“Colonel” Ruben Pinheiro Guimarães was manager of the principal playhouse in Bahia. The ancient “São João,” imperial theater when Portuguese viceroys ruled Brazil, still kept much of its stateliness in spite of being rather unkempt and disreputable after more than a century of constant use. In situation it takes second place to no other in the world, sitting out on the nose of the upper city, where to step off its esplanade would be to fall hundreds of feet down to the business section below, and gazing away across the bay to the utmost limits of the ocean horizon. Ruben, a Paulista of unbroken Portuguese ancestry, had the reputation of being somewhat related in business matters to the eel family; but there is a certain pleasure in flirting with possible fraud, as with any other kind of danger. It was not until eight at night, however, that I got his name signed to a “split-even” contract for twenty-five days, fifteen of them in the theaters of Bahia and ten in towns about the bay.
Unfortunately São Salvador da Bahia was not an ideal place to settle down. For one thing, it had a new style in hotels. Elsewhere in Brazil they had been questionable, here they were not in the least so, for not one of them pretended to be anything but what it was,—full of frousy females who had not even the virtue of being young or good-looking, hags on the last rung of the ladder that leads from concubinage in Europe through street-walking in Rio down to the gutter of pandering to the chiefly African rouées of Bahia. Even as hotels they were the worst imaginable, yet high-priced at that, and with adventurous women from foreign parts assigned to every other room and constantly hanging out the windows one had the edifying sensation of living in a brothel.
The hotel I was finally compelled to endure looked out across the marvelous bay, upon the “São João,” and down the wide stone-paved street leading from the upper to the lower town. Up this snorted huge motor-trucks loaded with meat from the abattoirs, straining automobiles, and an unending procession of those citizens of Bahia who found it cheaper to walk than to squander the tostão it costs to be lifted from the lower to the upper level. Great quantities of freight also ascended or descended on foot. A trunk or two, with perhaps a valise on top, often came noiselessly marching up the steep street on negro heads; bedsteads, bird-cages, bureaus and all other forms of furniture, fruit in baskets or without, bunches of bananas laid flat on a frizzled pate, chickens with their legs tied and panting in the roasting sun, every known and nameable article that cannot cave in an African skull moved by what is still the cheapest form of transportation in Bahia, even in this century of steam and electricity.
The former capital and oldest city of Brazil takes its popular name—the official and correct one is São Salvador—from the immense bay on which it is situated—the bay which from anywhere in the upper town stretches away in deepest indigo-blue, everywhere dotted with specks of white sails, to the low ridges of hills, faint with distance, that all but surround it. In some ways it has a finer setting than that of Rio, though it is not so strikingly, so dramatically, beautiful, and the old capital has the advantage over the new that almost constant trade winds sweep across it. Bahia is built in two stories, that at sea-level being at most a few blocks deep and often thinning down to a single row of buildings. “O Commercio” the Bahianos call this lower part, and it is almost exclusively a business section, perhaps the only spot in South America that resembles lower New York in being silent and uninhabited at night, with only a few watchmen and belated pedestrians treading the dimly gas-lighted streets.
The upper town is reached either by a hard climb up the stone-paved roadway, by an American elevator of sixteen-person capacity, or by a steeply inclined cable railway with single cars. Hotels, stores, theaters, almost everything except the wharves, wholesale business, and the main market-place, are on the upper level. Nearly every building dates back to colonial days and many of the old houses are in splendid situations, perched on the edge of the ridge at the very base of which lies the immense bay. But they are taken up almost entirely by the descendants of slaves, with the accumulated uncleanliness of generations, and the white minority of Bahia has been driven to the often less attractive suburbs. The upper and main part of the town is built chiefly on two ridges, facing the sea and the bay respectively and in many places falling sheer into them. On their tops the ridges are thickly inhabited, and the streets crisscross in an effort to conform to the irregular lay of the land, but every now and then they disappear through wooded lanes into hilly virgin forests with innumerable huge trees,—the mammoth aguacate, thickly hung with alligator-pears, the intense green dome-shaped mango, most perfect shade-tree of the tropics, and here and there palm-trees standing haughtily above all else—for the rolling ridges are often broken with deep valleys in which negro huts congregate.
It would be beneath the dignity, as well as contrary to the languid temperament, of Bahia to take a census, but at the popular Brazilian pastime of guessing statistics the city professes to have about one third of a million inhabitants; there is no question that it is the third city in size in Brazil. Of that number certainly eight out of ten are negroes, a majority of them full-blooded, with all the traits their ancestors brought with them from the African bush, plus the faults of their Portuguese-Brazilian neighbors. Except for the two or three élite sections, such as that along the summit of the second ridge, there is scarcely a corner of Bahia in which one cannot stroll an hour or more and never see any but a black face—with the single exception that even in the most African quarters the shops are almost invariably kept by Portuguese, pasty-white of complexion, whether because of the sedentary indoor lives they lead or because of the contrast to the sea of blacks about them. One soon comes to know every white face in Bahia, even those with Caucasian ancestry enough to be individually distinguishable, so frequently does one notice them in the business streets, theaters, street-cars, and more pretentious cafés.
More slaves were brought to the province of Bahia than to any other of Brazil, not only because the planting of sugar and tobacco required much labor but because this part of Portuguese America was earliest settled. The original settlers from overseas were too proud to work; the negroes they brought over to work for them were emancipated and also refused to work, crowding into town to live on what they could pick up between their incessant native dances and church festivals, so that we have the edifying spectacle of an immense state, possessing unlimited natural resources, virtually bankrupt. It is said that the old colonial life, the old-time somnolence, Brazil as she was in the olden days, is still best seen in Bahia. If so, I am glad that my Brazilian journey came at a later date. Compared with the old capital, Rio seems little more than a quadroon city, and few negroes among many whites is plainly better for the negro than to be surrounded on all sides by bad examples of his own race.
The negroes are so numerous and so sluggish in their movements that unless one would be jostled at every turn one can travel the streets only by stepping out of their way. They lie on every corner and in every gutter; they loll, blocking the streets, in every shaded spot, on every threshold—wearing a few rags, yet often with a crude native cigar protruding from their thick lips, irrespective of sex, for Bahia is Brazil’s tobacco center and “fumo” is cheap—negroes, negroes everywhere, until they swim in black specks before the eyes when one closes them. It is another amusing example of the pseudo-civilization of South America that in the upper town the police will stop any man in full comfortable dress of summer who wears no coat, while negroes and even a few poor whites parade anywhere in a ragged, unbuttoned jacket without the suggestion of shirt or undershirt beneath it and barely enough suggestion of trousers to save them from complete nudity.
The negroes of Bahia speak Portuguese much as those of our southern states do English. In their mouths noite becomes “noitche,” muito is “muitcho,” senhor is “’nhor,” and “’nha” may mean either senhora or senhoras. How much of his Latin garrulousness the negro has caught from living with that race and how much his ancestors brought him from the Dark Continent is an interesting question. I do not believe the native African chatters with such a flow of words and gestures as are to be seen in any black gathering in Bahia. The cheerfulness and hilarious gaiety for which the race is noted stands out clearly in the general temperament of the old capital; while the Carioca is the gloomiest and most suicidal of Brazilians, the Bahiano rarely shows either tendency.
Down in the swarming market-place in the lower town powerful negroes of both sexes—the most splendid physical specimens in Brazil are the blacks—lie languidly about, hoping to sell a few cents’ worth of something,—pineapples, melons, mangos, sapotes, lemons, huge alligator-pears at a cent each, the blushing cajú, the jaca, or jack-fruit, which grows to watermelon size on the trunks of trees and has a white meat so coarse that it is eaten only by negroes; bread-nuts and bread-fruit, bananas, rosaries of what seem to be shelled but unroasted peanuts, small oranges, green in color—for though there are fine big seedless ones in Bahia this was not the season for them—and every other known fruit of tropical America, except a few native only to the Amazon region. Here one may have a coco molle gelado, in other words, iced milk of green cocoanut, than which there is no better way of quenching tropical thirst; here one may even find a man who, as a last resort against starvation, will almost be willing to work, at least to the extent of carrying away on his head anything less than a grand piano or the heavier makes of automobiles. Many copper coins, virtually unknown in the rest of Brazil, are used in the markets of Bahia,—vintems and double vintems, or twenty and forty-reis pieces—and the negroes still make their computations in the old colonial terms. In Bahiano market dialect a meia-pataca is 180 reis and a pataca twice that, though there are no actual coins of those denominations. Nickel, in one hundred reis pieces and higher, is too valuable for most negro transactions. As they say in Bahia, with a black it is “vintem pa’ cachaza, vintem pa’ farinha, e prompto!” (a copper for rum, a copper for mandioca meal, and enough!) He will not work again until he must have more cachaza and farinha. Whenever any real work is required, such as the digging of sewers, paving of streets, or laying of street car tracks, gangs of white Europeans have to be shipped in to do it.