Rita Baiana is a Bahian laundress in the tenement who spends everything she earns, throws the best pagodes in the tenement, refuses marriage and ends up living with Jerônimo after he leaves his wife for her. The chorado she dances is the tune that, on a Sunday night, silences the Portuguese fados.
The neighbors talk about her before they see her: "She has a good heart, too good, and won't keep a vintém for tomorrow. It's as if money itches her body". When the book introduces her, she is Firmo's lover, comes back after three months of revelry in Jacarepaguá, and the whole tenement gossips about her. When she hears talk of marriage, she replies with a refusal that sums up her character: "There's no way to live, each one master and owner of what is his!".
At the Sunday pagode, she dances the chorado in the middle of the circle, and Jerônimo sees in her "the synthesis of the impressions he received on arriving here". The next day, when he falls ill, she is the one who nurses him, with strong coffee and parati. She competes with Piedade for the man in a fight of clogs and fingernails, and wins. After Firmo's death, she leaves with Jerônimo for a tenement in Cidade Nova.
The narrator rarely gives her thoughts of her own: she appears mostly through Jerônimo's eyes and through the mouths of the neighbors. When Jerônimo, drunk, quarrels with his wife in front of her, Rita stays out of it: "If the man wanted to go back to his wife, let him go back! She wouldn't hold him, because love is not obligatory!". After she leaves, São Romão stops holding sambas in the open air.