Unequal Partnerships: black lovers, concubines, and mothers, and their fragile autonomy in 18th-century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Family histories of colonial Brazil have noted the common presence of informal families led by unmarried couples of both Portuguese and African descent. The stories behind these families’ origins vary in complexity, but many of them can be traced back to the relationship between a white, propertied, male slaveowner and a black enslaved or freed woman. The union between these couples was therefore often marked by an unequal power relationship that made their association a tricky proposition for these women. Some may have found companionship, respect, and material comfort in their intimate partnership with a former white master or white male acquaintance. Others found themselves treated publicly – if not necessarily privately – as their partner’s slave woman. Their fragile status could thus affect their own claims to freedom and property; it also affected their claims to some parental authority over the children produced by their union. When their ambiguous status threatened their autonomy, some of these women nevertheless appealed to local and imperial officials, and occasionally directly to the crown, to demand recognition of their prerogatives and free persons and/or as mothers. Their wills, deeds of sale, petitions, and representations in legal proceedings reveal the legal and extra-legal ways in which these black women constructed a narrative of their domestic lives to claim for themselves some of privileges and rights colonial society extended to white women and mothers.