Narrating Death and Life in the Illegal Slave Trade to Brazil

This paper offers a counterpoint to this panel by questioning how we can imagine “exceptional” lives that are not readily visible in the documentary archives. Many scholars have shown how Black and indigenous lives enter and are disappeared from the historical records in Brazil and the Americas more broadly. How can we write about them beyond archival silences? How can we do so without reducing them to their enslavement, or their resistance to it? I explore these questions through my current project on the illegal slave trade to Brazil that follows the journey of the Mary E. Smith, captured in 1856 and known today as one its “last slave ships.” The West Central Africans rescued from this ship enter the archives as people who are both liberated and deceased, with no past or future. I explore the possibilities of imagining their lives beyond these faint archival traces, in two ways: first, through a dogged archival search for the ship’s survivors who lived in Brazil as Africanos livres; and second, by looking beyond the written archive. For this I explore the possibilities of embodied archives, cosmology, and memory, among others. I argue that these women and men too are exceptional, not because of overt acts of resistance, or because they rose within Brazilian institutions, but for the very simple reason that they survived in a brutal world where life after slavery was a farce—and that their descendants are still alive today in the Amazon.