An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  I think of Bishroom and Mary, their love, and those meetings where they spent time each Thursday with other people of color at Trinity Methodist, where they could talk freely, and laugh, and be at ease together. I imagine they were the married couple, and I see their hands clasped together throughout the whole meeting, and the way Mary leans slightly toward Bishroom as the minutes tick on and she gets tired. They’re both getting older and feel the pain of the day’s labor more deeply—an ache in her hip joints and fingers, the stiffness of his knee broken by a master years ago. Now, I see her head resting on his shoulder in the final moments of the night, and how he puts on the straw hat she wove for him just as they rise together and walk to the door, her hand on his arm, showing their love for one another in a space where it’s safe. As the door opens, she lets go of his arm, and there’s the creak of wooden planks behind them, the sound of their friends approaching, the laughter of two women sharing a story; outside, dark is falling while the hum of cicadas rises, an incessant whir on this hot summer night. Mary loves the hydrangea and rose blooms they pass on their way back, and pauses to smell a red rose on a bush that spills over a wall, before any of the patrolmen can spot her. She sinks her face into the bloom, and inhales deep, blissfully lost for a second, while Bishroom protects her by scanning the road ahead.

  The page from the Trinity Methodist Church’s membership rolls that record Bishroom Vale, listed with the surname of his owner Elizabeth Vale, between 1822 and 1826. He’s noted as “married” and “slave.” Bishroom was sold to Hilton in 1834, but here he is, a member of the church group, a married man, living his own life.

  4

  Mosaic

  In 1835 Charleston, a white man is arrested for murdering a “negro.” The white man was looking for his runaway slave when he “entered a negro house . . . where he thought he might find him.” It’s early spring. The tulip trees bloom pink outside the window at the house that Susan’s brother Winthrop Williams lets. He writes to his younger sister Eliza Williams, back home in Rhode Island.

  A negro was lying sick on the floor near the door; in passing him, [the white man] tread on his foot or hand. The negro asked him not to do it again, or something to that effect; the man turned and said he had a good mind to shoot him and pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot him dead indeed.

  Winthrop notes that it’s unlikely the white man would be found guilty.

  It is doubtful whether he will be convicted as there was but one white person present and he the murderer’s friend. There were several negroes, but their testimony is not taken in any case whatever.

  At this point, Winthrop and Hilton are still new in Charleston. Hilton, five years older than Winthrop and four years older than Susan, has founded his now-thriving lumber business, and Winthrop has just taken a job in Columbia working for a factor, “a merchant who would sell a planter’s cotton, supply him with goods, and provide credit;” part of his job with the factor entails working in the store that is, in part, similar to his father’s in Rhode Island, with one significant difference: Cotton is traded here.

  I have at last a stopping place. I arrived here last Thursday and through the kindness of our friend Penuel Carpenter have obtained a situation in the store of Mess’rs. D&J Ewart & Co., who do a large business in Dry Goods, Hardware, Groceries, etc., and buying cotton from the Planters as it comes in. They have about $50,000 worth of cotton on hand at present.

  Today, that would be more than 1.3 million dollars. This is the beginning of Winthrop’s career as a cotton factor, inspired no doubt by the vast amounts of money he saw he could make from the trade. In a few years, he’ll go into a business partnership with his boss, Mr. Ewart, who comes from New York. Ewart uses his New York connections while Winthrop uses his Providence and Charleston connections to move cotton from the plantations around Columbia and Charleston, to the ports and then north or overseas to Liverpool, where it will be spun into cloth used for a quilt, and made into dresses for ladies and house slaves. In another letter home, written about the same time of his new employment, he writes about the man, Adger, who’s from Providence.

  I became acquainted with my present employer. . . . The store is close by; only a few doors below the Ewarts are engaged in two stores, the lower store, which in fact is 3 or 4 stores together. They do business in Dry Goods, Hardware & Iron of all kinds, Groceries, Crockery, and everything almost that is used by the Planters. They employ here 6 or 7 clerks, at the upper store where I am they keep a general assortment of all kinds of goods but on a smaller scale, the principal business is buying cotton as it comes in. They have now on hand about $50,000 worth most of it in the hands of James Adger of your city [Providence, RI] who does their business. All of our trade is in cash; we pay cash for cotton if we cannot sell goods in exchange for it but try to sell them as much as possible.

  Winthrop’s family was like many merchant and planter families who lived between Boston or Providence and Charleston, South Carolina, and profited from their North-South and mercantile connections. I’d come to learn, in the course of this project, how closely tied Rhode Island and South Carolina were. All of these planters and merchants were involved or implicated, in some capacity, in the slave trade. There was the Middleton family, for example, who owned Middleton Place, a plantation outside Charleston, along with eighteen other plantations in which their hundreds of enslaved people worked to build their wealth. They produced some of the rice—thousands of pounds of rice—for which Charleston is still famous, Carolina Gold; their enslaved people made those symmetrical pools at which I stared when I visited Middleton plantation. Jamaica Kincaid stared at these pools, too, and said of them: “At the foot of the terrace are two small lakes that have been fashioned to look like a butterfly stilled by chloroform.” She describes an encounter she has with a wealthy man whose last name is Cabot, and I wonder if he’s related to the Cabots of Massachusetts whom, Beckert says, made their wealth from cotton production and the slave trade. Kincaid says that what she didn’t mention to this wealthy man (who resented her discussing enslavement in the context of gardens), was that Arthur Middleton was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; he, like DeWolf, was sustained by his properties at home and abroad: in South Carolina, Barbados, and England. Middleton was part of the planter aristocracy, descended from parents who were also powerful citizens. He likely saw no irony in his signing of the Declaration in spite of his ownership of enslaved people, because to his mind, enslaved people were not, in fact, human. Furthermore, he was not an anomaly; the majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. The Middleton generations to come summered in Newport, Rhode Island, and intermarried with the DeWolfs, the powerful slave-trading family of Bristol, Rhode Island.

  The Nathaniel Russell Middleton House in Charleston is one of the city’s most opulent, with a “self-suspended” spiral staircase (it has no supports from the floor). When I took the tour, the guide was eager to tell us about that staircase and about how tenderly the home had been restored. “Look,” she told the group, “at that design along the woodwork.” We looked up to see a pattern along the molding in the circular room; I scanned down again, to take in the portraits of the family—a little blonde girl, smiling—and the dining table set with fine china, roped off from tourists who might get too close. She did not like it when I asked who would have served the family at that fine dining table, who would have polished all that silver and cleaned all those dishes. “Well, the servants,” she said.

  The servants.

  The Middletons and DeWolfs had married; Nathaniel’s wife, Anna, was from Bristol, Rhode Island. It was her family who was largely responsible for Bristol’s notoriety as a large slave-trading port. And while the Crouch-Cushmans were in a different class than the Middleton-DeWolfs, both would stay intimately connected and suffer through the same familial tensions during the division of North and South in the Civil War. Everything that Winthrop, Susan, and Hilton did in the South in the 1830s set
them more deeply apart from their northern siblings as the war approached. In the 1830s, war wasn’t so far off, as the country seemed to periodically veer closer, then swerve away, avoiding it once more.

  The DeWolf house in Bristol, Rhode Island.

  After telling his sister Eliza Williams about the murdered man, Winthrop goes on to tell Eliza the family news, how Hilton and his wife have moved out of Susan’s house in Charleston to their own home, about the differences between a Charleston boardinghouse and “a New England house,” and how they eat “wharfles for breakfast and supper, Johnny cake, rice, Turnips for dinner.”

  When he recounts the story of the murdered “negro” to his sister, he doesn’t comment on whether or not this is just, but he does call the white man “the murderer” and notes that the authorities arrested the white man. How did Susan, Winthrop, and Hilton so easily come to terms with these sorts of events that discounted enslaved peoples’ lives, and with owning enslaved people themselves? My initial mistake was in the question itself—in not understanding their New England roots, which mirror my own.

  I first look to South Carolina to understand the slave-holding culture. Unlike Susan and her siblings, Hasell and Charles were indoctrinated in a culture that sustained enslavement, and grew up in a grand three-story house by Charleston’s battery, where, as of 1820, they were waited on by twelve enslaved people. Their childhood brought them into contact with planters, the largest slaveholders in the country, as well as countless elites and more common people who owned a few house slaves, like Susan and Hasell did.

  8 Meeting Street, now known as the Tucker Ladson house, where Hasell grew up with his father Abraham and brother Charles.

  Susan and Hasell’s quilt is called a “mosaic quilt,” common for this era in the South Carolina Lowcountry, land of rice plantations and indigo—the plant that can make sky blue, midnight blue, almost-baby-blue when faded light, and best of all, a deep sky blue that bleeds almost to violet. Dip it in the dye and pull it out to oxygenate and then dip it again to deepen its hue. The more often it’s oxygenated and submerged, the darker it gets. Hands come out stained. Bind the fabric and you have shibori. Tie-dye. Paint on wax before dyeing and you’re left with pretty starburst and zigzag and flower-like patterns of white amid the blue. This is called “resist dyeing,” because the waxed parts, now scraped clean, have resisted taking on the blue. My favorite color is Prussian blue, an almost electric, popping color that was popular in the 1830s. While the cochineal I used to make red comes from insects’ shells, and fustic comes from bark, Prussian blue comes from minerals, the earth. That particular vibrant sky blue was discovered in the early 1700s, by a color-maker in Berlin, and, like the aniline purple dye mauveine in the mid-1800s, its discovery was an accident of oxidization. Prussian blue comes from the oxidization of iron, while mauve or mauveine comes from the oxidization of aniline and helped propel the production of synthetic dyes that would follow. Every color has its own long history, the story of its discovery, use, or invention. Madder makes red, too, from a root that was used thousands of years ago, in ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Scholars tell us that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun was buried with cloth that holds madder in its fibers. I imagine Egyptian women weaving, together, linen from flax on large looms, and then using madder root to dye it that beautiful vibrant red. The root, like indigo, originated in Asia.

  The notebook I made after dyeing fabric.

  Behind all the pretty colors there’s the story of indigo as a crop, a product, like rice and wheat and corn and denim and cotton, the fabric of our lives, and every other thing we wear and eat and use. Scholar Catherine E. McKinley tells us that indigo cloth was traded for human lives in Africa. Like New England rum. On the other side of the Middle Passage, indigo and rice were cultivated by enslaved people in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in South Carolina Lowcountry swamps and marshes, in what one white visitor described as “putrid water.” Imagine the mosquitoes swarming, biting, and filled with disease.

  I saw those half-moon pools at Middleton Place, the chloroformed butterfly that was part of rice irrigation, on a cloudy day in January when the wind riffled their surfaces. I wondered how anyone could have made such perfectly arched, perfectly symmetrical pools before they had access to mechanized tools and under the conditions in which they were forced to live. These builders would have waded into muddy waters hoping the water moccasins wouldn’t find them, hoping the rats and vermin would leave them be, swatting off the malarial mosquitoes their masters escaped when they rode off to their summer cottages each year. They were probably hungry, probably ill-clothed, probably hot and dehydrated, probably worried about their children and their wives and their husbands and all the people they’d been torn from along the way. The straight line where the halves meet didn’t waver. Kincaid reminds us that West Africans brought this skill of rice cultivation and irrigation across the sea, and here was one piece of its evidence, hundreds of years later, reflecting twenty-first-century clouds in its surface.

  Beyond there’s the Ashley River, which was diverted to make these pools and others that have been lost to the tides; the river rushes toward Charleston’s port at the mouth of the Atlantic, where Minerva, Eliza, and Juba lived at 6 Cumberland Street, a few blocks from the harbor. Imagine Minerva and Juba in those cotton dresses with the teakettle print, one in red and one in brown. Imagine Minerva prefers the red. Imagine she wears it out sooner than the brown because she wears it so often, especially on market days when she sells her vegetables to her neighbors. Imagine she hides this vegetable money away in the pocket she wears under her dress, a cotton pouch, muslin she claimed from Susan’s scraps; it holds her children’s futures, the freedom she will buy for them.

  How does this happen? How does a plantation become what it is? How does a city come to host populations of both enslaved and free people of color, poor whites and those who call themselves the masters?

  This is the South Carolina Lowcountry, hot and humid. From the air, its waterways reach like tendrils for miles between drips of green land, then blend into the blue bay and sea. This is flat land, swampy, where you can still buy Carolina Gold rice, marketed for tourists in small cotton sacks in gift shops, where you can take horse-and-wagon tours through the old city, which people still see as charming southern genteel. Restaurants have sugar and cotton in their names. One of the hotels is named after a hotel from Susan’s day—the Planter Hotel. There is something about this myth that still seduces people. I think of the restaurants where I ate in college, the ones I visit in Charleston, where chefs serve shrimp and cheese grits, hush puppies, collard greens cooked with pork, fried okra. I look for okra soup, which Winthrop notes he ate one evening, food that Michael Twitty writes that enslaved people cooked for their masters, popularizing dishes we now think of as southern cuisine. I think of Juba, standing in the kitchen or the yard, chopping collards while her son brings in water for the pots, humming to herself. Jimmy brings in the horse and carriage as Hasell enters in the front door; she hears his call to Susan. Sorenzo shows her younger child how to pour the water into the pot without spilling. Let’s say the younger child was a boy, too. Imagine how she loves his patience with his little brother when she hears him say he’ll race him back to the chickens.

  How did Juba and Sorenzo come to inhabit a place whose economy is driven by enslavement? The lowcountry became plantation country over time, its crops changing with demand:

  Beginning in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the discovery of exportable staples, first naval stores and then rice and indigo, permanently altered the character of lowcountry South Carolina. . . . African slaves began pouring into the region; and sometime during the first decade of the eighteenth century, white numerical superiority gave way to the lowcountry’s distinguishing demographic characteristic: the black majority. No longer societies with slaves, lowcountry South Carolina, then Georgia, and finally East Florida became slave societies.

  What’s t
he difference between a society with slaves and a slave society? This was a distinction applicable only in the pre-Revolutionary period. Christy Clark-Pujara writes that the difference “is not static; however the North was only ever a society with slaves,” though small parts of the North (including South County, Rhode Island, where I lived when I started studying the quilt tops) were slave societies. The South, on the other hand, would have been a slave society because “slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations: husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student. From the most intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones between ruler and ruled, all relationships mimicked those of slavery.” In slave societies, the master class “rule[d]” and “nearly everyone—free and slave—aspired to enter the slaveholding class.” Ira Berlin explains that people of color could become slaveholders themselves, and describes the codes that slave societies enacted to keep people in bondage. What prompted a society to shift from a society with slaves to a slave society was the discovery of crops that required a large labor force to harvest, produce, and export them. Rice, indigo, cotton.

  It’s 1820 in Charleston, twelve years before Susan and Hasell marry, and Hasell Crouch is still a child. He lives with his brother, Charles, and father, Abraham, in a fine house by the port. It’s three stories high with a square façade. Imagine two boys who stand at the third floor window to look out at the sea. From the top floor, they can watch the brigs and schooners sailing into port with the goods their father will document at the Customs House, known today as the Exchange Building, down the street, a few blocks away. The port is always busy, and between here and there, there are neighborhoods their father won’t let them traverse, where sailors and merchants, freemen and enslaved people commingle, everyone shouting, selling their wares or pushing their way through the streets.