One important reason so many women, white and Black, fastened coral to children’s bodies is that coral was long believed to hold talismanic and apotropaic powers, warding off a variety of maladies both physical and spiritual. These powers date to antiquity, and they persisted well into the nineteenth century, a period when infant mortality remained a tragically common occurrence, which is why coral beads remained a popular christening gift.
To many living in or passing through the nineteenth-century U.S., even the smallest piece of red coral jewelry brought to hand the labor—human and nonhuman—that produced coral. An essay in Godey’s Lady’s Book titled “Coral Reefs” (1858), for example, opens with these words: “Trusting that many of our lady readers who wear coral ornaments would like to know something of their formation, we publish the following.” The essay offers a detailed description of reef formation—drawn from European travel narratives and Darwin’s account of coral—that fashions “coral ornaments” as labor itself congealed. Each piece is literally the result of the “wonderful labors” of polyps who “die…to increase” the reef and also the product of an arduous process of human labor; the dangerous work of Mediterranean coral fishing is described in the final paragraph. And while “Coral Reefs” reached an audience of mostly “lady readers,” other genres of writing—including popular natural histories for children and Evangelical pamphlets for all—taught additional segments of the population to connect the familiar red coral jewelry circulating through daily life to the life-consuming labor of polyps and persons.
Yet the power of coral ornaments to evoke particular groups of laboring bodies, nonhuman and human, is perhaps rendered nowhere as vividly and compellingly in a single text as it is in “The Story of a Coral Bracelet” (1861) by West Indies-born British writer Sophy Moody. Published transatlantically in Moody’s collection of children’s tales, this autobiography of a red coral bead skillfully weaves together details from multiple sources of knowledge about coral’s origins and growth; its natural, cultural, and economic histories; and its journey from seafloor to parlor.