Abolition, when it finally arrived, was a festive occasion in Brazil. The streets of Rio de Janeiro were packed on May 13, 1888, the day Princess Isa

Machado de Assis’s Afterlives

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2021-07-03 18:00:07

Abolition, when it finally arrived, was a festive occasion in Brazil. The streets of Rio de Janeiro were packed on May 13, 1888, the day Princess Isabel granted the country’s last remaining slaves their freedom. Plays and orations were put on in honor of the decree, known as the “Golden Law”; blacks and whites were encouraged to mix in celebration. There “remains a general consensus among Brazilians,” writes the historian Marcus S. Wood, “that the hours directly following the [proclamation] were among the most ecstatic and genuinely optimistic that Rio has ever witnessed.” Famously, Isabel signed the decree with a pearl-and-diamond-encrusted quill. In photographs, you can make her out above the chaos, perched on the balcony of the Imperial Palace, waving at the gathered crowds.

The Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis attended the Golden Law celebrations. He left a terse record of the events: “There was sunshine, great sunshine, that Sunday of 1888 when the senate voted the law, which the Regency approved[,] and we all went out on the streets. Yes, I myself went out in the street, the most closed of all the big snails, I entered the parade in an open coach, the guest of an absent fat friend, we all breathed happiness, it was all a delirium.”