Camille Pissarro, Black Women's Labor, and the Caribbean Tortoiseshell Trade in the Post-Emancipation US Virgin Islands

In the years following the abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands), artist Camille Pissarro produced numerous sketches and drawings of Afro-Caribbean women at work on his native island of St. Thomas. The most remarkable of these drawings features an Afro-Caribbean woman removing the shell of a Hawksbill turtle. Prized for the eye-catching patterns and versatile qualities of their shells, the Hawksbill turtle was hunted by Indigenous peoples in the Western Caribbean and Central America for centuries. The arrival of Europeans in this hemisphere transformed these small scale, sustainable turtling practices into a global industry, exporting the Hawksbill shells to Japan where they would be carved by master artisans before returning to the Americas and Europe in the form of tortoiseshell combs, pins, boxes, and eye glasses. As the inhabitants of St. Thomas grappled with the transition to a wage economy following the abolition of slavery in 1848, newly emancipated Afro-Caribbean women entered the global “turtle economy” as a means of supplementing their income. Like the Hawksbills who travel great distances in their annual migration, disembodied shells traveled across the globe, passing through multiple hands and states of cultural transformation. Yet the mobility of black women who worked in this industry remained highly regulated through oppressive labor laws. This paper considers the Hawksbill shell as a metaphor for cultural exchange, looking to methods from the decorative arts, eco-criticism, and material studies to study the visual economy of black women’s labor in Pissarro's early drawings.