Enslaved Africans carrying heavy loads on their backs, heads, and shoulders frequently appear in oil paintings, photos, and watercolors from the slaveholding era in Brazil. Many of the earliest images were created by European artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Debret. In Debret’s 1826 lithograph Blanchisseuses à la rivière [Laundresses at the river], enslaved women are depicted carrying clean clothing on their heads under the surveilling gaze of an overseer.

Likewise, in Johan Moritz Rugendas’s engraving Negrèsses de Rio-Janeiro [Black Women from Rio de Janeiro], the enslaved carries a tray of fruit and a baby during a moment of exchange involving jewelry with what appears to be a free mixed-race woman. Though a possible signifier of subordination, the depiction of enslaved women with burdens on their heads also highlights African customs.

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 the painting On to Liberty (1867) by 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, as well as to convey notions of beauty, dignity, and strength. One of them is Panmela Castro, who here depicts Catarina Cassage. 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.

Rodrigo Bueno’s imaginary portrait of Narcisa Ribeiro is another example. 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.” Like in Castro’s portrait, Ribeiro here appears with a turban on her head, symbols not only of cultural affiliation but as a crown of their defiance and courage. ■

Enslaved Africans carrying heavy loads on their backs, heads, and shoulders frequently appear in oil paintings, photos, and watercolors from the slaveholding era in Brazil. Many of the earliest images were created by European artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Debret. In Debret’s 1826 lithograph Blanchisseuses à la rivière [Laundresses at the river], enslaved women are depicted carrying clean clothing on their heads under the surveilling gaze of an overseer.

Likewise, in Johan Moritz Rugendas’s engraving Negrèsses de Rio-Janeiro [Black Women from Rio de Janeiro], the enslaved carries a tray of fruit and a baby during a moment of exchange involving jewelry with what appears to be a free mixed-race woman. Though a possible signifier of subordination, the depiction of enslaved women with burdens on their heads also highlights African customs.

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 the painting On to Liberty (1867) by 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, as well as to convey notions of beauty, dignity, and strength. One of them is Panmela Castro, who here depicts Catarina Cassage. 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.

Rodrigo Bueno’s imaginary portrait of Narcisa Ribeiro is another example. 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.” Like in Castro’s portrait, Ribeiro here appears with a turban on her head, symbols not only of cultural affiliation but as a crown of their defiance and courage. ■