Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a tiny edition of picturesque Rio
Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João”
Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements
A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore
Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? The languid picturesqueness of Bahia is best personified in the typical Bahiana, black or near-black in color, wearing many bracelets and similar ornaments of tin and wire, sometimes gilded, her immense hips heavy with bulky skirts only a trifle less gay in color than her waist, shawl, and turban, placidly smoking a big native cigar and carrying on her head a small stool or a tiny table, legs-up like a helpless turtle, with perhaps a closed umbrella lying flat on top of that, on her way to squat on the one and lean on or raise the other in church or market. If she has only a single banana with her, the Bahiana will carry it on her head rather than by hand. I have seen the ancient anecdote of the negro-girl servant given a letter to post, who put it on her head and laid a stone on top to keep it from blowing away, duplicated in the streets of Bahia. Racial languor, however, gives way to passionate activity when some black troubadour takes to thrumming his guitar and singing modinhas and chorados. These popular ballads of Brazil, especially of Bahia and Pernambuco, mixtures of the moda and fado of Portugal and of the tribal rites of savage Africa, are childish in thought and monotonous of rhythm, weird, languishing, half-wild songs, often improvised by the unlettered troubadours and accompanied by sensual dances and strange African movements of the body into which the whole negro throng gradually merges, discarding all remnants of their second-hand civilization.
With such an electorate it is scarcely to be expected that Bahia should swarm with honest politicians. Indeed, it is frankly admitted that elections there are so corrupt that few bother to go to the polls and take part in what the native papers refer to as “our electoral farce,” knowing that the votes cast have nothing whatever to do with the result, which the government in power fixes beforehand. Graft and misgovernment are acknowledged to be worse than in Rio. Yet on the surface there is the usual Latin-American polish. The scavengers of Bahia had not been paid a cent in months, yet the municipality was building a “palace” in which a single staircase cost 400,000$000! A year before my arrival a delegation from the Boston Chamber of Commerce had landed at Bahia on a water-edge tour of South America, were brought ashore in a magnificent launch “at the city’s expense,” and treated with such tropical generosity that their letters to home newspapers bubbled over with praises of the wonderful hospitality of Bahia. Agostinho Manoel de Jesus, owner of the launch in which they had landed, was still going daily to the city treasury asking in vain for his money.