Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Brazilian woman with only two
years of schooling, was the mother of three illegitimate children,
each born of a different father. This story of her life in São
Paulo stands as a vivid, incendiary social document. With stark
simplicity, Carolina describes her squalid neighborhood, the
favela, and tells how she lived hand to mouth. To keep herself and
her children barely alive, to stave off their ever-present hunger,
Carolina must scavenge for scraps of metal and paper in the gutter
to sell. Her story is a witness to the vicious fights, the
knifings, and the sordid sex of the favelados—prisoners of poverty,
prey of the unscrupulous, and the breeders of revolution.
Robert M. Levine devoted his career to Brazilian social
history. He chaired the National Committee on Brazilian Studies and
the Columbia University Seminar on Brazil and was director of the
Center for Latin American Studies, University of Miami. His major
books include Vale of Tears and Father of the Poor? Vargas and His
Era.
“Written between 1955 and 1960, Child of the Dark is the daily
journal of an artist, a writer who, as the single mother of three
young children, supports her family by picking through garbage for
paper and scraps to sell. They live in a cardboard and wood-scrap
shack in a Brazilian slum called the favelas, where there is no
plumbing, and one public cold-water spigot is the only clean water
source for several hundred people. Her journal documents the lives
favelados are forced to live....Carolina de Jesus is a poet of
intense dignity.”—500 Great Books by Women
“A haunting chronicle…a dramatic document of the dispossessed that
both shocks and moves the reader.”—New York Herald Tribune
“It is a minor classic—because it is one of the very few books that
have ever been written about the lowest and the poorest, les
misérables, by one of themselves.”—Horizon
“It is both an ugly book and a touchingly beautiful book. It
carries protest and it carries compassion. There is even bitter
humor. As a fast-paced and strangely observant account of sheer
misery, Child of the Dark is an immensely disturbing study of what
can happen to a segment of the population of one of the world’s
potentially wealthiest nations…a rarely matched essay on the
meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation, and want.”—The New York
Times Book Review
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