An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  1 piece brown sheeting, yard wide or over, 12 or 13 cts. a yard

  8 yards fig. calico for Susan a summer dress 12 to 16 cts.

  16 yards calico for 2 servants from 9 to 12 ½ cts.

  He asks that they be returned by the brig Commerce, a ship that often takes their letters and goods back and forth. Susan wants finer quality cotton for her own dress, at the higher price of twelve to sixteen cents a yard, while the calico for two “servants”—the deceptively more genteel name for enslaved people—should cost only nine to twelve and a half cents. It wouldn’t be of as fine a weave, perhaps coarser and of fewer, less desirable colors. This is the print that looks like a black teakettle on either red or brown (which was then called “drab”) fabric, preserved in the fabric notebook with the note probably for slave gowns, and in tidy hexagons within the quilt. Those would have been made from the scraps left over after the dresses were made, either by Susan or by Minerva, Eliza, and Juba themselves.

  Suppose we imagine Minerva and Juba, one wearing red and one wearing brown. These are plain dresses with cinched waists and cartridge pleated skirts, bodices that hug their chests and long straight sleeves with a slight poof at the top—nothing so dramatic as Susan’s gowns, it would have been a less elaborate pattern. Perhaps Minerva, who’s about twenty-seven, is holding her child in her arms, swaddled in a blanket she stitched herself. That’s Celia or Cecilia, an infant in the spring of 1835. Maybe Minerva used a few scraps from their dresses, combined with other scraps Susan gave her or that she traded for with women at the market, to piece a small quilt. She sways side to side to soothe Cecilia, then gently shifts her into a sling on her back so she can haul in a pot of water for Susan to bathe herself. And do you see Juba, with her son pressed against her, her arms on his shoulders? She’s wondering how long she’ll get to keep him by her side. She’s thinking she needs to cut his hair tonight.

  We know Juba had more than one child; Susan wrote that little Hasell called her “Mammy” because he heard her children call her by that name. We know the name of only one of her children, Sorenzo (perhaps Lorenzo, but he was likely named for the white owner William Sorenzo). We might imagine that in 1835, Sorenzo was ten, and stands beside his mother momentarily before running to play with the other children in the yard. See him reach for the child who runs from him, his hand outstretched, laughing when his fingers catch the cloth of the child’s billowing shirt? Got you! he hollers. Imagine that he returns, breathless, to stand beside his mother again, and that her hand reaches for him almost unconsciously, finding the side of his head, then his cheek, in a caress. The glow of sunlight falls across his cheek, down his neck, across his lanky body where it catches the bottom of his mother’s brown skirt, illuminating them together in the stillness. He is laughing at something he sees in the distance.

  Now imagine a third woman. “She had two petticoats, one of which is drugget, the back parts striped with red, green, and yellow, the fore parts is striped with blue and brown,” and “new shoes, with wooden heels, tied with strings, and half-worn stockings.” She stands a little apart from the other two women. She’s about the same age as Minerva, thirty, and doesn’t have with her any children. This is Eliza.

  1849 map of Charleston. Crouchers lived on Cumberland Street, circled on lower right of map.

  Imagine that it’s morning, just after dawn, pink lighting the sky over the horizon on Charleston’s peninsula. The Crouches and Eliza, Minerva, and Juba live at 6 Cumberland Street, just half a block from the bay. When Eliza catches sight of the sun coming up, she remembers, for a moment, holding her mother’s hand as a child; it’s her only memory of her mother. She smells the salt in the air, hears the distant call of a shipmaster approaching a wharf. Eliza moves back inside quickly, hauling water to the washbasins upstairs, spilling none; she’s become adept at this, no matter how tired she feels. She was up late the night before with the baby Hasell, soothing him while Susan slept. She heard the doctor snore in the middle of the night. She is unwilling witness to their every intimacy. When she brings Susan and Hasell their breakfast in bed, she avoids their eyes, pretends they each live in private and distant worlds. She appeases them with a smile—another expertise—and then walks out of the room and down the stairs and out the door to the yard, where she watches the sun come up over the bay. This moment is hers.

  Back in the kitchen, she talks to Minerva about the garden, asking who will take the vegetables to market. Minerva misses the market, where she sees her friends and steals moments of autonomy in the one place that gives her authority. Here, she can determine her own prices for her produce. She can decide to whom she will or won’t sell. She can meet and talk with friends without fear of retribution. There will be no trip to the work house on market day.

  The enslaved people at the market could “collectively defy white authority in ways that would have been impossible individually.” They were predominantly women who grew vegetables in small gardens, made sweetgrass baskets, or knitted or stitched goods to sell. They could name their own prices, keeping a portion of the proceeds in agreement with their masters. One of the traps of enslavement was that owners realized they had to concede some freedoms to the people they owned in order to keep them within that patriarchal system—See, I’m a good owner, allowing you to keep the proceeds you get for your vegetables. Because owners, outnumbered by enslaved people in Charleston, realized they could be overtaken at any time, they made concessions to keep the people they owned “content,” and then held this over their enslaved people’s heads as if they had done them a favor. These favors, they might have reminded the women and men they owned, could be revoked.

  Perhaps while Eliza hauled water for the washbasins and cleaned the house, Juba was tending to the children and cooking breakfast. We know that Juba was the cook, based on that letter Susan wrote in July 1835: “I have Juba to cook for me, the one that Eliza [Crouch] had to cook for her when I first came.” Juba and Eliza and Minerva did the heaviest work of the household, cooking, tending fires, washing the clothes, and Susan took care of the lighter loads—ironing her “frocks and muslins,” making decorative pieces for the home like the hexagon quilt—an object that would take dozens of hours to make—that set her status as a lady, a member of the master class. Only white women could be ladies.

  The work that Eliza, Minerva, and Juba did allowed Susan to escape the most laborious and time-consuming aspects of “housekeeping.” Even washing clothes was hard work in the 1830s. I think of this every time I toss a load of laundry into my washing machine, pour in the detergent, close the top, and walk away to watch TV or walk my dog—these machines give me an easy life. In 1830, washing was done with lye soap that was tough on the skin. First, if it wasn’t store-bought, the soap had to be made, as it always was in the colonial days before the factories produced it. To make soap, women needed first to make lye from ashes, which were easy enough to find under the cooking hearth. The ashes were compressed in a container with an opening in the bottom, and then water was poured over them to produce lye water; it dripped out of the bottom of the container into another. Lye water was combined with animal fat, like beef tallow, which was saved when women cooked, and more water. Lye burned the skin, so women would have been careful not to spill it on themselves. Through a process of boiling, stirring, and then pouring the concoction into molds, soap was made. It had to sit for one and a half to two months outside of the mold before it could be used.

  All this just for soap. You can imagine what a thrill it would have been to buy a ready-made bar from the dry-goods store, saving hours of work. We don’t know whether Susan bought soap ready-made for the enslaved women to use for laundry, or if she had them make it themselves.

  Minerva would have had to shave the soap into flakes, then boil some of the shavings in water, in an immense copper or cast-iron pot that could hold ten gallons. She’d have hauled in the water from the nearby well, one or two heavy buckets at a time. She’d submerge the clothes and linens (separately,
of course), mix them with a great wooden spoon or stick, move them to clear water to rinse, then wring them hard and hang them on the line in the yard. Dirtier clothes could have been scrubbed on the washboard, but those that were too delicate for washing (suits and fine dresses) were spot cleaned and brushed. Only underthings were washed in their entirety. Quilts were washed or beaten clean once a year.

  In 1835, Minerva would have done the laundry at least once a week, with a baby, Little Hasell, in the house, along with the doctor and Susan. Juba, the cook, would have gone for the day’s groceries at the market, come home with eggs and a cut of beef from the meat market, or fish from the wharf, okra and tomatoes from the vegetable market, bread from the baker. She’d have made all of the day’s meals on the family’s cast-iron stove, in pots and pans that Susan and Hasell requested from Jason (Susan’s father) to be delivered from Providence in 1834. Susan, performing her lighter duties to illustrate her role as lady, made gingerbread and preserves that she sent north (her first batch, she said, was a disaster—far too watery), and probably toyed with the new recipes in ladies’ domestic guides and cookbooks that had been emerging more and more frequently since Amelia Simmons’ First American Cookbook of 1796.

  In thanks for all this labor, Minerva, Eliza, and Juba would have either slept on pallets in the kitchen, rolled out on top of the hardwood floors, or else in beds built against the wall with hay for mattresses. Each would have had a blanket to share with her children, or, if she was lucky and had sewing skills as well as time and fabric of her own, a quilt—if a quilt, she made it in her “own” small hours, after putting the children to bed and cleaning up the evening meal and before the morning work began at dawn—and a pillow that had been flattened over the months to a hard cotton slab. On Sullivan’s Island, where the family retreated in the summertime, they probably slept in a separate cabin in the yard—what my classmate had referred to as “slave quarters”—and had pallets. Maybe it felt like a small luxury to have their own private space and a window that faced the shore. Susan was proud to have one of the best spots on Sullivan’s Island, but Minerva might have cared only that she could hear the ocean waves at night and could sleep apart from Susan and Hasell.

  One night in Somerville, Massachusetts, I stood in a kitchen with six other women, stirring great vats of boiling dye. These were all-natural dyes made from avocado pits, small bugs called cochineal from Mexico and the southern United States, walnut husks, and fustic, wood bark. I was stunned to find that the old brown tree bark made a vibrant yellow, the walnut husks made a soft brown, the avocado pit was meant to be pink but instead turned gray, and the cochineal, crunched up with its red shell, turned pink (meant to be a stronger red). It took six hours to dye these fabrics, first cutting or crunching the cochineal pieces to be dyed, then boiling the water with the dye elements in the pot, including alum to fix the color, and stirring, slowly stirring, like weary witches. Until, finally, it was time to submerge the fabric.

  Afterward, we gently squeezed out the liquid and hung it to dry. It was dappled, imperfect, and some of my favorite fabric. Now when I see fabric from the 1800s, I imagine the hours that went into its making—from picking the cotton, to spinning it into thread, and then weaving it into cloth, then dyeing it by hand. Our efforts that night, even led by an experienced dyer, were unpredictable and imperfect, but women in the nineteenth century who relied on dyed cloth for their clothes and bedcovers would have had the process down pat, and their finished products would have been even and smooth. Enslaved women often spun, wove, and dyed their own cloth: “Slave narratives frequently refer to the fact that slaves learned how to use plant dyes expertly. Some dyes could be purchased in dry goods stores, while others grew naturally. Beech bark was used to achieve a slate color. Hickory bark and walnut bark colored fabric brown; cherry, elm, and red oak imparted red (a favorite color) . . . wild indigo gave blue. . . .” Even poison ivy could be used for dye, and “vinegar and water, or ‘chamber lye’ (urine),” could be used to set the dyes. Nearly two hundred years later, there I was in a quilting shop frequented by hipsters, learning a more “sustainable” form of hand-dyeing fabric with natural materials, setting them with alum (one of several mordants used then and now) just as enslaved women did in the 1800s and the colonial women who preceded them had done, and the women who preceded them through ancient history twenty thousand years ago had done, too. While the job of weaving shifted over time between the genders, it was women who sewed, dyed, and spun yarn over time, sustaining their families through cold weather, blistering sun, and harsh winds. In the nineteenth century, enslaved women often spent evening hours, after a long day’s work, spinning cotton and weaving cloth for their own use.

  Princess Feather, Jackson Hill, Nine Patch, Drunkard’s Path, Lily in the Valley, Feathered Star, Swan’s Nest. All the hope and whimsy in these quilt names, patterns made by enslaved women as well as free African American and white women. The skill of sewing as a seamstress was passed down from mother to daughter, and talented seamstresses were more valuable than enslaved women without a skill or trade. I sank myself into Stitched from the Soul, by Gladys-Marie Fry, to learn about quilts made by enslaved and formerly enslaved women.

  A spinning wheel at the Slater Mill Museum in Rhode Island.

  It was enslaved women who made the clothes for other enslaved people on large plantations, who cut the patterns and stitched the seams from “negro cloth,” or osnaburgs, cheap, rough cloth that was far less expensive than even that lower-quality cotton Susan ordered for her “slave gowns.” Negro cloth scratched the skin, like burlap; one man recalled that as a boy, he’d ask his older brother to wear his new clothes until they’d been worn in.

  Rhode Island’s South County, where I lived in that old tavern house when I began studying the Crouch quilt, was at one time a center for the production of “negro cloth”; this was in the early 1800s, with the proliferation of new textile mills in the North, which spun cotton picked by enslaved people down South. The cotton was picked in the South, then shipped north to be spun into cloth, then shipped south again to be sewn—by enslaved people—into their own horridly uncomfortable clothes. A vicious circle of industry.

  In spite of the suffering, the determination of the planter society to make a profit at any cost, the lives divided and truncated, there were these incredible triumphs of beauty born of skill and talent. “A former Georgia slave describes another slave’s pride in her quilt-making skills. ‘When Vanna brought the gay pieces up in a “double-burst” (sunburst) [quilt] pattern, Nancy fingered the squares with loving fingers. “Hits poetry, ain’t it?” she asked wistfully.’” Poetry made of scraps salvaged or woven and dyed.

  I flipped through Fry’s book again and again. See the turning pink and white swirls on this quilt from the 1830s? The red x’s and coffin shapes around flowers on this one from the ’40s, made to memorialize a baby or to help one heal? The fine appliquéd flowers on this one from the ’20s? This is broderie perse, in which a central fabric is cut from one fabric and sewn onto another with fine stitches that turn under the rough edges of the cloth, leaving a central flower bouquet on a printed cloth, or a circle of flowers like a wreath.

  People think that all African American quilting is Gee’s Bend–style quilting. Because of the way the Gee’s Bend quilts were made, the circumstances under which they were made, the artistry and aesthetic with which they were made, the Gee’s Bend quilts are distinctively African American quilts—but African American quilts are also those made with the precision of sharp points, the patterns that one of the Gee’s Bend quilters described as feeling constrained or too fussy.

  LEFT AND RIGHT: Hexagon flower from quilt made by “a negro seamstress in 1780” on the Drayton Hall Plantation, Charleston, SC. (See color insert for other images of this quilt.)

  If you haven’t seen them yet, the Gee’s Bend quilts are those gorgeous pieces that were displayed at the Whitney in 2003, which changed everyone’s perceptions of quilts and modern art
. Gee’s Bend quilts were made with gloriously bright, bold colors in simple, sometimes asymmetrical designs that have been compared to jazz music. They were improvised but carefully created, made with bright, bold colors. My favorite of the Gee’s Bend quilts aren’t square, as if they’re resisting that convention that a quilt must be so. The patterns and sense of aesthetics were passed down within family lines and evolved generation after generation.

  Many of the quilts selected for the Whitney exhibit were made contemporaneously with modernist paintings, even though local white people prohibited the Gee’s Bend women from gaining access to the twentieth century art world. The quilters are descended from enslaved people in rural Alabama. In the Jim Crow era, their peninsula became especially isolated when the local white community suspended the ferry to the mainland. Impoverished but surviving, the women’s quilting patterns, which were unique to each family and passed down from mother to daughter, remained strong for generations, evolving over time as women experimented with new twists on the patterns. What’s most remarkable about the quilts is that they were masterfully designed with scraps of old work clothes and dresses; you can still see the marks of shoulders and elbows and knees in the denim quilt, shades of faded blue that bleed to dark. When thread ran out for one quilter, she turned to fishing twine. No one was buying yards of fabric for these designs. They used what little they had, and the results are art. As Nancy said, it’s poetry.

  Anna Williams, born outside Baton Rouge in 1927, became famous for her hand-pieced quilts that some say “embody a polyrhythmic African-American aesthetic.” She’d cut pieces of fabric by hand with scissors rather than a rotary cutter—a pizza cutter tool that quilters use to expedite clean cutting—and sew together each tiny piece to create a splash of color across the quilt in triangles, rectangles, and squares, no shape perfect or regular. She improvised her designs, though she had an overall scheme in mind. Nancy Crow, a prominent art quilter (who is white) was inspired by Williams’s work and went on to found the Quilt National show that’s attended by thousands each year. Crow also uses this hand-cutting improvisational technique. She found that rotary cutters are too precise; scissors make imperfect lines, their crooked arch part of the character and beauty of the piecing.