To Live And Die in Shantytown

“Why do the church bells ring so often?” I asked Nailza de Arruda soon after I’d moved into a corner of her tiny mud-walled hut near the top of the shantytown called the Alto do Cruzeiro (Crucifix Hill). I was a Peace Corps volunteer. It was the dry and blazing hot summer of 1965. Save for the rusty, clanging bells of N.S. das Dores Church, an eerie quiet had settled over the market town that I call Bom Jesus da Mata. “It’s nothing,” replied Nailza, “just another little angel gone to heaven.”

Nailza had sent more than her share of “little angels to heaven.” Sometimes at night, I could hear her muffled but passionate conversations with one of them, 2-year-old Joana. Joana’s photograph, taken as she lay, eyes open, propped up in her cardboard coffin, hung on a wall next to the one of Nailza and Ze Antonio on the day they eloped.

Nailza could hardly remember the other infants and babies who’d come and gone in close succession. Most had died unnamed and had been hastily baptized in their coffins. Only Joana, properly baptized in church at the end of her first year and placed under the protection of a powerful saint, Joan of Arc, had been expected to live. And Nailza had dangerously allowed herself to love the little girl.

In addressing the dead child, Nailza’s voice would range from tearful imploring to angry recrimination: “Why did you leave me. Was your patron saint so greedy that she could not allow me one child on this earth.”

Ze Antonio advised me to ignore Nailza’s behavior, which he understood as a kind of madness that, like the birth and death of children, came and went. Indeed, the premature birth of a stillborn son some months later “cured” Nailza of her “inappropriate” grief. The day came when she removed Joana’s photo and carefully packed it away.

More than 15 years elapsed before I returned to the Alto do Cruzeiro. Since 1982, I have returned several times to investigate a phenomenon that first attracted my attention while I was in the Peace Corps.

The Alto do Cruzeiro is one of three shantytowns surrounding Bom Jesus in the sugar-plantation zone of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil. The region, approximately twice the size of Texas, encompasses nine states. As the poorest in the country, they are representative of the Third World within a dynamic and rapidly industrializing nation.

Life expectancy in the Northeast is only 40 years, largely because of the high rate of infant and child mortality. Approximately a million Brazilian children under age 5 die each year. The children of the Northeast, especially those born in shantytowns on the periphery of urban life, are at a very high risk of death. They lack the traditional protection of breast-feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages and multiple adult caretakers that survives in the interior.

In the hillside shantytowns that spring up around cities or, in this case, interior market towns, marriages are brittle, single parenting is the norm and women are frequently forced into the shadow economy of domestic work in the homes of the rich or into unprotected and “scab” wage labor on the surrounding sugar plantations. The women of the Alto may not bring their babies with them into the homes of the wealthy because the frequently sick infants are considered sources of contamination. They cannot carry them to the riverbanks to wash clothes because the river is heavily infested with schistosomes and other deadly parasites. Nor can they carry their young children to the plantations. At wages of a dollar a day, the women of the Alto cannot hire baby- sitters. Older children who are not in school will sometimes serve as care-takers. But any child not in school is also expected to find wage work. In most cases, babies are left at home alone, the door securely fastened.

The phenomenon that first attracted me crystallized during a veritable “die-off” of Alto babies during a severe drought in 1965. The food and water shortages, as well as the political and economic chaos that followed a military coup that year, were reflected in the handwritten entries of births and deaths in the ledgers kept at the public registry office in Bom Jesus. More than 350 babies died in the Alto alone. Yet, there were ample reasons for the deaths in the miserable conditions of shantytown life. What puzzled me was the seeming indifference of the Alto mothers and their willingness to attribute to their dying babies an aversion to life that made their deaths seem wholly natural.

I learned that the mothers’ strong expectation of death and their ability to face child death with stoicism and equanimity produced distinctive patterns of nurturing. Infants thought of as thrivers and survivors were nurtured. When infants were stigmatized, that is, thought to be born already “waiting to die,” mothers stepped back and allowed nature to take its course. These devout women do not consider this sinful. Rather, it is understood as cooperating with God’s plan.

Frequent child death remains a powerful shaper of maternal thinking and practice. In the absence of a firm expectation that a child will survive, mother love is attenuated and delayed. In an environment already precarious for young life, the emotional detachment of mothers toward some of their babies contributes even further to the spiral of high mortality-high fertility in a kind of macabre lock-step dance of death.

The average woman of the Alto experiences 9.5 pregnancies, 3.5 child deaths, and 1.5 stillbirths. Seventy percent of all child deaths occur in the first six months of life, 82% by the end of the first year. Of all deaths in the community each year, about 45% are of children under age 5.

With life in the Alto do Cruzeiro resembling that in an emergency room in an overcrowded inner-city public hospital, morality is guided by a kind of “lifeboat ethics,” the morality of triage. The seemingly studied indifference toward the suffering of some of their infants, conveyed in such sayings as “little critters have no feelings,” is understandable in light of these women’s obligation to carry on with their reproductive and nurturing lives.

Also, in a society where triplicates of every form are required for the most banal events, the registration of infant and child death is informal, incomplete and rapid. It requires no documentation, takes fewer than five minutes and demands no witnesses other than office clerks. Cause of death is left blank, unquestioned and unexamined. From the registry office, the parent walks over to town hall, where the mayor will give him or her a voucher for a free baby coffin.

The church, too, contributes to this routinization of child death. Under Liberation Theology, the bells of N.S. das Dores Church no longer peal for the death of Alto babies. No priest accompanies the procession to the cemetery. No prayers are recited. No sign of the cross is made as the coffin is lowered into the grave. In a few months, the remains of the former occupant are tossed into the deep well called the “bone depository.”

Still, the women of Bom Jesus are survivors. One, Biu, told me her life history, returning again and again to the themes of child death, her first husband’s suicide, abandonment by her father and later by her second husband, and all the other losses and disappointments she had suffered in her long 45 years.

“No, Dona Nanci, I won’t cry, and I won’t waste my life thinking about it from morning to night . . . Can I argue with God for the state that I’m in? No! And so I’ll dance and I’ll jump and I’ll play Carnaval! And yes, I’ll laugh and people will wonder at a pobre like me who can have such a good time.”