Early life
Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in the city of Sacramento, Minas Gerais, then a small rural town. Her parents were illiterate sharecroppers. She was the daughter of a single mother, and her father was married to another woman. For those reasons, she was treated as an outcast as a child and was a victim of child mistreatment. When she reached the age of seven, de Jesus' mother forced her to attend school. Maria Leite Monteiro de Barros, a wealthy landowner's wife who was also a benefactor to other poor black neighbourhood children, supported her for a while and paid for her schooling. Her formal education lasted a meagre two years, though by then she was already able to read and write. As her mother had illegitimate children, her family was excluded from Catholic Church. Nevertheless, she never stopped considering herself a Catholic. For instance, she often made biblical references and praises to God in her diary: "I dreamt I was an angel. My dress was billowing and had long pink sleeves. I went from earth to heaven. I put stars in my hands and played with them. I talked to the stars. They put on a show in my honor. They danced around me and made a luminous path. When I woke up I thought: I’m so poor. I can't afford to go to a play so God sends me these dreams for my aching soul. To the God who protects me, I send my thanks."[6]
In 1937, the year her mother died, de Jesus migrated to the metropolis of São Paulo, which was experiencing a demographic upswing and witnessing the appearance of its first slums. Here, she worked as a maid for white families, but found that the work clashed with her independent personality. In 1948, she became pregnant. These reasons led to her dismissal by the family for which she was a maid, and she ended up needing to live in the nearby favela, Canindé.[7] It is reported that authorities in her hometown thought her ability to read meant that she was a practitioner of witchcraft, because it was so unusual for someone like her.[8] In São Paulo, she earned a living by collecting recyclable materials. She would purchase what little food she could afford with the earnings of her hard work. De Jesus made her own shack out of scrap plywood, cans, cardboard, or pretty much anything she could obtain. Among the materials she collected, there would be an occasional journal or notebook, as well as books, which encouraged her to start recording her day-to-day activities and write about life in the favela. It angered her neighbours that she was always writing because they were illiterate and felt uncomfortable at the thought of her writing about them. Her neighbours were jealous of her and tended to treat de Jesus and her children badly. She never considered getting married, on account of having witnessed too much domestic violence in the slums and preferring to remain an independent woman. She had three children, each from a different relationship (at least one of whom was with a wealthy white man). Unlike many fellow black women, de Jesus celebrated her race and was proud of it. To her, her skin and hair looked beautiful.[9]
In her diary, she gives details about the daily life of favelados (the inhabitants of favelas), and bluntly describes the political and social facts which impacted their lives. She writes of how poverty and desperation can cause people of elevated moral character to abandon their principles and dishonour themselves to simply feed their families. According to her, favelados would never get the chance to save money, as any extra earnings would immediately be used to pay off debts.
