A Escrava Isaura 9.71 · 9.71

This is the sentence the book is built to make you feel: 'A escrava tambem tem coração' — a slave, too, has a heart. Everything Leôncio has said assumes the opposite, that ownership runs all the way down; Isaura answers with the one boundary property cannot cross. It is not a plea for kinder treatment but a claim about the limits of power itself — that there is a province of the person, the affections, no title deed reaches. Guimarães, writing thirteen years before abolition, puts the era's whole moral case into a slave's quiet correction of her master's grammar. The heart is not among the things that can be owned.

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