Janie grows up with her ex-slave grandmother in the yard-room of a kindly, wealthy white family in rural western Florida. She plays all the time with the four white children. One day a roving photographer takes a picture of the five children:

Rereading Body Parts on Planet Slum brought to mind this icon of Janie in Hurston's novel of more than fifty years earlier. The impoverished women of the bairros of Salvador with whom Beljuli Brown lived and worked are also the descendants of African slaves. I want to ask: how similarly and how differently from Janie do these women find themselves, mirrored in the white, middleclass heroines of the soap operas that play day in, day out on broken-down televisions in overcrowded shacks?