A Escrava Isaura 7.199 · 7.199

This is the ugliest line in the chapter, and it must be met head-on. André flatters Isaura by degrading the other enslaved women in the era's crudest racist terms: 'corja' (rabble), 'beiçudas' (thick-lipped) and 'catinguentas' (foul-smelling) — physiognomic and olfactory slurs long used to dehumanize Black people. His whole compliment works by contrast: Isaura is precious only because her darker sisters are, in his eyes, refuse. The passage lays bare the colorism at the root of the novel's world — a light-skinned slave exalted by the same logic that debases the dark-skinned — and Guimarães puts the contempt in a fool's mouth without ever quite disowning it. The modern reader should feel the cruelty as cruelty, and see the women so described as the real victims of the line.

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