A Escrava Isaura 1.58 · 1.58

This is the sentence the chapter is built to reach. 'Trastes de luxo collocados na senzala do africano' — fine furniture set down in the slave quarters. In one image Isaura demolishes the whole speech: an education, a beauty, a piano, do not change the nature of the room they stand in, and the room is a senzala. And the word cuts deeper than she says, because 'trastes' is also what a person could be called in the ledger of a slave estate — chattels, movables. She is describing her gifts as furniture and, in the same breath, herself: the most refined object in the hut is still counted among its contents. Guimarães gives his enslaved heroine the clearest sentence in his book, and it is a sentence about being property that will not be flattered into forgetting it.

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