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THE TEAM
CONTACT
This was how he formed relationships – some closer and longer lasting, others not so much so – with names that, like him, would come to assert themselves in the 1930s on the Brazilian intellectual scene, such as José Lins do Rego, Manuel Bandeira, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade and Sergio Buarque de Holanda. At the end of the decade, he put the sociology he had learnt in the United States to good use, working from 1928 on as a sociology teacher at the Escola Normal de Pernambuco. At the same time he continued as secretary to the State Governor, Estácio de Albuquerque Coimbra, a post he had taken the year before to the surprise of his foreign and Brazilian friends who wondered what sense there was in a thinker of his calibre getting involved with political life and its vicissitudes.
It is still ironic to note though that it was precisely these vicissitudes of political life that gave a new and decisive boost to Freyre’s intellectual activity. After all, his first book, Casa-grande & senzala. Formação da família brasileira sob o regime de economia patriarcal [The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization], published in Rio de Janeiro by Maia & Schmidt at the very end of 1933, is a work written “as an émigré”, as he himself would say many years later (“Como e porque escrevi Casa-grande & senzala” [How and why I wrote Casa-grande & senzala], 2002 [1968], p. 708). He had been forced to become an émigré as the 1930 Revolution, which brought Getúlio Vargas to the central government and led to a rearrangement of local powers throughout Brazil, caused him to go into exile, accompanying his ousted friend Estácio Coimbra. It was at this time that, in his own words, “the idea to write a work that might open up new perspectives for the understanding and interpretation of Man through an analysis of the past and the ethos of the Brazilian people” came to him – a work he had already been thinking about in 1926 when, passing through Washington, he had taken advantage of the rich contents of his old master Oliveira Lima’s library to do some studying and take some notes. It was, however, kept “in almost absolute secrecy” until the end of the decade (idem, p. 709). There is nothing gratuitous therefore in the opening lines of Casa-grande & senzala, in the first paragraph of the first edition: “In October 1930 I embarked upon the adventure of exile, going to Bahia and Portugal, with Africa as a port of call – the ideal journey for the studious interests reflected in this book” (CGS, 2003 [1933], p. 29). Needless to say, the journey (and his experience), however atypical and unexpected it was, is not only present in the work but rather shapes it as his use of the qualifying adjective “ideal” shows.
