Cry Child Of The Dark Summary

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In the favela of São Paulo, Brazil, 1958, Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote, “In this era it is necessary to say: ‘Cry, child. Life is bitter,’” (de Jesus 27). Her sentiments reflect the cruel truth of the favelas, where the city’s unemployed and impoverished inhabited small shacks. Poor families were pushed to the outskirts of the city, because of housing development, into shanty towns where the infant mortality rate was high, people were starving to death, drug lords were governing forces, addiction was rampant, and there was no indoor plumbing or electricity. Child of the Dark, a diary written by Carolina Maria de Jesus from 1955 to 1960, provides a unique view from inside the poverty of Brazil’s favelas, discussing the perceptions of good motherhood, race disparities, and class inequities within the confines of…show more content…
However, this did not mean that the Brazil welcomed its racial spectrum due to the Whitening. With 70% of people in the Rio de Janeiro favelas identifying as black, poverty of the favela is more clearly shown as disproportionate between races. Once, after commenting on serving black beans to her children, she said, “Black is our life. Everything is black around” (36). Black beans were seen as an embarrassment, something worth hiding from neighbors because of the disgrace of eating them. Symbolic for the view of the impoverished blacks, Carolina was making a statement that the favelas were the embarrassing “cheap stockings underneath” a queen’s velvet and silk, the disgrace of São Paulo (____). It was no surprise that these people, majority black, came to belong to a garbage dump. The dominating plantation society prevented all possibilities of success for the ex-slave black population, which predicated the formation of the favelas decades later. Carolina specifically
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