Plantation Boy by José Lins do Rego

First published:Menino de engenho, 1932; Doidinho, 1933; Bangüê, 1934 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Novels

Type of plot: Regional

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: Northeastern coast of Brazil

Principal characters

• Carlos de Mello, the narrator
• Colonel José Paulino Cazuza, his grandfather and the owner of Santa Rosa plantation
• Uncle Juca, Colonel José Paulino’s son
• Aunt Maria, Colonel José Paulino’s daughter
• Mr. Maciel, a schoolmaster
• Coelho, Carlos’s schoolmate
• Maria Alice, a married cousin of Carlos
• Cousin Jorge, the owner of the Gameleira plantation
• Marreira, a tenant farmer on the Santa Rosa plantation

The Story:

Menino de engenho. At the age of four, Carlos de Mello sees the bloody body of his dead mother shortly after his father killed her in an insane rage. The boy is taken from his city home in Recife to live with his maternal grandfather and aunts and uncles at the family sugar plantation, Santa Rosa. His father is confined to an asylum for the insane, where he dies, completely paralyzed, ten years later; Carlos never sees him again.

At Santa Rosa, Carlos begins a new life, the life of a plantation boy. Aunt Maria becomes his mother. On his first morning at the plantation, he is initiated into country life by learning to drink milk warm from the cow’s udder and to bathe in a pool by a waterfall. A few days later his cousins, two boys and a girl, arrive. The boys teach him wild country ways, such as how to ride bareback and how to go on secret swims. His cousin Lili, who is quiet, fair, and fragile, soon dies of a childhood illness.

One day, the famous bandit Antonio Silvino comes to Santa Rosa. Everyone fears what he will do, but he has come only to visit the colonel and pay his respects. Another time, the family has to abandon the plantation mansion and move to higher ground because the annual rains have turned into a flood that threatens the sugar mill and the house itself. The rains also leave behind rich soil that will mean a superior crop of sugar cane the next year. When a fire threatens the cane crop, all the plantation workers and neighboring owners come together to cut a swath between the fire and the rest of the fields to prevent the fire from spreading further.

Carlos always goes with his grandfather, Colonel José Paulino, on his inspection tours of the plantation. The colonel has expanded the original Santa Rosa plantation by buying neighboring properties, and now the plantation measures nine miles from end to end. The colonel has more than four thousand people under his protection, including former slaves who stayed on after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and still do the same work they did before. There are also tenant farmers who work the plantation in exchange for living on and farming their patches of land. On his inspection tours the colonel threatens shirkers, rewards the trustworthy, gathers news, offers food to the hungry and medicine to the ill—he is “the lord of the manor” visiting his lands and his “serfs.” The colonel is also judge and jury for his workers. Carlos sees him put a man in stocks for “compromising” a young girl, but the man continues to deny his guilt. Finally, the girl confesses that it is Uncle Juca who has made her pregnant.

Carlos’s country education includes the alphabet and reading lessons, but he learns much beyond his years from the plantation workers. As Zé Guedes walks Carlos to his lessons, he teaches the boy the lessons of life, introducing him to the prostitute Zefa Cajá, who provides the twelve-year-old Carlos with his first experience with sex—and syphilis. He learns country tales and superstitions as well. He comes to believe that a werewolf lives in the forest and that there are zumbis and caiporas (the spirits of dead cattle and dead goats) on the plantation.

When Aunt Maria gets married, Carlos feels abandoned; he feels that he has lost a mother for the second time. Soon after, however, at the age of twelve, he is sent away to a secondary school. On the train to the city with Uncle Juca he watches the beloved fields and forests of Santa Rosa plantation recede in the distance.

Doidinho. An anxious Carlos arrives with Uncle Juca at the Institute of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a boys’ school dominated by a rigid Jewish master, Mr. Maciel, who relies on discipline and is completely lacking in knowledge of child psychology. Although Carlos makes painful academic progress, his social adjustment is impossible from the outset. His extreme sensitivity sets him apart from his peers and leads him into flights of imagination that manifest themselves in exaggerated stories that he tells his schoolmates. Withdrawn, restless, and unable to endure his failure in military exercises, Carlos runs away from school and heads home to Santa Rosa plantation. As he approaches the plantation, however, he feels as alone and frightened as he did upon leaving it.

Bangüê. Nine years after his flight from the institute, Carlos, at the age of twenty-four, has graduated from law school and returned to Santa Rosa. He describes himself as a neurotic young man, unsure of his place and purpose in life. He has become an ambivalent daydreamer, one moment on top of the world with imagined plans for Santa Rosa and for himself as the powerful lord, the next moment in the depths of disillusionment and despair. For one entire year, Carlos does nothing but lie in his room reading newspapers and swatting flies.

A beautiful married cousin, Maria Alice, brings warm love into Carlos’s life. When she arrives at Santa Rosa he is at last aroused from his indolence, and for a time he seems to live through her, believing that she will help him to become the great lord of his dreams. During their affair he becomes a new person, riding over the plantation, shouting orders, settling quarrels, and taking an interest in the work of the plantation for the first time since childhood. Eventually, however, Maria Alice returns to her husband, and for the third time Carlos loses a woman he has idolized. His despair becomes greater than ever, and he returns to his room, his newspaper, and his flies. Alternately filled with hate and desolate self-pity, he wishes Maria dead one day and dreams of marrying her the next.

When old José Paulino dies, it is found that Carlos has inherited the Santa Rosa plantation. Once again he becomes energetic, full of plans and dreams of restoring the estate to its former glory. The situation at Santa Rosa becomes increasingly hopeless, however. Crops fail, and workers desert in search of higher wages. Worst of all, Carlos becomes convinced that Uncle Juca, bitter at not having inherited the plantation, is conspiring with a black tenant farmer named Marreira to kill Carlos and take over the plantation. Instead of caring for the declining land, Carlos becomes preoccupied with fearfully watching Marreira, whose success is representative of the rise of the working class in Brazil. Carlos eventually gathers enough courage to ask Marreira to leave, but when he finally turns from his imagined enemy he finds that his real enemy has defeated him. The factory that has long ground the plantation’s cane and refined the sugar refuses to extend credit any longer. Faced with the prospect of disposing of the plantation at public auction, Carlos instead sells it to Uncle Juca. Carlos then leaves Santa Rosa, having learned nothing of value from his experience. As the train speeds away with him, Carlos glimpses Marreira’s prosperous mansion, symbol of the new social environment in which he has been unable to compete.

Bibliography

Chamberlin, Bobby J. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Provides a fine introduction for the beginning reader of the author’s fiction. Notes the autobiographical elements of his work along with its regional and folkloric influences.

Ellison, Fred P. Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. 1954. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Classic work in the field provides an excellent introduction to the new Brazilian regionalism of the 1930’s and 1940’s. One chapter is devoted to an examination of Lins do Rego’s works.

Hulet, Claude L. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Brazilian Literature 3, 1920-1960: Modernism. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1975. Chapter on Lins do Rego is part of an anthology of Brazilian literature in Portuguese with introductions in English. Includes a short biography of the author followed by critical commentary and discussion of his style and techniques.

“José Lins do Rêgo (Cavalcânti).” In World Authors, 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1975. Gives an overview of the author’s life and summarizes each of the novels of the Sugar Cane Cycle. Includes a brief discussion of Lins do Rego’s detailed naturalism and simple, direct style.

Omotoso, Ebenezer. “The Myth of Black Female Sexuality in José Lins do Rego’s Sugar-Cane Cycle Novels.” In Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa, edited by Mary E. Modupe Kolawole. Lagos, Nigeria: Arrabon Academic, 1998. Presents a feminist examination of Lins do Rego’s depiction of women and sexuality in his novel cycle.

Swarthout, Kelley. “Gendered Memories of Plantation Life: Teresa de la Parra’s Las Memorias de Mama Blanca and José Lins do Rego’s Menino de engenho.” Latin American Literary Review 35, no. 69 (January-June, 2007): 46-66. Examines the novels’ depictions of childhoods spent on the sugar plantations of Venezuela and Brazil, describing how these works document the decline of a patriarchal rural life.

Vincent, Jon. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Dictionary of Brazilian Literature, edited by Irwin Stein. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Provides an overview of Lins do Rego’s life and work and discusses his involvement in the region-tradition school of thought and writing founded by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre.