This chapter centers the liberated African Adelino Mwissicongo’s biography from slavery to apprenticeship and from apprenticeship to incarceration for theft in the context of the struggles for “full freedom” by liberated Africans between 1850 and 1864, the radical transformation of Rio’s urban economy and social landscape, and the discourse on vagrancy and criminality that distinctly identified free people of color and Portuguese immigrants as objects of police surveillance in the last decades of slavery in Brazil. The chapter places Adelino’s story in relation to the problem of petty criminality and poverty as Rio underwent a rapid demographic transformation that saw a significant decrease in its slave population to under 17 percent by 1872, according to the first national census. I argue that the penitentiary became complicit in constructing a pathologizing discourse that branded liberated African men and women as “incorrigible” by collecting and providing documentary support for the denial or concession of freedom certificates.

The epilogue begins by offering a brief overview of the main arguments of the book before meditating on what Barragan (following Saidiya Hartman’s formulation) refers to as the “afterlife of gradual emancipation rule” in the Colombian Pacific. As she argues, the very essence of gradual emancipation rule—that is, the notion of gradated, scheduled “progress” amidst an ongoing state of racial terror—remains alive in today’s Colombian Black Pacific. This paradoxical state of progress and terror, Barragan shows, is nowhere more evident than in the current state of Chocó and the Pacific lowlands, the most marginalized and impoverished region in Colombia, with record levels of displacement and violence against civilians. She moves from the nineteenth century to the late 1990s, when the Colombian Pacific became the central site of powerful Afro-Colombian social movement mobilizations and ground zero of Colombia’s ever-shifting civil war.