Bitita's Diary

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote this memoir of her childhood late in life, and it was published after her death. Bitita was her childhood nickname. The book follows her from her birth in 1914 in Sacramento, a small town in rural Minas Gerais, to 1937, when she left for São Paulo for good.

She grew up poor and Black a generation after the end of slavery in Brazil, in a family home with no running water, and she records the racism, hunger and hard labour around her alongside family life and the events of the period. Much of the book is carried by the girl's blunt questions about why the world treats her people as it does.

Arranged by theme rather than strictly by date, it was first published in French in 1982 and in Portuguese in 1986. It sits beside Child of the Dark, her diary of adult life in a São Paulo favela.