4 - Black Diamond

Summary

Here is my palace

and here my table wines

my gold-framed mirrors

and silk-covered bed

the fragrance of my farmhouse

with my lighted chapel

PROFANE LOVE

In the second semester of 1753, shortly before arriving in Tejuco to assume his post, João Fernandes de Oliveira bought a parda slave named Chica from Manuel Pires Sardinha for 800,000 reis. It is not known exactly what led Pires Sardinha to sell her, though it is worth remembering that in August of that same year, during the ecclesiastical visit, the physician had signed a commitment to “break off [sic] all illicit communication” he had maintained with two slaves from his estate. Selling these women, such that all three would come to live in different houses, was an essential condition for the fulfilment of the terms of this commitment.

At another ecclesiastical visit held in Tejuco in 1750, one Alexandre Gama de Sá, accused of concubinage in the first instance with his slave Ana, in addition to the customary fine, was ordered to “rid himself of the slave woman who lives in his house so that he can no longer meddle with her.” In 1753, in the village of Itambé, Manuel Rodrigues da Costa was admonished to expel from his house a slave woman named Lucrécia de Sá, his concubine, despite the fact that she was already married to the freed black Domingos de Sá.