Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [35]
Silas hesitated to talk about racism in English, worried that it would quickly strain his vocabulary. Brazil is not without many of the same lingering racisms found in the United States, with blacks having higher incarceration rates, lower incomes, and fewer college degrees. Turn on the television in Brazil, and you’re likely to see popular soap operas featuring mainly light-skinned actors and actresses. But although he acknowledged the complexity of such problems, Silas did seem to think that racism in Brazil was rarely overt. “Here in Salvador, everybody is very proud of our black influences,” he told me. “It seems to me that most Brazilian people try hard not to demonstrate any sort of racial prejudice.”
I asked Silas how Darwin’s anti-slavery rants played here, but he hadn’t heard of them. So as we concluded our walk, Silas suggested I come by his university the next morning to meet his history professor.
When I woke up the next morning, I wrote down some questions for the professor, Carlos Eugênio Líbano, and ran them through an online translator that promptly rendered them meaningless in Portuguese. (“Knows surplus the visit of Charles Darwin the Bahia in 1832?”)
I met Silas in a patio in the University of Bahia’s Philosophy and Life Sciences campus a few minutes before his class was scheduled to get out. “Don’t you need to be in class?” I asked as he came out to greet me.
“No,” he said, thinking it over. He sighed. “I should go more often, but it is very hard.” He explained that he often worked late, or stayed up late playing music, which made attending his 9 A.M. classes difficult.
It was a beautiful campus, on a hill overlooking the ocean, with several shady viewpoints surrounded by the kind of greenery that sent Darwin into ecstasies. Silas helpfully identified one small, shaded area, on a tiny promontory overlooking the blue ocean, as his favorite spot in Salvador to smoke a joint. “You should bring your friends back there,” he said. “I think they will really like the view.” He seemed to know most of the students crowding the patio to smoke, talk, and eat, which made our progress toward his classroom slow.
Eventually, Silas led me inside a small, typical university classroom, where his professor was wrapping up his lecture. Then he started to take roll, and as I stood at the edge of the door, Silas quietly slipped back into the classroom with a cheery “Here, professor!” when his name was called. After class a small crowd clustered around the professor’s podium, and as I edged toward the front of the room, I felt like I was getting an audience with the Pope, or maybe Santa Claus, until someone in front of me vacated the line and I was next. The professor looked up at me expectant ly, waiting for me to give my name so he could put an X next to it and mark me present. Silas jumped in.
“Professor,” he said, “this is the friend I told you about, from the United States. He is researching Charles Darwin and his time in Bahia.”
The professor raised a spiky black eyebrow in my direction. “Your questions,” he said in Portuguese. “Speak.”
I hastily unbuckled my backpack and handed my sheet of questions to Silas, who read the first one. “What do you know about Charles Darwin’s visit to Bahia?”
The professor said he didn’t know much about it. “I am not an authority on Darwin,” he said. (His area of expertise was in studying slave life, specifically the acrobatic martial arts dance called capoeira, in the time of slavery.) “You can look up the microfilm, though,” he added. “What dates was he here?”
“The end of February, 1832.”
He shrugged, and indicated we should walk with him, Silas simultaneously keeping an eye on me while doggedly pursuing the professor through the crowd of students. I trailed behind both, doing my best to understand the rapid-fire Portuguese being spoken. Sometimes Portuguese sounds so much like Spanish that I thought I could understand, particularly