How to Make an American Quilt

by Whitney Otto

  Consider the fact that some roses cannot survive the environment into which they are born. Consider the fact that grafting a more delicate plant onto a hardier stock will probably make for a superior rosebush—one that can not only withstand the hostile environment, but thrive within it.

  English walnut grafted to black walnut results in a less greasy nut meat. The sour orange used as a base for the Mars orange is virtually uneatable, while the fruit of the Mars is very sweet.

  If the Brazilian nut will accept the soybean graft the product will be nutritionally superior, one rich in protein.

  A budding knife resembles a fish-boning knife with its sharp blade and curved tip.

  A seam ripper is a curve of sharp metal at the end of a long handle.

  Here are your tools: A budding knife and a flat board with four wheels and gloves and thin white rubber bands. That is all. Your needs for the graft procedure are simple, unadorned, well defined. There is no question unanswered.

  Except why would a rose geminate in unfriendly soil; why does it seek its life only to find it cannot survive it? Do not think about it now.

  The almond trees of the San Joaquin Valley look like dark trunks attached to white bases. They are painted white. This is better to see them in the shadows of the grove and has nothing, really nothing, to do with grafting, though it would appear that it does. This demarcation of base root to upper trunk.

  You understand these divisions, this fusion of two distinct elements.

  People remark on your beauty. You want to say that you are a result of polarities of color and culture; that you are the gorgeous, restless sum of your parts; that you are what people are so afraid of, this rare sort of mix. But the aggregate that is you is so seamless, so smooth, that no one—including yourself—can see where your father’s lines leave off and your mother’s pick up.

  T-bud grafting requires a T cut in the primary growth. This should be done on the side of the stalk, just below the node—or eye, as it is commonly called. Be sure the section to be grafted also contains an eye. All the information the rosebush needs is held in the eye. Now. Toward the base, where the plant meets the soil, slip the eye into the T. Your stalk should look “whole,” not like two separate pieces; the fusion should give the illusion of oneness.

  Take a piece of white rubber. Cut a hole in it. Wrap securely around the graft area (a bobby pin will hold it in place). This serves to keep out infection and dirt. Remember: The meeting of the eye to the primary growth must be clean and perfectly fitted. If you do not graft close enough to the base, where the plant meets the soil, it will dry up and the graft will be unsuccessful.

  On the matter of a perfect match—this is really more important for tree grafts than for rosebush grafts, but you are a perfectionist by nature and would be loath to perform a sloppy joining in the first place.

  Remember the names: primary growth and meristematic growth and the eye. The eye knows everything. The eye serves as biological memory. (Q: What has four eyes but cannot see? A: Mississippi.) Soon the graft will take and the rubber piece can be removed and discarded.

  Grafted roses can be found by the side of municipal highways, in building lobbies, in nurseries, or in the hands of a lover, passed from one to the other.

  Fusion, union, grafting, joining, sex, friendship, love: the difficult combination of disparate elements.

  Virginia Law, 1753: A woman servant who begets a bastard child by her master shall be sold by the church wardens for one year after her time is expired. If a free Christian white woman has a child by a Negro or mulatto she shall pay the church warden 15 pounds current money or be sold by them for five years and the child made a servant until thirty-one years of age. Any intermarriage between black and white, free or bound, shall be fined 10 pounds and spend six months in jail without bail.

  Virginia Law, 1910: Any person having one sixteenth or more of Negro blood shall be deemed a “coloured person.”

  Virginia Law, 1924: A white person must marry a white person and that any falsification of birth records regarding race (in order to marry) shall be deemed illegal and punished.

  Virginia Law, 1932: Any intermarriage between white and coloured is illegal and carries a sentence of between one and five years in a penitentiary.

  Antebellum American South: Slaves cannot be manumitted except for special and specific circumstances; cannot be taught to read or write; cannot worship in private; cannot bear firearms; cannot purchase medicine; cannot marry, hence, cannot have “legitimate” children; cannot “own” their children or spouses if not free; cannot control their own points of sale; cannot break a will leaving them as inherited property to a named beneficiary; cannot gather in a group; cannot have relations with white persons, though the white persons may have relations with them; cannot testify in a court of law; cannot bear witness; can be “striped,” linked in a coffle, owned, raped, disfigured, and murdered; cannot keep their own earnings when hired out to someone else; and, much later, cannot attend school, ride buses, frequent restaurants, or drink from anything marked WHITE ONLY.

  Your favorite quilts are those that are abstract. You try to love the more representational styles of quilts, try to warm to the Honeymoon Cottage pattern, the Drunkard’s Progress, or the Repeating Fans, but you cannot. You prefer the quilt that looks like music or dance; the ephemeral arts. You stitch a flurry of magenta and blue crescents and you know exactly what you are seeing; you know what they represent. These abstractions look like pictures to you, even if they do not to the other quilters in the circle. They accuse you of rejecting tradition. You counter by saying that you are making your own traditions, that they are correct—tradition has little meaning for you.

  And you, born in 1935, in college in 1953, feel both affection and disgust for this place in which you were born, this hostile soil. Because nothing has really changed in your lifetime; because you carry more than one sixteenth Negro blood; because you understand the theory and application of separate but equal; because your daily and biological life is so tightly wound into a world that appears to want to forget you exist; because you cannot travel freely in the United States; because you are seen as black; because Rosa Parks has not yet made her famous bus ride; because of all this, because you are educated and black and white and not welcome in this place of your birth; because you understand, historically, where you stand, you will leave this place.

  You will relocate elsewhere, to make you strong.

  You will one day return and make quilts like your mother before you and her mother before her, and all of the women will be suitably impressed at the expert way in which you join your pieces of cloth. They will think your mother taught you well.

  grafting roses

  Marianna has more lovers than she is aware of; that is, she is admired from afar. These admirers court her in secret, in the safety of their dreams. When they see her sitting in a café or walking to her job at the nursery or buying bread for dinner, they think, In my dreams we are together, then they return home to their wives and children and girlfriends. It is harmless; they would never think to force themselves on her; she is simply a passing fancy. Because she is so exotic in her looks, as well as being an expatriate, as well as being a woman working at a man’s job, where virtually no women work. Because it is difficult to discern her heritage at a quick glance. Because she walks with the grace of her mother, Anna Neale, who is back home in Grasse, United States.

  What her admirers do not, cannot, know, is that even her “real” lovers cannot truly have her, cannot claim her for their own exclusively. This leaves them unhappy and confused.

  For Marianna, the wedding vow is as binding as the deathbed promise. Her lovers do not know this about her either.

  By the time Marianna went to college, Anna was living outside the Clearys’ house, coming back only to cook supper occasionally for Glady Joe and Hy. Anna also arrived, once a week, to lead the Grasse Quilting Circle, which had begun at Glady Joe’s house. Anna now made enough money to liv
e by making and selling quilt patterns in town. She told her customers (some of whom came across great distances), “Yes, you could send away for a pattern, but mine are better because they are specialized. Not a factory item.” And that was Anna’s gift; that she could meet with a woman and translate her story onto tissue paper, which was then used as a pattern for a custom quilt. Anna could always come to understand at least one important element in the character of her customer—perhaps not understand the entire woman, but, then, quilters work in patches and bits.

  Sometimes, if a particularly nasty woman came to her, Anna represented her personality as an extreme opposite; if the woman was a bitch, Anna fashioned her pattern as if she were a saint. Imagine what her friends thought as the woman proudly displayed her quilt, saying, “And this is me.” The viewer looking from quilt to woman back to quilt, wondering how someone could be so blind to themselves, could possibly be flattered by such a subtle insult.

  Anna never lost her edges; never truly yielded. Marianna inherited her internalized strength, the way in which she kept her own secrets. It was not easy to be close to Anna or Marianna.

  MARIANNA TOLD HERSELF, I will never keep house for anyone. It was by luck and talent that Anna had parlayed her association with Glady Joe into a business and quilting circle.

  “Why do you continue to cook for those people?” asked Marianna.

  “Because I’m very good,” Anna told her.

  “I don’t see how you can do it. Not that it isn’t honest work, but you have your own things now. Things that belong to you.”

  “This is true,” said Anna, “but Glady Joe and I go back. I don’t have to tell you. And the money helps out.”

  “I can give you money,” said Marianna.

  “Maybe I want my own,” said Anna.

  MARIANNA GREW UP and went to an agricultural college in northern California, with every intention of returning to Grasse (Bakersfield is the “Bread Basket of the World”). But when she graduated in 1953, there was not a farmer in Kern County who would hire her. “A woman?” they said. “A Negro woman? Not in this life.” Sometimes they laughed or ignored her or called her honey.

  No one ever suggested to Marianna that she “understand” the men’s perspective. No one ever said, Look, it’s their ignorance. Anna told her, “Don’t listen to that trash,” and Marianna was not raised to “listen” in any case. Not by a mother with distinguished quilting skills and her own business.

  Sometimes people said, “How extraordinary that Marianna wants to work in agriculture, out in the fields with the farmers.”

  “Why extraordinary?” asked Anna. “Because she’s a woman? Because she’s black?”

  And the people would shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, both.”

  So Marianna ended up tending roses in the south of France, fairly close to a town called Grasse (“I like the symmetry of it,” she laughed), for a company that supplied flowers to much of Europe.

  CUT ROSES and miniature roses grow in a greenhouse. Garden roses and roses to be planted along the highway are grown outside. Marianna lies on a flat board with wheels, slowly rolling up and down the furrows, grafting roses—lying on her stomach to save her back.

  MARIANNA REMEMBERS being told that she will know she is in love because she will feel elation in his presence. Or perhaps it was something that she read. In any case, that is her definition of love: elation in one another’s presence. She likes that idea; waits to experience it.

  AFTER FIVE YEARS in France, Marianna finds herself living with one man and having a warm love affair with another. At night she comes home to Alec, who, like herself, is an American. He rubs her shoulders, which are strong and defined from the years of grafting; he traces his tongue along the small of her tired back. Alec never fails to make her heart quicken. He reads to her late at night, in bed, sometimes after sex, allowing her the luxury of drifting off to the sound of his wondrous voice. Occasionally, they argue, exchange unforgivable, angry words, but this is rare; they recover. That is, it does not undermine them.

  Alec and Marianna live outside Antibes. The house is like an accidental structure in the center of a turbulent garden of flowers and grass. It quite takes Marianna’s breath away, the uncivilized landscape, with its scents and varieties of color and form. The weathered brick house has an enormous wraparound porch, but it all looks to be on its way to being an abandoned dwelling, the garden soon to reclaim the land.

  The first day they lived there, Alec came into the garden carrying two bottles of red wine. “Italian,” he said of the wine, then dropped to his knees in the tall, unkempt grass and began working the cork with the corkscrew.

  Marianna felt awkward standing as this man struggled at her feet, and she soon sat down beside him, feeling unexpected pleasure at the heat of the early evening and the caress of the dry grass on her bare legs. “I could grow to like this,” she said, smiling at Alec.

  “It is like heaven,” he agreed, passing her the open bottle, watching her take a long swallow of wine. Her throat smoothly arched, eyes closed.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in her life, Marianna knew the luxury of love. She basked in Alec’s affection and grew more beautiful as a result. She was convinced that this was what she had always been waiting for and saw her life sharply divided between her life before Alec and her life since knowing Alec. She wondered how it was that her mother could live her life without someone to adore her and to be adored.

  Then Marianna met Noe, who was nothing like Alec, but to whom she felt drawn in any case. He was transferred to her section and she knew him only casually at first. They talked about work, about gardening, about France and America. They argued different points; Noe sometimes hurting her with his violent perspective on things. They would eat lunch together on the ugly wood benches behind the main greenhouse or he brought lunch and drove them both down to the ocean, where they sat close to each other on the seawall, lamenting the idea of having to return to the nursery to finish the work day. Their conversations unobtrusively moved from the general topics of work and politics, and pressed into the personal; Marianna noticing and not noticing this quiet shift; Marianna both startled and charmed.

  She told herself that she loved Alec, could love only one man at a time; loved Alec because he was good to her and, besides, they were both Americans, giving them a deeper understanding of each other. But Alec was white, too.

  Noe, on the other hand, was black, understood that about her, but he was also French, and had numerous misguided notions about the United States to which he vigorously and emphatically held, regardless of what she said.

  Noe brushed her loosely curled hair (“Your father’s side, I guess?” he said, having seen a photograph of Anna), lifted it above her neck, lay kisses on the line of her spine. He said to her, “Leave your lover and live with me,” as they dressed in the afternoon, having skipped lunch, choosing to spend their time in his flat.

  Marianna did not know what to say, so she said nothing. Pretended that he had not spoken to her at all. She was wrestling with this new discovery about herself: that she could still deeply love Alec while feeling desire for Noe. Did she love Noe? This made her ill, this involvement with two men; it wrenched what she had with Alec, confused what she felt for Noe; told herself what she had thought was the Real Thing never was, that nothing was real.

  She became irritable at home. Critical and restless. When Alec tried to touch her she would swat his hand away saying, “Leave me alone. Stop crowding me all the time.”

  Marianna noticed every annoying thing Alec did, things a lover would never see, and as she rode her belly board up and down the furrows at work, she found herself thinking about leaving Alec. She thought about breaking it off with Noe. As she lay prone, wrapping the white rubber around the stem, protecting the newly joined split from infection, she discovered that she was in the untenable position of loving two men when she had previously thought she could love only one.

  IN THE MIDST of her tumultuous love life, M
arianna considered returning home. It was becoming more difficult for people to determine her background. She knew she could “pass” if she so desired, that she could be taken for white and not black; she resembled her father as well as her mother, though she had inherited Anna’s cool walking grace and her kinship with the moon.

  But she refused to deny her African-American heritage, for to do so would deny Anna, and that she would not do; act as if her mother had never existed! She considered Anna’s blood the proudest part of herself, not something to be falsified. It would betray that languorous walk.

  It was so odd, really, this anglicizing of her features as her face matured, as if her white history would not be ignored, either, and her body was some sort of quiet battleground, with her father’s side slowly but surely assuming more and more territory. It was frightening to see in herself the man she never knew; become someone she did not know. Marianna began to feel the most profound need to be back with her mother. To steady herself.

  ALEC LEARNED of her sexual betrayal.

  Marianna says, “It isn’t technically betrayal,” as they sit across the kitchen table from each other that night, “if no promises are made. We are not married. I did not promise to be sexually exclusive and I did not ask it of you.” She knows their agreement has been implicit; she knows she is killing him.

  “But I was.” His eyes well up with tears that do not fall. To which she repeats, “I did not ask it.”

  She takes a deep breath, hating the sound of her own voice. “I don’t believe in monogamy. In my love, I have always been true to you. Always.”