ABSTRACT
The history of Brazil’s slave past has been essentially reconstructed from the documentary sources left by the ruling classes. Recording the memory of slavery through the testimony of black men’s families allows the historian to hear the evidence of those who until have constituted the ‘silent figures’ of history. Since the hundredth anniversary of Slavery Emancipation in Brazil in 1988, a group of researchers from the University of Sao Paulo have been taperecording the memories of black families of their captive past. Under the colonial system, which in Brazil continued up to 1822, coercive toil was imperative for slaveholders to get a fast return on the capital they had put into the slave. Black family memory of childhood has no place for the mythologized happy and smiling times common in bourgeois reminiscences. In nineteenth-century moralistic speeches, young black women were often singled out as corruptors of their masters, using their physical attributes to take advantage of them.
