Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations
The town of Araraquara proved to be of about the same size and activity as São Carlos, and especially well off in public buildings somewhat out of proportion with its general appearance. Clustered in the center, about the large, red-earth praça, was the church, an old sheet-iron playhouse, an ambitious Municipal Theater, closed as usual, a large and well-arranged cinema bearing the unescapable name “Polytheama,” and, across the street in a red lot of its own, an ambitious new two-story building labeled in English the “Araraquara College.” I took a turn through several of the wide, irregular, red-smeared streets to make sure that the place was worth playing, then found that the man I sought was also manager of the largest store in town, next door to his playhouse. He proved to be a short, unshaven young Italian who had not been long in Brazil, which accounted for his being so good-hearted and easy-going that I had no difficulty in taking sixty-five per cent. away from him for Saturday and Sunday night performances. I might have had as large a share of the special Sunday children’s matinée, but as what had become a custom required him to distribute candy and toys to the children, I took pity on him and split that part even.
One of my fellow-countrymen was head of the college. His most noticeable characteristics were as a smoker of corn-husk wrapped cigarettes and as an authority on the history of Brazil. He had long been a teacher and would have preferred to spend his summer vacations in the land of his forefathers; but these came in December and January, when it is cold in the United States, and it would take nearly the two months to reach and return from there, while he could cross to Lisbon in twelve days and spend most of his vacation comfortably tramping about southern Europe. His Brazilian wife and two bilingual daughters were almost American in point of view, though by no means in appearance. The boys of Brazil, the head master asserted, are more tractable than American boys, also more superficial, learning more easily but forgetting much more quickly—a statement frequently heard from American educators throughout South America. That they were tractable was quickly evident, for when a native teacher sent to show me over the establishment called a boy away from a football game—rugby is popular even with workmen on coffee estates in São Paulo State—he trotted meekly off to do an errand without a hint of resentment. There were half a dozen American boys in the school, all Brazilian born of men from our South, and not merely had they taken on many of the characteristics of their companions, but they had washed-out complexions and no suggestion of that “scrappiness” familiar on our own playgrounds. This pastiness of skin is general among the sons of northerners born in Brazil and quite different from the color of the blonde descendants of Portuguese in whom the Goth crops out.
Morally the head master had been thoroughly Brazilianized. He had grown tolerant of the many little things which are not quite as they should be, having lost the familiar American longing to reform the world and fallen into many of the lesser vices and easy-going customs of Brazil. He had, however, introduced coëducation into his school, against the advice of the natives, because he believed it necessary to proper sex development, and now the families that had been most strongly against it sent their children to the college. In the afternoon we drove by automobile to the professor’s fruit-farm, which a former slave was paid 75$ a month to keep in order. Two of his piccaninnies followed us around like pet raccoons, constantly holding plates of fruit within our reach, and the atmosphere of the place was much what it must have been in our South before the war when the “mastah” visited one of his plantations. On our return we met an American farmer from far out in the country. He had come to Brazil twenty years before, when already an adult, but he spoke English with considerable difficulty and a distinct accent, though his Portuguese was by no means perfect.
Beyond the River Mogy Guassú, the first I had crossed since leaving São Paulo, I changed from the “Paulista” railway system to the winding and narrow-gauge “Mogyana.” We passed many fields of charred stumps, suggesting how matta was cleared for the planting of coffee. The rare towns were monotonously alike, dull-white walls and red-tile roofs of the same shade as the soil, which turned all light-colored animals, including the children who played in it and the men who worked in it, a pinkish hue. This red soil is the terror of housewives in São Paulo State, especially in the dry season, when it sifts thickly over everything and clings tenaciously to every exposed surface. Soon we were completely surrounded by coffee fields, sertões of coffee, a world absolutely shut in by coffee bushes, which actually brushed the sides of the train and stretched away, endless and straight and unerring as the files of a well-trained army, up and down over hill and dale, with never the slightest break in alignment, into the dense-blue horizon for mile after swift mile.
One plantation through which we traveled for more than an hour has 2,500,000 bushes; an English corporation owns an unbroken sixteen kilometers of coffee trees, crisscrossed by a private railway. Down in the hollow of each fazenda, or section of plantation, were long rows of whitewashed, tile-roofed huts, all run together into one or two buildings, sometimes with a church attached. These were the homes of the colonos, or coffee workmen, once negro slaves, now chiefly Italians, though I caught glimpses of a number of Japanese, the women still in their native dress and carrying their babies on their backs by bands across the breast. Some years ago a few ship-loads of Japanese were sent to Brazil, landing in Santos, and most of them came so directly into the back country, and are so nearly segregated there, that even their racial tendency for imitation has not caused them to throw off home customs. Here and there, too, were groups of European immigrants still in the costumes of their homelands in the year, in some cases distant, when they left them. Italian colonization succeeded negro slavery closely in São Paulo State, which owes its prosperity and its leadership in the world’s coffee production mainly to these newcomers. In addition to their living quarters and modest wages, the colonos are usually given a piece of ground on which to plant corn, black beans, and mandioca for their own use, and sometimes permission to graze a few head of stock. One of the chief troubles of the coffee fazendeiro, however, is the tendency of Italian colonos to abandon the sun-drenched fields as soon as they get a bit of money together and go to town to engage in some minor form of business.
Coffee blossoms and berries are often found on the same bush at the same time, and there are seven grades of the product, according to the time in which it is picked. The regular harvest is from May to July or August. Then the ground under the bushes is carefully swept, if it is smooth, or is spread with cloth, and the berries are scraped from the branches with one motion of the hand, sparing as many leaves as possible, after which all is swept together and sent to great drying platforms that look not unlike concrete tennis courts. The colonos labor on the piece-work system, each family being responsible for a given number of plants and the picking being paid by the liter. The berries are planted some eight feet apart in both directions, making straight rows from four angles. It is better to set out young plants from a nursery, but this is too slow a process for large plantations. Some of the land was formerly treeless campo, but a large part, and the most fertile, has been cleared of dense matta in the crude and wasteful way of pioneer communities, leaving only here and there a majestic tropical tree topping a ridge. The plant begins to produce in about four years, and has been known to continue to the age of a hundred and thirty, growing up from the stump as often as it is cut down. An ordinarily good tree will produce twenty-five quarts of berries, which in their maturity considerably resemble small cherries, the two coffee beans inside requiring continual attention before they are finally dried and sorted and disappear in sixty-kilogram sacks in the direction of Santos and the outside world.
The plants were brought to Brazil from French Guiana long ago, and coffee-growing was a paying business in the State of São Paulo “until the government heard of it.” The number of non-producers who get a finger into the coffee cup before it reaches the actual consumer is beyond belief. Taxes begin with so much per thousand “feet” of plants, and continue incessantly until the product reaches the retail market. Transportation from the field to Santos is ordinarily two or three times as much as from Santos to New York, and a sack for which the grower received ten dollars the grocer in the United States has been known to sell for forty-five, even in the days before the World War produced so many experts in profiteering. It is often asserted that the coffee fazendeiro makes more profit out of renting the bottom lands, where the danger of frost makes the planting of coffee inadvisable, as chacaras, or small market gardens, or from the catch crops that can be planted between the rows after picking-time, than from his many times more acres of coffee-trees. Throttling taxes are his greatest trial, and the prophecy is frequently heard that this growing habit of Brazilian government will eventually ruin the great coffee industry of São Paulo.
At sunset we coasted down into Riberão Preto, fourth city of the state, in the bottom of a great shallow bowl of earth lined uninterruptedly with coffee bushes as far as the eye could reach. In the pink glow of evening a carregador put me and my baggage into a carriage before I had time to express any personal desires on the subject, and I was driven through the Saturday night activities of a lively, rather frontier-like town to the chief hotel. What the other half dozen in town must have been I dread to imagine, for this resembled nothing so much as a dingy, careless, unadorned, lack-comfort style of barn, suggesting that I was getting back again into the real South America, away from the fringe of near-civilization on the coast. It was seething with travelers, salesmen, an Italian theatrical company, servants, dogs, and innumerable caged parrots, and I was assigned another of those intolerable ground-floor rooms opening directly on the street that are unescapable in the one-story towns of interior Brazil. Nor had I had time to test the one comfort of such establishments, the shower bath, when a jangling bell demanded that all guests come to supper at once, on penalty of going without it entirely.