The daughter of a slave and a white master, Adelina traveled to São Luís do Maranhão and served as a sentry, warning abolitionists and fleeing slaves when and where there was a police operation. There isn’t much information about who Adelina, the Charuteira, was. era. But it is known that, with his ability to infiltrate different parts of São Luís do Maranhão, he helped the abolitionist movement that was taking shape in the capital of Maranhão, especially among the elite students.
In his Dictionary of Black Slavery in Brazil, sociologist Clóvis Moura (1925-2003) has an entry on the matter. According to him, “it was Adelina, a cigar maker from São Luís do Maranhão, who forwarded the information to the Clube dos Mortos association.”
The Clube dos Mortos was a radical abolitionist group that operated in the capital of Maranhão, helping to free enslaved people.
The profession of the cigar maker
Adelina was probably born in 1859. The Dictionary of Women of Brazil – From 1500 to the present, organized by the pedagogue and feminist activist Schuma Schumaher and the psychologist Érico Vital Brazil, also dedicates an entry to Adelina. She was said to be the daughter of a slave “known as Boca da Noite and a rich master”.
It is believed that the mother’s real name was Josepha Tereza da Silva. His father was João Francisco da Luz.
“Adelina was an intelligent and shrewd slave,” says sociologist Moura. “She knew how to read and write, she embroidered and sewed. Her mother had raised all the master’s children and, on her deathbed, had received the promise that she would free her daughter as soon as she turned 17, “when she should have come to her senses and nothing more would have been lost.”
It is unclear whether the promise was kept or not. According to the Brazilian Women’s Dictionary, no. But because during her adolescence her father suffered “a financial setback, became impoverished and began making cigars”, the girl became “sales manager”.
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Moura says she became a cigar salesman at age 16, “a few months before she got her freedom.” For him, therefore, Adelina ended up becoming a freedwoman.
The fact is that, free or prisoner, she always had the alibi of circulating the streets of São Luís: «Twice a day she went around the city delivering trays of cigars from bar to bar, and selling them individually to passers-by. “, informs the entry of the Women’s Dictionary.
One of the recurring points of his sales circuit was Largo do Carmo. The traditional Liceu Maranhense, a high school that trained the local elite, was based there. The students became Adelina’s customers. And Adelina learned abolitionism from them.
“There he had the opportunity to participate in numerous abolitionist demonstrations promoted by students on the steps of the school,” adds Dicionário Mulheres. “He fell in love with the cause and began participating in demonstrations and marches in favor of the abolition of slavery.”
But we must be careful with the term abolitionism, recalls the historian Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, professor at the University of São Paulo (USP) and author, among others, of Geminiana and her children: slavery, motherhood and death in 19th century Brazil .
For her, abolitionism existed in Brazil “only in the 1880s”, “led by white political figures”, “paternalistic and authoritarian”. “Him [o abolicionismo] It’s anti-slavery but also anti-slave, just like the so-called Brazilian abolitionist literature that depicted black characters as terrible people,” he comments.
Machado adds, however, “that not everyone thought the same way.” And that in this historical soup “the participation of free and popular people has ended, and there are other possibilities, like that of Adelina”.
An agent on the move
“The girl produced cigars that were sold to individual buyers or trading companies,” explains Moura. “This activity gave him the conditions to follow the abolitionist movement and circulate in the most diverse social environments of the capital of Maranhão, even among the slave owners, of whose plans he informed the abolitionists, thus facilitating the escape of the slaves.”
This coming and going on the streets allowed her to form “a vast network of relationships” and to know “all the details of the city”, explains Dicionário Mulheres. “His ease in moving through the streets became his greatest asset in the fight against slavery, as it allowed the movement’s activists to anticipate police actions and organize slave escapes,” the entry adds.
In other words, her freedom of movement made her a key player: she knew everyone and acted as a sentry, alerting abolitionists and runaway slaves when and where there was a police operation.
“This idea of circulation is very common [em histórias relacionadas à lutas contra a escravidão]. The importance of mobility, the ability to move, was crucial for a person to be able to get involved in these movements”, contextualizes the historian Machado.
Adelina would have personally helped some to escape. An example would be the case of a slave known as Esperança. She was pregnant by a Portuguese merchant and desperately wanted to escape, so she could live with him and so that the couple’s child would be born far from captivity. Adelina would have contacted her contacts and would have found a way to ensure that the two went, safe and sound, to a village within the then province of Ceará.
The sociologist Moura also places Adelina to remind us that “in the abolitionist movement there was also the participation of slave women”. There is no record of when she died.
Source: Terra
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