Confederacy Lingers On In Brazil


Rebels' Descendants Keep Their Roots Alive

May 10, 1995|By KERRY LUFT Chicago Tribune

AMERICANA, Brazil — Judith MacKnight Jones speaks English with a sugary drawl, picks pecans from the towering trees that shade her home and keeps a copy of Southern Living magazine on a counter top.

Henry Smith, a spry, bright-eyed 83-year-old, shakes hands with a visitor and says, "I'm very glad to meet another pure American."

If you spend more than a couple of minutes with Thomas Steagall, 21, he is likely to bring up his favorite music: Dixieland jazz.

This is the very, very Deep South.

Five thousand miles south of Dixie, the descendants of a band of Confederate soldiers who fled the reconstructed United States and founded this city get together every few months to honor their forefathers and remember their struggle to settle in a foreign land.

Even today, some descendants speak fluent English tinged with a Southern accent. Many still eat the foods their ancestors brought: watermelon, fried chicken, cornbread, biscuits, gravy - but not grits. "They don't translate well," said Judith Jones' son Allison, 52, an engineer.

When they hold their annual reunion and picnic in April, at a tiny graveyard hidden amid thousands of acres of sugar cane, they dance in hoop skirts and Rebel gray uniforms and proudly display the green, yellow and blue flag of Brazil and the battle flag of the Confederate States of America.

"I know the war is over," said Steagall, the youngest member of the 400-member Fraternity of American Descendants, founded in 1954. "But we have traditions here, American roots, and it's important for us to keep together."The story of the Confederate exodus to Brazil began with the end of the Civil War in 1865. Col. William Hutchinson Norris, an Alabama state senator, led the way, arriving in December of that year and buying a large farm about 80 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

He planted cotton and watermelon and wrote to friends back in the South, telling them there was plenty of cheap land available. In addition, Brazil still allowed slavery - it was not abolished until 1888. The Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II, wanted the Americans to come, hoping they would help make his country a textile giant.

So they came by the thousands - an estimated 2,900 a year landed in Rio de Janeiro from 1867 to 1871, and many more arrived in other ports. Some settled in the north, in the state of Bahia, others went to the south, living in towns called Juquia, Xiririca and New Texas, and others established a colony in the Amazon city of Santarem.

But the most successful colony was the one led by Norris. In this area, the Southerners found a red-brick soil reminiscent of good Mississippi clay, and today Americana, a city of 160,000, remains at the center of the Brazilian textile industry.

A small museum in the nearby town of Santa Barbara d'Oeste tells the story of those days - of how the confederados, as they were known, brought the plow and sewing machine to Brazil, along with watermelons, pecans, new strains of cotton, and perhaps baseball.)

But it was a sequestered community, one that intermarried, opened its own schools and imported teachers and preachers from the United States. For a few generations, they spoke only English at home, although they had to use Portuguese while conducting business.

At times, the settlers were ostracized by the Brazilians. In Americana, the Catholic priests would not allow the Protestant Southerners to be buried in the local graveyard. So they started their own.

That little cemetery, between Americana and Santa Barbara, is the center of the confederado descendants' heritage. An obelisk emblazoned with the Confederate flag pays tribute to the original settlers, listing their names, from Ayees to Yancey. More than 400 people are buried beneath gravestones inscribed in Portuguese and English.

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