The Brazil Travel Site

Intimately Bound Up with Brazil, a Memoir

by Bernard James
“We were somewhere in that crowd. Marta Rocha was Miss Brazil. The Carnaval was not as fully organized as it is today.”
 
 
I was born in St.Louis in the Creole enclave called the Ville. My grandfather had been the honorary mayor of the Ville. My grandfather died before I was born. There were many people that called my grandfather “Uncle John” who were not related to us by blood. I was raised in Chicago and went to school there. We left the Ville when I was eight years old and never looked back. While in the Ville I spoke French and Spanish freely and was discouraged from speaking Creole. That is why today I am slow in Creole; although in New Orleans and vicinity (Houma) many people open up conversations with me in Creole, I switch as fast as I can to French.

When I went back to Harvard last April I did the same thing. The cab drivers in Cambridge are mostly Haitian: I can understand their Creole but I respond in French. Downtown on Market Street In San Francisco, people who I have never seen me before open up a conversation with me in French. It happens almost every time and has been some what of a joke. I lost my wallet one time with five hundred dollars in it. It was returned to me by a French speaking Swiss University girl. When she returned to Geneva I sent her a purse in gratitude. None of our conversation was in English. I don’t know why this happens, since I do not wear the French flag on my sleeve.

One of the reasons that my father left the Ville, I later learned, was because the Ku Klux Klan imposed a secondary boycott and he could not get food or supplies for his restaurants. We landed within walking distance of the University of Chicago, which had a tremendous influence on all our lives. My oldest sister graduated from there in 1942 or earlier. Woodlawn is next to Hyde Park; my brother Andrew is now a neighbor of Obama and Rahm Emmauel.

In Chicago we were visited by many foreign students, among them, Mario Wagner Cunha from an elite Brazilian family. Papa Doc got his medical degree there. We had many Haitian visitors and kept open house of sorts. Cooking is one of my hobbies. My father had ten children; how he managed to maintain a haute cuisine in St. Louis and Chicago is a still a mystery to me. It takes twelve hours to make French pastry the way we made it. I do not make crepes with Grand Marnier every day. We traveled; we must have been fairly comfortable. At least up to the Depression.

I went to school with Luis Labouriaux, a Carioca of Creole-French descent. Later on we were in the graduate school at Michigan together. We became as close as brothers. When I went to Rio, Dona Judith formalized what was already extant. Luis knew her before she knew herself. Luis would have been her godfather except that he did not take Catholicism seriously. Their custom is transitive. Whenever my brother Andrew came to Rio with me, he was treated the same way. Dona Judith tried to marry him off too. She regarded my children as her grandchildren.

Some things sink in on me perhaps later than they should. Those students at the University of Chicago at that time came through what I now call an elite filter. To put it another way, there were no poverty stricken peasants running up and down the Midway. When Dona Judith introduced me into her circle, I did not realize that it was “the circle!” At her coming out party (quinceanera) she and her sister were introduced to the emperor. Joe Sixpack does not usually find himself in the presence of an emperor. (I knew that Diva was a Brandao; I did not realize it was the Brandao.) One does not casually call on an Archbishop (her uncle) as I did. She named her second son Giordano Bruno in defiance of the Church. Giordano did not fare as well as Galileo; he was burned at the stake for his beliefs.

For a long time after the war I struggled with raising my family either here or in Brazil. I wanted to spare them American racial prejudice. I have a passport with all my children on it. That decision was made for me when the military took over in Brazil. I stayed here and sent them through the American school system. You can blame me for the results. I was overjoyed when Brazil returned to democracy. I was in Sao Paulo in the crowd on that very day! I did not overtly become a Lusophile; I was dragged into it by events. I was prepared to send my sons to Rio rather than put up with the Vietnam War draft.

We are now more than ever intimately bound up with Brazil; it is in the warp and woof of our existence.

AXE
Bernard