The Enslaved Man the Mistress Ordered to the Pillory — and Who Became Their Only Hope!

In 1854, at a jerky-producing estate near Pelotas, in Rio Grande do Sul, an enslaved man named Bonifácio was dragged into the central courtyard by two of the property’s henchmen. The private chapel’s bell struck noon. The other workers of the estate, both enslaved people and free laborers, had already been gathered to watch. And the owner of that property, Colonel Aparício Leivas, stood beside a solid wood pillory, already open, waiting. Bonifácio, with his wrists tied in front of his body, was pushed into the pillory, which closed over his neck and wrists with a dull thud. Dr. Wenceslau, a physician hired by the Leivas family, was also there, arms crossed, watching with a poorly disguised look of satisfaction.

“Do you think you know more than a trained doctor?” said Colonel Aparício, approaching the pillory.

Bonifácio, with his neck trapped in the wood, raised his eyes but did not answer. The colonel continued:

“My daughter was dying of a fever, and Dr. Wenceslau, with all his science, couldn’t bring that fever down no matter what he tried. Then you come along with your roots and herbal concoctions and cure the girl in three days. That is not healing, Bonifácio. That is witchcraft, and witchcraft on a Christian estate does not go unpunished.”

Bonifácio, his voice hoarse from his position in the pillory, replied:

“I only used what my grandmother taught me, sir. There’s no witchcraft in that.”

The colonel shrugged:

“It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that this entire farm is already whispering that a slave’s root cured what the doctor’s science could not. And that, my friend, is a much bigger problem than my daughter’s fever. You will stay in this pillory until the sun sets three times, to remind everyone here that a trained white man’s medicine is worth more than a captive’s brew, even when it isn’t.”

And that was exactly what happened. Nobody in the courtyard moved; nobody interrupted. Because in a charqueada where the master’s authority and the authority of official science always walked hand in hand, anything that threatened this dual authority had to be crushed in the public square, even if it meant punishing the person who had just saved a life.

The story I’m about to tell is what happened after those three days in the pillory. Because this story doesn’t end there, with Bonifácio exposed to the sun and the cold night air. It begins exactly there, in the instant when Colonel Aparício, without realizing it, turned a quiet healer into a figure that, less than two years later, the entire farm would desperately need.

To understand this story, you need to understand what a charqueada was in 19th-century Rio Grande do Sul. Unlike the coffee plantations or sugar mills in the rest of the country, charqueadas were estates dedicated to producing charque—the salted and dried beef that supplied a large part of the Brazilian domestic market, especially the regions that sustained huge contingents of enslaved labor in other activities, such as the mines and the coffee farms themselves.

The work at a charqueada was brutal. Slaughtering, salting, and drying the meat took place under a scorching sun in exhausting shifts, and the Pelotas region, at the peak of this economy, held one of the highest densities of urban and rural enslaved populations in southern Brazil. This is a detail many people are unaware of, as the popular imagination almost always associates slavery with the country’s northeast or southeast.

On these estates, access to formal medical care was extremely limited for the enslaved population. Trained doctors were rare in the region, expensive, and generally reserved to treat the masters and their families. This left the captive population almost entirely reliant on their own healing knowledge—much of it brought or adapted from African traditions and transmitted orally from generation to generation within the enslaved communities themselves.

This knowledge, which included the use of medicinal plants, wound-care techniques, and healing practices that often proved more effective than the official medicine of the time (which was still quite rudimentary by modern standards), was simultaneously indispensable for the survival of the captive population and deeply threatening to the authority of the masters and the few trained doctors in the area. They viewed this folk knowledge as an unacceptable rival to their own professional and social legitimacy.

It is important to understand that the official medicine of the period, even when practiced by physicians trained at the finest European universities, still operated under theories that would be considered obsolete today, such as the belief in bodily humors and the extensive use of bloodletting as a treatment for practically any ailment. Many medical historians point out that, in practice, popular healing knowledge—especially that based on centuries of empirical observation of medicinal plants—often produced results that were as good as or even better than the official treatments of the time. However, this effectiveness was rarely acknowledged publicly, precisely because admitting it would mean accepting that enslaved people, who were deemed socially inferior, possessed technical knowledge superior to that of formally educated white professionals—a possibility the racist logic of the era absolutely refused to entertain.

It was within this tension between practical necessity and institutional pride that Bonifácio’s life became the centerpiece of a story yet to unfold. Bonifácio was born on the charqueada itself, the son of a woman named Iracema. While still enslaved, she had learned from her own mother a vast knowledge of medicinal herbs and roots. This wisdom was adapted over generations, blending African traditions brought by their ancestors with native plants from the southern region that the family learned to recognize and use over their years living there.

There were no birth records for enslaved people, only calculated ages and the owner’s name written in a property ledger. Bonifácio was estimated to be just over 32 years old in 1854. Iracema had passed away a few years before the incident at the pillory. But before she died, she passed on to her son detailed knowledge about dozens of plants and their applications: which roots helped break a fever, which leaves were good for cleaning infected wounds, and which teas relieved the digestive problems that constantly afflicted the enslaved population, who were subjected to poor diets and minimal sanitary conditions.

From a young age, Bonifácio accompanied his mother on trips to the woods near the charqueada, learning to identify each plant by its leaf shape, smell, and texture. Over the years, he developed a quiet but solid reputation within the enslaved community as the person to turn to when someone fell ill and no doctor was available, or when a family’s meager resources couldn’t stretch to pay for a formal consultation.

Iracema used to tell her son—according to accounts that survived among the descendants of that charqueada’s enslaved community—that each plant had its own language. True healing required not just knowing the name and effect of each one, but also knowing how to listen to the sick person’s body, understanding that similar symptoms could hide completely different causes. Bonifácio took this lesson to heart throughout his life. He developed his own method of careful observation before any treatment, asking detailed questions about the symptoms, how long the person had felt ill, and what they had eaten or done in the preceding days. This approach, though he didn’t know the scientific name for it, closely mirrored the clinical diagnostic practices that formal medicine would only rigorously systematize decades later.

Colonel Aparício Leivas, the owner of the charqueada, had inherited the property from his own father. He was obsessed with projecting an image of modernity and respectability to Pelotas society, which included always hiring the most highly regarded doctors in the region to attend to his family—a considerable expense that he made a point of mentioning in social settings as proof of his refinement. Dr. Wenceslau, a physician educated in Portugal who had been treating the Leivas family for several years, was highly conscious of his own status. He looked upon any healing practice outside the formal medical protocols he had studied with deep suspicion and barely concealed contempt, viewing the folk knowledge of enslaved communities as dangerous superstition, if not outright charlatanism.

The tipping point came when Colonel Aparício’s youngest daughter, a 7-year-old girl named Anita, developed a high fever that wouldn’t break despite all the treatments Dr. Wenceslau applied over several days. It reached a point where the family began to fear the worst. In a night of sheer desperation, the girl’s mother, Dona Felisbina, Colonel Aparício’s wife, secretly sent for Bonifácio. His reputation as a healer had reached her through whispers from the housemaids. She begged him to try something, knowing full well this directly defied her husband’s orders and the authority of their hired doctor.

Knowing perfectly well the risks he was taking, Bonifácio prepared a root-based tea his mother had taught him decades earlier, specifically meant for stubborn fevers, and applied compresses from another plant known to reduce inflammation. In less than three days, Anita’s fever broke completely, and the little girl the family thought they might lose was back to eating and playing normally.

Relieved and grateful, Dona Felisbina made what would turn out to be a fatal mistake for Bonifácio. She carelessly mentioned the incident during a visit from other local ladies, openly praising the enslaved man’s knowledge for achieving what the doctor himself could not. The news, as it often does in small towns, traveled fast, reaching Dr. Wenceslau’s ears before Colonel Aparício even officially heard about it.

Professionally humiliated and terrified that the incident might ruin his reputation and his clientele among Pelotas’ elite families, Dr. Wenceslau sought out the Colonel personally. He demanded an example be made, arguing that allowing an enslaved man with no formal training to practice medicine posed both a sanitary and moral danger to the entire estate.

And this is exactly where the scene I described at the beginning truly took place. What I’m going to tell you next is harsh, but it must be told to the end, because staying silent in the face of injustice is also a way of letting prejudice win.

Pressed by his own pride and the doctor’s demands, Colonel Aparício decided the punishment had to be public and prolonged to serve as a definitive example. Bonifácio spent three full days locked in the pillory, exposed to the blistering sun by day and the biting cold of the gaucho nights, given only water and a piece of bread, while the charqueada’s inhabitants walked past him during their daily chores.

I won’t detail the physical agony of those three days. I won’t describe every hour of exposure, nor the state his body was in by the end. What I can tell you is that Bonifácio, though severely weakened, never begged for forgiveness nor denied his own knowledge throughout the entire ordeal. When he was finally released, barely able to stand, Colonel Aparício approached him and asked:

“Did you learn your lesson, Bonifácio?”

Bonifácio, his voice weak but unwavering, answered:

“I learned that you would rather let a daughter die than admit a slave knows how to cure what the doctor doesn’t. That is what I learned, sir.”

Unsettled by the response, the colonel said nothing more. He ordered Bonifácio back to his regular duties as soon as he recovered, formally forbidding him—under threat of even harsher punishments—from ever practicing any form of healing on the property again.

Over the following months, Bonifácio obeyed, at least in public. He kept his distance from any situation that could be construed as practicing medicine. However, in secret, he continued teaching fragments of his knowledge to a few highly trusted individuals within the charqueada’s enslaved community, understanding that this wisdom needed to survive, even if he could no longer openly practice it himself.

These secret lessons always took place at night, after work, in a small tool shed at the back of the estate. There, Bonifácio taught three or four trusted people—including a young man named Deodoro, a second cousin who showed a genuine interest in the subject—the basic principles his mother had taught him decades prior. He taught them how to identify the right plants in the nearby woods, how to prepare infusions at the proper strength, and most importantly, how to observe the sick person’s symptoms before deciding on any treatment.

Bonifácio insisted in every lesson that this knowledge could not die with him, even if circumstances currently prevented him from using it openly. According to accounts passed down among descendants of that same community, he would repeat that hidden knowledge is still living knowledge, but forgotten knowledge dies forever.

The situation remained relatively stable until late 1855, when news began to spread across the entire province. First a distant rumor, then an undeniable reality: a cholera epidemic that had already devastated other parts of Brazil throughout that year was finally reaching Rio Grande do Sul. It spread with terrifying speed through the ports and trade routes connecting the region to Porto Alegre and the rest of the country.

The cholera epidemic of 1855 and 1856 is still considered one of the worst public health tragedies in the history of Imperial Brazil, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in just a few months. It struck with particular force among the poorest populations and enslaved communities, who lived in precarious sanitary conditions and had even more limited access to any formal medical care—care which, in any case, knew very little about how to effectively treat a disease whose exact cause the science of the time did not fully grasp. Historians estimate that the cholera epidemic of that period claimed between 150,000 and 200,000 lives across Brazilian territory. A staggering number for the era, considering the country’s total population.

The disease spread rapidly through contaminated water, a transmission mechanism that official medicine had not yet clearly identified. This made containment measures almost always ineffective and, in many cases, completely misguided. Entire cities suffered sanitary collapse. Cemeteries overflowed, and widespread panic led many wealthy families to temporarily abandon their urban properties in search of safer areas, often leaving behind the very enslaved population that most needed care to fend for themselves against the disease.

When cholera reached the Pelotas region in early 1856, Colonel Aparício’s charqueada was hit hard. Dozens of workers, both enslaved and free, began showing the characteristic symptoms. Dr. Wenceslau, despite all his formal training, found himself completely powerless to halt the epidemic’s advance. The official medicine of that period lacked an effective treatment against cholera, relying instead on generic hygiene recommendations that did little to slow the disease’s rapid spread.

It was in this moment of absolute despair, with bodies piling up and entire families falling ill in a matter of hours, that Dona Felisbina, remembering what had happened two years earlier, approached her husband privately. Against his initial wishes, she insisted that Bonifácio be called upon once more, arguing that faced with the very real possibility of losing more children, more workers, and perhaps the entire farm to the epidemic, Dr. Wenceslau’s pride could no longer be the priority.

Colonel Aparício, watching his charque production grind to a halt and the death toll rise day by day, relented. He sent for Bonifácio and explicitly asked him, for the first time, to use all his knowledge to try to help contain the tragedy.

Despite everything he had endured, Bonifácio did not hesitate to help. He understood that this went far beyond any personal resentment he might hold against the colonel. Lives were at stake, and the knowledge he harbored, though limited in the face of such a severe epidemic, could make a real difference.

With the help of the other enslaved individuals who had learned pieces of his knowledge in the preceding months, Bonifácio set up a system of care based on keeping the sick constantly hydrated. They used teas and solutions made of salt and sugar dissolved in boiled and cooled water. Although he couldn’t explain the scientific reasoning behind it, his family’s tradition had taught him this empirical practice was effective in combating diseases that caused severe diarrhea and dehydration—the core symptoms of cholera.

Historically, we now know that oral rehydration, even when done empirically without a scientific understanding of the disease, was one of the few truly effective measures available against cholera for much of the 19th century, long before official medicine developed formal treatment protocols based on this very principle.

The work of Bonifácio and his small team of assistants during the most critical weeks of the epidemic at the charqueada helped significantly reduce the mortality rate among the workers they treated, especially when compared to neighboring estates that relied exclusively on the meager resources of the era’s official medicine.

Dr. Wenceslau, forced to witness firsthand the effectiveness of the knowledge he had labeled as witchcraft less than two years prior, never publicly admitted his mistake. However, he began to collaborate—albeit with visible reluctance—with Bonifácio’s instructions during the epidemic’s peak. For someone as arrogant as the doctor, this gesture was, in its own silent way, a form of acknowledgment that words could never express.

When the epidemic finally subsided in the region around mid-1856, Colonel Aparício’s charqueada had lost proportionately fewer workers than several neighboring properties. Quietly, among the workers themselves and even some well-informed neighbors, this outcome was attributed to the wisdom of Bonifácio and his small network of helpers.

Although he never offered a formal apology for the pillory incident, Colonel Aparício granted Bonifácio something months later that shocked the entire estate: permanent, public authorization to practice healthcare among the charqueada’s enslaved and free population. He also provided resources so Bonifácio could cultivate his own medicinal plants on a small plot of land within the property, no longer having to forage for them secretly in the woods.

It wasn’t manumission, nor was it an explicit apology. According to accounts passed down through the families of the region, the colonel was never able to openly admit he was wrong. Still, it was a practical, undeniable recognition that this knowledge—the very knowledge he had tried to silence by force three years earlier—had become essential for the survival of the entire estate.

Bonifácio continued living and working at the charqueada for the rest of his life. Over time, he became a highly respected figure not only among the enslaved community but also among the region’s free residents, who quietly sought him out for treatments that official medicine still couldn’t offer with the same efficacy.

Deodoro, the nephew Bonifácio had trained in secret during the months of prohibition, eventually became a recognized authority among healers and herbalists in the Pelotas region decades later, when abolition finally came to Brazil in 1888. He kept alive much of the knowledge Bonifácio had inherited from his mother. Accounts surviving through the descendants of this community describe Deodoro, by then a free man, treating both Black and white families in the region, in an era when the line between folk medicine and official medicine slowly began to blur compared to the rigid boundaries of the slavery years. However, prejudice against healing practices associated with Black communities persisted in more veiled forms for decades to come.

He never formally learned to read or write, but over decades, he passed down his knowledge to children, nephews, and trusted apprentices, ensuring that this wisdom, nearly erased by force on a single wooden pillar, would outlive him by generations.

Surviving records about Bonifácio are scarce, as is common for most enslaved people of that era. However, some parish documents and contemporary accounts, collected decades later by researchers interested in the history of the Pelotas region, confirm the existence of an enslaved healer known to the community as “Bonifácio of the Herbs,” whose knowledge, according to those same accounts, played a significant role in reducing the impact of the cholera epidemic on at least two local estates.

But I believe there is another kind of archive that parish records never knew how to keep properly: the archive of popular knowledge that spans generations through oral tradition. It is preserved today in home medicine practices, bottled herbal remedies, teas, and blessings that many families in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul and many other regions of Brazil continue to practice, often without realizing they carry within them the echoes of knowledge that people like Bonifácio risked their bodies to protect.

Scholars of the history of Brazilian popular medicine point out that much of the knowledge regarding medicinal plants still circulating in the country’s rural and peripheral communities stems directly from this blend of Indigenous, African, and folk wisdom that developed in contexts just like Bonifácio’s. Marginalized communities, excluded from access to official medicine, had to develop and preserve a body of practical knowledge out of sheer necessity to survive—a body of knowledge that, decades and even centuries later, continues to be used, even if its historical origins and the immense price paid by those who kept it alive often go unacknowledged.

Bonifácio was not just a victim of prejudice and cruelty. He was a guardian of knowledge who, even after being publicly punished for what he knew, chose to use that very same knowledge to save the lives of those who had punished him. He did this not out of submissiveness, but because he understood the true value of a human life far more profoundly than any formally trained doctor of that time.

This story exists to remind us of two important things. First: prejudice tries to silence knowledge that threatens established authorities, but reality, sooner or later, usually exposes who truly knew the right path. Second: there is a kind of greatness in helping someone who deeply hurt you, not out of forgetfulness or weakness, but because some people understand that saving lives matters more than any personal revenge ever could.

Bonifácio lost three whole days of freedom and dignity locked in a wooden pillory. He lost the right for months to openly practice what he did better than anyone else. But he never lost his knowledge. And it was precisely this knowledge, patiently preserved through the worst kind of public humiliation, that ended up saving the lives of dozens of people—including the very family that had ordered his punishment.

And that is why we tell this story today. So that the few scattered records of Bonifácio of the Herbs won’t be the final word on a man whose knowledge helped a community weather one of the worst epidemics in Brazil’s history. And that, my friend, is the story of the enslaved man whose mistress ordered him to the pillory for curing those that official science couldn’t. And the very knowledge that nearly destroyed him publicly ended up becoming, less than two years later, the only thing capable of saving the entire farm from one of the worst epidemics Brazil has ever faced.