A huge old fort and stone wall face the harbor, and from the landing-place a stone-paved street lined by carefully trimmed, haycock-shaped trees slants swiftly up to the venerable cathedral and the main square, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above. Situated on a low, but narrow and broken, ridge, its streets stumble rather steeply up and down in places, and the town is so compact that, once ended, these passageways break off instantly into dense-green and almost trackless jungle, except the single Rua Grande, which goes on across the island. Perhaps it is due to its situation that São Luiz is cooler than its two degrees from the equator would suggest, though here the constant trade winds die down, thereby saving the region from the glaring aridity which characterizes all that part of the continent to the eastward. In fact, somewhere between Ceará and Maranhão is the dividing line between that scantily wooded semi-desert and the humid, dense jungle of the Amazon basin. In many ways São Luiz is the most pleasant little capital along the coast of North Brazil, and not the least of its charms is the pleasure of again seeing grass and trees in all the green profusion of tropical lands. Here one begins to feel that equatorial humidity which leaves even the clothing damp and sticky; by night strange creatures singing in the prolific vegetation mark São Luiz as the beginning of the great Amazonia.
Rural policeman of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of the region
From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street car
A street of São Luis de Maranhão
In Brazil it is the custom to interview newspapers rather than to wait to be interviewed, and immediately upon landing the local manager hired an automobile in which all of us engaged in the “necessary courtesy” of calling upon all the editors. Some of them were men of real culture and widely informed, their full Caucasian complexions burned that coppery red of those who have lived for generations near the equator. Even the local cinema manager, who had never been off the little island of São Luiz, spoke faultless French and would not have been out of place in the best society of old Europe. A few, on the other hand, had traveled rather widely, and these were even more inclined than the others to be dogmatic in their editorial wisdom. One vivacious young editor of rather forceful and unusually attractive face for Brazil, who looked like a white man browned up for a minstrel show, who might have been a strong character and a pleasant, handsome fellow had not some wanton ancestor casually added a bit of negro blood to his veins and given him the egotistical volubility, the instability, and the surliness of the mestiço, had no sooner been presented to us than he began talking like a whirlwind about the United States, neither desiring nor expecting to have his opinions in any way questioned, his attitude that of a judge who means to be kindly but who regards his judgments as final. In answer to one question which I managed to thrust between his closely cemented words he casually remarked that, though he knew most of Brazil and had been several times to Europe, he had never visited the United States, adding in his turbulent flow of speech that he had fear rather than a desire to do so “because there life is so intense.” In the next sentence he was assuring, and convincing, his native hearers that the “Collosus of the North” was purely scientific and commercial, without the slightest conception of or interest in anything artistic—and then suddenly he broke forth upon the negro question.
Next to Bahia. Maranhão has the greatest percentage of African blood of all the states of Brazil; hence this was a natural topic. It usually is between educated Brazilians and traveling Americans. The editor’s opinions on the subject were those of many of his class, long since familiar to us. There were 900,000 negroes in Brazil, he dogmatized, in other words about three per cent. of the population(!), who were rapidly being absorbed and would soon disappear, whereas in the United States twelve per cent. of the population were negroes, who, being forced to resist the attitude of the whites, would remain a race apart and a constant and growing menace. In two or three centuries, he prophesied, there would be only negroes left in the United States, because they “reproduce like flies and lie in the shade and live to be a hundred, while the white men are wearing themselves out by their absurdly intense living.” Ergo, Brazil had been far more fortunate and wise in her handling of the negro problem than her great neighbor of the North.
It was the same old argument, the rock on which the bulk of Brazilian and American opinion on this subject always splits. In Brazil the negro is physically stronger and better fitted to the climate than the whites; in the United States, as a whole, the reverse is the case. This, and certain other differences overlooked by most Brazilians, keep the argument from becoming clean-cut. Yet is the negro, or at least the part-negro, the best type that can permanently prosper under Brazilian conditions? No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes that the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black” through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? The first is the Brazilian, the second the American point of view, and the gulf between them is not easily bridged.