PATRICIA SAMPAIO
You can barely see the girl who insisted on taking care of today’s chronicle. She was trying to write about someone else, but she wouldn’t leave me alone, meddling in the smallest spaces of documentation, insisting on becoming a protagonist. The last time she showed up, I surrendered.
1846. It must have been a wonderful day in Manaus, typical of those who justified the enthusiasm of travelers and naturalists in their accounts. Delighted foreign visitors and satisfied hosts are our characters. They were all at the Tarumã waterfall, enjoying the freshness of the waters and the tranquility of the outskirts of the modest village lost in the woods. Suddenly, from the account, an unbelievable scene emerges: a woman rose from the waters of the creek and walked towards the bank. The dress she wore clung to her wet body, her long hair would stretch for a moment over the waters to, the next moment, cover her entire body up to her feet as if they were a cloak. It was almost a vision of the birth of Venus, one would say. This is exactly how the American entomologist William H. Edwards described Leocádia coming out of the creek: a Venus of the New World.
Leocádia was not exactly what we could call “less important people”. Not even in a dream. He was from a wealthy family by local standards, he had a first and last name, a house on the farm and in the city, slaves and others that signaled distinction, power and privilege. As was often the case with girls of good family, she married one of the most important businessmen in the city, the Italian Henrique Antony. She had children and prodigal offspring. She was wealthy and “well-born,” but not even such a condition could prevent her disappearance from the records.
There is an important historiographical production on the lives of women in Imperial Brazil. As a rule, research confirms some images about their subordinate place, overcome by the force of patriarchy. Women confined in the domestic space, prevented from exercising activities in the public arena, from having access to education and so on. On the other hand, it is never too much to note that concrete historical subjects do not tend to conform to previously formatted patterns. In other words, everywhere, and in addition to the weight of restrictions, many were those who found other ways to circumvent prohibitions and reinvent their ways of living. A good example is the enslaved women who, living for profit, empowered themselves to the point of being able to pay for their freedom and, sometimes, even for their companions. This is how Joaquina did it in 19th century Manaus. Elsewhere, women took on the task of rebuilding their lives under extreme conditions: this was the case of women from Pará who rolled up their sleeves after Cabanagem and tried to regain control of their properties, their lives and their destinies, as revealed the beautiful thesis by Eliana Ramos Ferreira.
What else is there to say about Leocádia? A few fragments only. She was the daughter of Lina and Antônio Brandão. I discovered that she spoke several languages fluently, had traveled to the United States, was beautiful, amiable, cultured, well-informed, and as a result was able to maintain excellent conversation with the many foreign travelers and naturalists she received at her home in Manaus. with unusual familiarity. Edwards, as we have already seen, was so deprived of domestic intimacy that he was even invited to sponsor the boy who was born during his stay in Manaus.
I couldn’t find out when she died, but I know that in 1869, Henry was already a widower. When Agnello Bittencourt made the entry on Antony for his Amazonian Dictionary of Biographies (1973) collected information from their descendants, but there is not a single mention of Leocádia. Not even her name was mentioned in her famous husband’s extensive biographical note, and that’s when I understood at once her insistence on claiming space to give the air of her grace around here. I have the impression that Léo (I think she already allows me intimacy) wanted to tell us that there were other possibilities of being and being in the world despite the injunctions of her time, that the female condition can surpass/cross class dimensions and that the The silence that was created about his passage through this city was not meant to last forever. Glad to meet you, lass.
Patricia Sampaio is a professor at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and a researcher at CNPq. She received her doctorate from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF/RJ). His areas of research are indigenous history and indigenism in Brazil and African slavery in the Amazon. In this space, Patrícia Sampaio publishes a series of stories considered unconventional. The proposal is to recover the lives of anonymous characters, ordinary people who, apparently, did nothing exceptional; just existed.
