Child of the Dark

Child of the Dark is the English translation of Quarto de Despejo (literally "Room of Garbage"), the published diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian woman who lived in a São Paulo favela, or urban shantytown, during the mid-to-late 1950s. The book comprises a translator's preface by David St. Clair, diary entries spanning July 1955 through January 1, 1960, and an afterword by historian Robert M. Levine.

St. Clair's preface provides historical context. Portuguese colonizers arrived in Brazil in 1500, exploiting Indigenous labor and then importing enslaved Africans. After slavery's abolition in 1888, formerly enslaved people migrated to cities seeking work, but many found none. They settled on unwanted swampland in São Paulo or hilltops in Rio de Janeiro, building shacks from scrap materials in settlements that became known as favelas. Periodic droughts in Brazil's Northeast drove additional waves of unskilled, illiterate nordestinos (migrants from that region) to the cities, swelling the favelas further. Local governments did little, and politicians appeared only during campaigns, making promises they abandoned once elected. St. Clair introduces Carolina as a woman born in 1913 in Sacramento, in the interior state of Minas Gerais, the daughter of an unmarried farmhand. Her mother insisted she attend school, but Carolina's formal education ended after the second grade when the family moved. As a young woman, she worked a series of jobs in São Paulo, repeatedly losing positions because of her independence. She bore three children, each by a different father: João, José Carlos, and Vera Eunice. In 1947, unemployed and pregnant, she arrived at the favela of Canindé and built a shack from scavenged boards roofed with flattened tin cans and cardboard. To survive, she walked São Paulo's streets collecting scrap paper, metal, and discarded food, earning as little as a few cents per day. To escape her misery, she began writing poems, stories, and a diary in notebooks salvaged from the trash.

The diary opens on July 15, 1955, Vera Eunice's birthday. Carolina could not afford shoes for her daughter and instead found a pair in the garbage, washed and patched them. She traded empty bottles for bread and sold paper for 65 cruzeiros, spending nearly all of it on food. Her daily routine emerges across the early entries: rising before dawn to fetch water from a communal spigot where women argued and gossiped, washing clothes at the river, cooking meager meals of rice, beans, and farinha (coarse wheat flour), and spending hours collecting scrap to sell at a junkyard. Carolina chronicles the hostility of her neighbors, who fought with her children, hurled insults, and once threw a filled chamber pot on the children. She asserts her principles throughout, valuing reading and writing over gossip and warning antagonists that she was recording everything. Small kindnesses appeared alongside pervasive ugliness: a fishmonger gave her fish and a Spiritist Center donated food, but a neighbor's child called her a racial slur, and someone burned five sacks of her collected paper. The 1955 entries end on July 28, and the diary then skips nearly three years.

The 1958 entries begin on May 2 and document Carolina's escalating hunger and sharpening political consciousness. On May 13, the anniversary of Brazil's abolition of slavery, she prayed that God would enlighten whites, even as she fought what she calls "the real slavery," hunger. She describes the favela's social ecosystem: charitable organizations provided occasional aid, brick-house neighbors petitioned to remove the favelados, and politicians courted favela residents during campaigns but vanished once elected. Carolina classifies São Paulo with a bitter metaphor: the Governor's Palace is the living room, the mayor's office the dining room, the city the garden, and the favela "the backyard where they throw the garbage" (May 15, 1958).

Hunger dominates nearly every entry. On May 20, Carolina returned home to find her children eating macaroni salvaged from the garbage; she cooked it with beans, breaking her own promise never to eat discarded food. On May 27, she ate nothing until she bought a bread roll, and the world, previously yellow and distorted from hunger, became normal again. Through the summer months, Carolina records violent interpersonal conflicts, domestic abuse witnessed by children, and the degradation poverty inflicted on the community. She reflects on race with complexity, declaring that she adores her black skin and arguing that whites and blacks share the same vices. Her political commentary sharpens as she criticizes the Social Service as useless to the poor and observes that elections are a "Trojan Horse" appearing every four years.

Writing serves as Carolina's refuge. She describes retreating into fantasy, imagining herself in a golden castle with crystal windows. She states that when she is in the city she feels as if she is in a living room, but when she returns to the favela she feels like "a useless object, destined to be forever in a garbage dump" (May 19, 1958). Senhor Manuel, a man who courted Carolina and occasionally gave her money, proposed marriage. She declined, explaining that no man would tolerate a woman who writes through the night and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow.

The diary's later months in 1958 chart deepening deprivation. A child died in the favela at two months old; Carolina observes that if the child had lived, the child would have gone hungry. A woman with three children died by suicide because she could not cope with the cost of living, and Carolina comments that the woman lacked the soul of a favelado: those who, when hungry, go through garbage and keep living. On December 31, a gypsy named Raimundo arrived at Carolina's shack. She found him attractive, but she gradually came to see his predatory nature and resolved to report him to authorities. He departed the favela.

On May 6, 1959, the diary's pivotal turning point arrives when the reporter Audálio Dantas photographed Carolina and took her to the São Paulo Academy of Letters. On June 10, her diary excerpts appeared in O Cruzeiro, Brazil's biggest weekly magazine. Carolina reflects: "It feels as if my dirty life is now being washed" (June 11, 1959). Back in the favela, neighbors cursed her for exposing their community. Despite the attention, her circumstances remained dire. On June 16, she writes that there is nothing to eat and she considers inviting her children for "a mutual suicide," but she resists. On Vera's birthday, July 15, Carolina could not afford a cake; she made corn mush, and Vera asked hopefully if it was a cake, then cried when told it was not. Carolina writes: "Life is just like a book. Only after you've read it do you know how it ends."

The diary ends on December 31, 1959. Carolina earned 80 cruzeiros from paper, bought rice, soap, kerosene, and sugar, and stayed up to listen to the São Silvestre footrace on the radio. She prayed for God to bless Brazil and hoped 1960 would be better. The final entry is dated January 1, 1960: "I got up at 5 and went to get water."

An afterword by Levine provides essential context. Published as Quarto de Despejo, the diary became a sensation: The first printing of 10,000 copies sold out in three days, and within six months 90,000 copies had been sold, breaking all Brazilian book sales records. Two months after publication, Carolina loaded her possessions onto a truck to leave the favela, but neighbors swarmed it, hurling rocks and insults; her children were struck and bloodied before the truck sped away. She used her royalties to buy a brick house in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Santana, but neighbors ostracized her family because of their mixed race. She quickly exhausted her savings by giving money to visitors, was forced to sell her house, and returned to collecting cans and paper. Carolina Maria de Jesus died on February 13, 1977, at the age of 63. Levine notes that the political Left rejected her as selfish for writing about her own family rather than systemic reform, while the Right considered her an embarrassment. Despite this neglect in Brazil, Child of the Dark has been translated into more than a dozen languages and remains assigned reading in thousands of university classrooms in the United States and Canada.