A Escrava Isaura 9.77 · 9.77

This is the chapter's most repellent line, and it must be read for what it is on two levels at once. As a threat, it is Leôncio's ultimate cruelty: unable to possess Isaura himself, he will degrade her by force into a marriage she abhors — using her body as a thing to be assigned. But the phrasing, 'o mais vil, do mais hediondo de meus negros', also exposes the speaker, not the men he names. Leôncio ranks the enslaved men as vile and loathsome by their bondage, exactly the slander he has just aimed at Isaura; the contempt is his, and it recoils on him. Guimarães, an abolitionist writing for an audience that still held people as property, lets the villain condemn himself out of his own mouth — the reader is meant to recoil not at 'os negros' but at the man who would weaponize a human marriage as a punishment.

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