Saci

A column of dust lifts off a cart track at two in the afternoon, runs the length of a coffee row and drops. In the plantation country of São Paulo and Minas Gerais that was not weather. Something was riding inside it, and the old advice was to throw a straw sieve into the middle of the whirl and see what came out struggling.

He had been busy since before dawn. Filth in the cooking pots. The mill stopped for no reason anyone could find. The lye tubs tipped over in the yard, the dogs in an uproar at nothing, the horses in the pasture run to a lather with their eyes rolling white. Those complaints were still being repeated on the fazendas of the southeast a generation after abolition, and they all attached to one culprit.

In 1917 Monteiro Lobato ran an inquiry through O Estadinho, a supplement of the São Paulo daily O Estado de S. Paulo, and asked his readers to send him everything they knew about the Saci. Letters came in from São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. He printed them the following year at his own expense, under the pen name Um demonólogo amador, and covered the cost by selling advertising pages in which the Saci personally recommended a range of products. It was the first book anyone had written about him and it is still the best evidence of what people actually believed.

The correspondents could not agree on his height within a factor of two. One made him half a metre tall, black as a vulture, standing on a single goat’s foot, with big red eyes and white pointed teeth. Another put him at a metre, in red baize breeches, with a hooked nose, a goat’s wisp of beard and very long fingernails. A third had him the size of a boy of twelve, skinny, gap-toothed, quick-eyed and laughing all the time. The fullest account in the book is an inventory rather than a portrait: heron’s nose, a tongue a span long, a tuft on the chin, the swollen belly of a man with malaria, the navel of a child who cried too much, one leg, a child’s footprint, and the spur of an old cockerel with room on it for two chicks to roost. Climbing a bank he leaves three scratches, which is how they knew about the three fingers. A hole through the palm of the hand. A bat’s ear. A red cap shaped like a gourd, held on with a horsehair strap.

Much of that is caricature and the scholarship says so without softening it. Renato da Silva Queiroz, whose 1987 anthropological study is still the standard one, read the depositions as a deposit of the collective prejudices that defined the Brazilian Black man as an inferior being, close to the animal and equipped with malevolent attributes. The mutilations are a different matter. Nineteenth-century newspapers carried advertisements for runaway slaves, and those advertisements list whip scars, broken bones, cropped ears and amputated fingers. The historian Elaine Pereira Rocha reads the Saci’s missing leg, missing fingers, wormy belly and worn-out navel as that same inventory, moved onto a body that got away. The Saci is the ghost of a Black child who did not survive.

Which is exactly what made him useful. He salted the beans. He broke the eggs. He lost the tools, delayed the errand, kept somebody out all night. In a house where a slow return could be answered with a beating, an encounter with the Saci was an explanation nobody could disprove and it cost nothing to offer.

Where he came from has never been settled. Luís da Câmara Cascudo dated the first records to the nineteenth century and placed them in the southeast, which pointed at the coffee zone and at slavery. He also traced a route up from the south, along the Paraguay and the Paraná, the dispersal centre of the Tupi-Guarani, and noted that Paraguayan country people spoke of the Yasy Yateré, red spirits the size of a seven-year-old who steal fire from camps because they cannot make it themselves. Queiroz thought the being may have begun among Tupi-Guarani peoples in the south as a frightening guardian of the woods, a one-legged boy with reddish hair who walked empty paths and broke the silence of the forest. Souza Carneiro argued in 1937 for an African root instead, the Dudú-Calunga, a small Black boy with one leg and one eye. Lindolfo Gomes derived the whole thing from an indigenous tale that Barbosa Rodrigues had recorded, the Jaci Taperê, in which a girl in love with her brother shoots a chain of arrows into the sky, climbs it and becomes the moon while he becomes a curassow. Florestan Fernandes called the result the africanização of an Amerindian sprite. Queiroz’s own verdict was an amalgam of indigenous, African and Portuguese, and after a century of argument that is roughly where the matter still sits.

There is a bird in this too. Tapera naevia, the striped cuckoo, is called saci across much of Brazil, and its other country names include martim-pererê and matinta-pereira. It calls after dark, and the rural superstition makes it a small demon of the roads that misleads travellers with the notes of its song until they lose their way.

One of Lobato’s correspondents had his story from João, a man his father had owned. João knew a caboclo in Itu who had caught a Saci. The man was sitting at his door one night warming himself at the fire when he made out a Saci watching him from behind a fig tree. He went inside as though he had noticed nothing, put a rosary of twisted grass in his pocket, came back to the step and let his head drop as if he were dozing. The Saci came up on the ball of his foot and started drawing on his pipe. The caboclo threw. The thing kicked and screamed like something being killed, and it was in the noose.

Lobato published a children’s book called O Saci in 1921 and the creature changed. The apparition went out of him. His appearance stopped being explained, slavery stopped being mentioned, and by the time he reached television on TV Tupi in 1952 he was a boy’s companion with a few tricks. Ziraldo gave him his own comic in the 1960s. He has been on Brazilian screens on and off ever since. Rocha’s objection to all of it is brief: celebrating him as a folkloric character stripped of his history naturalises the mutilation, and in the same movement makes the torture smaller and clears the torturer.

What he can do follows from what he is. He goes invisible whenever it suits him. He travels inside the dust devils, which is the only shape most people ever see him in, and he moves faster than a horse can run. He knows the forest plants, which ones heal and which ones do the other thing, and anyone going into the woods to gather them is expected to ask his permission or pay for the discourtesy afterwards. He rides the loose horses bareback at night and drinks from them while they exhaust themselves in a blind panic across the pasture. He is never without the little clay pipe, and he will ask any stranger he meets for tobacco.

He is also, for a spirit, remarkably easy to beat. Throw a sieve of woven straw over the whirlwind and he is pinned under it. Get him into a glass bottle and stopper it and he stays put. Take the red cap off his head and he has nothing left at all, because everything he can do is kept in the cap, and a Saci without it will negotiate. That is the only circumstance in which he takes an order from anybody. He is bought, and the price is his freedom back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Saci?

The Saci is a one-legged trickster spirit of Brazilian folklore, usually described as a Black boy of about twelve in a red cap, smoking a small clay pipe. He travels inside dust devils, goes invisible at will, and is blamed for the small disasters of rural life: soured milk, burnt beans, stopped mills, lost tools and horses run ragged overnight.

Why does the Saci have only one leg?

The stories themselves do not explain it, and different tellings give different reasons. Historians reading the nineteenth-century record note that runaway-slave advertisements in Brazilian newspapers described exactly this catalogue of injuries, including amputated fingers and cropped ears, and Elaine Pereira Rocha argues that the Saci’s body carries the marks of slavery onto a spirit who escaped it.

How do you catch a Saci?

Throw a sieve of woven straw over the dust devil he is travelling in, then get him into a glass bottle and stopper it. His power is held in his red cap, so taking the cap leaves him with nothing and forces him to bargain. One testimony collected by Monteiro Lobato describes a countryman in Itu catching one with a rosary of twisted grass thrown while pretending to doze in his doorway.

Where does the Saci come from?

Nobody has settled it. Câmara Cascudo dated the first records to nineteenth-century southeastern Brazil and linked them to the coffee plantations and slavery, while also tracing a route up from the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, where the Guaraní tell of the similar Yasy Yateré. Souza Carneiro proposed an African source in 1937, and Renato da Silva Queiroz concluded that the Saci is a genuine amalgam of indigenous, African and Portuguese material.

Did Monteiro Lobato invent the Saci?

No. Lobato collected the myth rather than creating it: in 1917 he ran a public inquiry in the newspaper supplement O Estadinho and published the replies as a book in 1918, and many of his correspondents had heard the stories from formerly enslaved people. What Lobato did invent was the softened version, in his 1921 children’s book O Saci, which dropped the horror and left slavery out entirely.

Related Entries

Curupira, Caipora, Iara, Anhangá, Jaci, Headless Mule, Lobisomem, Jasy Jatere, Pombero, Kurupi, Osanyin, Eshu, Duende