But during the tumultuous years of the Civil War, Christiana Carteaux Bannister flourished as a woman who came from both Indian and black backgrounds, and who founded and ran a successful business.

She founded and ran hairdressing salons, championed the antislavery abolitionist movement and raised money for black Civil War soldiers and their families.

Bannister was also a principal founder of a home in Providence for elderly black women, established in 1890 as the Home for Colored Women, on East Transit Street; today known as the Bannister Nursing Care Center, on Dodge Street.

And she was the wife of Edward Mitchell Bannister, a landscape painter who won a first-place prize in the United States Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

One of Mr. Bannister's biographers, Juanita Marie Holland, credits her with being his chief patron, saying it was Mrs. Bannister's business prosperity that allowed him to develop as a painter.

Bannister acknowledged his wife's role: "I would have made out very poorly had it not been for her, and my greatest successes have come through her, either through her criticisms of my pictures or the advice she would give me in the matter of placing them in public."

But Christiana Bannister's place was hardly that of a behind-the-scenes helpmate.

Born in 1822 in North Kingstown as Christiana Babcock Carteaux, she is first noted in histories as "Madame Carteaux," operator of hairdressing salons in Boston and Providence.

Carteaux not only styled hair and designed wigs, she marketed her own cosmetic and hair preparations, sometimes listing her occupation as "hair doctress."

In her Providence salons, she "attended some of the best people of this city," says a Providence Journal account. In 1853, one barber she hired was "Ned" Bannister; they were married June 10, 1857.

Christiana Bannister was involved in the dramatic causes of her time, using contacts with her highly placed white customers to further abolition and soldier relief.

When the 54th Colored Regiment, the Northeast's initial black fighting force, left Boston in 1863, she was president of the Colored Ladies Relief Society and probably presented Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the unit's white commander, with the Massachusetts flag.

Later, as president of the Colored Ladies Sanitation Commission, Bannister organized a Boston fair to raise money for families of wounded or slain soldiers; her husband donated a full-length portrait of Shaw, who by then had died, to be raffled at the event. The Bannisters moved to Providence in October 1869. Holland thinks they may have been trying to escape racial hostility, which, despite Boston's abolitionist history, increased as freed slaves moved north.

A year after the painter collapsed in church and died, in 1901, Christiana Bannister suffered a bout of apparent dementia and died weeks later at the State Hospital for the Insane, at age 80.

Among the Bannisters' legacy is a portrait of Christiana painted by Edward Bannister, now owned by the Bannister Nursing Care Center. Holland describes the portrait:

"Mrs. Bannister's expression seems to encompass both compassion and inner strength, and the rich details of her dress, chair and the vase at her elbow help create a loving and elegant portrait of this remarkable woman."

Story by BRIAN C. JONES

Source: Sources: Reaching Through the Veil, Juanita Marie Holland and Kenkeleba House; Dictionary of American Negro Biography, Rayford Logan; A History of African-American Artists, Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson.