Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  The style of her quilts is typical of the west African textiles made by the Fon in Benin and the Fante of Ghana. Like them Harriet uses bold shapes, simple cut-outs of human figures, animals and birds with no character detail. Her quilts appear to be created from cultural memory, although she had no direct experience of Africa and was, most probably, a second, or even third, generation slave. They suggest that the African visual language was conserved over time and space and able to be safeguarded by a woman who did not inherit it directly from her ancestors. If so, it increases the meaning and poignancy of her quilts as examples of what has been called ‘ancestral reverie’.

  This might have been all we would ever know of Harriet Powers, but for a letter discovered in 2009. In the letter Harriet outlines her life as a slave, shares her story of becoming literate and describes four quilts she sewed. And there is one further tantalising clue of Harriet herself in a photograph taken in around 1897, when she would have been about sixty years old. It shows a plump woman wearing a ceremonial apron on which are appliquéd mystical signs and masonic symbols. They suggest that she might have been a conjure woman, someone who people believed could enlist the help of spiritual agents to activate charms and cure emotional or physical sickness. The zigzag design sewn along the apron’s hem is undeniably African in origin and echoes an ancient ritual symbol of African protection much used in the ritual textiles of west Africa.

  African traditions also survive in the remote world of Gee’s Bend in Boykin, Alabama, where the descendants of African America slaves are making strip quilts – not in nostalgic or sentimental homage for an Africa they have never known, but as the continuation of a textile practice that has been passed down, generation to generation, in this same place since the sowing of the first cotton plantation in 1816. It is an isolated area just a few miles long, bordered on three sides by the Alabama River with only one mud road going elsewhere and an erratic ferry service. Even this was disbanded in the 1960s in retaliation for the community’s attempt to register their vote in the nearby town during the Civil Rights Movement. It took forty years before it was reinstated. Such poor transport links have meant that for centuries there has been limited contact with white American culture.

  What the women in Gee’s Bend sew originates in their inherited slave culture, and through this to their more ancient African ancestry. Their quilts resonate with echoes of the woven kente cloth patterns of the Ashanti and Ewe tribes of Ghana. Through a ridge of corduroy and the rough of denim they piece back the texture of a lost land: scrub-faded, sun-baked, ploughed and furrowed. One of their favourite patchwork blocks is the Log Cabin pattern, which, according to Scottish quilt historian Janet Rae, has its origin in the earliest system of land cultivation in which dry and wet fields were butted together in horizontal and vertical strips. The block has been given a second name in America. It is also called ‘The Underground Railroad’.

  The geographer and map-sampler sleuth Judith Tyner discovered, as she was writing her book, that her great-great-great aunt had sewn a map sampler. She’d had no idea, but thought it was strange how strongly she felt the pull of map samplers over the years. The African American quilts of today often mirror the textile traditions of an Africa from centuries ago. Needlework can take us far away from where we are in our imagination, but it can also lead us back to where we belong.

  On one of Harriet Power’s quilts is a scene from Jacob and his ladder, a popular bible story. Only when you connect it to its source do you fully understand its import and the probable reason she chose it:

  I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All people on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. (Genesis 28:10–17)

  13

  Value

  A guest writer has been invited to host the creative writing group I have recently joined. He asks us to introduce ourselves and say a little about what we are working on. As each member outlines their memoir, crime thriller, historical novel or their collection of short stories the writer nods encouragingly. Then it is my turn. I tell him I am writing a book about the social, emotional and political significance of sewing. The writer doesn’t nod. Instead he pauses, leans forward and places his elbows on the table, then slowly interlaces his fingers. ‘Ah yes’, he says. ‘I can just see me asking my local bookstore if they have that bestseller on social, emotional and political sewing’. His look towards me is pitying.

  We read extracts from our work: the memoir, the thriller, the short story. Certain of further ridicule, I read what I have brought, the opening of the Connections chapter, where I describe my discovery of an old patchwork quilt. To my, and the writer’s, surprise he finds it moving and interesting. He says it reveals a world he knows little about. He says the writing is beautiful. My faith in the book is restored. It has passed an important test: to undo a prejudice and to enlighten. The following week the leader of the group asks me how my book on knitting is coming along. I leave the group. There are only so many battles I have the spirit to fight.

  It all began with string. Its invention changed the history of humanity. Once the craft of turning plant fibres into thread and twisting them to make string was discovered, animals could be caught, tethered and domesticated; objects could be tied together and carried; fishing nets could be fashioned; babies could be cradled on their mother’s backs and women could walk further to collect plants for food or medicine. Crucially, from string came thread and from thread came cloth. It fell to women to spin the thread and weave the cloth because it was something they could do near or at home. It was compatible with child rearing and cooking.

  The earliest evidence of string, from around 15,000 BCE, was found in the painted caves of Lascaux in France, but its invention was even earlier, as shown by the survival of a small Palaeolithic Venus figure carved in stone in around 20,000 BCE. She is wearing a skirt of cords suspended from a hip belt. Archaeologists discovered that such skirts continued to be used through the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Ages, evidenced not only by ancient artefacts, but in actual remnants found in burial sites. The skirts seem to have had little practical purpose. Some only drape over the buttocks, others barely screen the sexual organs. It seems their function was cultural, a form of communication. They were made to signal messages about a woman’s fertility. Decorated, knotted and weighted, they became agents of sexual attraction in the competition for virile partners, crucial to societies whose clan survival was dependent on successful procreation. The making of string and its skirts became associated with fecundity and childbirth – with a woman’s ability to create life.

  Spinning thread and weaving cloth, the bringing of something into existence where nothing had been before was, like conception and childbirth, mysterious to ancient tribes, even magical. Around such crafts, rituals developed to protect their efficacy. Myths evolved, stories of women whose power lay in their use of thread: the Trojan princess Andromache weaving protective roses to make a cloak for her husband, Hector; Ariadne leading Theseus to the centre of the labyrinth and back to safety with her ball of red thread and the Moirai (the three Fates) of Greek mythology, who controlled human destiny: one spinning the thread of life, another measuring it out and the third choosing when to cut it. In the symbolic, metaphorical rhetoric of past cultures, thread became a symbol for time, but it also represented the path a soul took to journey between temporal and spiritual worlds. The needle also was endowed with magical power. It signified a strong union because of its ability to join separate elements and create a whole. Its eye was thought to represent the gateway to heaven.

  Embroidery is an ancient craft. Archaeologists have found examples of it in the Cro-Magnon culture in France, in the fossilised remains of clothing, boots and hats from 30,000 BCE. In Siberia, they discovered remna
nts of stitched decorative designs dating back to 5,000-6,000 BCE and a tomb in the Hubei province of China disclosed silk embroidery from 5th-3rd century BCE. This historical evidence doesn’t establish who were the makers of such embroidery, men or women. While men are recorded as embroiderers in imperial and ecclesiastical workshops – at the courts of Moghul emperors and in the Medieval guilds of Europe – it was primarily women who were responsible for the creation of domestic, tribal and ceremonial cloths. In many traditional cultures, specific designs for embroidery and the ritual acts involved in its sewing were passed on from woman to woman, connecting mother and daughter, grandmother and granddaughter as continuums of cultural and emotional value.

  The wedding dress of a Karakalpak bride in Uzbekistan was sewn in patterns that symbolised mothers and daughters. In Tajikistan, a woman who had lived a long life would cut out a bride’s dress for younger women to sew. A mother and her daughter worked together embroidering the daughter’s wedding suzani (a tribal textile from Central Asia), with other female relatives helping as the marriage day approached. In Bangladeshi culture, a mother would sew blessings for her daughter into the nakshi kantha (an embroidered cloth traditionally made from old saris) she made for her marriage. In the Punjab, a grandmother embroidered a silk cloth (phulkari bagh) for her granddaughter, sewn with symbols and colours of family significance, to be held above her head as she processed to her wedding. Stitched textiles quite literally kept women in touch with one another.

  Such textiles also had monetary value. In earlier centuries, a girl’s dowry was a significant part of an arranged marriage and part of its barter system as an important element of property transfer. The more valuable the textiles were, the greater chance of a good match. A family would invest heavily in cloth and thread to ensure a better marriage for a daughter, and the financial outlay could be substantial. In Hungary, a girl’s dowry might contain up to 300 items, from bedcovers to fabric cases for mirrors and combs, cradle covers, doorway hangings, tablecloths, pillowcases and towels, as well as her own bridal attire. In Transylvania, a dowry might represent more than 500 metres of cloth. The quality of the needlework was as important as its quantity, as evidence of a girl’s proficiency. Started when she was seven or eight years old, a dowry could take a girl at least ten years to complete. Dowries, as brides-wealth, have a long history in Europe, South Asia and Africa as well as other parts of the world but in modern times they have been reinvented as bridal shows, the pre-marriage gift-giving, or wedding lists sent out by the couple-to-be. But the dowry tradition persists. It is still practised across all sectors of Indian society, for example, and in Bangladesh and Pakistan. But it has become discredited; blackmail and wife-burning as retaliation for what are claimed to be insufficient dowry settlements have corrupted its original purpose. Today, most governments no longer sanction it and girls contest having their value measured out in property. The dowry system has, by and large, come to an end. But with its demise goes the emotional connection it harboured between women of different generations.

  Women’s needlework has incrementally lost economic and cultural value through the centuries. In the thirteenth century, the work of professional women embroiderers was recorded in official documents. The needlewoman Mabel of Bury St Edmunds was noted for her services to Henry III, for whom she embroidered a chasuble in 1239 and an embroidered standard for Westminster Abbey in 1234. Her skill was so appreciated that the king commanded she be given six measures of cloth and a length of rabbit fur as a reward, an honour usually reserved for knights of the realm. Nuns, too, were celebrated for their needlework, not necessarily individually but through the reputation of their nunnery. But, in the Middle Ages, merchants increasingly took over the negotiation of embroidery commissions and women’s names began to disappear from official order books. When the Black Plague wiped out a vast swathe of the populations of Europe and Asia, the final death toll included many of the wealthy patrons on whom embroiderers relied for commissions. Facing a sharp decline in business, the London Worshipful Guild of Broderers, the trade guild for professional embroiderers, decided on damage limitation. Male embroiderers kept the more lucrative work, such as goldwork, for themselves, and women embroiderers were delegated less skilled needlework. They began to lose status. By the sixteenth century, women were excluded from official positions within the Guild altogether. In 1609 they were barred from guild apprenticeships and, if they were found to be undertaking any ‘unlawful work’, such as commissions of higher status that guild members felt should be their preserve, they were heavily fined. Without access to professional training, no longer having an equal role in managing the affairs of the guild and lacking the stamp of quality conferred through guild membership, the value of women’s needlework diminished. It became seen as unskilled and amateur.

  While there were undoubtedly women still employed as embroiderers, with no official status in the commercial world, they moved into the shadows.

  When the sumptuary laws (those that governed the quality and consumption of cloth and dress and other products) were revoked in 1630, the Worshipful Guild of Broderers lost its legal power over the training or employment of embroiderers and its authority to legislate over quality. Embroidery was no longer a status symbol as the public indicator of wealth and power. Instead, these were evidenced through a person’s personal circumstances. A prosperous merchant and administrative class was on the rise, investing in property as the visible marker of their success. They could afford to separate the workplace from the home and, housed in different physical spheres, men’s and women’s worlds divided. Men appropriated the external world of politics, trade and commerce, while women were relegated to the internal realm of house and family: still sociable, still influential, but contained. The difference between masculine and feminine activities became more marked. As it did so, a new construct of masculine and feminine qualities began to emerge. Women’s needlework, now home-based, became associated with family care and its accompanying virtues of duty, decency and morality. As femininity and domesticity became more intertwined, needlework became their tangible expression, and women compounded the association. Faced with economic and social sequestration, increasingly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they used their needlework to bolster their presence. They crafted furnishings, clothing and accessories that evidenced skill, elevated status and good taste. They adorned their homes and dressed themselves and their families in the trappings of upward mobility. A delicately embroidered pair of gloves signalled liberation from the grime of agricultural toil and indicated conspicuous leisure. An ornate assembly of embroidered household linens demonstrated household wealth and a wife’s capacity for good stewardship. Largely excluded from the world of letters, women used textiles to demonstrate their knowledge and intellect, sewing emblems of personal significance, flowers that held meaning and tales of stoical biblical heroines such as Susanna, Rebecca, Judith and Ruth, women who had committed courageous acts or displayed power within marriage. Just as Mary, Queen of Scots, had used the content of her embroidery to affirm her sovereign power when in captivity, so women made visible their attributes of strength and command diminished by their consignment to a domestic realm.

  Women’s attention to home-crafted textiles served to widen the gap between professional and amateur needlework. Domestic and decorative sewing became divorced from the professions of tailors, seamstresses and ceremonial embroiderers. An economic and social divide emerged between working women who sewed to earn money and those middle and upper-class women who chose sewing to signal their freedom from paid work. But their home-based needlework did more than create a class divide. It encouraged the idea, the ideal, of the feminine and of decorative sewing as a feminine craft.

  Outside the home, a hierarchy was developing between art and craft. With the revocation of the sumptuary laws, embroidery lost its position as a high art, the place it had held since medieval times. It was diminished both economically and culturally. With gender di
vides more accentuated and the increased feminisation of sewing, men were not interested in compromising their gender identity by associating themselves with needlework. Their lack of participation served to annex sewing further into a woman’s realm. Tailors, who had hitherto enjoyed the prestige as skilled craftsmen, began to be ridiculed as effeminate. They were increasingly the butt of male scorn. One tailor protested that his trade had become ‘the byword for effeminate helplessness’. In the tailors’ trade journal The London Tailor John Pallister complained that the ‘the association of sewing with femininity’ was marking tailors out for contempt.

  A similar prejudice was at work in the world of art. The Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth century saw a shift from the role of the artist as craftsman and designer to that of inspired individual artist. This was a role that brought greater status and financial return, both for artists and for those who commissioned, exhibited and collected their work. Artists, culturally and physically, separated themselves from craft workers. They promoted themselves as concerned with heart and mind rather the labour of the hands. They had studios rather than workshops and established their own exclusively male societies. The Royal Academy of London, founded in 1768, was one. Craft, seen as functional and manual, moved down the artistic pecking order. It became a working-class occupation and its economic worth lessened exponentially. Needlework – at best a cottage industry, at worst a domestic diversion for female amateurs – moved down even further. Robbed of cultural import, it was no longer deemed a worthy occupation but increasingly dismissed, even ridiculed, as mindless. Its antecedents were forgotten and the demotion of needlework became increasingly directed and interpreted through a masculine prism.