The Material of Race

While the Lopez family struggled in Philadelphia, Sarah Brandon went east to London to attend a high-end Sephardic school. London presented Sarah with a new world of opportunities and connections. As in Philadelphia, many members of London’s Sephardic community had connections with Barbados, hence there was no hiding her past as a slave. Yet through friendship, trade ties, and money, Sarah Brandon made that past moot. Her most precious heirloom was part of the new self she constructed: an ivory miniature of herself painted in watercolor, beautiful and wide-eyed in a white empire-waist dress, her hair lifted in a Grecian knot. The portrait was an intimate gift to the man she would marry—Joshua Moses, a handsome and well-connected Jew from Philadelphia and New York. Ivories were a love token, but Sarah and Joshua’s marriage would also unite two major merchant families and change Sarah’s future, again.