Writer Georgina Lawton has been to Rio before. A blue sky β naked except for the burning midday sun β radiated a heat so heavy that I was almost wilting as I strolled through a market in Rio de Janeiro. As I pulled my hair up and off my neck, I ambled past street stalls loaded with neon bikinis and bottles of molho de pimenta, a fiery hot sauce. I ducked beneath long, green sugarcane stalks balanced precariously on the shoulders of shirtless men and weaved around children selling sweets and cigarettes beneath bright umbrellas.
It was my second time in Rio and at Carnival. The first time, in , Cariocas took me to street parties and helped me source rides home. I remember marveling at their openness. I remember the joy I felt from seeing brown bodies of every shape, shade and size jiggling in the sun, slicked with glitter. This time, I wanted to dig beyond the in-your-face hedonism of Carnival. I already knew that Brazil's greatest cultural export, Carnival, had primarily been built on the backs of Black Brazilians.
Images of lithe and light Carnival queens persist, and popular bars are often socially segregated by class and race. In Madureira, I met Rayanne Moreira, a friend of a friend. I would hear this a lot. There were stores selling homeware, clothes and electronics.
I picked up a diamante belt and grams of braiding hair, astonished at the bargain prices. Over a snack of chicken pastries and sugarcane juice, Moreira, who has grown up in Madureira, explained that her neighborhood is actually home to some of the most famous samba schools in Rio, and that Carnival, although officially canceled in February, would still involve plenty of informal celebrations.
Moreira, who was similar to me in curl pattern and complexion except for a smattering of freckles across her face and blonde hair, was dressed in all white. In The Penal Code outlawed the practice of Afro-Brazilian religions, equating them with black magic and denigrating them as backward. The fusing was necessary for survival, to preserve hope. Over half of the 10 million Africans enslaved in the New World ended up in Brazil, forced to toil in sugar plantations under a brutal Portuguese empire.
