eed i n g t he ci t y

wore miniature symbols of their deities worked in silver and attached

by a large pin (a balangandã) at the waistband of a skirt or made of
wood, silver, or gold and worn as necklaces. Blacks especially carried
small sewn purses around their neck fi lled with powdered potions,
herbs, and Catholic paraphernalia—prayers, bits of altar stone, conse-
crated wafers—to ward off evil or secure some desired end.47 By such
means, to borrow from the historian Peter Brown describing another
culture, did the people “challenge heaven to come down to those who
wore them.”48

governing for the people

Two government agencies impinged directly on the lives of those

engaged in the food business: the city council and the office of the
governor-general of the captaincy or president of the subsequent prov-
ince. In colonial times city council members were elected by and
from among the “good men,” whom the historian Charles Boxer char-
acterizes as “the respectable—and respected.” Contemporaries knew
without doubt who fit that description, leaving historians frustrated
in their attempt to discover their defi ning qualities.49 Not surpris-
ingly 40 percent of the Salvador council members from 1780 to 1821
had close links to the sugar industry, and another 20 percent con-
sisted of international merchants. Workers had no direct voice. Af-
ter Brazil became independent, a surprisingly broad electorate chose
the council members, and the council’s composition consequently
changed, although the poor still did not take office. One historian has
examined the lives of forty-four members who held office between
1840 and 1872. She found that twenty were either doctors or lawyers,
seven were civil servants, four were described simply as real estate
owners, one was a priest, one a military officer, and only three were
merchants, leaving eight whose professions could not be identified.50
City councils wielded significant authority. No separation of pow-
ers existed in colonial times, and councils were legislative and ad-
ministrative bodies as well as appellate courts for minor cases. Both
before and after Brazil’s separation from Portugal, their jurisdic-
tion extended far beyond the urban centers, in effect making them
“county” councils. They appointed a number of officers, including
tax collectors, inspectors of weights and measures, petty judges who
imposed fi nes for violations of city ordinances, and the personnel of
the municipal slaughterhouse. City councils had extensive responsi-

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 t h e c it y o n a b a y 29

bilities with regard to the food trade, as they were responsible for see-
ing to it that food was available in sufficient quality at an affordable
price.
The governor or president, appointed from Lisbon or, later, from
Rio de Janeiro, could and often did overrule the council. After inde-
pendence, national legislation, especially a law of 1828 and a major
constitutional amendment of 1834, weakened city councils to allow
the centrally appointed provincial president even greater power over
the municipality. Few presidents, however, went as far as José Egídio
Gordilho de Barbuda, the Visconde de Camamu, a man of military
background who in 1829 castigated the city council for having said
it would “‘comply with [the president’s] request’”; he told them that
“the provincial president does not request, but rather orders, and you
shall simply obey his orders.” Other governors acted with more cir-
cumspection, perhaps recalling that an unknown assailant had shot
and killed the Visconde de Camamu while still in office.51 The real-
ity, nevertheless, remained much as he described it. Councils exer-
cised power within the space granted to them by provincial execu-
tives. On the other hand, because provincial presidents often stayed
in office only a few months before being replaced by someone new to
the scene, the city council could exercise autonomy through procras-
tination and perseverance.
The authority of both governor and city council rested ultimately
on their ability to ensure the well-being of “the People.” The notion
that those above had a responsibility toward those below was deeply
ingrained in the mentality of Salvador’s inhabitants and the authori-
ties. Apart from God, the king or emperor headed the entire edifice,
and he was believed to be as solicitous regarding the welfare of his
people as any father would be for members of his family. In 1807 Sal-
vador’s city council captured the prevailing spirit in referring to the
“paternal zeal with which [the ruler] promotes the prosperity of his
loyal vassals.” In an independent Brazil, a provincial president later
stressed that he undertook certain measures “so that the Imperial
Government will always appear as the Father of the People [Pai dos
Povos].”52

For all those who supplied Salvador with food, the city provided
context. Its topography, with a lower and upper city, mirrored its so-
cial arrangement. Its visual, built environment shaped their sense

Graham-final.indb 29 6/30/10 10:31:58 AM

 30 feed i n g t he ci t y

of place. They were ranked and ranked themselves within a strati-

fied world, even as they sought to advance their social position.
More than that, the seemingly neat lines dividing one group from
another were in fact permeable, blurry, always shifting. The status
differences I use here—black/white, rich/poor, Catholic/Muslim/poly-
theistic, African/Brazilian/Portuguese, slave/free, male/female—all
had exceptions that stretched and bent the categories. Flexible rela-
tions informed and shaped their culture and were shaped by it. On
the one hand, there was a general understanding of what the rules
were, even if some people regarded them differently, evading or sub-
verting them. Yet there were common customs, common moral as-
sumptions, and common notions about the world that threaded their
way through the whole society. People often differed as to what was
right and just, but on the whole, broadly acknowledged notions about
what was “normal” and “reasonable” tied them together and contrib-
uted to cohesion.
Commerce in foodstuffs offers a lens through which we can exam-
ine more closely the workings of a ranked society, the connections
and conflicts across strata, the search for identity, the contestation of
place, and the vitality of commercial enterprise. In trade, social di-
visions become blurred, and interdependence emerges as a constant.
Here is hierarchy in motion: more complex, more nuanced, more con-
tingent on circumstance than any generalization can possibly con-
vey. This commerce is worth examining in some detail.

Graham-final.indb 30 6/30/10 10:31:58 AM

 Pa rt I

getting and selling food

Graham-final.indb 31 6/30/10 10:31:59 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
 Ch a pter 2

from streets and doorways

A na de São José da T r in da de took out a license in 1807 for her-

self and three of her slaves to sell foodstuffs door-to-door in Salvador
or to set up a stall at a corner or square. She died in 1823, and when
her will was opened, readers discovered many things that may not
have surprised them, but surprise us. That she was illiterate is only
to be expected, for she was born in West Africa and brought to Bra-
zil on a slaving ship at an early but unspecified age. Upon arrival in
Salvador she was sold as part of a larger group, “in a lot,” and put to
work selling food on the street for her mistress. She managed eventu-
ally to buy her own freedom in exchange for a newly arrived female
slave and a substantial sum in cash. She reported that she kept her
manumission letter with her at all times. Although, as she said, “I
remained unmarried,” she had had five children, three sons who had
died and two daughters who were still alive. We do not know how
old she was at her death, but we know that her granddaughter was
already married.1
This former slave left a three-story house built of dressed stone
with plastered interior walls and glass windows, the ground floor of
which she rented out as a store. She owned her land free and clear.
She also owned nine slaves, two of whom she still sent out each day
to sell food “on the street,” including one described as “young and
currently pregnant.” She conditionally freed one female slave, stipu-
lating that the woman should pay a certain amount to Ana’s grand-
daughter over time to fully secure her freedom. She freed outright
another slave, already old, her body covered with open sores. Three
of her slaves were children, two of whom she gave to her daughters,
freeing the other one. Her rich collection of gold jewelry included

Graham-final.indb 33 6/30/10 10:32:00 AM

 34 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

crucifi xes, scapulars, rosaries—one with seven “Our Fathers” and

seventy “Hail Marys”—a reliquary, and many “heavy gold” chains,
as well as cuff links and two golden shoe buckles. She also owned a
diadem with half-moon mirrors, a pair of earrings set with aquama-
rines and twelve embedded diamonds, a topaz ring, and a ring with
ten small “rose diamonds.” Silver objects included a crucifi x showing
Christ encircled with rays displaying his title and showing the nails
with which he was crucified; she also had a silver fork, spoon, and
pitcher with saucer. A slave trader who had borrowed money from her
and also pawned gold and silver items was still in debt to her at the
time she made her will. On the other hand, she “owed no one any-
thing.” The total value of her estate was impressive, and I use it as a
benchmark in evaluating the wealth of others who appear in this and
later chapters. It makes her a middle-class householder. Ana de São
José da Trindade had moved from being a slave to being a poor freed-
woman and then a woman of property and a slaveowner. She was not
alone, for upward mobility was certainly not restricted to whites nor
to men.2
Grocers, like street vendors, demonstrated entrepreneurial skill in
supplying the city of Salvador with food. Most arrived from Portugal
with little capital and made their way in a new setting as best they
could. Some did poorly. Ana de São José da Trindade probably noticed
that many of them had less property than she. Others, however, can
be placed in the upper class. Antônio José Pereira Arouca arrived
from Portugal at age twenty-two. When his fi rst wife died, after hav-
ing borne several children, he was in fi nancial straits, owing more
than he owned. But by the time of his own death in 1825 he owned
a sugar plantation, a manioc farm, a vessel that brought foodstuffs
to the city from the southern coast of Bahia, and three large houses
in Salvador. Two of them were somehow conjoined. Built on sloping
ground in the closely packed lower city, a three-story house faced an
interior street and included a dry goods store at ground level. Beneath
it was another one, “with a view toward the sea.” It included a gro-
cery store “and below it a warehouse with entrance from the sea.”
His land extended “at the back to the sea and is walled on two sides
[and leads to] a stone wharf to resist the waves.” The frontage of the
property measured only twenty-two feet, but it obviously extended a
good distance toward and into the bay, providing valuable direct ac-
cess from his boat to his stores.3

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 35

street vendors

In the absence of a central market place and building—not created

until the 1850s and then still deemed seriously inadequate—house-
holders in Salvador routinely relied on street vendors to supply their
food.4 Most of these vendors, in contrast to the owners of general
stores, were women, especially women of color. Foreign observers
often remarked on Salvador’s hawkers and their colorful clothes,
attention-getting cries, and exotic goods for sale. Prince Maximilian,
of later fame in Mexico, commented in 1860 on the “black people
passing through the streets with baskets full of the most splendid
fruit, always carrying it for sale as they go.” But to those who lived in
Salvador, they were simply part of everyday life, hardly worth notic-
ing. They had been present in Salvador for at least two centuries and
in Lisbon before that.5 And in West and Central Africa, women had
long dominated trade and were renowned market vendors.6
Until 1821 the city required all street vendors to be licensed. There
was no charge, and a person could secure such a license for oneself,
for one’s slaves, or for both. Tellingly, four female slaves took out li-
censes for themselves. I examined 843 licenses issued in the months
of January 1789, 1807, and 1819, accounting for 977 street vendors.7
The register noted that 106 of those requesting licenses were persons
of color, leaving the race of the remainder unspecified. Census data
indicate positively that some vendors were white. Although Africans
were especially prominent among vendors, there were many cre-
oles—that is, blacks born in Brazil. By adding the 106 persons of color
to the 382 slaves for whom their owners secured licenses, I conclude
that nearly half of all vendors were black or mulatto (488 of the 977),
mostly women. Among the primary licensees, women were more
likely than men to be vendors themselves (70 percent of the women
compared to 48 percent of the men). Among the 382 slaves who were
sent out on the street, only four were men. So for the larger sample of
977 vendors, 866, or 89 percent, were women.
These women worked according to a variety of arrangements.
Most often they were self-hired and traded on their own accounts.
The slave woman Genoveva paid her mistress 200 réis per day in
1830 (an amount equivalent to the price of three pounds of meat).
Many owners rented their slaves to others, who then sent them out
with goods for sale. Manoel José Dias lived entirely from the rental

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 36 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

figure 2.1. Female street vendor, ca. 1776–1800

of his three houses and his seven slaves, three females and four
males, all engaged in “self-hired selling on the street.”8 Cloistered
nuns owned female slaves who sold in this way, and 5 percent of the
primary licensees who were women preceded their names with the
word “Dona,” indicating some claim to status.9 Some street vendors
might specialize in certain products, and others not. Ludovica, for
example, “sold milk [only] until 8 o’clock in the morning . . . and
Maria only sold fruit 11 days in the month of August and 13 in Sep-

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 37

tember . . . and then only ’till mid-day, for from this time on they sell
sweets.”10
A contemporary complained that the streets of Salvador were “jam
packed with black female vendors . . . who impede the public’s use.”
Hundreds of them went door-to-door, criss-crossing the street, offer-
ing their goods for sale, searching for buyers, although some vendors,
like Ludovica, could sell their goods rapidly because they had regular
customers waiting to buy from them.11 The vendors’ melodious cries
signaled the moment when a housewife would send her house ser-
vant, probably a slave woman, out to the street to bargain on price
and quality. Today a leisurely Sunday morning stroll with a few stops
takes fi fty minutes from Santo Antônio além do Carmo south to
Campo Grande, covering the principal part of the city as it existed in
the late eighteenth century (see Map 1.3). This trajectory does not in-
clude moving out to Santa Ana or the neighborhood of Vitória, built
up by 1860. There were few paved sidewalks or streets then. Dust or
mud predominated. Where it existed, irregular stone paving formed a
“V” toward the center of the street “along which flowed the rain wa-
ter.” Rain water and much else: an 1852 traveler described the streets
as “irregular, ill-paved, generally narrow, and having a gutter in the
middle into which is commonly cast the filth and offal of the adjacent
dwellings.” Since “the houses are unprovided with water-closets,” he
added, the alleys served as “temples of Cloacina [Goddess of Sewers].”
This is where a street vendor walked, stopping to sell, then rebalanc-
ing her load before heading off to another customer.12
They typically carried their goods on their heads in baskets or
pots, on trays, or, by 1860, in glass-enclosed cases to keep dust and
flies away from their goods, but they were not all constantly am-
bulatory. Those who sold milk had to lug heavy tin milk cans, two
of them probably suspended from each end of a pole.13 It was heavy
work. Not surprisingly, then, many vendors displayed their goods on
a mat or stand to wait for customers to fi nd them. Prince Maximil-
ian spotted “many young damsels seated in rows by the wall” sell-
ing “eatables.” At one time sales of fresh meat, fish, and fowl along a
posh Vitória boulevard were allowed only “on the heads of vendors”
because residents did not want their transit through the streets im-
peded by shop stalls or mats spread out on the ground.14 To the de-
spair of those who loved order, sellers even placed their mats at the
handsome entryway to the municipal council’s chambers, alongside
many of the city’s beggars. Alternatively, street vendors sometimes

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 38 gett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

figure 2.2. Male street vendor, 1960

sat on stools or benches behind portable tables, frequently gathering

at the same location. Sometimes they placed their small stands right
in the street; one vendor who did so had a horse and rider run smack
into her, scattering her rice.15
By 1799 there were also more permanent wooden structures called

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 39

quitandas, “where many black women congregate[d] to sell every-

thing they bring.” These were placed at three locations, one in the
lower city, one on the central Terreiro de Jesus square, and one by the
more southerly São Bento church, where the city council had in 1790
built some stalls for rent to the “female vendors of fish and other edi-
bles.” Most of the renters were women.16 Presumably they undertook
these fi xed costs to be able to have a larger stock and sell items whose
weight made it difficult to sell door-to-door. As for the city’s motiva-
tion, it sought to avoid the “well known inconvenience to the [tran-
siting] public” caused by “those who customarily sell victuals and
subsistence goods on the streets of the city.” But by the mid-1830s the
number of booths by the São Bento church had so increased that they
were “obstructing the place,” leading the city fathers to order those
vendors (quitandeiras) to retreat to the area that had been originally
designated for them. Such an expansion of quitandas without any ap-
parent diminution in the number of ambulatory hawkers suggests a
steady pressure on the part of vendors to gain control over more and
more public space.17
So vital were vendors to the life of Salvador that, despite the com-
plaints of some, most provincial legislators in 1828 rejected a pro-
posal that every black who moved about must carry a passport issued
either by his or her master, if a slave, or by a public authority, if free.
An assemblyman exclaimed that such a law “could not be enforced
among us,” and immediately introduced an exception on behalf of
those who “carry . . . essential foodstuffs.” After the Muslim revolt
of 1835 a proposed city edict sought to forbid Africans from partici-
pating in the food trade (reserving it only for the Brazilian-born), but
the provincial chief of police, despite his hostility toward Africans,
successfully argued against the measure, saying that it would result
in a “rise in prices and mass confusion.” Three years later the city
council again proposed that no African, slave or free, be permitted
to deal in “beans, corn, farinha, etc.,” and once again the measure
was turned down. Finally, in 1849, a special provincial tax was lev-
ied on Africans “who trade,” but it apparently had little effect be-
cause eight years later, well after the end of the slave trade in 1850,
the city council bewailed the fact that Africans “have taken over the
business of trading in produce, chickens, suckling pigs, etc.”18 Un-
noticed but surely relevant is the fact that besides supplying others
with food, vendors were also consumers of goods bought with their
earnings.

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 40 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

Table 2.1. Occupations of Freed African Women in the Parish of Santana

(Salvador), 1849

Occupations Number Percentage

Sellers of foodstuffs
Greens 33
Fruit 22
Fish 2
Cooked food 14
Unspecified other produce 5
Other unspecified foodstuffs 56
Subtotal 132 78
Sellers of other things
Unspecified street vendors 5
Sellers of clothes or shoes 2
Sellers of unspecified goods (mercadeja) 10
Subtotal 17 10
Other
Washerwomen 10
Domestic servants 3
Other 7
Subtotal 20 12
TOTAL 169 100

Source: Calculated from Maria Inês Cortes de Oliveira, “Libertas da freguesia de Santana
(1849): Ocupações e jornais,” paper distributed at a conference held at the Arquivo Público
do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, July 1993 (courtesy of Alexandra Brown). A less precise
breakdown, but with more cases, can be found in Cecília Moreira Soares, “As ganhadeiras:
Mulher e resistência em Salvador no século XIX,” Afro-Ásia, no. 17 (1996): 59.

Vendors sold an enormous variety of things—cloth, ribbons,

thread, amulets, shoes, handkerchiefs, dresses—but food was their
most prevalent item. In one parish in 1849 almost four-fi fths of the
gainfully employed freed African women sold foodstuffs (see Ta-
ble 2.1). Street vendors even marketed basic staples such as manioc
meal, beans, dried meat, and salt, although generally they sold more
perishable items, including milk and eggs. The sale of fresh meat
from the “wooden bowls of black women,” provoked city ordinances
at fi rst forbidding it but later specifying where vendors could do so.19
Similarly, the city council, wishing in 1824 either to concentrate the
selling of fish at the waterfront or to prevent spoilage by encouraging

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 41

its rapid sale, required that it be sold elsewhere only by “sellers wan-
dering through the streets of the city for the convenience of its inhab-
itants, it being forbidden, however, for them to set up stands.”20
Street vendors were best known for their fresh fruits and vegeta-
bles. Among the garden produce were lettuce and other greens, cab-
bages, okra, green beans, cucumbers, and onions, as well as corn,
pumpkins, and yams. With distinctive cries they advertised their
seasonal fruit: bananas, oranges, tangerines, limes, mangoes, water-
melons, grapes, guavas, papayas, and pineapples. Seen from a window
above, their fruit-filled baskets presented “both in form and coloring
some of the prettiest pictures of still life that can be imagined.”21
Vendors peddled cooked food as well, notably lightly grilled meat
cut up into bite-size pieces, cooked over a brazier in the street. The
city council believed the meat they sold was likely “corrupted.” One
observer alleged that they used beef that had been pilfered from
butcher shops by their soldier-friends, and there is evidence that
some of their meat had indeed been stolen. When Francisco, the
slave of Rosa Rodrigues, was “caught with a large basket” of stolen
fresh meat weighing almost fi fty pounds, the men who apprehended
him just outside the slaughterhouse concluded, given the small size
of her household, that Rosa was probably going to cook and sell it
on the street.22 Street vendors also carried whale meat, which they
“brought to market wrapped in banana leaves, ready-cooked,” as well
as cooked pork, sausages, and grilled fish. Among prepared foods
were a large number of dishes unknown to European palates but
still found today, such as “carurus, vatapás, pamonha, canjica, . . .
acaçá, acarajé, ubobó,” dishes that are made from such ingredients as
manioc meal, rice, corn, black-eyed peas, dried shrimp, coconuts, and
peanuts, prepared with okra, onions, garlic, and tomatoes.23 These
foods were likely cooked in red palm oil with spices of African ori-
gin, and—given the blending of the secular and the divine—may have
been prepared according to African religious precepts. On the other
hand, a characteristic of Bahian cookery now, and probably then, is
the intermingling of foods of different origins, scorning none. Por-
tuguese olive oil, African red palm oil, and native American manioc
might all be used in the same meal, cooked by the same person. The
sellers probably ate this food themselves, and surely one of the advan-
tages of being self-hired, rather than a domestic, was the possibility
of determining one’s diet and how it would be cooked.24
Not only was there great variety overall, but so also for any one

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 42 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

vendor, because customers wanted small quantities of several things.

Given the perishability of so many items, a vendor would not want
a large stock of any one. And if there existed a glut of one product,
she would have other things to sell as well. Even the quitandeiras,
though holding a larger stock than itinerant vendors, were subject to
the same considerations.
Street vendors were energetic businesswomen. As Ellena, a hawker,
testified about herself, “she retires after dark and gets up early.” If
the work was hard, however, at least she got to decide where to go,
whom to meet, when to rest, and, up to a point, at what rate to work.
Her success at selling probably depended less on how much physical
energy she expended and more on a savvy choice of streets to wander
and the time of day to be there, as well as on her personality. She
needed a strong voice with which to call out her wares. Especially
the quitandeiras, remaining always at the same spot, had to build
long-term relationships with customers. All vendors needed good
bargaining skills both in purchasing from their suppliers and selling
to their buyers. Bargaining required, as it ever does, both a knowledge
of its etiquette—only make serious offers—and a keen awareness of
the abundance or scarcity of the merchandise at any one moment. In
dealing with both suppliers and customers, vendors had to keep men-
tal track of multiple transactions and quickly calculate the required
profit, considering as well their time and trouble. They had to be care-
ful in their purchases in order to maintain a good reputation for the
quality of items sold, meaning they could not afford to be credulous.
Street vendors had to time their sales optimally to avoid deteriora-
tion of the merchandise, yet not sell too cheaply. This was all the
more important because, insofar as vendors transported the merchan-
dise themselves, it had to be high in value in relation to its bulk and
weight, and so likely fragile or perishable. All street vendors had to be
vigilant against theft and to protect their goods from rain, sun, and
wind. Faced with fierce competition, they had to be satisfied with a
slight profit. Their numbers suggest that many were ready to do this
work.25 Still, the exercise of these many skills, the risks involved,
and the awareness of having concluded a successful transaction must
have given female street vendors the self-confidence, dignity, inde-
pendence, and dynamism that comes from proficient trading and ac-
tive participation in a money economy. They were far from hapless
victims.

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 43

a way of life

Vendors generally wore cool and simple clothes. One who sold bread
and corn cakes dressed in a coffee-colored calico skirt with small
white polka dots and a white shirt. Another one, who sold boiled
yams from a tin box, wore a “white calico skirt, a very old cotton
blouse, and a calico cloth wrap.” A third woman could be found in a
blue calico skirt, a linen blouse, and “cloth from the coast of Africa,
already old, with blue and red stripes.” A European painter in the
1830s depicted a fish monger with a white blouse off one shoulder, a
yellow-flowered skirt, a wrap of African cloth, sandals, and a turban.
In the mid-nineteenth century another artist said the slave women
“wear a white chemise so loose that it only hangs on one shoulder
at a time, wrapping round their waist a striped cloth called ‘pano de
la [sic] costa’: the ground white and striped horizontally with broad
blue and pink stripes.” He found the result “graceful and becoming
. . . always in good taste.” The twenty-eight-year-old Prince Maximil-
ian was enchanted with the turban of “white and pale-blue gauze”
worn by one vendor. Two other travelers reported on these turbans,
one describing them as being of various colors, and the other explain-
ing that the vendors wore “a sort of thick round turban with a cavity
in the center on which they deposit their loads which are frequently
of immense weight. Their heads are generally shaved or their hair
closely cut.”26 Slaves went barefoot, but freed women wore “graceful
white sandals” that could be seen thanks to the “very short skirts
that allow one to see above the ankles.” Ana de São José da Trin-
dade, besides five calico skirts, had more luxurious clothes, but not
to wear on the street. She owned two skirts of special cloth, two col-
ored gowns, three crimson velvet belts, three shawls made of cloth
imported from Africa, and one half-slip. Rosa Maria da Conceição,
another freedwoman, had no relative to whom to bequeath her black
and bright-red silk and satin skirts. One historian has suggested that
precisely because skin color prevented confusion as to class, authori-
ties did not think it necessary to enforce sumptuary laws in colonial
Brazil.27
Owning jewelry provided a way, as it did for Ana de São José da
Trindade, for vendors to keep and guard their wealth as well as assure
its liquidity, aside from its glamour and glitter. The fish monger who
modeled for the European painter wore gold earrings and, on her belt,

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 44 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

a balangandã, a large pin from which hung silver symbols of African

spirits and maybe some baubles. In the mid-eighteenth century a for-
eigner observed that “only with difficulty can you fi nd here the most
humble mortal, even among the multitude of black women who sit
on the street selling fruit, who does not decorate herself with buck-
les, bracelets, rings, and buttons of fine gold, many with encrusted
precious gems.” At the end of the colonial period another traveler
described how, “on festival days,” he saw black and mulatto women
“with their bosom and arms weighed down with golden chains and
reliquaries of the same metal.” This was still true in the 1850s, when
“superb chains of gold” made slave women “look like sultanas.”28
Many vendors lived like the rest of the free poor and enslaved of the
city: crowded into rooms just below street level with small windows
that provided little air and barely a glimpse of the feet of passers-
by. Typically such rented spaces had no dividing walls and only bare
ground for floors. Furnishings consisted of woven straw mats, rolled
up during the day and spread on the ground at night. Slave women
who lived with their masters or mistresses—those who sold sweets,
for instance—often occupied windowless rooms on higher floors, but
those who lived on their own fi lled these basement lodgings. When
a slave gained her freedom, she soon thought of renting such a room,
perhaps sublet from another freed slave. In fi nding a place to live, she
would likely rely on ties of friendship, kinship, or love. According to
an 1855 household census, the street vendor Ritta Paula Lisboa lived
in a basement alcove with Francisco Lopes Montinho, a carpenter,
both of them freed persons. The bulk of street vendors likely lived in
such places.29
Ana de São José da Trindade lived quite differently, however. Be-
cause she had accumulated considerable property, the postmortem in-
ventory of her estate is rich with detail, revealing not only the limits
of what was possible for a vendor, but the standard set by the middle
class. She lived on the street leading to the Carmo monastery, a prime
spot not too far from the city center. Her three-story stone house had
glass windows, another sign of affluence, and a rooftop terrace. It was
doubtless built contiguously to that of the neighbors, as was typical
of the place, and its eighteen-foot frontage was not considered narrow
at that time. The list of her furniture began with a small, portable
shrine: a jacaranda-wood crucifi x set in a darkly painted box made of
a lighter soft wood. She left a bed with a headboard and frame of jaca-
randa, a jacaranda chest with two large and two small drawers, each of

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 45

which could be locked, a mahogany ark, and a large mahogany trunk

with two drawers below. Other furniture included a settee, six cane-
bottomed chairs, a small whale-oil lamp with four wicks suitable for
the living room, four English paintings with gilded frames and no
glass, two rectangular living-room mirrors with gilded frames, and
a small brass candlestick. Her dishes consisted of thirty-seven ordi-
nary china plates, a soup tureen with lid, a long serving dish, two
china coffee pots (one white, one painted), and two salt shakers. She
lived far beyond her beginnings as a slave. 30
Although Ana de São José da Trindade’s property was substantial,
probably exceptional, her life story was not unusual in many of its
other aspects. Another street vendor, Rosa Maria da Conceição, an
illiterate woman from West Africa, purchased her own freedom and
took out a license to sell on the street in 1819. She listed not one
but four houses in her 1838 will, including the two-story stone one
in which she lived, two one-story stone houses (with stone floor-
ing), and a “small rammed-earth one.” She and her sick husband,
whom she had married in 1804, owned an astonishing total of thirty
slaves, although fi fteen of them were children. Of the adults, eight
were women, all Africans; their occupations are not specified, but at
least some of them likely worked as vendors, as did their owner. The
Brazilian-born freed woman Maria da Cruz probably began as a ven-
dor, but she moved beyond that. By 1852 she was delivering for sale
substantial quantities of manioc meal—far more than anyone alone
could carry—to the hospital run by the Santa Casa de Misericórdia.
Even after the fi nal end of the slave trade in 1850, she invested in
goods shipped on speculation to Africa. She remained illiterate. 31
Postmortem estate inventories are skewed as samples because they
inevitably deal with those who owned property. Yet it is remarkable
that of all former slaves who left wills between 1790 and 1850, more
than 40 percent possessed urban real estate, albeit most owned only
one such property, often built on land for which they paid a perpetual
ground-rent. The historians Sheila de Castro Faria and Júnia Ferreira
Furtado have amply demonstrated that some freed women elsewhere
in Brazil, especially the Africans among them, possessed consider-
able wealth, countering the common idea that they were universally
poor. Female street vendors can certainly not be lumped into the low-
est class.32
Many, of course, were among the less fortunate, as was the cre-
ole slave Florinda, found crying on the street because she feared her

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 46 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

mistress would punish her when she got home for not having sold
enough. A few vendors may have died wealthy, but most of those with
property did not own much. When Benedita Maria Carneiro died, her
property consisted of two slaves, some furniture, and some gold and
silver objects. Her worth amounted to about one-fifth of Ana de São
José da Trindade’s. Her property also had to be divided in two (half
of it being her husband’s part of the joint property), with Benedita’s
half then divided into three parts for her grandchildren by a former
marriage. To make the division, the slaves had to be sold, leaving the
widower without the income they would have earned for him “on the
street.” Other vendors had even less. For most of the freed and free
women, one can be sure, selling on the street provided only enough
income to survive day-to-day, not enough to acquire slaves of their
own or to save for illness and old age. 33
Illness could prove disastrous or be endured only with great diffi-
culty. Some slaves were abandoned when ill, although certainly many
were not, and we know one surgeon presented his bill to a master for
“visits I made to the black woman Maria, Nagô, slave . . . during the
illness from which she died.” Some vendors suffered swollen feet and
hernias from carrying heavy loads. Felisberta was “missing two or
three teeth from the upper jaw,” and Lena was covered in smallpox
scars. In 1821 one estate inventory listed an old slave vendor with ery-
sipelas, or St. Anthony’s Fire, a painful and highly contagious disease
characterized by a high fever and deep red inflammation of the skin
and mucous membranes.34 Sometimes an indigent turned up dead on
the street, perhaps the very street on which she had sold door-to-door.
The Santa Casa de Misericórdia would use its simplest litter to carry
deceased slaves to an ignominious grave in the pauper’s field at the
Campo da Pólvora; however, a quarter of all church burials were of
slaves. To avoid dying without the proper rites and rituals, those who
could afford to joined a sodality.35
Slave vendors could be pitifully vulnerable to cruel exploitation
by their owners, and we should not imagine that former slaves made
kinder mistresses than whites. One freed slave, the Yoruba Maria Joa-
quina de Santa Anna, viciously punished her slave Rosa, also Yoruba,
to the extent of swinging a “knife for scaling fish” at her face, cut-
ting off the left side of her upper lip, permanently exposing four teeth
and giving her “a frightful appearance.” Rosa ran away and hid in the
woods, where she was found at death’s door for want of food and her
festering lip full of maggots. These cruel punishments scandalized
the neighbors, and Rosa’s screams kept them awake nights. Presum-

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 47

ably with the help of others, Rosa got her case heard by a judge of
the High Court, before whom Maria Joaquina was charged with the
crime of “mutilating a bodily part with a specific function.” He sen-
tenced her to cease such punishments and put Rosa up for sale im-
mediately. Instead, on the morning of May 23, 1832, Maria Joaquina,
accompanied by her male companion, dragged Rosa off, past the out-
lying district of Rio Vermelho. They were headed toward a remote
spot with the intent, it was said, of having at her freely. They had put
a rope around her head like a halter and tied her with straps. But as
they passed the seaside chapel of Santa Ana in Rio Vermelho, Rosa
managed to wrest herself free and dash into the church, seeking asy-
lum. Undeterred, her captors rushed in after her and violently pulled
her away, not hesitating to “commit the sacrilege of leaning on the al-
tar and placing a hand on the Holy Stone.” At this point, an officer in
the National Guard separated them and removed Rosa to his house,
only, he said, to protect the “Chapel’s installations.” The local po-
lice commissioner then asked a justice of the peace to have her value
appraised so she could be sold to someone under whose care Rosa’s
“fortune would be bettered.” The judge agreed to do so after getting
a doctor to examine her carefully. In his report the doctor noted two
other knife wounds on her shoulders in addition to scars of whipping
on her “buttocks, back, thighs, arms, and legs.” Maria Joaquina was
jailed for her public actions “offensive to morality and good customs,”
but after twenty-eight days in jail she managed to raise funds to post
bail. We do not know what happened to Rosa. 36 It may be that Maria
Joaquina’s low status as a former slave made neighbors and justices
more willing to intervene on Rosa’s behalf; had Rosa’s owner been
an upper-class white, her fate might have been ignored. Or perhaps
not. Precisely to preserve the institution of slavery, some limits were
placed on the behavior of slave owners generally. 37 In this particular
case the fact that both slave and mistress were women, and likely
street vendors, did not lessen their hostility toward each other, for
animosities were not only between black and white, or between men
and women. And certainly the life of a vendor was never easy, even if
few were as severely mistreated as Rosa.

grocers and their stores

While vendors walked the streets selling door-to-door in the open air,
grocers—the other commercial suppliers of food to the city—worked
from their stores. With two or three tall, narrow solid-wooden

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 48 get t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

figure 2.3. Corner grocery store and street vendors, 1835

doors—and, if on a corner, more still—their shops opened directly

onto the street, plunging grocers into the rhythms of urban life.
As locals put, they sold “from their outer doors.”38 A separate door
led directly to a stairway to the upper floor, frequently the owner’s
home. The physical unity of the living space and the place of busi-
ness contributed to a conceptual unity also, so that casa could mean
(and can still mean) both one’s house and one’s business. 39 Like street
vendors, some grocers outsold others, and a vocabulary developed to
distinguish among stores by their size and the volume of goods they
stocked. They ranged from the smaller, more makeshift tendas to
the more substantial armazens, with the common vendas falling in-
between (although the terms were sometimes interchangeable). And
while these general stores often sold drinks by the glass, taverns just
as often sold foodstuffs.40
José Pinto de Almeida’s store included a “counter with drawer and
key,” seventeen “boards that serve as shelves” behind the counter,
large and small scales with a number of iron weights, two sets of
measures of capacity—some of wood, some of tin—three tin funnels,
a wine jar, nine “small and large cups,” and a candlestick. Only occa-
sionally did a store counter have glass panels. Many stores also held a
shrine with a saint’s image.41
A general store was a microcosm of the city as entrepôt, displaying

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 49

goods produced less than an hour’s walk from the city center along-
side merchandise from far reaches of the world: cinnamon, cloves,
ginger, pepper, and tea from Asia; red palm oil and peppers from Af-
rica; bottled beer, wheat flour, butter, cheeses, bacon, and ham from
northern Europe and, later, from North America; salt, dry biscuits,
sardines, dried codfish, wine, brandy, vinegar, olives, olive oil, raisins,
and almonds from Portugal; jerked beef from Uruguay, Argentina, or
southern Brazil, and sun-dried meat from the interior of Bahia; sugar,
tobacco, rice, beans, corn, and manioc meal, as well as onions and
garlic, bacon and lard, sugarcane brandy, coconuts, coffee in the hull
or ground, and fi rewood from the Recôncavo or other Brazilian ports,
not to mention fruit, eggs, and live chickens from the city’s semirural
suburbs and whale oil from the local flenser and refi ner. At such a
store, buyers also purchased candles, torches, writing paper, pencils,
cloth, hardware, rope, brooms, mats, straw hats, fans, chamber pots,
tobacco, cigars, needles, cutlery, rough china dishes, toothpicks, and
fresh bread, just to mention some of the myriad items for sale. But
crucially, all of these stores sold foodstuffs, goods subject to rapid de-
terioration. Such a store would always be a place where one could buy
a drink or, if hungry as two soldiers were, “biscuits and cheese.”42
Shopkeepers prospered, although some more than others, enough
to put most of them in the middle ranks of society. They certainly
did not live in wattle-and-daub, thatch-roofed huts as did some of the
free poor, nor usually in the sumptuous houses in the Vitória neigh-
borhood owned by a few wholesalers. More typical was Baltazar de
Andrade Bastos’s place. A dealer in dried meat, he owned a house
and land like that of Ana de São José da Trindade near the Carmo
church. He rented out the small ground-level store, wide enough only
for a door and one window. His living quarters on the upper floors
included a “ceilinged front room with three floor-to-ceiling windows
with iron balustrade,” two bedrooms, one with a ceiling, and a dining
room open to the rafters, plus a partial attic with two rooms and a
bedroom “with two chest-high glass windows facing toward the front
of the house.” At the back of the building was a “small patio” with a
separate kitchen.43
Store owners carefully dressed in keeping with their position. In
the 1840s they wore waist-length gray linen or striped cotton jackets,
and gray linen or nankeen pants with flaps in front covering the fly.
On special days they wore a tie, but only the very rich wore a frock
coat. In 1809 an Englishman noted that “the men copy the Europe-

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 50 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

ans in their mode of dress” except on special occasions, when “they

wear lace on their linen and have their clothes bedaubed with em-
broidery.” Simply dressed store clerks might ask permission from the
owner to wear a tie and vest—that is, to dress above their station.44
One store owner, wealthy enough to lend money at interest, included
in his well-stocked clothes closet two frock coats—a much-used blue
one of fine cloth with yellow brocade frogs, and another ordinary
black one—as well as an overcoat, a “Scottish” cape with wool lin-
ing, three striped jackets of Lille wool, seventeen fi ne cotton shirts,
one pair of serge trousers, four pairs of linen and twill trousers, six
vests (two of them made of black velvet and fi ne cotton, and four
“very used” white corduroy ones), twelve handkerchiefs (including
seven linen ones and one of silk, “some white and others colored”),
thirteen pairs of linen stockings both long and short, and one fine hat
with a rounded crown. When he died, his estate totaled three and a
half times that of Ana de São José da Trindade.45
Among the 475 applicants for store licenses at the beginning of
1789, 1807, and 1819, only 69, or 15 percent, were women.46 In other
sources I found only occasional references to women store owners. Ad-
vertisements placed in an early local newspaper referred to a woman
who sold drinks, to another who owned an eating house, to one who
sold snuff, and to another who had a large store. In 1780 “Bernardina
so-and-so,” who lived in the outlying district of Rio Vermelho, was
fi ned for not taking out a license for her store and not having her
weights and measures inspected. Ninety years later the same rule ap-
plied: Maria das Mercês committed a similar infraction.47 When Ana
Joaquina de Jesus and Florinda de Aragão died, the two inventoried
estates consisted primarily of general stores, but because of Brazil’s
joint-property regime, it is impossible to know whether the busi-
nesses were primarily their husbands’. In neither case could I fi nd an
inventory carried out at the time of their husbands’ deaths.48
Although Brazilians figured among the owners of general stores,
most were Portuguese. Rare indeed was the slave—yes, a slave—born
in Africa who owned a small business where he sold beans, rice, and
corn on his own account from a rented corner in the lower city. At
the time of Brazil’s struggle for independence from Portugal the com-
mander of the Portuguese army described the “Commercial Body”
of Salvador as being made up of “Europeans,” by which he meant his
compatriots.49 An Argentinean stereotyped the Portuguese as hard-
working and ambitious, in contrast to the lazy Brazilians, and another

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 51

foreigner said the Portuguese (not counting those in government or

the military) typically arrived poor in Brazil, “but by parsimony and
continued exertion directed to one end, that of amassing money, they
often obtain their object.” For them, Brazil was a place to rise so-
cially.50 Many Portuguese shopkeepers maintained close ties with
their homeland, supporting the Santa Casa de Misericórdia in Lis-
bon, making separate wills for their property in each country, leaving
money to relatives in Portugal, or returning there to die. They were
citizens of the Atlantic World, but their connection to Portugal made
shopkeepers particularly vulnerable to the xenophobic mob actions of
the 1820s and 1830s that followed Brazil’s independence.51
The energy and self-discipline of store owners were evident. They
kept track of inventory, ordering and reordering goods to stock their
shelves, while carefully juggling profit and loss. They sought loans
and kept records on those to whom they sold on credit. And they
stood out by their ability to read and write in a society where few
were literate.
Ties of authority and dependence linked shopkeepers to their
clerks. Almost all store owners employed at least one, although one
grocer stated that he was too poor to do so. It was common for a Por-
tuguese owner to hire a relative, perhaps a nephew, as his cashier.
These clerks could also be salaried workers, like the one at Manoel
Tavares’s establishment. Tavares’s widow fi red him and closed the
store “because it yielded more losses than profit.” Owners were said
to keep close watch on clerks, even requiring attendance at mass
on Sundays and holy days.52 As a reward for this dependence, some
clerks eventually became minor partners in the business, although
surely not if they failed to satisfy their boss. The best ones might
even inherit the shop, as happened to three clerks of Joaquim José de
Oliveira, who owned two stores. The executor described one of them,
a Brazilian, as a “relative” of the storekeeper, which may explain his
good fortune. Even those who were not related by blood usually lived
in the same building as the owner, being housed and fed by him,
forming a sort of family.53
Slaves could also work as clerks. After Raimundo, who had arrived
from Africa in 1815, was put to work clerking, his skill attracted the
attention of a Portuguese storekeeper who bought him for the same
purpose. In 1823, at the end of the war for independence, his master’s
allegiance to Portugal meant that the store was confiscated and auc-
tioned off, making Raimundo the property of a third store owner. Fi-

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 52 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

nally, in 1828, Raimundo succeeded in purchasing his freedom and

set to work, now with a last name of Barros, selling cloth, not just in
Salvador but in towns around the bay.54
Francisco da Cruz’s story is much sadder. A mulatto slave, he
claimed to have always been “obedient . . . and faithful” at his job as
clerk in his owner’s foodstuffs store and that its balance sheets would
show that the business “had rendered favorable profits.” The master
had himself often said that “‘no one had a better clerk than he.’” Be-
cause of his reputation for fidelity, Francisco was offered credit by
others to conduct business ventures on his own, which did well.
Then, because of the intrigue of those who were jealous of his suc-
cess, his master concluded that Francisco’s wealth had resulted from
his stealing at the store. He then imprisoned Francisco in his private
cell and began to torment him, “now putting him in stocks, . . . now
limiting his food and feeding him only once a day, now torturing him
by shackling his fingers to the point of crushing them and making
them swell.” Francisco got his case heard by the Criminal Court and
was transferred to a public jail, but his master sued for his return.
Francisco then appealed directly to the Crown in Portugal, asking
that his master sell him or accept a fair sale price for his freedom in
compliance with “all the rules of natural law, good reason, and dispo-
sitions of positive law.” He could afford to buy his freedom, he said,
speaking of himself in the third person, “because people who have
taken pity on him will lend him the necessary sum.” The record does
not indicate whether his supplication was successful.55
In the 1830s another legal dispute partially revolved around
whether Cypriano, a Yoruba slave, had simply “pretended” to be too
slow-witted to be a successful store clerk, or whether he had never
worked as a clerk. But not only did no one question the claim that
an African-born slave could have clerked at a store, but the notion
that Cypriano cleverly acted so as to conceal his true abilities or
knowledge suggests that contemporaries did not doubt he could have
them.56

Street vendors and storekeepers formed a complex trading system

that linked producers to ultimate consumers. African women and
Portuguese men brought with them to Salvador an intensely com-
mercial spirit from across the Atlantic. For most of the period cov-
ered here, new waves of immigrants and slaves continued to arrive in

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 fr o m s t r e e t s a n d d o o r w a y s 53

Salvador from overseas, embodying a keen sense for trade and respect
for its successful conduct—an expectation and a background that
made such work normal and rewarding. Hundreds and hundreds of
transactions took place each day in this active, vibrant, and growing
economy, creating an air of intense activity throughout the city. A
British admiral described the inhabitants of Salvador as being “more
active in commerce than those in any other part of Brazil.” And it
was truly said in 1799 that “commerce is the strongest column sus-
taining this colony.”57

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 Ch a pter 3

connections

As st r eet v en dors a n d stor e ow n ers constructed a citywide

community, horizontal ties criss-crossed vertical ones, multiplying
their contacts with a broad segment of the population. Business itself
meant constructing networks, but those engaged in the food trade
were not merely economic creatures. They had a variety of ties to
others, pointing in many directions. From these connections they
naturally built up solidarity with some and hostility toward others
while defi ning themselves. Families, friendships, neighborhoods, and
venues where they frequently gathered provided occasions for socia-
bility and the sharing of cultural backgrounds as well as tense mo-
ments that could lead to negotiating compromises or heighten ani-
mosities. Even their relationships with borrowers and creditors were
personal ones, laced with emotional significance.

family, friends, and neighbors

Family ties filled the lives of food traders, but formal marriage, al-
though a sign of higher status, was not the usual pattern in Salva-
dor. The proportion of married men and women to those who lived
in consensual unions cannot be known, of course, since census tak-
ers did not note these latter arrangements. The historian Kátia M. de
Queirós Mattoso, who has studied fragmentary manuscript schedules
surviving from an 1855 census, concludes that households headed by
a man listed as single but which included a single woman of appro-
priate age, especially one with children and no other man present,
amounted to 52 percent of the total. Certainly such unions were a
deeply rooted practice in Salvador, as elsewhere in Brazil and Portu-
gal. Foreign travelers commented on them, in one case saying that

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 c o n n e c t io n s 55

“marriage is rejected by the majority.” Anyway, the less affluent could

hardly be expected to undertake expensive Church-sanctioned mar-
riages, the only legal ones, although there were ways to get around
such obstacles.1
Surely concubinage had its own rules and understandings, but be-
cause it operated informally, it remains largely hidden from our gaze.
But not always. The children of a concubine—in the probate docu-
ments that I examined the word is never used to signify a passing re-
lationship or an adulterous one—had many legal rights, and lawyers,
witnesses, and judges spoke favorably of the children’s mother as hav-
ing been “always understood, held, and maintained as a concubine
[sempre havida, theúda, e mantheúda como concubina].”2 Evidence
from other places in Brazil drawn from civil and ecclesiastical court
cases reveals that in these unions almost all the men enjoyed higher
status than the women by virtue of class, race, or legal status (free).
Marriage was only for equals, although not all equals married. The
man could certainly be patronizing, as was one who declared, “I have
always remained in the state of bachelorhood and had no children
until now and, therefore, I institute as my sole heir Theresa de Jesus
with whom I have lived and from whom I have received important
services in carrying out her duties, therefore making herself worthy
of my gratitude.” Portuguese men, most of whom moved to Brazil in
their youth, frequently entered into such relationships with women
of color, as their wills disclosed. One declared that “at no time was I
ever married and, as a bachelor, by my weakness I had repeated carnal
copulations with one of my slaves named Francisca and from them I
have a daughter whom I had baptized with the name of Josefa, whom
I hereby institute as the heir of both parts of my goods.” The unequal
terms of such a liaison are obvious, but that does not rule out mutual
attraction and affection.3
Men often explicitly acknowledged the children of such long-
term consensual unions as theirs, firmly transforming them into legal
heirs. Typical was the case of Bartolomeu Francisco Gomes, a cattle
merchant and store owner, who made Epifânia Maria da Conceição,
“in whose company I have lived for sixteen years,” the executor of
his estate and recognized his paternity of her two daughters. When
a concubine died, the man might subsequently establish a similar
association with another woman, having had children by both and
treating the children of both unions as all his. The grocer José Pinto
de Almeida lived with Raimunda Veríssiama de Jesus until her death,

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 56 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

and then with Francisca dos Reis Valle, whom he appointed as execu-
tor of his estate despite her illiteracy. With Raimunda he had had two
children, and with Francisca, three more. Never did he marry either
of them. José Gomes da Costa declared, “I am a bachelor and I have
always lived in this state; nevertheless I have had some natural chil-
dren of whom the following are still alive.” Here the testator named
the mothers: Florência Maria Ferreira, “a single mulatta,” Custódia
Neta, “white, single,” and Maria Gomes, her color not specified,
“who is [now] married to Victorino Dias Ferreira.”4 Even without an
official statement, for a man to have treated a woman’s children as if
they were his could be used in court to establish his paternity.5
The custom was not limited to Portuguese men. João Nunes, a
freed African who himself became a slave trader, listed a number of
his unions over a long period, presumably with consenting women
given that he spoke of them with respect, was careful to name them,
and recognized their children as his, making them his rightful heirs.
With Josefa Gonçalves dos Santos, a West African freed woman, he
had had a daughter Felícia Gonçalves. Both mother and daughter had
died by the time he made his will in 1807, but Felícia had had a daugh-
ter, his granddaughter, whose name he knew. With Catarina, who
came from southern Angola, he had a blind daughter named Maria
Nunes. Then he formally married Francisca Ribeira da Cruz, a free
black woman, whether African or not is not stated, who predeceased
him without bearing any children. The last woman mentioned in his
will did not secure the same place in his will as the others: he had
owned a slave, Ana, for whom he had taken out a license as a street
vendor eighteen years earlier. He later granted her freedom, keeping
her letter of manumission along with his own, suggesting either that
they lived as man and wife or that he wished to hold on to her in-
come. After being freed she bore two daughters. He gave Ana and her
daughters virtually nothing and did not acknowledge these children
as his. We do not know whether the two African women with whom
he had earlier lived had been free before he took up with them or
whether, like the vendor Ana, they had been freed by him.6
A family controversy erupted regarding a vendor who, accord-
ing to one version, had once been a general store owner’s “publicly
kept and maintained” woman before he married someone else. She
had lived with him openly in his house, and he felt “much cheered”
when she bore a daughter, Máxima, whom “he held in his arms as he
showed her off to his best friends.” When Máxima reached marriage-

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 c o n n e c t io n s 57

able age, he found her a husband, gave her a large dowry, and helped
her furnish her house. That is Máxima’s story. It is unclear whether
he continued to maintain Máxima’s mother after he legally married
another woman and had two sons with her. The other heirs claimed
that the vendor, Máxima’s mother, had “never” been their father’s
concubine. They said that she “had had illicit friendships with differ-
ent men,” and that at one time, true, she had managed their father’s
store for him, “earning two patacas [a small amount] per week,” but
that was all. The judge sided with Máxima, however, ruling that she
had been cheated out of her rightful share when the property had
been divided.7
Wives and concubines played an important part in the lives of store
owners, and some of them helped at the store or managed the prop-
erty. Even Máxima’s opponents had to acknowledge that her mother
had done so. One wife declared she was “head of household” and held
a “power of attorney from her absent husband,” a store owner. Men of-
ten named their wives as executors of their estate, but few explained
their decision as did Felix Ferreira de Santana, a rentier, who stated in
his will that his wife would pay all his bills “from whatever moneys
there are, for she really knows everything about it as I go over it with
her as half-owner of our property.”8 We may speculate that many
women had big roles in general stores, helping out as clerks and, when
literate and numerate, managing the books and correspondence.
We know little about how store owners felt toward their wives,
whether formal or informal. The historian Júnia Ferreira Furtado,
having examined ecclesiastical investigations into “sinful” cohabita-
tion, found much evidence of “affectionate ties” between unmarried
couples.9 Francisco Ferreira da Gama, a Portuguese businessman in
Salvador, married a poor woman, Vitória Luisa do Rio Gama, with
separation of property, a legal contract used when the partners pos-
sessed an exceptionally unequal amount of wealth. They remained
childless. Although he noted in his will that (aside from an inherited
entailed estate in Portugal) “the goods that I possess have all been ac-
quired by me,” he acknowledged that he had been married to Vitória
for twenty-three years “always with perfect harmony and understand-
ing, with co-operation on her part insofar as possible toward the com-
mon good of our household.” So, reversing the effect of his marriage
contract, he left all his goods to her except the entailed estate, albeit
with the stern proviso that if she married again “she will lose this
favor” and would merely have usufruct of one-third of his property,

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 58 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

while the remainder would go to his brother and sister in equal parts.
Although patronizing, he evidently had great confidence in his wife’s
business sense (if not in her faithful memory of him) as he named her
executor for his properties in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, and
Porto. Affection and admiration had grown over time and trumped
their originally cautious arrangement.10
Love, sex, and family surely occupied as much attention in a street
vendor’s mind as in anyone’s.11 In 1859 “a large number of black Mina
vendors” habitually gathered around the jail in Barbalho, once a fort,
and in its central courtyard. There they “spread out their mats . . .
next to the grates of the prison [windows]” to sell food to the prison-
ers and guards, “lingering until 7 at night.” An inspector declared
this custom constituted an “offense to morals,” for they fl irted and
did much else with the guards, some of whom he found in “less than
respectable positions” with the women. A Frenchman described how
when black women gathered water at the public fountain, “lovers
come there to help [them] draw the water and also carry the jug half
way. They stop to talk, offer them flowers, the bushes are near by!”12
A fleeting encounter could grow into a loving relationship, one
linking a free person to an enslaved one. An 1855 census listed both
self-hired slave women and freed women as living with freedmen. A
free mulatto paid for the freedom of his enslaved wife, Antonia de
Araújo. Another free man borrowed funds from seven friends, includ-
ing four women, to purchase the freedom of his wife and child. A sol-
dier deserted to join a slave woman. A male slave fled to link up with
his love, who had become a freed woman.13
A major difference between most shopkeepers and street vendors
is that male store owners did not have to provide immediate care for
their children, whereas hawkers could be seen on the street “with
or without children.” The street vendor Ana de São José da Trindade
bore five children, and innumerable instances of vendors with chil-
dren appear in the documents—especially, of course, in the case of
slave women, whose children were property and worth recording.
Benedita, a young West African slave who sold food on the street,
lived with her eight-year-old son Felipe and his little brother, three
or four years old. Whether these children resulted from consenting
relationships is, of course, unknowable, but the sources show that
street vendors often established long-term unions.14 The flexibility of
vending made it possible for self-hired, freed, and free women to work
both inside and outside their household.15 Or a vendor could take her

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 c o n n e c t io n s 59

child with her to work, even nursing the baby as she sat, waiting for
a customer to pass by. She could ask another to look after her child
when needed, counting on friendship and the solidarity of mothers.
Eventually children could help their mothers and learn the trade
themselves. If a woman’s mate had been born in Brazil, their extended
family would include his parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews—that
is, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins for the children. African
partners might have had links to others who had arrived aboard the
same slave ship, also forming a kind of family. Each partner probably
belonged to at least one sodality, broadening the reach of their ties
still further.
From their extended families, children acquired a culture. They
presumably took on religious belief, discovered ethnic traditions,
heard family stories, learned standards of proper behavior and re-
spectability, witnessed rituals of social interchange, observed pat-
terns of authority, and acquired skills and strategies of survival and
resistance. In short, they came to know how to negotiate the some-
times treacherous fields of power and love. The children were en-
meshed from the beginning in a larger social universe starting from
baptism, so often carried out with named godparents.16
The relationship between godparents and child could be especially
problematic because it so clearly exposed the interconnection be-
tween authority and protection. Godparents were chosen with great
care and were meant to be people on whom the child—and, by exten-
sion, the parents—could rely for help. In doing so they became cli-
ents of a patron and owed him or her their loyalty.17 One godparent, a
cattle merchant, expressed his exasperation that his godchildren did
not appreciate his heavy-handed guidance. He declared that he left
nothing to them,

to all of whom—to free them from trouble and taxes etc.—I gave
during my life and several years ago appropriate gifts and also some
sums from my pocket that I placed for each one of them into the
Savings Bank [Caixa Econômica] at interest for them, telling them
what I did; but their parents, uncles, and they themselves, instead of
welcoming this, took the money out to spend right away, etc., etc.,
and some even criticized me for not going myself to the Bank, saying
that I should give them the money directly, even telling me face-to-
face that gifts or not, these were their [moneys] and that they wanted
them and did not require guardians on this matter!

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 60 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

On the other hand, one African woman who engaged in trade revealed
a startling reversal of the usual vertical arrangement of coparent-
hood. This ex-slave bequeathed two gold chains to “my goddaughter,
the daughter of my former master.”18 Relatives and ritual relatives
wound threads of meaning around each person.
As for friends, we may ask, “To whom did a store owner turn when
he wished to summon people to testify on his behalf?” In one case
the owner of a general store called three friendly witnesses: a French-
man, aged twenty-four, engaged in business; a fi fty-year-old Portu-
guese owner of a commission house who sold slaves; and a tinsmith,
born in Salvador, aged twenty-two, with whom the grocer sometimes
went hunting. When another storekeeper believed that he had been
wronged by an inspector of weights and measures, he called five men
as witnesses, three Portuguese and two Brazilians: two were store
clerks, one owned a store himself, one “lives from his business,”
and one, the only mulatto, ran a brothel. Two were married men.
These men knew each other, had common interests, and willingly
spent their time on behalf of the complainant. We may call them his
friends, whom he could call on when needed.19
Street vendors gathered at many locations, fi nding both friends and
rivals. They elbowed their way forward at the beach to get the best
of the catch from fishermen and the most select fruit where boats
docked. They met while competing for manioc meal at the public
grains market. The authorities complained about how, not content
to remain within the designated locations for food stalls, they also
clustered on the steps of the chamber of commerce building, doubt-
less chattering, gossiping, joking, or complaining of their lot. A for-
eign traveler noted a group of black women “selling fruits . . . in ani-
mated conversation,” adding that the ones he saw on the streets were
“chatting with prodigious loquacity as they walked.” What especially
impressed him was how they managed to carry on conversations
while balancing bundles on their head, sometimes speaking “their
native African languages.” Prince Maximilian also described “a
troop of Negroes and Negresses” who worked “amid much noise and
jokes.”20
Beyond family and friends, store owners and street vendors lived
among neighbors, with whom they had face-to-face contact and some-
times close association. Residential segregation was by wealth, not
by color. Two storekeepers, both born in Portugal—Antônio Teixeira
Porto, aged 55 and a widower, and Domingos Alves da Silva, aged 23

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 c o n n e c t io n s 61

figure 3.1. Street vendors at Rosário church, with Carmo in the background, 1860

and a bachelor—lived on the same street in the lower city. They were
called as witnesses regarding the theft of a silver lamp stolen from a
church. The accused were two other Portuguese: a shoemaker, sin-
gle, aged 48, described as barefoot (despite his trade), wearing a shirt
made of African cloth; and a man who “lived from business,” aged 40,
dressed in a black jacket and white pants, wearing shoes. To witness
a search of their house, the police had summoned the neighbors, all
of them male, giving us some notion of who rubbed shoulders with
the two store owners: besides a white store clerk, 27, born in the Ba-
hian town of Valença, and a white “businessman,” born in Salvador,
46, married, the neighbors included a 50-year-old black man and a 60-
year-old mulatto, both born in Salvador, who lived “from buying and
selling”; two mulatto tailors, aged 24 and 29, one born across the bay
in Cachoeira, the other from the arid region to the north just beyond
the border of Sergipe; a mulatto carpenter born in Salvador, aged 40;
and a mulatto sailor, born in Salvador, aged 18. Six of the twelve men
were white, and, of these, four were born in Portugal. One of the other
neighbors was black, the rest mulattos. Three of the eight Brazilians

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 62 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

were born outside Salvador, in the surrounding region. Aged between

18 and 60, only three were or had been legally married, although, as
we have seen, they likely had long-term female companions. Besides
the two store owners, one witness clerked in a store and five others
made their living “from business,” three were artisans (carpenters
or tailors), and one a sailor, besides the shoemaker/thief. None were
strictly manual workers without skills or tools. If there were rich
merchants on that street, they were not called as witnesses. This was
the storekeepers’ neighborhood, not counting women, children, or
slaves—the social world of petty commerce in the lower city.21
Street vendors also lived with a mix of other people. One female
street vendor belonged to a storekeeper who also owned a male se-
dan chair carrier, a male boatman, a male street vendor, two female
seamstresses, and a girl learning to be a seamstress; they were in one
another’s most immediate daily company. The many vendors who
lived on their own, both slave and free, had neighbors with other live-
lihoods. Fragments of the manuscript census carried out in 1855 list
those who lived on the centrally located Rua da Ajuda. The fi rst five
domiciles, whether houses or rooms we do not know, included these
ten people (although the Africans were listed as “free,” they could
only have been freed):

• First domicile:
female, 52, single, Gbe, free, street vendor
• Second domicile:
male, 64, single, Hausa, free, street vendor
female, 44, single, Hausa, free, street vendor
• Third domicile:
male, 40, single, Portuguese, free, store owner
male, 18, single, Portuguese, free, his clerk
female, 60, single, creole [i.e., Brazilian-born black], free, his
servant
• Fourth domicile:
female, 60, single, white [free, of course, probably Brazilian],
quitandeira
• Fifth domicile:
male, 34, single, mulatto, free, boatman
female, 40, single, creole, free, [no occupation listed]
female, 60, single, creole, free, agregada [i.e., a dependent who
lived in the household]

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 c o n n e c t io n s 63

These ten, living cheek-by-jowl, included four men and six women
ranging in age from 18 to 64; three white, two of whom were Portu-
guese; and seven persons of color, three of whom were Africans. As to
occupations, they included one storekeeper, one clerk, one boatman,
and four female street vendors. On another central street “behind
the jail,” a free creole butcher and two vendors—one a Yoruba with a
12-year-old son and the other a mulatta—were immediate neighbors.
Vendors, in short, lived with other relatively poor people, regardless
of color and regardless of place of birth. Although some wealthy per-
sons may have lived nearby, the neighbors of street vendors were usu-
ally poorer than those of store owners, just as their housing was more
precarious.22 It is nevertheless true that Ana de São José da Trindade,
despite being a street vendor, managed to live better than many shop-
keepers. A ranked order was daily being undone and then recalled
and reinstituted.

wider contac ts

Beyond families, friends, and neighbors, shopkeepers and street ven-

dors established contacts with a wide community, ranging from the
meanest slave to the most respectable householder. Wholesalers in
the lower city routinely did business with wealthy import-export
merchants, while grocers sold to people of all ranks, including street
vendors who bought for resale. Grocers would surely have had their
regular customers whom they knew by name and sold to on account.
On Sundays and holy days, when most businesses had to close, gen-
eral stores could legally stay open until noon, as did bakeries. Con-
sequently, they served as gathering places for many, including some
whom the authorities considered dangerous or disruptive (see Fig-
ure 2.3). The city council found it necessary in 1831 to decree that
the owners of those stores in which there were “noisy shouts, illegal
gaming, or slaves lingering beyond the time needed to make their
purchase” be fi ned or suffer four days in jail.23 The frequent repeti-
tion of these ordinances indicates they had little if any effect. Gen-
eral stores became meeting places where free and freed persons, re-
gardless of color, mixed with slaves. Certainly the self-hired could
meet there any day. These shops welcomed both the orderly and the
disorderly, slaves as well as slave owners. They were places for so-
ciable reunions. Nothing suggests that grocers found it awkward to
deal with their socially inferior customers.24

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 64 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

The practice of hawking and the physical mobility it required drew

street vendors into an extensive set of relationships that reached
across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries. They wandered
the streets or sat at corners where they could talk with water car-
riers, porters of wine casks, chair-bearers, self-hired slaves, and free
and slave passersby, not to mention higher-class customers. Vendors
must have met bakers, butchers, city authorities, soldiers, policemen,
street urchins, and construction workers. Their suppliers included
not only the owners of outlying farms and general stores in the city
but the boatmen who brought fresh food and grain from across the
bay and the fishermen who disgorged their catch on the beach. Ellena
testified that she spent her day selling fish and “hunting up fisher-
men.” The city council claimed that street vendors’ association with
boatmen unfairly facilitated their business, for it enabled them to get
ahead of consumers wishing to purchase directly from suppliers of
fruit, legumes, and fish.25 Vendors would know all or most of these
people by name, as well as the names of the domestic servants at the
houses where they sold their goods. These encounters formed part of
their workday routines.
Not all of the vendors’ connections were friendly ones. Soldiers
and policemen, although recruited from the same social class as
many of the vendors, held the authority to exercise force over them.26
The worst clashes occurred in negotiations over prices, since soldiers
seemed to believe they, and not the vendor, should have the last word
on the matter. They sometimes claimed, falsely, that the governor
had set prices for such goods and that they were merely demanding
that foodstuffs be sold at the regulated price, “arbitrarily [determin-
ing] that bananas should be [sold] at ten or a dozen for ten réis, large
watermelons for four vinténs [80 réis], small ones for two and other
foodstuffs in proportion to whatever dictates their desire, . . . their
excess reaching the point of taking the said goods by force.” Soldiers
also insisted that street vendors accept their copper money, despite
the fact that supplying merchants refused to accept any of it because
of widespread counterfeiting. Accusations that soldiers “mistreated”
female street vendors surface as a leitmotif of the era. Their arrogance
and disdain did not go unnoticed. A newspaper scathingly reported
that when a mounted soldier accidentally trampled a vendor’s stand,
scattering her goods all about, although unseated himself, he never-
theless calmly remounted his horse and rode off without an apology
or backward glance.27

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 c o n n e c t io n s 65

Because of their many contacts, shopkeepers and street vendors

could consider news as much a part of their stock-in-trade as the
goods they sold, although they bartered news for other news rather
than selling it for cash. A Portuguese-born shop owner likely kept
his countrymen up to date on what was going on. On a single day
vendors could exchange information with house servants in the up-
per-class district of Vitória and boatmen on the shore about to sail to
towns in the Recôncavo. Ursulina’s food-buying customers included
the political prisoners who rioted in 1833 at a prison-fort out in the
bay, a place she could only have reached in a rowboat or canoe. It is
safe to assume she knew more about their plans for a riot than did the
judge who subsequently heard the case against them.28
Street vendors were deeply affected by, and sometimes participants
in, the 1835 “Muslim” uprising, precisely because they were tied into
the larger urban system by their business. The governor learned of the
plot through a series of denunciations that began with a vendor. To be
sure, the community of street vendors, carriers, and for-hire slaves
and freedpersons was awash with rumors, so any one of many may
have let something slip. But the documented source of the denun-
ciation was Sabina da Cruz, an African who had had a knock-down
drag-out fight with her husband that morning—not their fi rst. He had
walked out, taking many of her things with him, and she was still
fuming that evening. When she went looking for him, she traced him
to a house where they refused her entry because, they said, he was
too busy to come out to talk to her. They told her that soon Africans
would be masters of the land. She replied that they would all soon
be feeling the lash themselves and rushed off to see her friend Gui-
lhermina Rosa de Souza, the wife of a freedman, who had contacts
among the whites. Sabina may have been as worried about her hus-
band’s safety as she was angry at him, and perhaps hoped her action
would stop the movement before he got into trouble. Guilhermina, a
freed African and probably a vendor herself, told her white neighbor
from whom she rented her rooms about what she had learned, and the
news quickly passed up to the president of the province. The authori-
ties reacted swiftly, provoking the rebels to launch their effort pre-
maturely in the middle of the night with disastrous results. If Sabina
can be blamed for their quick defeat, other vendors became deeply in-
volved in promoting the revolt: 14 percent of those put on trial were
women, most of them street vendors.29 Still others were negatively
affected by it: Teresa Maria de Jesus found herself alone after the au-

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 66 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

thorities deported her husband, a freed African, allegedly for his links
to the uprising. Gullible at fi rst—she “trustingly” signed a power-of-
attorney in favor of a man who cheated her—she soon learned how to
defend herself through pursuing her case in several courts, rallying
her friends to testify on her behalf, recovering her property, and get-
ting the man who cheated her put in jail, where he eventually died.
Being part of a larger community had its advantages. 30

patrons and clients

Most store owners made up the lowest link, aside from the street ven-
dors, in a long chain of commerce and credit. At the other end of the
commercial power spectrum were the large-scale merchants, closely
allied with the planter class, who engaged in transatlantic trade. Sugar
and tobacco exporters, importers of European manufactured goods,
major players in the slave trade—these men probably looked down on
the bulk of the store owners, while selling them imported food, lend-
ing them money, and sometimes owning a shop or two themselves,
operated by others.31 José da Silva Maia’s fi rm, at one time Salvador’s
leading transatlantic merchant house and a ship owner himself, sup-
plied codfish to José Pinto de Almeida, who owned two groceries
where he sold drinks and foodstuffs. Lesser merchants who did not
engage in international trade nevertheless built an extensive com-
mercial network into the interior towns of Bahia, especially those
around the Recôncavo, and supplied the grocers in Salvador. They
also bid for contracts to supply the army and sold large quantities of
foodstuffs to institutions such as the hospital of the Santa Casa. Like
the big shots, they might also own a retail store. Some store owners
engaged in other businesses, as did Manoel Tavares. Besides his gro-
cery, he owned land that he used only to extract fi rewood, six small
boats engaged in sailing across the bay, and slave sailors to operate
them. He died in 1816 with an estate worth over two and a half times
that of Ana de São José da Trindade’s. 32
Shopkeepers, however, should not be confused with the merchant
elite. They focused on small sales and carried a limited inventory.
Many, probably most, owners of general stores did not register at the
Board of Trade, where a merchant had to have a certain amount of
capital or be vouched for by those who did. At the end of the eigh-
teenth century a Portuguese schoolteacher living in Salvador said
that although the merchants numbered 164, “there are as well in this

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 c o n n e c t io n s 67

city multitudes of businessmen who trade in foodstuffs.” At another

point he claimed that there were well over 250 general stores in the
town. Although store owners were not the wealthiest people, they
nevertheless held some prestige. They frequently served as officers
in the colonial militia’s second regiment or, later, in the National
Guard, a position that allowed them to lord it over their clerks, who
made up the bulk of the men. Military rank mirrored their social
status.33
For all the distinctions of status among traders, from the wealthy
overseas merchants to the struggling street vendors, they formed an
interconnected whole through the transfer of goods and the exten-
sion of credit. The Pereira Marinho fi rm was a leading merchant- and
slave-trading house. Its Portuguese founder, Joaquim Pereira Marinho,
became a prominent member of Salvador’s Santa Casa de Misericór-
dia, the city’s richest sodality and charitable organization, and he left
a huge estate at his death in the 1880s.34 His enormous wealth derived
in part from his activity as a money lender at the rate of 2 percent per
month; for instance, he financed one man’s purchase of a house and
land in a city suburb. What matters here, however, is that he supplied
other merchants on credit, one of whom was Luiz Manoel da Rocha,
a moderately wealthy Portuguese owner of two general stores with
capital sufficient to be described by his executor as a comerciante.
Besides being listed as a creditor in Rocha’s postmortem inventory,
Pereira Marinho continued to sell salted meat from Rio Grande do
Sul on credit to Rocha’s estate while in probate. 35
So what sort of merchant was Rocha? Like Pereira Marinho, he
had been born in Portugal. He married, was widowed, and married
again. He owned a large food store in the lower city and lived over his
smaller shop in an imposing three-story stone house facing a small
square in the upper city. Besides the house where he lived, he owned
two others immediately next to it, one with a store, presumably
rented to someone else. He owned still another ten houses, making a
total of thirteen. One sign of his wealth is that his property included
two saddle horses, unusual among city dwellers. Typically, however,
he owned many slaves; to be precise, twenty-six of them, including
one female street vendor. That he brought some of his goods into the
city on his two sailing vessels suggests the reach of his business. His
enormous downtown store had for sale hundreds of bottles of wine,
in addition to many casks, and an astounding 18,000 corks, whereas
his smaller one held much smaller quantities of everything, with

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 68 g et t i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

only 145 bottles of wine. Rocha’s extensive debts—passed on to his

heirs at his death in 1853—belied all this apparent wealth, although
it also speaks to how others understood him to be a good risk. By tak-
ing into account what he owed, his real wealth was less than that of
Ana de São José da Trindade, the street vendor! Like Pereira Marinho,
he was also a creditor, lending money in one case to a widow in the
neighboring province of Sergipe whom he mercilessly dunned, and
in another case to a borrower in the Recôncavo city of Santo Amaro
who lost his house when Rocha foreclosed on the mortgaged property
that had been offered as security.36 Also like Pereira Marinho, he sold
goods on credit to others, including Bartolomeu Francisco Gomes,
another storekeeper.
Gomes was the natural son of a couple who had lived in the sea-
side town of Camamu, south of Salvador. Unlike the twice-married
Rocha, Gomes never married, but he had two daughters by his long-
time companion, Epifânia Maria da Conceição, a literate woman. He
named those two, aged twelve and nine, as his heirs. After having
earlier been a cattle trader, by 1848, in partnership with his cashier,
he owned two general stores in the area north of the Carmelite mon-
astery. The variety of goods in Gomes’s stores was as extensive as
any, but the amounts were considerably smaller: half a bushel of rice,
one bushel of corn, half a bushel of beans, seventy-one pounds of
wheat flour, twenty-two pounds of potatoes, twelve pounds of meat.
Gomes owned four slaves but no houses, paying rent to a sodality
for the house where he lived over one of his stores and to a Portu-
guese landlord, a dry goods merchant, for his second one. When he
died in 1848, his modest estate was worth only a quarter of Ana de
São José da Trindade’s. Over a period of many months from 1842 to
1845 Gomes purchased from Rocha, always on credit, a wide variety
of foodstuffs and other goods. Gomes, of course, also bought supplies
on credit from others besides Rocha, just as Pereira Marinho and Ro-
cha leant to many.37
That Rocha owned a slave street vendor completes the chain of
supply and credit, although free hawkers were perhaps more likely to
have bought from Gomes than from Rocha. Sixteen women owed a
salted meat wholesaler a substantial total for supplies they had ped-
dled on the street. A man who seems to have lived from lending listed
a woman who sold sweets among those in debt to him. For those
raised in West Africa, it would not have been strange to receive goods
on credit or to borrow goods and cash from others.38 Occasionally,

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 c o n n e c t io n s 69

however, it was the street vendors who lent money to others. I have
noted how Ana de São José da Trindade, the African vendor, lent a
large sum to a slave trader. She also accepted jewelry from him in
pawn. And Joaquina Maria Borges de Sant’Anna, also a street hawker,
lent even more to the owner of a dockside warehouse. Although we
have no written records as evidence, it is highly probable that ven-
dors generally extended short-term credit to their customers, if for
no other reason than that the chronic shortage of small change made
it difficult to settle accounts after every transaction. Grocers kept a
running account of their sales for later settlement. The city coun-
cil in 1846 described them as profiteering from the “pennies inter-
est they charge on small loans.”39 So, from Pereira Marinho through
Rocha and Gomes to female street vendors and beyond, the goods and
credit flowed downwards, and the payments on interest and principal
went upward. I assume that Pereira Marinho also owed his suppli-
ers overseas, as did others. British importers were said to go every
Saturday to collect something from storekeepers to whom they had
advanced goods on credit.40
Commerce in Salvador, as in most premodern societies, at least in
the Atlantic World, ran principally on credit, not on cash. Banks were
nonexistent in Salvador at the beginning of the period studied here
and did not become numerous or strong enough to support a major
commercial center before the late 1850s. The Santa Casa de Miseri-
córdia, the Desterro nunnery, and other similar institutions lent only
on the security of land, principally to sugar planters.41 So individual
merchants or tradesmen did the commercial lending, and it was said
in Salvador that those who “sell only for cash, sell little or nothing.”
If some storekeepers owed much, others could be described princi-
pally as money lenders. Loans paid off on time before the death of a
borrower do not appear in estate inventories, but these documents
nevertheless suggest that virtually everyone who engaged in trade
was a borrower, a lender, or both simultaneously. As Antônio José
Pinto put it, he “had not a single personal debt” but “I owe for some
items to supply [my] foodstuff store.”42 Not uncommonly—it hap-
pened elsewhere—debts could exceed the value recovered from auc-
tioning off all the goods of a store. Many estates consisted mainly of
paper wealth, requiring the heirs to pursue the debtors. For example,
on paper José Pinto de Almeida, who owned a large store in the lower
city, was four times as rich as Ana de São José da Trindade. But the
value of his estate can be divided into the following categories:

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 70 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

House 1.71 percent

Gold and silver 1.34 percent
Slaves 4.30 percent
Furniture of the store 0.44 percent
Goods for sale 9.24 percent
Cash on hand 3.28 percent
Receivables 79.69 percent
Total 100.00 percent

At the fi nal settlement of this estate almost fi fteen years after Al-
meida’s death, the executor noted that many of these loans had never
been repaid because “some [debtors] have died, others have gone
bankrupt, and others left [the city], leaving no goods.” The executor
asserted, in his own will, that “I undertook every diligent measure
so that the property [of the minors] not be destroyed. . . . I withstood
two serious suits that ended by necessary [out of court] settlements.”
In turn he took debtors to court “from whom I was unable to collect
amicably. . . . I paid out of my own property the proven debts owed
[by Almeida]. Finally, I supported and [continue to] support the said
orphans.”43
The rate of interest is seldom mentioned in such transactions prob-
ably because it had been rolled into the price of the goods in advance.
When specified, however, rates were high. In 1781 a local lawyer
wrote a friend that if one owned a “smack,” one could easily get oth-
ers to invest in the carrying trade at 18 percent, payable within thirty
days of the vessel’s return to port. When, in 1795, the governor sum-
moned the city’s businessmen to see if they would be willing to lend
money to the then-allied British fleet anchored in the bay on its way
to South Africa, they replied that it was “much more advantageous
for them to invest in [export] goods than to lend [their money] even at
an interest rate of 20 percent.”44
Credit relationships were not simply business ones, but those of
clients and patrons. Like most patronage connections in Brazil, they
were riven by ambiguity, all the more so since the borrowers were also
customers. Although borrowers depended on lenders, lenders also de-
pended on borrowers. Advancing credit to customers required a judg-
ment regarding the borrowers’ ability and commitment to repay the
loan, but not doing so meant they might well take their business else-
where. An emotional charge suffused the transaction, and a personal
connection made it work. A popular saying today puts it succinctly:

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 c o n n e c t io n s 71

“Better a friend in business than money in one’s pocket [Mais vale

um amigo na praça que dinheiro no bolso].” In 1865 a merchant who
dealt in dried meat wrote humbly to a partner of a large fi rm that had
guaranteed his rent, saying somewhat hesitatingly, “Compadre and
friend: I wish you good health and happiness. Will you do me the fa-
vor of lending me the sum of two hundred mil-réis, that is, if it is pos-
sible, because I need this sum today to satisfy a creditor of mine. If it
is possible, you can send it with my slave. I remain here at your ser-
vice and with affection.” On the other hand, once a connection had
been established and goods supplied on credit with some repayments
made, the next transaction would surely be easier, take less time, and
produce less anxiety for both parties. By definition, however, borrow-
ers wished to expand lines of credit, whereas lenders sought to restrict
their risk by limiting the amount owing by any one borrower, while
simultaneously making it large enough to attract particular borrow-
ers/customers and solidify their loyalty. In that tension they bar-
gained as best they could, using their social skills, their knowledge of
the other’s trustworthiness and business acumen, their keen sense of
timing, and their ability to persuade, cajole, or threaten, being care-
ful not to overstep the understood boundaries that determined ac-
ceptable behavior for client and patron. The borrower, of course, also
benefited from the lender’s expectation of repeated business because
it helped guarantee the quality of the goods in question. Information
about potential borrowers was as crucial to lenders then as now. Good
ties to notaries—who recorded in their books all legally enforceable
obligations to pay, all suits, and all probate inventories and divisions
of inherited property—surely proved invaluable to a lender anxious to
ascertain the credit worthiness of a borrower. Finally, neither lender
nor borrower could afford to make their bond an exclusive one, each
preferring to have such links to several people, multiplying the num-
ber of patrons and clients. The estate of a wealthy sugar factor and
exporter who died in 1814 listed many store owners as debtors, each
for relatively small amounts, presumably both because he wanted to
spread his risk and the borrowers wished to limit their dependence.
The lender-borrower association was never an entirely easy one, and
its challenges were present at every link in the chain, from interna-
tional merchant to street vendor.45
Only a few store owners’ debts, however, were backed by more than
a spoken promise to pay. Some store owners accepted jewelry as pawn
to secure their loans, as did street vendors such as Ana de São José

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 72 g ett i n g a n d s el l i n g fo o d

da Trindade.46 All loans resulted from face-to-face transactions that

relied on trust and personal knowledge, not on abstract principles of
honesty applicable to everyone. Violating the unspoken rules brought
condemnation enough and prevented further borrowing from almost
anyone. If a storekeeper saw he could not repay his creditors, he would
turn his goods over to them and start anew. As John Turnbull, an
English businessman, explained, “the laws of debtor and creditor re-
semble those of Scotland: An insolvent debtor makes a cession of his
goods to his creditor and is thenceforth personally free.” That is, as
another foreigner made even more explicit, “when a bankrupt deliv-
ers up his effects, they are sold and divided among his creditors who
have no further claim upon him. But if he either neglects or refuses
to do this, the law empowers them to seize everything he may pos-
sess and in this case they still continue to have a claim on whatever
property he may acquire, ‘till the whole debt is liquidated.” On the
other hand, the lender faced still other insecurities, because, short of
completed bankruptcy proceedings, it could prove exceedingly dif-
ficult to recover money leant to a recalcitrant borrower. A third com-
mentator claimed that to recover a debt of 100$000 “you will easily
spend 25$000” in legal and other fees and “lose six months.” Never-
theless, many creditors found it worth their while to pursue debtors,
and suits for recovery of loans filled the courts and took up the time
of bailiffs citing debtors and threatening to have their goods embar-
goed. Foreclosure for debt was not uncommon.47
Auctioning the contents of a store to pay off debts, or for any other
reason, had its own publicly performed ritual. The judge, with his
scribe present, ordered the bailiff to begin the proceedings:

He did so, loudly saying, “May he who wants to bid on the goods of
the food-store of José Pinto de Almeida come before me and I will
receive his bid.” . . . And accepting this bid he began to announce
it, saying in a loud voice “eleven thousand, seven hundred and sixty
réis over and above the appraised value of the goods existing in the
store; . . . he who would give more come before me and I will receive
his bid.” There not being a larger bid, he then . . . began to [seek] a
larger [fi nal] bid, saying before all present: “Offer more, because I
don’t fi nd more, if I fi nd more, I’ll take more, some little bit, I give
you one, I give you two, a larger one, a smaller one, I sell at the mar-
ket, I auction at the market, and because there is no one to offer more,
I hand you the sapling branch.” And approaching the bidder he said
these fi nal words: “May God give you good value for the goods of the

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 c o n n e c t io n s 73

store,” . . . and he gave him a green branch as a sign of having won the
bidding, and the Judge took it as fi rm and valid.48

Such a proceeding doubtless drew onlookers, even those uninterested

in acquiring the property. It demonstrated to a larger public not only
the norms of wise business behavior but also the need to render loy-
alty and deference to those who lent you funds.
Illiterate street vendors did not leave written records of their deal-
ings. When they sold food on credit to householders, these debts could
surely prove difficult to collect.49 When a buyer stiffed a vendor, what
recourse did she have? If, however, a vendor failed to pay what she
owed, I suspect word spread quickly from supplier to supplier with
dire consequences for her. Being at the bottom of the credit ladder
had its price.

Vendors, mostly women and mostly black, and shopkeepers, mostly

Portuguese men, all interacted with others of distinct social posi-
tions. Their fi nancial role mirrored their social one: borrowing from
international merchants and lending to street vendors, grocers formed
a crucial layer in the pyramid of credit, making practically all trad-
ers into lenders and borrowers, patrons and clients. The unrestrained
movement of street vendors about the city as they did business broad-
ened their reach, exposed them to other perceptions, and may have
given them strength, even power, especially the conceptual ability
to counterpoise themselves to dominant groups. Grocers also built
connections through and across social ranks, from relationships to
slaves—their own and those of others—to ties to wealthy consum-
ers and merchant-suppliers. The formal and informal dealings of gro-
cers and vendors, repeated on a daily basis, widened the scope of their
experience through face-to-face encounters across class and ethnic
divisions. Yet both vendors and shopkeepers were bounded by under-
standings of social position, understandings that formed a web—flex-
ible but still present—in which they were caught.
In addition to their business dealings, both shopkeepers and street
vendors built extensive networks through family and neighborhood
to construct a community—dynamic, flexible, and durable. The sur-
viving evidence allows us only to glimpse something of the dense
connections that shopkeepers and street vendors constructed and
maintained, not only through business but also through residential
proximity, affection, and even love.

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