An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  Anna Williams Quilt, 1995. Cotton, synthetics, 76 ¼ × 61 ½ in. (193.7 × 156.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, (See also her quilt in color insert.)

  Countless white women have been inspired by the work of the African American Gee’s Bend quilters and Anna Williams’s work, myself included. Modern quilters—predominantly white and middle-class—call themselves “improv quilters,” with whole books recently dedicated to the topic (a chapter of my own book was about “improv”). I’ve worried that we’re co-opting a form that was innovated by African American women and works like jazz, with riffs and jagged lines and poetic loops and arcs. The Gee’s Bend quilters seemed to “break the rules” of quilting by which others had told me I must abide: no need for precise corners, tidy seams, sharp points, or following the pattern. This imperfect form was liberating, and I found myself making improvised quilts, too. Like most “modern” quilters, I was cutting up yards of expensive fabric to make a form that had been innovated by the Gee’s Bend women, out of necessity, using what was available in a limited market, with scant resources, all thanks to racist oppression and discrimination.

  Before the Industrial Revolution—and in all but wealthy circles after, too—no one would have cut up yards of whole cloth to make a quilt. Even today, a woman I know who grew up poor in New England scoffed when I told her I was buying fabric for a quilt. Buy it and cut it up? What an absurdity! She laughed. Quilting was an art of scraps, creating something new and useful of whatever was left over from the dresses and suits and shirts a woman spent her days sewing. Seamstresses, who made the clothes, were also, of course, some of the expert quilters, but all women were trained in the skill; quilts were a necessity for cold nights. Gladys Marie-Fry notes that enslaved boys also picked up the skill that they saw their mothers teaching their sisters: “According to oral testimonies, obtained from descendants of former slaves, the male slaves simply watched and listened as mothers transmitted sewing skills and needle crafts to their daughters.” A white northern woman noted upon visiting a Georgia plantation in the 1800s that, “. . . among the Southern field hands, the women can hoe as well as the men, and the men can sew as well as the women, and they engage in all departments of labor according to the necessity of the case without regard to sex.” This blending of men’s and women’s labor, scholar Stephanie M.H. Camp notes, added another layer of oppression to women’s lives: “Another badge of slavery was the androgynous appearance imposed on some bondwomen by work and dress . . . With a mixture of pride and bitterness, Anne Clark recalled that during her life in bondage she had ‘ploughed, hoed, split rails. I done the hardest work a man ever did’ . . . Fleming claimed that the women he knew even resembled men in the field.” While free white women were cultivating their cult of domesticity in fine dresses and corsets, enslaved women “wore pantelets or breeches” to work in the fields. Eliza, Minerva, and Juba, as house slaves, were given dresses (or cloth to make their own dresses), of finer cloth than the rough “negro cloth” that field slaves had to wear, but still of lesser quality than that used for Susan’s dresses.

  Though they lived several decades earlier, Eliza, Minerva, and Juba may have dressed similarly to these women who were photographed in 1879 in Charleston, SC.

  Enslaved women wouldn’t have been preoccupied with conforming to the performance of domesticity that so concerned Susan. As Cynthia M. Kennedy explains, “Enslaved girls were taught household skills from the time they were toddlers, and youthful slaves learned early that their lot in life comprised hard work and an endless quest for self-preservation rather than balls and parties followed by marriage.” This is the contrast between Susan and the three women she enslaved—Minerva, Eliza, and Juba. While it was Susan’s job to marry well—her access to upward mobility was a good husband—and maintain a lady’s home (the “cult of domesticity”), it was an enslaved woman’s job to sustain herself and her family while keeping her owners satisfied enough with her performance of the labor they demanded. Alice Walker points out that in the midst of the hard work of survival, which included enduring sexual abuse, black women made art in the everyday: “What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time?” she asked in the 1970s. “In our great-grandmother’s day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to chill the blood.”

  Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)—eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children—when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay?

  How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.

  The answer to this question lies in the garden Walker’s mother tended every day, bringing to the world a burst of beauty that was her art, just as Walker’s art—permitted and possible for her generation—is her writing. She writes about Phillis Wheatley, beloved American poet of the eighteenth century who was enslaved by a Boston family. Walker says it’s no wonder Wheatley’s health failed, when she was surrounded by the “contradictions” of her world: being taught that her homeland was a savage place from which she’d been “saved,” working all her life under enslavement to serve an elite white family, yet with the talent that would have earned her the title of genius had she been a white man. She wonders how many women who were enslaved had ancestors who made art on their walls back in Africa, sang with voices like Bessie Smith, and had daughters who became writers like herself, women who were finally permitted to make the work they were born to make. She wonders how enslaved women survived without being able to make their art, and the answer is in how they treated their everyday objects—their talent was channeled into their gardens, their cooking, sewing their clothes, or making their quilts. Stephanie M.H. Camp writes, “Women, whose bodies were subject to sexual exploitation, dangerous and potentially heartbreaking reproductive labor, and physically demanding agricultural labor, worked hard to bring personal expression and delight into their lives. Women wove and dyed color, patterns, and designs into their clothing.” Minerva, Eliza, and Juba wouldn’t have been preoccupied with the cult of domesticity as Susan was; instead, they’d have defined their individuality and found joy in the works they created and perhaps wore, in the slim hours of their own time.

  From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: “The embroidered inscription ‘Frances M Jolly 1839’ graces the center medallion of this quilt top. This signed and dated silk-and-wool-embroidered quilt top came from an African American family, and the maker, Frances M. Jolly, was said to be an ancestor of one of the donor’s grandparents. The family, of whom little else is known, is said to have lived in Massachusetts and moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina.”

  Log cabin, Streak o’Lightning, Whole Cloth, Appliquéd, Courthouse Steps, Tulip pattern, Grandmother’s Flower Garden. I scanned each of these quilt patterns made by women of color before the Civil War, pictured in Fry’s book. Grandmother’s flower garden, this last one, catches my eye because, like Susan and Hasell’s quilt, it’s made of hexagons that became popular as a result of the publication of the 1835 Godey’s Lady’s Book pattern. These quilts represent only some of designs that that enslaved women made. People think of African American–style quilts as being only those with improvised patterns made as a result of a lack of access to enough fabric to make a consistent, symmetrical pattern, just as clothes were patched as needed, becoming, as Fry notes, quilts themselves. Enslaved people were given clothes once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes only once every few years, or worse. Camp explains
, “Old, torn, shredded, and dirty clothing resulted in more than saved costs for slave owners; it had social effects. Poor quality attire reflected and reified slaves’ status and played a role in their subjugation. Former bondwoman Harriet Jacobs wrote bitterly in her narrative of life as a bondwoman that the ‘linsey-woolsey dress given me every winter’ by her mistress was ‘one of the badges of slavery.’” Consequently, “when bondpeople, especially women, outfitted themselves for their own occasions, they went to a great deal of trouble to procure or make clothes of quality and, importantly, style.” Women traded “homespun goods, produce from their gardens, and pelts with itinerant traders for good-quality or decorative cloth, beads, and buttons . . . Enslaved South Carolinians had an especially independent economy.” Maybe Eliza, Juba, and Minerva made sweetgrass baskets, or sold vegetables grown in their own kitchen gardens, in exchange for cloth of their own.

  Now when I see a quilt made by a woman who was enslaved, I see a piece that must have been the product of much negotiating for fabric and dye, and hours spent working to dye the cloth over boiling vats on an open fire, drying it in the yard, cutting it into sweeping symmetrical shapes, and then gathering or making other goods in exchange for enough cotton to fill the quilt, and spending hours over a loom for any homespun cloth that was also used. Some surviving “everyday” quilts that enslaved people used for themselves are made of varied, irregular shapes of cloth pieced together as in the style of crazy quilts that would become popular with white Victorian ladies in the late 1800s—whatever shape scrap one had, one used. Enslaved women couldn’t typically spend a lot of time making decorative quilts for their families when they needed them for warmth and comfort during cold nights, and spent all their daytime hours making quilts and doing other heavy labor for their masters. The quilting style that began out of necessity flourished and proliferated as a distinctive style, imitated by quilters who say they’re making “improv” quilts today. They are artistic masterpieces. But so were the “fancy” quilts they made for the master’s house, sometimes in partnership with the mistress. Most of what enslaved women made did not survive because it was used every day, until it was positively worn out. But we can recognize that their hands were in the work of countless dresses and quilts and coverlets used by wealthy white women on plantations and in city houses. When Eliza’s and Minerva’s brown and red dresses wore out, maybe they turned them into quilts for their own use; maybe, somewhere in the past, there was a quilt made entirely with their hands, with these same snippets of cloth that Susan and Hasell used in their bed quilt. When I touch the quilt, run my hands across its seams and hundreds of white stitches, I wonder if some of this is the work of Eliza, Minerva, and Juba. I feel the ridges of the seams between hexagons, where the whip-stitch bound them. There’s no signature, no record to indicate that this is the work of enslaved women. And even if they didn’t work on this quilt (Camp argues that urban enslaved women didn’t share stitching labor as plantation enslaved women did), it was Eliza, Minerva, and Juba’s labor that gave Susan the time to make this piece. The enslaved women are not overtly recognized in the archives of documents and in the quilt tops that mark Susan and Hasell’s lives, but they’re decidedly here. We can recognize their labor and the legacies they created—the gardens, food, clothes, and quilts that were their art.

  Sullivan’s Island panorama by Hugo Bosse, 1860.

  Imagine that it’s ten o’clock at night on Sullivan’s Island, and Susan and Hasell have gone to bed. Maybe Minerva, Juba, and Eliza talk about their lives together at night, about their own children, about, perhaps, the latest marriage between neighbors on Sullivan’s Island. Eliza’s hands might be sore from hauling pots and weeding the gardens and washing and stirring and wringing the clothes, and sewing Susan’s hexagons. But she’d return to the cabin in the yard, and pick up a quilt she’s making with Minerva and Juba for their children to use at night. Before they know it, winter will be here with its chilly, rainy nights, and Juba and Minerva want to keep the children warm when they’re back in the city kitchen with its doorways and windows whose drafts can’t be defeated by the stove’s fire. Maybe they have fabric from the trade they made with friends at the market in Charleston, and black sailors at the docks—handwoven hats in exchange for pieces of fabric. They have scraps, too, from Susan’s sewing; she’s been ordering yards of fabric from the North, so the women have her remnants, whatever she doesn’t use after her dresses are cut and the quilt hexagons are made. Imagine that they pick up needles with hands sore and stiff from the day’s work, and sit by the fire in their cabin, and sew for an hour before falling asleep side by side, Minerva with Cecilia nestled on her chest, her soft breath lulling Minerva into sleep; maybe Sorenzo sleeps already under coverlets Juba made back on the plantation in North Carolina, with patterns and stitches taught her by her mother Judith, and by her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her. These skills, talents, and knowledge are inherited legacies of wealth, too.

  Sullivan’s Island as depicted in 1860, and a map of the city of Charleston (central peninsula) and Sullivan’s Island (top right corner).

  3

  Warp & Weft: Agriculture & Industry

  The long stitches across the hexagon are the basting stitches; the short stitches between hexagons are the whip stitch. Typically, when a quilt is finished, the papers are torn out so the quilt can be layered with batting and backing. That may not have been the intention with these quilt tops.

  When the machines start up in the textile factory, they roar; it’s as if the whole building is shaking to life, a clatter of metal on metal, the belts charging over the wheels. There are rows of great looms in this cavernous building with its floor-to-ceiling windows. The windows have latches on the bottom, but in 1835, they couldn’t be opened because the breeze would cause the cotton threads to blow in the wind, tangle the machines, make the particles fly through the air in a flurry. Just down the road from Susan’s Providence home, where her parents still lived in 1835 and where she’d grown up laboring over samplers, Slater Mill had been functioning since the late 1790s. Slater Mill was the first textile mill in the United States, founded by Samuel Slater.

  Slater Mill’s opening set off the American Industrial Revolution and the burgeoning textile mills that would come a few years later in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I stand now, in the midst of the roar. How did Susan and her brothers so easily adapt to owning enslaved people in the South? These mills are part of the answer.

  The looms at the American Textile History Museum,in Lowell, MA, which closed in 2016.

  Once Susan and Hasell move south in 1833, their new lives together begin, though not as prosperously as Susan would like. First, they live with Hasell’s and Susan’s relatives, including her brothers, Hilton and Winthrop. Like Susan, Hilton and Winthrop moved south in hopes of upward mobility. While her chance came through marriage, the boys’ came through business ventures—lumber and cotton trading, both of which thrive thanks to their father’s connections back in Providence.

  It takes only two short years for the siblings’ lives to begin to flourish in Charleston. But in 1833, Hilton’s nascent lumber business is tenuous and Hasell is still waiting for his “profession” to get under way. Hilton writes from Charleston to his father asking for advice about whether to pack up and head home to Providence, or to stick it out in Charleston. If he stays, he says, he’ll need money from his father—or another relative—to get his business running.

  The question now is if I had better go on with the business or close out and return to the north. Of one thing I am certain: situated as I am now I cannot make money. As it is I have not capital enough to carry it on to advantage. Find[ing] eight hundred dollars soon would enable me to do a very handsome business, but with my present capital I can do scarcely anything. You must have money on hand to take advantage of the market, for if you buy on a credit, you have to buy of the second person and consequently pay a profit on it, but by having cash you buy of the country
people that bring it down, and often get great bargains. My present lease of the yard expires on the last day of July, and I can by that time sell out all my stock and collect all the accounts due now, but if I could get five hundred or eight hundred dollars more I should much rather continue in the business as I am confident with that addition to my present capital I could do well.

  Hilton is both asking for advice as well as money from his father here, believing that if he only has “more capital,” he’ll be able to get a better start in the business. He’s writing to his brother Winthrop, who’s still living at home. Hilton goes on to emphasize his point:

  I wish you to let Father read this letter and both of you write me fully on the subject what I had best do how the lumber business is at Providence and if Father and myself could do anything at it. Or how the grocery business, the same kind you are in, would succeed? Suppose you and myself should go in company in the fall and open a store of that kind? Do you think you understand the business well enough, and why could not we succeed as well as Mr. Paddiford? I think were you and myself in company and had a snug store managed it well and economically that with Father’s judgment purchasing goods we might do well, but as you can judge of the state of the market better than I can, you can of course tell better the thing would succeed but as soon as you receive this for I cannot conclude about buying more lumber till I hear from you. If Father can get the money for me and thinks it would be better for me to go on with the business, I would in that case like him to engage a cargo of White Pine lumber, should I conclude to give up business I cannot leave until July, and if I had sold out I should not have been able to have left for some time as I should have had to [stay] and [settle] my accounts. That was one reason why I was not anxious to sell out, as by retailing it out I get much better prices for my stock and have something to do in the same time.