5 - The Lady of Tejuco

Summary

Not even Saint Ifigênia,

in full feast day gleam,

outshines the negress

in all her riches.

THE HOUSE AND THE STREET

In 1754, now free and bearing the surname Silva, Chica was the owner of a house and slaves. According to the village baptismal records, the birth of the daughter of her slave Ana took place at her house. During the de genere process for Simão Pires Sardinha's admittance into the Order of Christ, the deponents in Lisbon affirmed that the subject's mother was an important person who lived “in the greatest ostentation, the lady of a large house,” basking “in the light of nobility and great wealth.”

The house of Chica da Silva, visited “by people of the highest order, from the government and the judiciary,” was on Ópera Street, now Lalau Pires Street, on which the free and the freed, white and black, lived side by side, blurring the hierarchical boundaries by which the mining society sought to order itself. The street took its name from the opera house constructed on it, the oldest in Minas Gerais. In 1774 Chica's neighbors were João Antônio Maria Versiane and João Machado Pena, the bookkeeper and notary of the Royal Diamond Extractor. The former, white and married, lived as a tenant, though he later purchased two houses on Rua Direita, near the parish church.