By Gary Hawkins | Sept/Oct 08 | Features

The Lost Confederados

Why thousands of Southerners fled to Brazil after the Civil War, why they stayed, and why their descendants still remember

The original chapel, which fell into disrepair, was a wooden structure with seats and an aisle down the middle. Women sat on the right and men on the left. A changing room for the ladies buffered the front door from the main room. This is an area where they could slip out of their riding gear and into something more appropriate for a church service. Once a week the colonists met at the chapel for church services; they also held burials, weddings, and baptisms there. For me, getting around in this twenty-mile stretch is no problem. I’m covering fifteen miles in as many minutes in my American Rádio Taxi, but for the colonists, travel to Campo was an all-day affair, with food (including fried chicken), conversation, letter reading, gossip, and the singing of hymns. These weekly meetings tended to keep the colonists Southern, at least for a while.

Sagrado

I stroll by the Confederados Monument, which is basically a miniature of the Washington Monument. I’d read it described as a “twenty-five-foot granite obelisk,” and the height looks about right, but the surface is definitely whitewashed concrete. The names of the original colonists are supposed to be etched into its base, but I can’t see them because couples are sitting all around it. I continue on, fifty or so feet on a shaded brick path, up the worn steps of the new chapel and inside. The interior resembles a severe one-room country schoolhouse with stucco walls and tile floors. The seats are flat, wood-backed, and as cramped as the center section of a jumbo jet. None of the original colonists ever entered this structure, built in 1962, but I’m betting the seats are a throwback. Hard religion on hard seats.

The entrance to the cemetery is indirect, almost serpentine. I weave past a variety of trees that deny me a full view until I’m in it, and now I’m in it, and nothing I’d read or seen had prepared me for this. With shade trees and ten-foot rows of sugarcane forming a ceiling and three walls, the cemetery is effectively a room. The gaps between the sugarcane and the tree crowns are high cathedral windows. There are no manicured lawns or polished stones, nothing to mow or weed-whack. The grounds are relaxed and unkempt by design, meaning Nature has been invited to have a say in how things look and work in here. Tiny saplings grow from cracks in the headstones; plots fill with berries; headstones sink so deep into the topsoil that you can’t tell when their designees died; etchings wear down to obscurity; trees interrupt the tidy alignment of plots; trees distract the casual observer from the headstones; trees dazzle the viewer with their diversity—eucalyptus trees from Australia, mango trees from India, banana trees, pine trees, copaiba trees, coconut trees, caryota palms, and several more I can’t identify. The cemetery with its hundreds of trees and stones is the real chapel here. The cemetery is sagrado. Sacred ground.

The oldest plots are laid out against the sugarcane wall at the back of the cemetery. Among them is that of Beatrice Oliver, Oliver’s wife. Oliver, you remember, is the colonist who donated a parcel of his land for the burial of Protestant Confederados. His wife was the first colonist to die in Brazil. The headstone reads:

In Memory of Beatrice E. Oliver