Originally published in Portuguese in 2006, now expertly translated by Mary Ann Mahony, Crossroads of Freedom is a pleasure to read and a tremendous contribution to the study of slavery and abolition. In this meticulously researched book, historian Walter Fraga examines how enslaved peoples in the sugar zones of Bahia, Brazil, sought to control their lives and labour in the years surrounding abolition. While Brazil enacted gradual measures limiting slavery beginning in 1871, full freedom from the institution came only in 1888. These long middle years thus brought uncertainty for all sides, and they also brought increased contestation from those enslaved on sugar plantations. As Fraga argues, these struggles centred most critically around rights for the enslaved to cultivate their own subsistence plots. Likewise, he reveals, this same struggle around land proved formative in the years after abolition. With a creative and far-ranging array of sources, this work provides rich, archival details into the lives of the enslaved, the planters, and the newly freed. Tracing long continuities across periods of slavery and freedom, Fraga succeeds in bringing new insight into the experiences of those who lived through the transition to free labour. The result is a book that is innovative, well-grounded and important for those interested in slavery and freedom across the Atlantic.
Crossroads of Freedom is organised roughly chronologically: the first three chapters focus on the pre-abolition period, while the remaining six chapters take a closer look at abolition and the years that followed. Though all of the chapters are consistently insightful, I wish to highlight three in some detail. Chapter 1 is particularly important as Fraga uses it to lay the groundwork for understanding life on the sugar plantations of the Recôncavo, the rich sugar zone surrounding the city of Salvador, Bahia. As he notes, by the 1870s numbers of slaves there were declining for a variety of reasons, and planters further faced a general shortage of freed labour. These conditions, as well as news about impending abolition, meant that although planters continued to resist abolition fiercely, they also were forced to make concessions within the plantation. Chief among these, perhaps, was the increased granting of time for the enslaved to cultivate their own subsistence plots and increased opportunity for earning wages.
Chapter 2 and 5 merit special mention for their striking micro-historical perspective. Chapter 2 offers close study of a dramatic case of conflict on a plantation in 1882, culminating with the murder of a master. With painstaking cross checking of archives and plantation records, Fraga is able to piece together an astonishing amount about the tensions of slavery during this time as well as about the lives of the particular individuals involved.
Chapter 5 also focuses on a conflict, this time after abolition, resulting from former slaves who gathered together to massacre planter cattle in symbolic rituals. Again, Fraga creatively unravels a multitude of sources to get at the perspectives of the newly freed in remarkable ways. With these chapters and others, Fraga reveals that the enslaved had sharpened their negotiating teeth before abolition. The conflicts that emerged after abolition thus relied on strategies and understandings that were not fresh inventions, but rather had a significant history and precedent. The book as a whole stresses that the enslaved were active in shaping their lives and labour during slavery, and that the same agency continued, though hindered by planter and police repression, after slavery finally came to an end. The newly freed emerged into freedom as people with roots, and as individuals and families with deep understandings of the dynamics of land and labour in the sugar zone.
As should be clear, Fraga's book brings together painstaking research across a variety of sources. Drawing upon plantation inventories, birth and death records, criminal cases, oral histories, planter correspondence, popular songs and contemporary novels (to list only a few), Fraga puts together a truly impressive portrait of the era. Throughout, he includes extensive citations from his sources, as well as detailed charts of families and individuals from plantation registers. These inclusions allow readers not only to evaluate the evidence for themselves, but also to fully appreciate the elegance of his analysis, as he carefully unravels multiple layers of possibility and meaning from the sources.
Fraga's work can be placed in the midst of several important historiographic debates. Clearly, he is speaking to historians across the Americas who have pointed to the significance of subsistence plots for the enslaved. And certainly, his work is important to those interested in the trajectory of Bahia in particular. More broadly, however, his work speaks to those concerned with the transition from enslaved to free labour; to those interested in the rise of urban labour movements after abolition; and to those interested in the changing fate of sugar and land ownership in the aftermath of slavery. Remarkably, Fraga makes a major contribution to all of these debates.
Perhaps because Fraga's work responds to so many historiographic concerns, it cannot help but leave some aside. Curiously, despite his evident interest in land, the larger question of land disenfranchisement remains less developed, despite its obvious importance for problems of twentieth-century poverty. Another topic left largely untouched is that of racial identity. Fraga ultimately seems to indicate that an urban labour identity became most formative for freedmen in Salvador, but given the rich literature on race and ethnic identity for the city, as well as his own rich source base, such conclusions could be probed further. Such omissions do not take away from the importance of what is already a far-ranging and ambitious work, but simply leave the reader wanting more.
This is a book that can fruitfully be used in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. The translation, by Mary Ann Mahony, a fellow historian of Bahia, is fluid and precise. Her introduction elegantly places the work within a larger historiography of slavery and freedom in Brazil; a foreword by Robert Slenes, a prominent Brazilian historian of slavery, gives further context. Fraga's thoughtful approach gives agency and humanity to the enslaved in Bahia and their efforts to fashion a new life with abolition. His interest is the meaning of freedom for both masters and the enslaved, and he shows eloquently all of the contestation, uncertainty and ebullience of the start of a new era.
