One casa grande in the State of Ceará had 120 hammocks in its chests, for 120 guests. This was on the fazenda called “California,” built in 1850 and hopefully named “California” for the California gold rush. This fazenda was founded in 1850, without a name. A friend of the owner inquired, “How’s so-&-so with his California?” (referring to the American gold rush of ’49) and so it was named “California.” Besides the hammocks for 120 guests who might want to spend the night, there were special “priests’ hammocks,” for their periodical visits. The lace “varandas” of these showed crosses, crossed lances (emblems of the Passion), and bunches of grapes and ears of wheat (emblems of the Eucharist).
Another art inherited from the Indian is the cúia, or decorated gourd, enamelled black, used as dippers and for bathing. The enamel is a secret, handed down from generation to generation. The decorations are often very beautiful, incised in the gourd and left in natural color, or brightly painted: flowers, fruits, flags, and such sentiments as: Souvenir, Independence or Death! Mother Love, or Happy Birthday.
From the Portuguese and also the Moors, the Brazilian women have inherited the art of lace-making, exquisitely fine lace that taxes the eyes and the patience: a hand’s-breadth is often more than a day’s work. Lace made from thread of banana-leaf fibres instead of commercial thread is particularly rare and valuable. The weavers of Mato Grosso also use this delicate fibre, an art learned from the Paraguayan Indians. Drawn-work, crocheted and knitted lace, embroideries — where the patterns have not been coarsened or “modernized”—are also very beautiful. The most famous lace-makers are from the town of Aracati in Ceará State, but the laces of the State of Santa Catarina, made by descendants of immigrants from the Azores are also famous. There is a whole group of folk-songs devoted to the lace-makers; some of them have to do with the saga of the notorious northeast bandit Lampião (killed in 1938). Strange to say, the war-song of Lampião’s bandits was “The Lace Maker”: “Oh, lace-maker! / Oh woman making lace! / Teach me how to make lace / And I’ll teach you how to love…”
In the gold-mining regions, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Bahia, the goldsmith’s art developed, with much skilled workmanship, often showing Moorish influence in its filigrees and arabesques. The stones set in these pieces are usually rough diamonds, or the many Brazilian semi-precious stones: aquamarines, topazes, amethysts, and tourmalines. A great deal of work is done in Bahia with gold and silver, ivory and coral, often in the form of amulets, lucky charms. The figa, or “fig,” in English, is seen everywhere in Braziclass="underline" tiny ones hung around babies’ necks, along with the medal of a saint, and big ones, of wood, hung on the walls. This immemorial image of a clenched fist with the thumb protruding between the first two fingers is seen everywhere in Brazil. (Shakespeare speaks of it, but it antedates Shakespeare by many centuries.) Also from Bahia are the balangandãs, jingling bunches of charms formerly worn by slave women, at their waists, and now collectors’ items. The charms are several inches long: pomegranites, cashew-fruits, musical instruments, phallic symbols, objects of macumba rites. From Goiás come rosaries of gold beads, with the “Our Fathers” of coral or baroque pearls.
In the region of Cariri, until recently the “wild west” of Brazil, land of bandits and religious fanatics, local workmen specialize in making knives and daggers. To this day they made silver daggers to be worn in high boots, and daggers with handles of ivory, enamel or gold filagree. So “wild” is Cariri even now, that during a friendly futebol (“soccer”) game between the teams of two rival towns, above the applause and shouts could be heard the cries of a man selling locally made knives from a basket on his back, like popcorn or Orange Croosh: “Get your little daggers for after the game!”
The art of the saint-makers is traditional, passed on from father to son. Every little household chapel, or “oratorio,” has its wooden images carved by the local saint-maker. Formerly, these saints were sometimes made with the bodies hollowed out, in order to hide gold and diamonds from the government inspectors, and the expression “a hollow saint” is still used to mean a hypocritical person. Figures of saints, made in the days of Aleijadinho, are still being made in the interior. Recently, however, the priests, unfortunately especially foreign priests, not appreciating the primitive in art, and wanting to get money for their churches, have been exchanging these often very remarkable wood carvings for the sentimental contemporary statues of tinted plaster, factory-produced, and sad to say the rural congregations’ tastes are deteriorating as well.
Because of this, many of the good “saint-makers” have now turned to making “miracles” instead, ex-votos, to be offered as payment for promises fulfilled by miracle-working saints at the most popular shrines (Our Lady of Nazareth in Belém, St. Francis of Canindé in Ceará, Good Jesus of Lapa on the banks of the Rio São Francisco, Our Lord of the Good Death in Bahia, Our Lady of Penha in Rio, Our Lady of Aparecida in São Paulo). Each of the churches, usually raised by the Church to the dignity of basilica, has its special rooms for displaying ex-votos, veritable museums of popular art: legs, arms, hearts, heads, ears & eyes, and inner organs, in wood or wax, each attesting to a miraculous cure. Along with them are paintings: fishing-ships, jangadas, saved from storms, hunters from wild beasts or deadly snakes, souls from swarms of devils.
In the field of sculpture, however, the greatest folk-achievement was the figureheads used on the cargo boats on the Rio São Francisco — a custom rapidly dying out. Some of these figureheads are very fine, several feet tall, towering at the bow of the boat, and carved in a style reminiscent of Romanesque sculpture in its strength and simplicity. Animals, women, characters from Afro-Brazilian folk-lore — but principally “the Great Worm,” the most dreadful of the spirits that live in the river.
One speciality that industrialization has not yet touched is the art of carpentry — inherited from the Portuguese ship-builders — particularly the manufacture of […] for flour mills, cotton seed and cheese presses, and other domestic industries. They are complicated pieces, nuts and screws, rollers and scrapers and all worked in hard-wood, and in some cases, such as machinery for making manioc flour or wine or paste from the cashew-fruit, no metal can be used at all. The huge screws, more than six feet high, are carved in spirals, in “bow-wood,” as hard as iron; the enormous wheels and travelling beams are made of whole tree-trunks, without a single nail or screw of metal, held together by a complex system of wooden pegs and joints. The carpenter’s only tools are the axe, saw, adze, chisel, and his two hands.
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Like other primitive peoples, Brazilians of the interior prize their folk-poets, whom they call “singers.” They are often wanderers, playing the violin or guitar, and their verses are improvisations, sung to their own accompaniment but in strict, ancient forms and meters. They appear at rural festas and engage each other in interminable duels of verse, sometimes going on for several days, with the “singers” only stopping to eat and drink. The competitors try to outlast each other in ideas, rhymes, and good-temper. It is an art that could only develop in a Latin tongue like Portuguese, full of rhymes and assonance. The loser of the duel is the one whose rhymes finally fail him, and, exhausted, he yields the victory with a set of verses paying homage to the superior powers of his rival.