It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a tigre, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse, and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale. The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance, and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him. No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance, we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our sections.
My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead. It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,” write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for frail humanity to be.
After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes. That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique, overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the pianist, Guiomar Novaes.
The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress, looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant church which he had been mainly instrumental in building.
In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,” as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers, free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery, the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their color-line.
Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.
When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving their attention chiefly to corn and beans.
It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average, and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much less forest than the imagination pictures.
As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard, monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an hour or more.
São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of carregadores, baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices. Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their families for a week.