In the decades before abolition, enslaved women bearing loads on their heads, backs, and shoulders appear in images that depict their escape to freedom, such as in these works of François Auguste Biard and Theodor Kaufmann. Here we see family groups literally dragging their children toward a new life, with women carrying most of the burden. Head garments begin to signify the promise of liberty as the means to carry their few but essential belongings. In this sense, turbans were transformed into symbols of women’s participation in rebellions and insurrections, indexes of a new beginning in other towns or places.

Contemporary Brazilian artists have picked up on these features of visual (self-) fashioning from the colonial era to symbolize honor, the importance of ancestry, and African religions, and to convey notions of beauty, dignity, and strength. This is the case of Panmela Castro and Rodrigo Bueno and their imaginary portraits of Catarina Cassage and Narcisa Ribeiro. Cassage was a well-known enslaved saleswoman who, during the 1830s, ran away while pregnant to ensure that her newborn would live in freedom. She gave birth in the Laranjeiras quilombo. Ribeiro, an enslaved woman who lived towards the end of the eighteenth century in Minas Gerais, was notorious for wearing luxurious clothes, “as if she were a lady.” At the time, this was considered an impertinent and “scandalous attitude.” In both portraits, contemporary artists feature them with turbans on their heads as symbols not only of cultural affiliation but as crowns of their defiance and courage. ■