How to Make an American Quilt

by Whitney Otto

  It was divided into fifteen large squares filled with appliquéd animals, birds, men of dark brown, hovering angels blowing trumpets, serpents as large as life, stars, the outsized sun, flaming candles of dripping wax. These were African scenes: animals with tusks, warriors clashing with spirits and themselves and beasts. Candles that burned upside down. Giant fish devouring unfortunate men, who tumbled from enormous balancing scales. The colors of dense, earthy tones; yellow stars blaze a midnight field; the unforgiving sun.

  This was all before the ships and the block and the coffle. Before the mix of blood that no white family would acknowledge in its own house but could readily identify in a neighboring family. All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh.

  Again. The quilt as dream-desire placed against the reality of the world.

  ANNA LIVED with her great-aunt Pauline in a couple’s house in San Francisco. The man had inherited enough money (making him not rich but “comfortable”) so that he did not have to work and could, instead, pursue his interest in astronomy, with his telescope trained on the heavens and his charts and maps and volumes. Anna would examine the books in his study as Pauline picked up and dusted; she would make the connection between the stars in the book and the overscaled stars in the quilt. “Pauline,” Anna asked, pointing to an illustration, “is this Africa?”

  Pauline glanced at the picture as she passed by. “No. The sky belongs to nobody. The sky is free.” So different from the earth.

  PAULINE DECIDED that she would send Anna to college; Anna, with her love of heavenly bodies, stars, and comets. The man of the house was forever showing things to Anna, happy to have anyone interested in his hobby. He would pull up a chair and place Anna upon it so she could look through the telescope. Pauline heard him tell her about the nature of the planets, introduce her to the cosmos. Someday, he said, we’ll go see for ourselves. Anna answering that she will be the first on board, to which the man replied, laughing, Now, that is not likely, is it?

  Pauline hated the man for saying that to Anna. She walked into the study and pulled Anna off the chair. Anna slapped her arm; Pauline shook her niece and said, “I’m getting you your own telescope. Your own.” With Anna looking back over her shoulder, smiling at the man.

  THE MRS. of the house lusted after The Life Before. Pauline explained to her, “These are African stories, African dreams and myths,” and so on, but the woman was excited by and only interested in the quilt, not the story behind it.

  “A real beauty,” she said. “How much?” The mrs. fingered its edges, lay her hands upon the appliqués, clicked her tongue at the craftsmanship, the sophistication and elegance of the work.

  Pauline gently extracted it from the woman’s grasp. “It’s not for sale.”

  Not long after, Pauline overhead the mrs. telling her friends about The Life Before. She heard her say, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it….No, I’m sure you haven’t, either….Oh, it is very different. There are some stories that even go along with it….Well, I don’t remember them offhand, but I could find out….”

  Pauline ran to the kitchen, where Anna sat doing her homework; who looked at her aunt’s frantic expression and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Pauline shook her head. Continued to her room, where she tore the quilt from her bed and folded it inside scented blue paper. Stuffed it high above in the back of her closet. The mrs. so coveted her quilt that Pauline no longer trusted what she would or would not do. It was better to remove all temptation.

  When Anna asked after it, Pauline told her, “I have put it aside, baby, saving it for you.”

  “I want to see it now,” said Anna, suspicious that it wasn’t set aside at all but given to someone else.

  “No,” said Pauline firmly, not wanting to release it from the sanctuary of the closet and into the world of the mrs. “You’ll just have to believe what I say.”

  AS ANNA GREW OLDER, it became increasingly difficult for Pauline to enter her room, with its cut-out photographs and drawings of stars and planets pinned to the walls.

  Pauline went to the mrs. and asked for $25 for the quilt. The mrs., whose husband was not involved in the stock market and was left relatively untouched by the recent crash, said, “Pauline, given current events, you can certainly understand that I don’t have twenty-five dollars.”

  Pauline started from the room. The mrs. said, “I’ll give you fifteen dollars.”

  Fifteen, thought Pauline. Why, that is nothing! How can I release my quilt to someone who does not know its value, in any sense? But Anna was more important. She was now thirteen; she was sheltered, clothed, and fed, but she needed things in this life beyond that. She should understand luxury, even small, inconsequential luxury. (Education is a luxury. Pauline scowls.) Everyone should have something beyond simply being alive. Besides, Anna was becoming an accomplished quilter in her own right and perhaps she could make something as beautiful as The Life Before.

  “Twenty,” said Pauline.

  The mrs. turned up her palms. “What do you want me to say? Fifteen is the best I can do.”

  Pauline took in the mrs.’s new dress of lavender silk; her wrist bright with a ruby-and-pearl bracelet, a recent gift from her husband.

  THE SALE MADE, Anna in tears, Pauline silent. Pauline again told the mrs. the stories represented on the quilt until the mrs. listened without listening and Pauline gave up. Anna refused any thought of a telescope now, leaving Pauline to ask the mrs. if she could buy back her quilt.

  “Oh, no,” said the mrs. “I couldn’t. It is too much too part with. I’m sure you understand.”

  The mrs. hung it on the walls of her sitting room, where Pauline could see it as she cleaned the room. She would visit it and wonder how she ever grew to be so foolish, so miscalculating. How could she ever have thought that material things didn’t really matter, that they were all equal and interchangeable and that you still could not take them with you when you died. Pauline was ashamed to admit how much she loved the quilt. The Life Before. As time passed, she would still visit the quilt, but she would not touch it. She no longer told the quilt’s stories to anyone, not even to Anna, realizing that now Anna might not remember them to tell to her children. But without the quilt as illustration, it was probably better to lose them altogether. To Pauline’s relief and dismay, the mrs. never repeated the stories to her friends, who often admired her purchase and asked if the mrs. thought Pauline could be persuaded to make one for them.

  Pauline wants to laugh at them, call them stupid, and say, Don’t you know that only you can tell your story? You can’t buy someone else’s life. Then she stops. Hears her own words. Well, she will say if the mrs.’s friends ask her, the quilt isn’t by my hand, in any case. That is what she’ll say to shut them up.

  ANNA AT SIXTEEN shows no interest in the stars. Not for years now. Nor does she freely converse with the man regarding his hobby. She does not look at the books in his study. She has removed the makeshift solar system from her walls. “I prefer them unadorned,” she says to Pauline.

  She knows that Pauline misses her quilt, mourns it in silence because a Christian woman is not supposed to feel longing or regret for worldly things. Being that things of the spirit will sustain us over things of the flesh. But Pauline is lost, distracted, and distanced by the theft of her history, appropriated by someone for whom the quilt is an ornamental object and nothing more. Anna knows that Pauline only offered it up to the mrs. to gain something else for her—only to realize too late that some things cannot not be bartered. And that it was with clenched fists that Pauline conducted the sale. Knows that she parted with the wrong thing and that it cannot be undone.

  Why couldn’t Anna have both things? The quilt and the telescope; her history and her future? Why were their lives always a series of choices that seemed to cancel each other out?

  As for the mrs., Anna can scarcely stand to be in the same room with her, let alone the same house; is disturbed from
being that close to anyone who could buy something like the quilt; who could be that unabashedly immoral.

  ANNA DID NOT even say good-bye when, at the age of sixteen, she left San Francisco. Left without warning. Hit the road. The night before she said to Pauline, “It grieves me to see you like this.”

  “It grieves me, too,” said Pauline.

  Then Anna was gone.

  And The Life Before was gone with her.

  And it was with great pleasure that Pauline approached the mrs. that day, all comfort and humility, took her hand, and placed $15 in its palm. She closed the mrs.’s fist around it and said, “I’ll make you another one.”

  But the mrs. shook her head and wailed, “I wanted that one.”

  It was with lightness of heart and step that Pauline went from the room. “Too bad,” she said softly in the hall, out of the mrs.’s earshot. “I just feel so sorry for you.”

  ANNA NEALE WENT SOUTH to the outskirts of Bakersfield, where she became the maid of a rancher’s wife. The ranch had two business partners: one in Texas (who also had another ranch) and one in Chicago (who thought of his investment as romantic, a boyhood fantasy of the Old West). Anna’s employers had inherited their capital, then built upon it. Because they grew up privileged, they were accustomed to having servants and therefore treated them in the old-money style, that is, neither cruel nor kind, intimate nor distant. The servants were simply invisible.

  New money sometimes exercises its social muscle on hired help, reminding the servants of what they are in order to reaffirm what the employers have risen to. (Years later, during the early fifties, Anna will see the movie Beauty and the Beast, by Cocteau. In this film, the invisible servants of the Beast’s castle are portrayed by human arms holding candelabras or receiving garments, as well as eyes that see, carved into ornate fireplaces and chairs. Anna will say to her daughter, Marianna, “See, baby—that was my life on the ranch.” When Beauty cried, as she sat perched on the edge of the Beast’s deathbed, her tears transformed into diamonds, falling into her hands, dropping onto the Beast’s inanimate form. This will be the most memorable part of the movie for Marianna, not the invisible servants.)

  One summer, the son of the Chicago partner spent three months on the ranch, where he met and fell in love with Anna—or, perhaps, it was the idea of Anna—whom he could not marry even though this is America and we are all God’s children, because Anna was a maid and she was black. Her garnet necklace no longer overwhelmed her frame as it had when she was a child; she was now seventeen, with the garnets just skimming her delicate collarbone, their many facets refracting in the sunlight. She moved with a singular grace. The boy noticed her walking around the house and on her evening strolls, where he watched her watching the night sky.

  It was the way in which she considered the evening star that made him want her. Sikhamba-nge-nyanga.

  She-who-walks-by-moonlight.

  IT WAS NATURAL that the invisible Anna should find herself curious about and attracted to the high visibility of the rich Chicago boy. She had never had a lover before and found his admiration to be both thrilling and frightening. She could not trust him, yet she was not cautious. Divided her heart between her desire to respond to his proffered love and her dislike, mistrust of his skin; her shy affection for a boy close to her own age and the potency of his social power; she was both suspicious and willing in the face of love.

  (There was a duality of historical forces at work: the interplay of racial color, as well as the son of the man from Chicago and the maid of the house simply carrying out a traditional arrangement between the classes.)

  The boy reached for her garnet beads, laid his hand on both her necklace and her neck. Where did you get these? he asked.

  My great-grandmother, she said, covering his hand with hers—either to caress his fingers or shove them away—she could not have said. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember.

  They glinted like diamonds in the light.

  Sometimes he treated her as if she knew nothing, but she knew that he never bothered to ask her the right questions. Like about the rotation of the planets or the significance behind a meteor shower or the meaning of a blue moon or how to lay down the base for a quilt. He came to her room when everyone was away for the day; he sat familiarly on her bed as Anna slouched against the wall. Anna noted the way he examined each square of The Life Before. She held her breath; she thought he might ask the right questions.

  “It has a name,” she said, stepping closer.

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s called The Life Before.” She felt suspended between airy heights and great depths.

  “The Life Before,” he repeated. Then asked, “Do you ever think about me?”

  Anna relaxed her breathing. She decided to tell him the quilt stories (the ones that Pauline thought she might have forgotten) had he asked; he did not ask. And she saw herself as he might have seen her, as someone who did not matter to him, as something to do during his interim on the ranch. She reconciled herself to solitude. Again. And she wanted to laugh at his question; wanted to say, That is all I am allowed to do in this place, is think about you and your family and their comfort and their guests and their ills. She said, “Of course.”

  “I hate it here,” he said. “You’d love Chicago. You ever been to Chicago?”

  Anna shook her head. No sense in saying that she grew up in San Francisco. That she was not a stranger to city life.

  “It is something to see. Particularly the buildings. They are impressive. Very beautiful. Some fairly new, the fire and all.” He lay on his back across her bed. “Now there’s something I’d like to do. Build.”

  Anna sat near him on the bed.

  “My father has other plans,” he finished.

  “But you are rich. You can probably do whatever you want with your life.” She moved closer. She wanted to feel control; she wanted to feel wealth by association.

  He laughed. “Oh, yes, as long as it is acceptable to my parents. You know how parents are.” He smoothed the hem of her skirt flat on the bed, superimposed it on The Life Before.

  Anna shrugged her shoulders. “I was raised by my great-aunt Pauline. My mother died and I don’t exactly recall her. They say I take after my father.”

  She could see the boy staring at her, examining each feature of her face and figure. She knew what he was thinking: that the skin was a rather light brown and the hair, while curly, was almost, well, white in construction. The mouth and nose were so beautiful; they belonged to the skin.

  “Your father?” he said.

  “Color seems to be problem for some people.”

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “Every day,” she said, “I am aware of my color—made aware of my color or that I have a color or that I belong to a color. I am always my color first and Anna second. As if people can be divided, carved up that way.” She stopped. “Ah, but you have your parents to contend with.”

  He pulled her over to him, pushed her shoulders down; Anna was willing. She had nothing to lose.

  IT WAS THROUGH this sad liaison that Anna came to be unemployed and left with a child to raise. She was angry with the boy and angry with herself. But not with Marianna, her baby; none of the bad feeling for the father bled through to her affection for the child.

  When Anna learned she was pregnant, she left, much the same way she’d left the house in San Francisco. She did not tell the boy that she was having a baby; she kept it to herself. She did not want to hear him say that he loved her but could not marry her.

  She simply left one day. “I’m leaving,” she said, and by the next day was gone. Anna would not leave without telling her employers good-bye; that would be too much like running away and that she would not do. She does not run—they cannot make her—she walks.

  SO BEGAN the third phase of the four quarters that neatly separate Anna’s life. As a housekeeper (domestic being the popular name in 1935) for the Rubens family, which included Mr. and Mrs. Rub
ens and their daughters, Glady Joe and Hy. Anna and Glady Joe were both seventeen.

  For years, Mr. and Mrs. Rubens had had a steady stream of “wayward” girls employed in their home, living there, doing light housework, and cooking. They were sponsored by the Episcopal church and they stayed until the baby arrived, at which point the Rubenses bade farewell to the girl, as the girl did to her baby. It was understood that these infants were earmarked for adoption into responsible, barren families.

  As Mrs. Rubens often said to friends who applauded her “good deeds”: “It is the least we can do for a girl who finds herself in a bad way.”

  The pastor came to see Mrs. Rubens personally regarding the matter of Anna. “You see,” he said, “this is a little more delicate than usual. Anna Neale is Negro.” He did not add that she was as much Caucasian as she was Negro, because it simply would not have mattered; because this is the United States, with its archaic “one drop” rule, a legacy passed down from the Founding Fathers: One drop of Negro blood makes one Negro.

  Mrs. Rubens said quickly, “Send her over. She is welcome here.”

  Anna almost felt worse working for a family that went out of its way to be “nice” to her, to include her, to be concerned about her pregnancy. To show interest in her condition, Anna knew, was altogether different from showing interest in her. She was more accustomed to the invisibility of her role at the ranch, or even the mrs.’s treatment of her. Pauline was now semiretired from her job there. It bothered Anna when the Rubenses insisted upon introducing her to their friends. She was embarrassed at Mrs. Rubens’s calling her “our Anna” as in “You must meet our Anna.” Mrs. Rubens took a special interest in Anna’s diet (“Plenty of milk” and “You could stand to gain a little weight as well”). Mrs. Rubens let out old clothes of her own (“It’s either you or Goodwill, Anna”), and told Glady Joe and Hy “not to bother Anna.”