The Masters and the Slaves

Gilberto Freyre

While the implications of some of his ideas have long been debated, even today Gil-
berto de Mello Freyre (1900–1987) is considered one of the great interpreters of Brazil-
ian culture. In a trilogy of books about Brazilian history and society that he wrote
beginning in 1933, he critiqued then-­current views of racial miscegenation as a source
of social degeneration and instead celebrated the mixture of European, American,
and African races and cultures that, in his view, explains the uniqueness of Brazil.
Freyre was raised in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, one of the centers of
Brazil’s sugar-­producing and slaveholding colonial past. After finishing his early edu-
cation in the city of Recife, he traveled to the United States, where he studied at Baylor
College in Waco, Texas, and completed a master’s degree at Columbia University,
studying with the anthropologist Franz Boas, who greatly influenced his thinking.
The Masters and the Slaves (1933) was his first and most famous work. Together
with the other two books in the trilogy, The Mansions and the Shanties (1936) and
Order and Progress (1957), it was an extended essay about the formation of Brazil
and Brazilian identity. After an initial chapter on the process of colonization, ex-
cerpts of which appear below, the subsequent chapters each focus on one of the races
that Freyre argued created Brazil, with one about the role of the indigenous, another
on the Portuguese colonizer, and two long chapters explaining “the black slave in
Brazilian sexual and family life.” As this chapter title suggests, the topic of sexuality
as a form of power and negotiation pervades the book, as Freyre’s arguments center
on the importance of patriarchal family structures.
His thinking provoked a monumental intellectual shift for Brazil. During the em-
pire, writers largely ignored black and mixed-­race populations, and in the First Re-
public most intellectuals adopted racial theories that understood racial mixtures as
a cause of national inferiority. By contrast, Freyre declared that miscegenation had
led to a panoply of racial gradations and to such a thorough mixing of cultural ele-
ments that the resulting Brazilian culture was a unique new hybrid. The Masters
and the Slaves was an instant best-­seller, and his vision of race—​­what later came
to be known as the idea of racial democracy—​­proved immensely compelling to many
for decades.

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 Gilberto Freyre (1900–
1987) challenged scientific
racism and reshaped
national notions of race
in Brazil. Courtesy of
Acervo Iconographia.

I. General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil:

Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-­Holding, and Hybrid Society
When, in 1532, the economic and civil organization of Brazilian society was
effected, the Portuguese already for an entire century had been in contact
with the tropics and had demonstrated, in India and in Africa, their aptitude
for living in those regions. The definitive proof of this aptitude is to be found
in the change of direction that Portuguese colonization underwent in São
Vicente and in Pernambuco, from an easy-­going mercantile way of life to
an agricultural existence. Colonial society in Brazil was organized upon a
more solid basis and under more stable conditions than it had been in India
or on the African plantations. The foundation was agriculture, and the con-
ditions were a patriarchal stability of family life; the regularization of labor
by means of slavery; and the union of the Portuguese male with the Indian
woman, who was thus incorporated into the economic and social culture of
the invader.

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 In tropical America the society that was formed was agrarian in structure,
slave-­holding in its technique of economic exploitation, and hybrid in com-
position, with an admixture of the Indian and later of the black. This was
a society that in its evolution was protected less by a consciousness of race,
which was practically non-­existent in the cosmopolitan and plastic-­m inded
Portuguese, than it was by a religious exclusiveness given expression in a sys-
tem of social and political prophylaxis; less by official action than by the arm
and sword of the individual. All this, however, was subordinated to a spirit of
political, economic, and juridical realism that here, as in Portugal, from the
first century on, was the decisive element in the forming of the nation. What
we had in our country was great landowning and autonomous families, lords
of the plantation, with an altar and a chaplain in the house and Indians armed
with bow and arrow or blacks armed with muskets at their command; and
from their seats in the municipal council chamber these masters of the earth
and of the slaves that tilled it always spoke up boldly to the representatives
of the crown, while through the liberal-­toned voices of their sons who were
priests or doctors of the law they cried out against every species of abuse
on the part of the Metropolis and of Mother Church itself. In this they were
quite different from the rich criollos [those of European descent born and
raised in the colonies] and learned bachelors of Spanish America, who for so
long were inert in the dominant shadow of the cathedrals and the palaces
of the viceroys, or who, when gathered in cabildos [town councils], did little
more than serve as a laughingstock for the all-­powerful lords of the realm.
The singular predisposition of the Portuguese to the hybrid, slave-­
exploiting colonization of the tropics is to be explained in large part by the
ethnic or, better, the cultural past of a people existing indeterminately be-
tween Europe and Africa and belonging uncompromisingly to neither one
nor the other of the two continents; with the African influence seething be-
neath the European and giving a sharp relish to sexual life, to alimentation,
and to religion; with Moorish or black blood running throughout a great
light-­skinned mulatto population, when it is not the predominant strain, in
regions that to this day are inhabited by a dark-­skinned people; and with the
hot and oleous air of Africa mitigating the Germanic harshness of institu-
tions and cultural forms, corrupting the doctrinal and moral rigidity of the
medieval Church, drawing the bones from Christianity, feudalism, Gothic
architecture, canonic discipline, Visigoth law, and Latin tongue, and the very
character of the people. It was Europe reigning without governing: it was
Africa that governed. . . .
In its ethnic and cultural indeterminateness between Europe and Africa,
Portugal appears to have been always the same as other portions of the pen-
insula. A species of bi-­continentalism that, in a population so vague and ill-­
defined, corresponds to bisexuality in the individual. It would be difficult to
imagine a people in more fluctuation than the Portuguese, the feeble balance

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 of antagonisms being reflected in everything that pertains to them, confer-
ring upon them an easy and relaxed flexibility that is at times disturbed by
grievous hesitations, along with a special wealth of aptitudes that are fre-
quently discrepant and hard to reconcile for the purpose of a useful expres-
sion or practical initiative. . . .
Within this antecedent factor of a general nature—​­the bi-­continentalism
or, better, the dualism of culture and race—​­there are other, subordinate fac-
tors that call for our special attention. One of these is the presence among
the elements that united to form the Portuguese nation of individuals of Se-
mitic origin, or stock, individuals endowed with a mobility, a plasticity, and
adaptability social as well as physical that are to be made out easily in the
Portuguese navigator and cosmopolitan of the fifteenth century. Hereditar-
ily predisposed to a life in the tropics by a long tropical habitat, it was the
Semitic element, mobile and adaptable as no other, that was to confer upon
the Portuguese colonizer of Brazil some of the chief physical and psychic
conditions for success and for resistance—​­including that economic realism
which from an early date tended to correct the excesses of the military and
religious spirit in the formation of Brazilian society. . . .
As to their miscibility, no colonizing people in modern times has exceeded
or so much as equaled the Portuguese in this regard. From their first con-
tact with women of color, they mingled with them and procreated mestizo
sons; and the result was that a few thousand daring males succeeded in es-
tablishing themselves firmly in possession of a vast territory and were able to
compete with great and numerous peoples in the extension of their colonial
domain and in the efficiency of their colonizing activity. Miscibility rather
than mobility was the process by which the Portuguese made up for their de-
ficiency in human mass or volume in the large-­scale colonization of extensive
areas. For this they had been prepared by the intimate terms of social and
sexual intercourse on which they had lived with the colored races that had
invaded their peninsula or were close neighbors to it, one of which, of the
Mohammedan faith, was technically more highly skilled and possessed an
intellectual and artistic culture superior to that of the blond Christians. . . .
In opposition to the legend of the “enchanted Moorish woman,” although
it never attained the same prestige, there evolved that of the “Moorish hag,”
representing, it may be, an outlet for the blonde woman’s sexual jealousy
toward her colored sister. . . . With reference to Brazil, as an old saying has
it, “White woman for marriage, mulatto woman for f—​­, black woman for
work,” a saying in which, alongside the social convention of the superior-
ity of the white woman and the inferiority of the black, is to be discerned a
sexual preference for the mulatto. Moreover, in our national lyricism there is
no tendency more clearly revealed than one toward a glorification of the mu-
latto woman, the cabocla or Indian woman, the brown-­skin or brunette type,
celebrated for the beauty of her eyes, the whiteness of her teeth, for her wiles

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 and languishment and witching ways, far more than are the “pale virgins”
and the “blonde damsels.” . . .
All of these elements, beginning with a Christianity that was lyrically so-
cial, a cult of the family rather than a religion of the church or cathedral . . .
All these elements and advantages, to repeat, were to favor a colonization
that in Portuguese America, as in the “proprietary colonies” of the English
in North America, was to rest upon the institution of the slaveholding fam-
ily, the Big House, the patriarchal family, the only difference being that in
our country the family was to be enlarged by a far greater number of bas-
tards and dependents, gathered round the patriarchs, who were more given
to women and possibly a little more loose in their sexual code than the North
Americans were.
The true formative process of our society, as has been said, is to be viewed
from 1532 on, with the rural or semi-­r ural family as the unit, whether it was
a matter of married couples who had come from the homeland or of families
that had been set up here through the union of colonists with Indian women,
with orphan girls, or even with women whom matchmaking fathers had sent
over at random from Portugal. . . .
The advantages of miscegenation in Brazil ran parallel to the tremendous
disadvantage of syphilis. These two factors began operating at the same
time: one to form the Brazilian, the ideal type of modern man for the trop-
ics, a European with black or Indian blood to revive his energy; the other to
deform him. . . .
Of all the social influences, perhaps syphilis has been, next to bad nutri-
tion, the most deforming in its effects, the one that has to the greatest extent
drained the economic energy of the Brazilian mestizo. It would appear to
have come from the first unions of Europeans, wandering aimlessly along
our shores, with those Indian women who offered themselves to the white
man’s sexual embrace. That initial ethnic “tare” of which Azevedo Amaral
speaks was first of all a syphilitic tare.
It is customary to say that civilization and syphilis go hand in hand, but
Brazil would appear to have been syphilized before it was civilized. The first
Europeans to come here were swallowed up in the aboriginal mass without
leaving upon the latter any traces of their origin other than those of syphilis
and racial hybridism. They did not bring civilization, but there is evidence to
show that they did bring the venereal plague to the population that absorbed
them.

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