From Mills to Mansions: memories and fictions in Gilberto Freyre and Jayme Griz

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze some ghost stories elaborated by the contemporaries Gilberto Freyre and Jayme Griz on format of accounts, compiled memories or interviews that concerning the supernatural. Jayme Griz collected oral accounts of ex slaves, descendant of slaves, workers of sugar’s plantations and of workers of mechanized sugar production. Gilberto Freyre organized accounts of oral and documentary sources when worked as editor-in-chief of the old newspaper A Província, in 1929. He researches and transcribes stories of hauntings and haunted houses of cases that took place in the course of historical and particular files, and official police investigations on the city of Recife. Both describe, with different points of view, the memories of a world in transition between the 19th and the 20th centuries.