Narratives of the “Good Master” and the Origins of Black Communities in Brazil, 1870–1920

This paper interrogates the meaning of the narratives about “good masters and generous landlords” that can be found in the oral traditions and memories of slave-descendants in Brazil. Taking a few cases from black rural communities in Amazonia it argues that, while these ideas have traditionally been regarded as “false consciousness” or whitewashed images of the enslavers, in reality they reflect the existence of an important sphere of social advancement for the slaves and ex-slaves via establishing agreements with the masters. The narrative has indeed received additional layers overtime, such as the gendered image of the masters’ wife as an embodiment of Virgin Mary’s Catholic piety and mercy, but by crossing these narratives with multiple other sources we can sometimes disentangle those layers with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It is of paramount importance to identify and study the agreements between former slaves and masters or landowners, because it allowed a number of black rural communities to settle in the lands where they still live in the present.