Disorders at the Water Fountain

As the free and freed colored population of Bahia increased towards the end of the eighteenth-century, Portuguese officials stationed in the colony increasingly pointed to the proliferation of such “masterless” individuals as evidence of urban “disorder.”  Public water fountains, among other spaces, became associated with improper behavior and danger.  At these fountains enslaved and free women would come daily to fill water jugs for their masters and mistresses or for themselves.  Many of them would also meet with male acquaintances, share information about what was going on in their households, and generally enjoy some time away from the surveillance of patrons or owners.  Yet it was the men who accompanied these women, and the military soldiers who were charged with policing the fountains, whose behavior alarmed them the most.  In particular, the violent confrontations that sometimes took place between soldiers and women, and the subsequent conflicts that took place between soldiers and other men over the treatment of the women were foremost in their considerations.  This paper will thus examine the relationship between the concept of order/disorder and black masculine honor at the public fountains.  For elite observers, the ability to protect one’s subordinates, especially women, was one of the things that distinguished one as a man of order.  Thus those who could not or would not protect their women were the very embodiment of disorder, and thus dishonor.  While it was already established in secular discourse that enslaved peoples had no honor, and thus the fictional order-disorder divide could be rather easily maintained with respect to master-slave relations, larger numbers of freed black males represented a new problem for colonial elites who were anxious about disorder:  how, if ever, could people of African descent be incorporated into the world of order?