The verses she sang
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As coplas, que cantava, dizião assim?
The verses she was singing went thus:
Guimarães pauses the narration and hands us the words themselves. The verses the hidden singer was singing went as follows — a lament, in the first person, of a woman born into slavery.
A single line, and a hinge in the whole book. Guimarães steps out of description and lets the enslaved woman speak — or rather sing — for herself. What follows is not the narrator's account of her suffering but her own voice, in the first person, put into verse. In 1875 that was a real act: to give a slave not just beauty and refinement but a <em>lyric</em>, an inner life articulate enough to make a poem of her bondage. The song is coming; he clears the stage for it.
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