by Clare Hunter
Cecilia Lewis was eighteen in 1809 when she made her silk map sampler at the Pleasant Valley Boarding School at Hudson River. On it she included the names of Native American tribes sourced from an earlier eighteenth-century map. She used silk chenille to thread her way around her new land, sewing from east to west, following the pull of America’s expansion from North and South Carolina to Kentucky. Her grandfather had been one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and her grandmother a British prisoner during the Revolutionary War. Now she was registering in her own hand the evidence of the independent nation her grandparents had fought for. Later in life, when she moved to Wisconsin, over 1,000 miles away, she journeyed across the terrain she had embroidered many years before: the routes she had outlined in thread, the places she had named, the country she had sewn together.
It was not only maps that were stitched. Schoolgirls also embroidered globes of the world. America was the only country to create them. Manufactured printed and painted globes existed in Britain, but they were inordinately expensive to import to America. Westtown Academy near Philadelphia owned just three, a totally inadequate number to service its many pupils. Three-dimensional globes were thought to be more efficacious in the teaching of geography, since they were accurate miniature representations of the whole earth and gave shape to the world, to its movement and rotating presence. When Westtown Academy needed more, it decided to make its own.
Rachel Cope wrote from the school to her parents in 1816:
I expect to have a good deal of trouble in making [the globes], yet I hope they will recompense me for all my trouble, for they will certainly be a curiosity to you and of considerable use in instructing my brother and sisters, and to strengthen my own memory, respecting the supposed shape of our earth, and the manner in which it moves (or is moved) on its axis, or the line drawn through it, round which it revolves every twenty-four hours.
The schoolgirls cut silk ovals that they stitched together to make spheres which they stuffed with wool. Then, on the silk, they delineated the Arctic and Antarctic circles, the Equator, parallels and meridians, ecliptic and rational horizons, state outlines and grids in stitches; they inked the names of continents and cities and named the surroundings seas and shorelines with goose-quill pens. Their globes were perfect miniature universes realised in the tactility of cloth and thread, the first globes to be manufactured in America. They were only five inches high.
When in 2012 Sotheby’s in New York auctioned the Landmark Collection of Betty Ring. the American textile scholar who, along with her two-volume guide Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework 1650–1850, published in 1993, did more than most to revive public interest in samplers, the collection of nearly 200 lots sold for over $4 million. There was only one map sampler, spheres of the eastern and western hemispheres stitched in 1809 by Polly Platt while she was attending the Pleasant Valley Boarding School in Hudson River Valley, the source of many extant sewn maps. The sampler was bought for $50,000. It had survived long enough to become collectable. Sadly, it was one of the very few to do so.
In more recent years, local map-making has been a way for communities to record what they most value in their neighbourhood. Common Ground is an environmental charity founded in 1987 to engage people with the places where they live in imaginative ways. It organises diverse events and participatory projects aimed at the exploration and discovery of local natural and architectural heritage. The Parish Maps Project, begun in 1983, encouraged communities to create their own maps in a variety of mediums that captured not just the layout and features of a physical landscape, but also its emotional value. These were heart maps, a charting of preciousness. In community map-making, time can conflate: it is possible to layer knowledge and memory, insert lost landmarks, reinstate hidden paths, reinstall the ghosts of vanished architecture.
Some communities emphasised tactility to effectively convey the feeling of home. Community map-makers in Redlynch, Wiltshire, made a three-dimensional soft sculpture landscape based on the local Ordnance Survey map of the area. It is an undulating evocation of natural heritage materialised in velvet, silk, cotton and canvas, criss-crossed with threaded paths along the River Avon, patchworked in a crazy quilt of farms and woodlands. Hedgerows fray along the edges of roads, trees fringe pleated fields. In Thirsk, Yorkshire, the local environment was threatened by development. Their community map courted conservation by detailing everything local people wanted to see protected. It is an inventory of Thirsk’s natural beauty, season by season: the sweep of returning birds in spring, the ragged fall of leaves in autumn, the snow-ridged hills of winter, the crowded grassy park in the summer. The sewn Parish Maps Project encouraged communities to seek out local distinctiveness and replicate it in cloth and thread to animate a familiar and often endangered landscape of home.
In the Scottish town of Renfrew, I became involved in the creation of a series of embroidered panels for the town’s quincentenary. In the centre of a panel called Sky Above, Earth Below, Still Waters was a densely embroidered streetscape of the town: stitches texturising brick and stone, slate and hedges, iron and grass. Aerial photographs provided the detail from which the initial drawings were made and, the crowded map having been dissected into smaller pieces, people were invited to take home a piece to sew. Most chose a place that had personal resonance: their own street, the place where they worked, their local church. It is one thing to distribute parts of a town, but quite another to join them back together. The pieces came back slowly at first and then in a rush as the deadline loomed. Each edge was coated to prevent fraying and stitched down in its rightful place. As piece by piece was assembled we watched Renfrew grow and take shape again, just as it had done over the centuries, moving out from its historic centre to the post-war estates and spreading further to the more recent out-of-town developments. The participants had re-built the town where they lived, charted a physical intimacy: their routes to work, the school run, the kissing corners, the teenage hang-outs, the marriage venues, the burial grounds.
When we revisit familiar places, particularly the villages, towns or cities that shaped us, they are redolent with memories. And what they rekindle is not just a reminder of an event, an encounter or romance, but past emotions, the reawakening of the feelings of an earlier self. For many of us there are places of which we have no tangible memory, yet they tug us with a frisson of belonging. Experiencing a particular quality of light on a gleam of water or the loom of a distant hill can summon up an unexpected connection. For no matter where we were born or where we grew up, for most of us there are other places, ancestral lands, that somehow still resonate deep in our unconscious.
When I visited Australia in 1991 I was asked if I would like to make a banner with an Aboriginal group. I hesitated at first, aware that I had only a glancing knowledge of Aboriginal life. But I said yes, curious to get closer to an ancient culture that was both fascinating and mysterious. I knew a little about song lines and had a small appreciation of the close Aboriginal affinity with the earth, but that was all. It was hard for me, tightly formed by a Scottish industrial city, to grasp the essence of the Aboriginal spirit, so deeply rooted in an empathy for the land. I did some research on this stricken community, an ancient culture diminished by colonial harm, tribal knowledge lost, spiritual roots virtually destroyed by a programme of displacement and the fragmentation of family through the enforced removal of mixed-race children. No matter that there was now an attempt to restore land to its indigenous people with the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976 – this was a culture severed from its ancestral connection to specific locations. Day by day I saw their people sitting alone or in small clusters on the grass in public parks, like fallen leaves made brittle through lack of sustenance.
When I turned up a couple of weeks later at Melbourne’s Arts Access workshop for the first session, no one appeared. The staff were unperturbed. This was normal. It wasn’t a matter of lack of interest or respect, they told me, but
of what feels right at the time. Today obviously was not the right time. The next day, however, they came: a group of eight women from the Aboriginal Drug and Alcohol Rehab Unit. They seemed a small army of resistance, bonded by their own boundaries, known to each other, some inter-related, watchful of their space, guarding their territory, and wary of me. These were chain-smoking, tough-talking women. I had worked in many poor areas of Glasgow with the roughest and the toughest – or so I had thought – but this group seemed like hewn rock. They had little appetite for chit chat, listened to my spiel about banners with seemingly scant interest. I presumed that, in lives taut with addictive difficulty, time spent with others stretched their attention beyond its limit.
But we blundered on. We devised a structure, a vertical triptych. Its themes were simple: land, loss and hope. We cut out the Aboriginal symbol for a women’s meeting place, we appliquéd lost children, we stitched the strips of the Aboriginal flag, and while we worked the women shared current news of abuse, imprisoned relatives, conflict with authority, careless violence, oppression, racism: everyday tales of their lives. I listened with incredulity. As they pinned and sewed, the air became clouded in thicker and thicker layers of smoke from their cigarettes. The smoke seemed to drift, like them, in a separate world upon which they had no hold, no security, no direction. But as the banner took shape there was a loosening and the odd burst of laughter. Creative confidence and interest took a tentative hold. These were women coming up for air.
The banner they made was called Keep the Circle Strong in lettering cut from cloth in the Aboriginal colours of red, black and yellow, claiming solidarity, cleaving to each other to keep a grip on themselves. Their displacement wasn’t a symptom of addiction; it went much deeper than that. They could not be emotionally sustained by the culture they had been forced to adopt. They had lost their anchor – their land – and its strength to draw on. They had lost the preciousness of a natural world to which their spirits were tethered.
Once the banner was completed the women departed. There were smiles but no effusive thank yous. Later that week I went to a concert given by the Aboriginal musician Archie Roach. A friend of mine who knew him took me backstage and there, in the dressing room, were some of the women I had worked with. They greeted me like a member of the family, as someone who had crossed a line with them.
Later, back in Glasgow, I invited a group of Highland-born Gaelic women to make their own banner in response to the one created by Aboriginal group. They immediately identified with the Aboriginal women’s banner and its themes of emotional anchorage to the land, of social and spiritual displacement and the subsequent diminution of an indigenous identity whose reclamation had never been fully realised. They decided on a visual echo, using the same format as that made by the Aboriginal women in Australia to tell their similar story. At the top they sewed a Celtic knot, the ancient symbol of connection. Below it they appliquéd a sheep, the animal with which the English replaced people in the Highlands in the eighteenth century. Its body was crowded in imagery: of forced evictions, burning crofts, an emigrant ship sailing away from Scotland, the British flag. They marked down the fate of those who were forced off the land, symbolised in hands holding the Gaelic words for loss and home. And, in their last section, they registered the retrieval of a proscribed language. Across continents, the story is the same: displacement bringing a loss of self and the disorientation of a community. But the sense of connection persists. The banners were a dialogue between two groups of women distanced by geography but bound together by a common experience, a textile duet of tactile empathy. Both maps of sorts, they charted how intrinsically people are bound to their place of origin. For both groups, removal had altered their sense of home – no longer physical but emotional, no longer experienced but remembered – an attachment conserved in myths, songs and stories and through words that no longer conveyed the depth of meaning they once had.
Like the Aboriginal people and Gaels, many Africans lost their culture when they were forcibly removed from their homeland and shipped as slaves to Europe and the New World. The American slave trade began in Virginia in 1619. By the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was legal in all thirteen colonies. Most American slaves were black Africans captured in west Africa, 700,000 brought to America by 1790, 3.2 million registered by 1850. Among the captured slaves were skilled agriculturalists and artisans. Dragged from the natural world in which their spiritual beliefs were rooted, black African slaves tried to safeguard their cultural identity, an identity that had been shaped by a different landscape. With most forbidden to read or write, slaves hoarded the fragments of their traditions through oral storytelling and scraps of songs. But such mediums were limited. They could not preserve the rich, symbolic visual language through which many African magical and tribal beliefs were transmitted, meanings too important or too sacred to be imparted through text or speech or singing.
Bereft of possessions and traditional talismans of protection, black slaves improvised with what materials they could, with bits of wood and off-cuts of fabric, to reclaim elements of their lost material and symbolic world. When a language is lost, or forbidden, people find ways to keep it in circulation. They don’t relinquish it, but translate it into other forms that can escape confiscation. So it was with African American slaves: they kept hold of cultural memory by translating it into mediums where it could be kept safe.
Quilts became one way to keep hold of Africa. Slaves plucked cotton from the snag of bushes or its wayward escape on a wired fence, enough to pad a quilt. They gathered bark and indigo, berries and blossom for dyeing and unpicked grain sacks and worn-out clothes. They were glad of the bits of cloth their white mistresses permitted them to keep once the dressmaking was done. With these they made patchwork quilts to piece together a heritage.
Their quilts did not mimic the traditional patchwork of white American women, which were stitched in orderly arrangements. Slave quilts were improvised like music: syncopated, free-spirited, with asymmetrical staggerings of texture and shade to create an abstract whole. Fabrics were cut in strips and sewn together in different lengths, down and across, vertically and horizontally. When they were done, they looked like patches of earth or plots of ground as seen from the sky.
In 2000 Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard published Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, based on the narrative of the African American quilter Ozella McDaniel. Their book was an exploration of the use of sewn quilts made by slaves as mnemonic codes on the Underground Railroad, the routes that guided slaves to freedom from the south to the north. These quilts, McDaniel had claimed, held encoded information which, when hung on a washing line or draped over a fence, signalled a safe house or danger ahead. They carried topographical data in a deceptive but decipherable arrangement of knots, stitches and symbols. The book was highly controversial. An Underground Railroad expert dismissed the findings as folklore, pointing to the absence of any account of such quilts in slave memoirs, diaries or in the oral testimonies collected in the 1930s. Many American textile curators and quilt historians were equally sceptical given the lack of evidence, either stitched or spoken. But the image of a slave touching out a rise of stitches to trace a route to safety in the moonless dark is so seductive that I, like many others, would wish it true.
Some slave quilts have survived, although they are rare. Most were made with cheap or already worn fabric, and therefore faded, frayed and thinned through constant use in the comfortless climate of plantation life. There are, however, two that have lasted. They were made by Harriet Powers, born in 1837 into slavery in Georgia, as were two of her nine children. Her quilts, known as The Bible Quilt and The Pictorial Quilt, offer a unique insight into the visual vocabulary of enslaved women in the nineteenth century and provide indisputable evidence that African American slaves carried their visual culture with them and, as Harriet did, used their sewing to preserve it.
Harriet Powers was freed in the
1880s after the Civil War and, for a while, seems to have been reasonably comfortable, tending a small farm of four acres. It is thought that she became a seamstress to supplement the family’s farming income. In 1886 she began to exhibit her quilts at the rural cotton fairs that were popular in America at the time. Such fairs were a useful way for women to see each other’s needlework and share techniques. Possibly, for Harriet, they offered an opportunity to market her skills and drum up business. Her Bible Quilt was exhibited at the Athens Cotton Fair in 1886 and an artist, Jennie Smith, offered to buy it but Harriet was reluctant to sell. This quilt seemed to have had a special significance for her. But Jennie kept in contact and, five years later, when Harriet and her husband fell into financial difficulties, Harriet finally sold it to her. She asked for ten dollars but was beaten down to five. Jennie wrote down her version of the conversation she had with Harriet at the time of her purchase when she explained the quilt’s themes. Useful though it is to have this record, it is probable that Jennie was an unreliable witness. Her version emphasises Harriet’s Christian motives in making her quilt and supplies a patronising and possibly sanitised, portrayal of Harriet herself.
The second quilt was displayed at the Cotton State Exhibition in Atlanta in 1895, by which time Harriet had separated from her husband. It is thought it was either commissioned or purchased by wives of the faculty members of Atlanta University as a leaving present for the Reverend Charles Cuthbert Hall of New York City, the vice-chair of the university’s board of trustees. There is written evidence that Harriet made more quilts but none of these have survived.
Harriet’s quilts are a fusion of American quilt-making, Christian imagery and African traditions. While they seem at first to ape the traditional quilts of white Americans in neat blocks of appliqué, illustrating biblical stories – apparently as visual evidence of Christian lessons piously learned – close examination reveals a more subversive message. Many of the biblical stories Harriet chose for her quilts dwell on themes of loss and escape: Adam and Eve, Job, Cain and Abel, Jonah and the Whale, Christ’s ascent to heaven. The fabric strips that divide her blocks are not symmetrical, but staggered. Her quilts, while pictorial, are also symbolic, rooted in the African tradition of a coded visual language. They seem to have had a personal resonance for Harriet herself. Unwilling at first to sell her Bible Quilt to Jennie Smith, when she did so she still could not fully relinquish it but went back to see it several times. It seemed from her first refusal to sell, and her later visitations, that the quilt held a special emotional and possibly spiritual significance. It was precious: a talisman of survival, a connection to where she belonged.