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Dressed in rags, dirty, half-starved, aggressive, cursing and smoking cigarette butts, they were, in truth, the masters of the city, the ones who knew it completely, the ones who loved it completely, its poets.

Like its author, I feel unapologetic about loving this story to bits, despite being aware of its shortcomings and its problematic depiction of rape. The work of a young author in love with his home city and with the colourful life of its inhabitants, the novel is part of a militant six book series written between the ages of 18 to 24 for the dual purpose of capturing the soul of Salvador de Bahia and inspiring revolutionary fervour in the readership.
Written in 1938, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise in communist sympathies in the ‘lower� classes, the novel was banned and burned in the same city so lovingly portrayed here yet, over time, it has become a classic despite its very real issues.
The author felt the need to defend his youthful enthusiasm in a postscript that I also find is needed here before I dive into the actual story.

No one knows better than I, who wrote them, what the weaknesses and defects of my novels are. But, by the same token, no one can measure the sacrifice they cost me, the honesty that went into their making, the disinterest and pure love that made the novelist return to his people.
I know full well that this series of novels has nothing of genius or the miraculous about it. The work of a young man, it could not help but be full of defects. I do know, however, that there exists in it a feeling that has almost always been forgotten in Brazilian works of art: an absolute solidarity with and a great love for the humanity that lives in these books.

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Today he is fifteen. For ten of these years he has wandered about the streets of Bahia. He never knew anything about his mother, his father died of a bullet wound. He was left alone and he spent years learning about his city. Today he knows all its streets and all its alleys. There isn’t a shop, store, establishment that he doesn’t know.

Pedro Bala is the leader of a gang of feral children who hunt the streets of the city by day, break into homes by night and hide from police and social services in an abandoned warehouse by the beach. The newspapers have named them the Captains of the Sands and they are the most notorious and chased of street gang in Bahia.
To Jorge Amado, they are foremost and most importantly lost children in need of love and shelter, boys who must survive by their wits in a hostile adult world, rejected by polite society, vilified by the press and turned into outlaws by police brutality and by poverty.
They have nowhere and nobody to turn to for help but each other, a band of brothers (comrades) who live by their own code of street honour and whose daily strife is compensated by the greatest gift the city has to offer: the adventure of freedom in the streets of the most mysterious and beautiful city in the world, in the streets of Bahia de Todos os Santos, the bay of all saints. as Father Jose Pedro explains why a state run orphanage would not be right for the captains.

In the moonlight, in an old abandoned warehouse, the children are sleeping.

The author doesn’t try to hide his love for his little hooligans, making real efforts here to portray their life of crime and the squalor of their abode in a sympathetic way. The modern reader will have a harder time swallowing this, in particular a repulsive rape scene by the leader of the Captains, Pedro Bala. And this is not the only incident of abuse of women in the book. When he managed to get a little black girl on the sand, it was with the help of others, by force.
Similarly evident are Jorge Amado’s communist sympathies, something probably understandable in the aftermath of the Great Depression [the series of six Bahian books were written in the 1930s]. John Steinbeck, who I also re-read recently, had a similar attitude in his social novels, although Amado is much more trenchant in his call to revolution.
In his later novels, Amado abandoned the militant tone, if not the sensibility towards the oppressed. And his love for Bahia and for its laid-back, colourful lifestyle only increased, as I noticed in my favourite story from him: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.
I actually learned a new word that is very fitting for both the early and the late novels: malandragem : is a Portuguese term for a lifestyle of idleness, fast living and petty crime � traditionally celebrated in samba lyrics, especially those of Noel Rosa and Bezerra da Silva. [wiki]

Amado tries, and in my opinion succeeds, in making folk heroes, cultural icons from his captains of the sands. One of them, Good-Life or Boa-Vida, is like a poster boy for this malandragem life, not interested in money or a job, only in parties, drinking, making music and love, walking leisurely on the city streets.
Another national icon, revered in the book by Dry-Gulch, the angriest of these dangerous urchins, is Lampiao, a cruel bandit in the eyes of landowners and government officials, but a sort of Robin Hood to the people of the back country.

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Literary, the style is a bit more awkward than in Dona Flor, but it is clear this is a labour of love, and signs of what Amado will eventually achieve as a wordsmith are here allright.

... he took what he needed from Charles Dickens and used also the form of the folktale, the picaresque novel, and the documentary novel.

There is no actual plot, or character development, just a series of vignettes from life on the streets with eventually a sort of plot progression following the way the children grow up to either be destroyed by the system or be absorbed into the life of the city.
Pedro Bala the ‘Bullet� is the gang’s leader and the focus of the novel, but many short stories follow his lieutenants: the Professor, Legless, Big Joao, Lollipop, Good-Life, Cat, Dry Gulch and others. There are few adults who penetrate the secretive gang of criminal children, yet they admit in their secret hideaway people like God’s Love [the sailor who is teaching them capoeira], Don ‘Aninha [the candomble priestess], Father Jose Pedro [the poor priest who tries to help the captains].
There are no girls in the group, at least in the beginning, and the captains are quite repulsive in their early manhood, as I mentioned earlier. The author seems aware of this issue and will add a new member to the gang later in the novel, an orphaned girl who loses her parents in a smallpox epidemic.
From a target of gang-rape, this young girl manages to become their mother-sister-wife-saint symbol, a full rights partner who joins the boys on their raids in the city and offers spiritual comfort at night. Her story arc ends rather melodramatically, in a Dickensian pastiche, but she did make an impression on me.

I could now tell about the fate of the captains later in life, but I believe this is better left to each reader to arrive at in due time, as they follow the children through the streets of the city. I would only mention that of Pedro Bala, the leader, as indicative of the social awakening role the young author hoped to induce in his readers.

The revolution calls Pedro Bala the way God called Lollipop at night in the warehouse. It’s a powerful voice inside him, as powerful as the voice of the sea, as the voice of the wind, as powerful as a voice without comparison. With the voice of a black man on a sloop singing the samba that Good-Life had composed.

For myself, I want to preserve an earlier scene that shows not the criminals the rest of the world sees in the captains, but the children yearning for love that is their inner soul:

He goes along like a believer to mass, a lover to the breast of his beloved, a suicide to death. He goes pale and limping. He mounts a blue horse that has stars painted on its wooden rump. His lips are tight, his ears don’t hear the music of the Pianola. He only sees the spinning lights, and he comes to the realization that he is on a carousel, spinning on a horse like all those children who have fathers and mothers, a home and someone to kiss them and love them. He thinks he is one of them and he closes his eyes to hold the certainty better.