Madame Satã

João Francisco dos Santos was born into misery. One of seventeen children of Manoel Firmino dos Santos and Firmina Teresa da Conceição—both descendants of enslaved Africans—he entered a world where survival itself was a daily struggle. When his father died in 1907, his mother made a choice born of desperation: she traded her seven-year-old son to a horse trader named Laureano in exchange for a mare.

The boy became an enslaved laborer on Laureano's farm. Within a year, he escaped, fleeing with a woman named Dona Felicidade who brought him to Rio de Janeiro. By 1913, at thirteen, he was living on the streets of Lapa—the bohemian heart of the capital, where the underworld mingled with artists, prostitutes, and gamblers in a permanent carnival of transgression.

It was in these streets that he met Sete Coroas, the most famous malandro of the First Republic. Sete Coroas was already a legend—a Bahiano who had come to dominate Rio's underworld, immortalized in sambas, feared by police, and worshipped by the poor. He took the young João under his tutelage, teaching him what Satã would later call "the fine art of malandragem": the game, the navalha (straight razor), the papo (smooth talk), the rasteira (leg sweep), and valentia (courage that verged on madness).

When Sete Coroas died in 1923, he left João as his successor in Lapa and Saúde.

João became a capoeirista of terrifying skill. His battles against police were legendary. He routinely fought barehanded against quartets of policemen armed with wooden clubs. In one famous incident, a drunken João resisted arrest by a 24-man platoon, leaving seven officers badly wounded—two with broken arms, two with split livers. The rest of the squad decided to let him sleep it off rather than shoot him.

"In the blink of an eye", one witness recalled, "his hands turned to feet and his feet, in tumbling turns, attacked with the violence of a piledriver".

But João was more than a fighter. In 1923, he performed as a drag artist in "Loucos em Copacabana" at Teatro Casa de Caboclo, taking the stage name Mulata do Balacochê. He was an openly gay Black man in an era when any one of those identities could get you killed. He refused to hide.

In 1928, his life changed permanently. After his second performance, he was accosted by a vigilante who called him a slur. He fired back. The resulting confrontation led to a 16-year sentence for killing a night watchman named Alberto—later overturned on self-defense grounds after he had already served time.

The name "Madame Satã" came in 1938. Released from prison, he entered a carnival costume contest at Teatro República wearing a fantasia inspired by a bat from his native Pernambuco—all golden sequins and dramatic flair. He won first place. Days later, police arrested him with other homosexuals in a downtown park. When the booking officer demanded his nickname, João refused. But the delegado recognized him as the carnival winner and, associating his bat costume with Cecil B. DeMille's film "Madam Satan", recorded the name that would follow him forever.

Over his lifetime, João accumulated 27 years and eight months in prison across 29 legal proceedings—ten convictions for charges including homicide, assault, theft, vagrancy, obscenity, and weapons possession. He claimed roughly 100 murders and over 3,000 fights, though these numbers carry the weight of malandro mythology.

He worked as a bouncer, protecting nightclubs and the prostitutes and marginalized people who frequented them. "We are human beings", he declared when asked why he protected those society despised. He raised six adopted daughters in Rio and one more on Ilha Grande.

In 1971, journalists from the underground newspaper O Pasquim "rediscovered" him. The interviews that followed led to his 1972 memoir, "Memórias de Madame Satã", narrated to Sylvan Paezzo. The book revealed a man of complexity—violent and tender, criminal and protective, illiterate yet philosophically profound.

Two years before his death, he performed one last time, playing Satan in "Lampião no Inferno" (1974). He died on April 12, 1976, at age 75, weighing only 46 kilograms. He was buried as an indigent in the cemetery of Vila do Abraão, Ilha Grande, wearing his panama hat, with red roses placed in his coffin.

Madame Satã represents the bridge between the old capoeira carioca of the malandros and the modern art that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. His feats impressed a whole generation of capoeiristas. His life was reimagined in the 2002 film "Madame Satã", directed by Karim Aïnouz with Lázaro Ramos in the title role, which premiered at Cannes.

He remains an icon of resistance—a Black, homosexual, illiterate son of former slaves who refused to bow to the racist, homophobic, and moralist norms of his society.