Even in the dark of night, black bodies are circumscribed; force is exerted to keep the ‘other’ out of sight. In ‘Urban slavery at the threshold of night: The Architecture of Nightfall in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’, historian Amy Chazkel explores how night time itself impacted on the structures of racist governance over architectural and urban space.

This essay was originally published in ‘A Nocturnal History of Architecture’ (Spector Books, 2024).

Granite extracted from this quarry became the stones that paved the streets, the city‛s public fountains, and its buildings; the roads to and from it in the eighteenth century became the first urban streets. Stones from here were used in the eighteenth century to construct the church, São Francisco de Paula, whose tower held one of the city‛s two bells whose sound demarcated the beginning of night.² Fugitives from slavery might have found a way to blend into the busy city during the day.

At night, though, a curfew directed officially at enslaved people but in practice at anyone of African descent subjected those in the streets after the evening bells to police stops, flogging, or arrest. This document is typical of the fragmentary information that survived to tell the story of the daily experience of the physical world that the city‛s enslaved inhabited. Historical research into the nocturnal experiences of the enslaved, by necessity, depends on the accumulation of anecdotes preserved in documents occasioned by the moments their private lives became public: curious asides noted by foreign travellers about the strange places where barefoot and “slightly clad” slaves were found taking their rest, newspaper announcements seeking their return when they ran away, and indignant orders by police to arrest them.³ Today we are allowed these rare glimpses of enslaved workers trying to seize moments of respite or evade captivity altogether because they spent the night out of doors.

Most of Rio‛s enslaved residents in the decades after independence took their rest in spaces that were, by design, outside the reach of the prying eyes of travel writers and patrolling police. Legally prohibited from living independently from their masters or overseers or from walking around the streets after the evening curfew bells, slaves’ routine experiences of the city at night rarely found their way into the archive. This essay on nineteenth-century Rio only tentatively and speculatively enters the domestic realm; instead, it lingers in the doorway and reflects on the thresholds between house and street, private and public life, day and night, and, ultimately, architectural and socio-legal history.

Acknowledging life after dark as part of the history of built space means going beyond considering the play of light on and in buildings; it calls upon us to acknowledge the social experience of daily temporality. In modernising cities everywhere in the nineteenth century, local governments restricted people’s movement in public space during certain hours. These restrictions were only roughly bounded by sunset and sunrise; they invented the night as a socio-legal phenomenon and not just an astronomical one and were only loosely connected with the human inability to see in the dark and the need to sleep.⁴ Appreciating the historical importance of daily temporality involves, first, understanding the hidden, informal, and dissident uses of space, like the granite quarry that became an encampment for fugitives from slavery, or how people slept in hallways, on floors, and more broadly the uses that formal architectural plans did not anticipate or make allowances for. It involves, too, reflecting on how public restrictions at night might have reached into the private recesses of people’s lives, particularly into the interior spaces of the homes where the enslaved were compelled to flee before the last toll of the curfew bells.

Historians have taken up the question of daily time and the social and cultural importance of the difference between day and night. Nightfall is like a “frontier zone,” as one classic study argues: people push beyond borders to find new opportunities for social advancement and wealth and to evade surveillance and social constraints.

Others consider the night as a time of fear and danger as well as freedom and liberation from diurnal restrictions and routines.⁵ By now, it is no longer revolutionary to see the night as a legal and a cultural construct that is “independent from the notion of darkness.”⁶ The growing cohort of scholars of the nighttime have shown that the world after sunset — as a social, political, legal, and indeed also architectural construction — while related to its astronomical context is also a human creation fashioned both to control and protect workers and to impose public order. The urban architecture of night in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro encompassed the city’s church bell towers and doors with locks, along with clocks, bells, street lamps, and candles in niches in the sides of buildings. In a more figurative meaning of the term, Rio’s architecture of night also included the edifice of municipal ordinances and police edicts that shut some of the city’s residents inside each evening at curfew.

Over five million enslaved Africans were trafficked to Brazil from 1501 to 1850, comprising around 38% of the total slave traffic to the Americas. In 1821, on the eve of Brazilian independence, 46% of the population of Rio de Janeiro was enslaved. As a Portuguese colony, Brazil had become thoroughly addicted to the forced labour of captive Africans and their descendants. When it became an independent country, slavery endured the legal, political, and social transition fundamentally unaltered.

The forced labor of captive Africans and their descendants was a central feature of urban life throughout Brazil, but Rio de Janeiro was the principal port in the South Atlantic slave trade. The city served as the seat of the colonial government (headed by a viceroy) and then the capital of independent Brazil. Slavery lasted until 1888 in Brazil, longer than anywhere else in the Americas. It endured long enough to intersect with urban modernity to an exceptional degree, overlapping with the beginnings of industrial factory labour, for example, and the commercialised entertainment that brought denizens to Rio’s streets, theatres, and cabarets at night. During this period, artificial illumination made after-dark mobility in the city’s public spaces a normal part of urban life. In fact, enslaved workers and so-called “freed Africans” (africanos livres), people who had been illegally trafficked to Brazil after 1831 and nominally emancipated but actually kept as forced labourers, were the ones who lit and extinguished Rio’s whale oil- and gas-fueled street lamps. It was because of — not in spite of — this nighttime mobility that fears of the enslaved moving about the city and blending in with the crowd created a perceived crisis.

Municipal policy and local culture were marked by a fear of slave rebellion, an anxiety about fugitives, and by the slave-owning classes’ increasingly racialised fear of people of African descent in general. While colonial and post-independence national and local authorities were slow to impose an urban design on Brazil’s capital city, the use of public space was nonetheless of intense concern to governing elites and urban residents.

In Rio, as in many other cities throughout the world, the quotidian rhythm of activity occurred against the backdrop of a prohibition against entering the streets at night, a prohibition in Rio’s case that was aimed at enslaved people but, in practice, affected all city dwellers of visibly African descent, at the arbitrary discretion of patrolling police officers. Rio’s police chief issued new policing regulations in an edict (edital) published in January 1825. Anyone, whether slave or free, who encountered a law enforcement official had to submit to questioning. Among its several provisions, the edict established a curfew: After 10 pm in summer and 9 pm in winter, patrols could search anyone out in the streets “for illegal weapons or instruments that could be used in a crime.” The bells of the São Francisco de Paula church and the São Bento convent were to ring for a full half hour, “without interruption,” to announce the hour to all. This curfew only applied to slaves, implicitly to free persons of African descent, and, on occasion, to foreigners. The edict reads: “After the evening church bells have stopped ringing, it is prohibited to linger without an obvious motive on corners, squares, public streets; to whistle or to give any other signal. This prohibition extends to Blacks and people of colour even before this hour, but after it becomes dark.” Future police commanders expanded the hours but did not revoke this edict until 1878, and the city of Rio remained under a curfew for more than half of the nineteenth century. This explicitly selective regulation applied to slaves but offered exceptions to those with written proof of special permission from their masters to be out at night. The policy fell most heavily, then, on free people of colour who could not obtain permission from a master to be out after dark. Captive labourers routinely found themselves on the streets at night doing their master’s bidding in dumping household waste, drawing water, delivering messages and objects, and, ironically enough, tending to the oil and then the gas lanterns that had to be lit and extinguished each night after the curfew bells had already tolled.⁷

The urban infrastructure that supported the curfew included the street lamps that lit the way for patrolling police and the bell towers that signalled the beginning of the nightly lockdown; the curfew also depended, of course, on the existence of the places where those subject to it would return for the night. Houses in the residential nucleus of the city stood tightly lined up alongside the narrow, often sinuous roads. Unlike the farmhouses (chácaras) in the farther-flung neighbourhoods on Rio’s outskirts, urban residences in the city centre in the early and mid-nineteenth century were strikingly uniform in their architectural style and layout: a door and window on the street, with a central living space in the front of the building (sala), small rooms (alcovas) along the side of a narrow hallway that extended the length of the building, and on the top floors, if there were any, a small balcony. Other divided spaces on higher floors might include a study, sleeping chambers, and a kitchen.

By day, the inside and outside of residential buildings conversed with each other only enough for smoke from kitchen fires to escape and for some daylight to enter. Houses protected themselves against the sun as much as they welcomed it in, shielding their homes from the destruction of furnishings, the radiant heat, and the unwanted glances of passersby. When the evening curfew bells signalled the time for compulsory shutting in for Rio’s enslaved population, how did they make use of the interior space of the home? Social historians of slavery and urban life in nineteenth century Brazil has discovered fragmentary information about how people, and including the enslaved members of the household, used the domestic space they inhabited in nineteenth-century Rio.

Postmortem inventories for those well enough off to have property to bequeath sometimes describe the layout of houses that were part of the estate. Travellers’ accounts and literary works allude to shopkeepers who often slept in an alcove in the back of their shop while their servants and slaves slept on the floor behind or on top of the counters or sometimes inside a walled garden adjoining the back of the house.⁸

The lower floor in a typical urban residential building only rarely served as a living space. It was most often used as a storefront, warehouse, or stable, or, according to one British traveller in 1823, was “occupied by the slaves, cattle and for domestic purposes.”⁹ Only the city’s largest houses had slaves’ quarters on the ground floor, and most households included at least one enslaved person. In the homes of the poorer and “middling” classes, enslaved household members instead found makeshift places to rest in corridors, alleys, warehouses, and on the beaten earth of the bottom floor of a multistory house.

We know so little about how people used the interior space of households in nineteenth-century Rio and how these uses fluctuated with daily cycles of light and darkness because the documents that might have allowed us a detailed view of people’s daily acts reflect the state’s limitation to the public realm. At the threshold of the private home, the state ran up against the traditional authority of the father of the family and the constitutional principle of the “inviolability” of the domicile. What went on inside the household was the domain of patriarchal privilege, and only under narrowly defined circumstances would the police or other authorities enter. Police records, municipal ordinances, and administrative documents were largely silent when it came to what went on inside the home. The socio-legal night was a function of nineteenth-century Brazil’s liberal legal regime. In urban Brazil, the threshold of the house was both an architectural detail and a powerful legal abstraction. And by night, this simple piece of wood assumed dramatic meaning in demarcating the outer boundaries for those subject to the curfew.

The Bohemian writer Franz Kafka’s early twentieth century novel The Trial contains a short parable in which the author uses architecture to evoke a hopeless search for justice despite the appearance to the contrary. The tale begins, “Before the law sits a gatekeeper.” A “man from the country” approaches an open gate. His desire is simply to “gain entry into the law,” in the earnest belief that it “should always be accessible for everyone.” The gatekeeper engages the man in conversation but refuses to allow him to enter. The man waits years and grows old and weak, learning the minute details of the gatekeeper's appearance and manner, while the gatekeeper bars him from passing through the open gate, “yet.” As the tale ends and the man lies dying, he asks why no one else had approached the gate to gain entry to the law in all those years. The gatekeeper crouches down to tell the man that the gate had been his alone, and now, the gatekeeper says, “I’m going to close it.”

Scholars of the social lives of the law have perennially called upon Kafka’s parable, which lets us see into the mind of someone subject to the law’s terrifying power and the capriciousness of those who control access to it.¹⁰ The Brazilian historian Eduardo Spiller Pena in his important book on the legal history of slavery borrows from Kafka’s tale to point to the patent absurdity of the idea of equality before the law in nineteenth-century Brazil, despite the persistent fanfiction that the law is an “open door” through which citizen-subjects can pass. Social and legal historians have shown that not only masters but also jurists and lawyers were more interested in protecting the hierarchical order and sanctity of private property than in freeing the enslaved, acting as gatekeepers to control who entered through that door.

Whatever its symbolic meaning, sometimes a door is, indeed, an actual door, too; a physical feature of a building designed to open and close and to serve as a physical barrier to define the space of a household. The field of architectural history can situate the study of urban slavery in the materiality of the real world and reconstruct what it was like to exist in built space, what resources architecture afforded, and what barriers it imposed.

Bio

Amy Chazkel is a historian of Brazil with broad interests in the urban humanities, law and society, crime and justice, policing, slavery, abolition, and post-abolition societies in the Atlantic world. In her own research and writing, she has principally explored the urban and legal history of post-colonial Brazil. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), a study of petty crime, urban culture, and the historical roots of the informal sector in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil and is co-editor of The Rio Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2016).