In the coffee-growing region of 19th-century Brazil, a woman named Benedita stood out from the crowd for one reason: her unusual height and physical strength.
At a time when slavery was still legal in Brazil, enslaved people were treated as property and were subjected to an unjust system that denied them basic human rights and freedom. Public sales were part of that system, separating families and reducing human lives to financial transactions.
Benedita’s story is remembered because of what happened during one such sale in Vassouras, a town that had become an important center of Brazil’s coffee economy.
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