Of Oxen and Puppets: Encountering the Afterlives of Slavery in Brazilian Cultures of Play
In October 2023, I shared key takeaways from the final chapter of my book project Surrendering to the Streets: Black Artists of Laughter, Anger, and Reverence. My remarks explored the emic meanings of a particularly well-documented “ox game” (bumba-meu-boi) in Recife, Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil. The following is a meditation on the theoretical stakes of my work vis-à-vis the living legacies of slavery.
Captain Soft Mouth (Boca Mole) thought of himself as a munificent enslaver in his majority nonwhite state of Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil. In fact, the landowner claimed that he never even branded Mateus and Sebastião, the enslaved father and son who did his bidding. The duo revealed the true extent of their suffering by fleeing the self-proclaimed “good master” who secretly withheld food and inflicted severe beatings. The captain hired a professional slavecatcher, the capitão do mato (bush captain, image), to recover his chattel but abruptly turned the tables. Soft Mouth cheated the slavecatcher out of his money and encouraged his subordinates to “pay” him in whippings. They thrashed him liberally with air-filled ox bladders.
This episode not only occurred nearly 80 years after abolition by imperial decree (1888). It was also an established part of a farcical and interactive community spectacular that combined puppetry, percussion, dance and song, blackface, clowning, acrobatics, jokes, riddles, and drag. For more than 60 years, Antônio Pereira da Silva (1889–1981) directed, managed, and starred in Recife, Pernambuco’s best-known variant of an “ox game” (bumba-meu-boi). This illiterate, mixed-race (pardo) mason’s assistant reprised the role of Soft Mouth in marathon performances loosely organized around the ritual death and “resurrection” of a landowner’s prized bovine. From atop his “horse,” Pereira/Soft Mouth supervised a permeable ring where his troupe of humble artists and spectators mutually determined the course of a play event.
Bumbas-meu-boi (strike or hit, my ox) have been documented in no fewer than a dozen Brazilian states. The final chapter of my book, Surrendering to the Streets: Black Artists of Laughter, Anger, and Reverence, looks beyond the stadium-based extravaganzas of the North to appreciate Northeast Brazil’s best documented interpretation of a rhizomatic kind of expressive culture. It draws on audiovisual evidence and textual transcriptions of improvised performances to reconstitute Antônio Pereira’s distinctive playverse. In Recife’s streets and public squares, lurid characters representing broadly legible social types voiced abiding truths about power and pretense in a violently unequal society.
My chapter (and the book as a whole) shows how chattel slavery was not only a tentpole of Antônio Pereira’s bumbas-meu-boi but also a larger universe of plebeian oral culture, including improvised puppet play (termed mamulengo in the state of Pernambuco). Both practices open apertures into a stable universe of named characters, leitmotifs, material objects, and punchlines. This ludic microworld stands as an evocative counterimage of the myths perpetuated by the plantation “big house” (casa-grande), which has long alleged that a uniquely Brazilian conviviality (convivência) “softened” its relations with the denizens of the “slave quarters” (senzala).
These practices’ troubling assessments of social and racial relations partially explain something of a scholarly disquiet. However, many 19th and 20th century interpretations also do not emphatically reject the basic rules of the “game,” operating instead within established frameworks of domination and submission. If, as I have shown of mamulengo, diminutive Black puppet protagonists had uncertain relationships with their color, we find no evidence that northeastern bumbas-meu-boi culminated with the enslaved deposing their captain. This is not to say that Antônio Pereira or his forebears never considered this dramatic upheaval; rather, it stands to reason that such an outcome could jeopardize local powerbrokers’ tolerance or even patronage. Indeed, the mythopoetic origin stories that Pereira and puppet artists related in mid to late 20th century underlined their crafts’ historically sanctioned spaces within existing structures of power.
In our introductory vignette, Mateus, Sebastião, and Captain Soft Mouth channeled what historian Stuart Schwartz has shown to be captors’ and enslaved people’s mutual disdain for slavecatchers. Both parties ostensibly benefited from this conclusion. The impetuous landowner, for his part, flexed his prerogative to make and break agreements while the enslaved father and son exacted their revenge with Soft Mouth’s express backing. Probing a larger body of transcribed performances from neighboring states shows that flight and capture were conventional leitmotifs in northeastern bumbas-meu-boi. We find instances of Black protagonists apprehending the slavecatcher and taunting him with a bold pronouncement: “Capitão do mato, look how the world has turned. You went to the forest to catch a Black man (or woman) and they captured you!”
Neither wholly conforming nor defiant, oral plebeian culture tends to hedge the narrow frames that scholars foist upon them. In these dramatic ruses or game of trickery (trapaça), nothing is as it seems, and their stubborn irreducibility to singular meanings helps explain their longevity. Recognizing this strong inclination toward opacity (a concept employed by Daphne Brooks, Michel de Certeau, Édouard Glissant, and others) is integral to understanding slavery’s long afterlives in cultures of play, even when the signs and symbols of enslavement are not immediately front and center.
