An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  Sophia and Abraham lived in that grand three-story house by the battery, where ships came in with goods for sale, near the markets that ran chaotic and quick-paced all day long. That was where Abraham worked, in the counting house that noted the ships coming and going, the goods they bought and sold, the sailors and captains aboard. He worked at the building that’s today called the Exchange building, which you can visit and tour.

  In the basement, the prison cells used for delinquent taxpayers or captured criminals, including pirates, remain, now filled with statues of pirates dressed in classical pirate garb (minus the stereotypical eye patches): tapered pants that come to the calf, high white socks, ankle boots, and poofy white shirts with openings that tie at the top. Billowy sleeves. Famously, several women pirates made their names in these waters, too. When I took the tour, a mother who was homeschooling her children made sure to tell her daughter the story of these female pirates.

  We mythologize pirates today, but they were always—as they still are—simply sailors who terrorized and stole from other sailors. They could take possession of a ship at sea, and then sell its wares for their own profits in port. Those wares could include enslaved people; in fact, it was far more profitable to pirate a slave ship than to organize and fund one from the start. Slavery was a dangerous and risky business, one that didn’t always return a profit. So many things could go wrong on that triangular route—the ships could run into bad weather and sink, sickness could strike the whole crew and cargo, enslaved people could riot and take over, murdering the crew, or—most likely—most of the enslaved people could get sick and die along the way. A ship that had made it almost all the way home with its “cargo” intact was a profitable rarity, and pirates would wait until such ships were close enough to the selling ports along the East Coast or the West Indies that they could safely make it to the auction blocks, securing a high profit with little risk. All they had to do was overtake the crew; they didn’t have to invest thousands of dollars in the voyage, nor wait the weeks or months the journey would take, nor hire the crew, negotiate with slave dealers in Africa, navigate the wide and wild seas, control and feed the hundreds of people in the cargo hold. All they had to do was battle a crew, take command, and sail into port to make their sales—hundreds of people sold off, and there was a tidy profit. This was the work of our mythologized villains, like Captain Kidd.

  Abraham would have been familiar with these stories, and would have seen the captured men and maybe even have stopped in to ogle them in their cells below his office. He was a Custom House official, so he signed off on all that came through the port as well as the sale of those goods once they left the port. The market was there on the docks, so it was easy to transport the dry goods, textiles, meats, fruits and vegetables, and people from the docks to the blocks. The front steps of the Custom House were used as an auction block, and the neighborhood around the building was full of traders and agents who sold enslaved people; Abraham would have passed those sales every day as he walked into and out of work, must have heard the auctioneer shouting out prices and the attributes of those people on the block through his open windows in the summertime.

  Eyre Crow—“Slaves Waiting for Sale—Richmond, Virginia” 1861.

  This engraving reveals the scene—several people scantily clad, standing for sale as the crowd below bids on them. This was what Minerva, Eliza, and Juba witnessed every time they walked to the market to buy and sell their goods; their heart rates must have quickened, their skin raised with goosebumps, as they walked past the block and heard the auctioneer describe women and babies for sale. We don’t know if they were ever sold on an auction block before, or when, Mary Ancrum Walker bought them. Those we’re able to track were sold by Susan in private sales after Hasell’s death.

  The enslaved people for whom Abraham was trustee in 1825, when he sold the house, would have been passed to his sons, Hasell and Charles, as soon as they came of age. Since Charles returned to Charleston before Hasell, Charles took ownership of their enslaved people when Abraham died in Providence in 1826. It was Susan’s father who paid for his burial. Apparently, the families were likely long connected, before Susan’s brother Winthrop befriended Hasell, before Hasell courted and then married Susan. Their families might have become acquainted when Mary Wilkinson, Abraham’s mother (Hasell’s paternal grandmother) went north to Newport each summer with her young sons, or through the link between Mary Wilkinson, a Rhode Island native and journeyman printer, and her husband Charles, a Charleston native; they were newspaper printers who distributed Charleston’s news. Mary took over the paper when her husband passed away, and later moved north to Salem, to start a paper of her own—a remarkable feat for an eighteenth-century woman.

  Rhode Island and South Carolina had strong ties. They were trading the goods that propelled the slave trade—rum, sugar, molasses, cheese, and cod. And it was common practice for southern planters and those wealthy enough to afford escape from Charleston’s hot, humid summers, to head for Newport, where their arrival was published in the local paper. In Charleston’s swampland, the risks of sickness in the city were high. Just a few decades later, conditions had not much improved, and Susan and Hasell were glad to have the island house to escape the sicknesses; when it was hot and “close” in the summertime, they encouraged Hilton to leave the mill and stay with them on the island, where they said it was as safe as in the North.

  Mary, Hasell’s grandmother, went to Newport at least three summers. Her arrival was announced in the Newport newspapers, which recorded all the town’s comings and goings. This was the news of the day: who was in town, who had left, what was happening on the docks and in the city. As Mary disembarked, she’d have seen the brick market building with its high first-floor arches that led to an open-air room. Here, vendors sold their goods—baskets of fruit and vegetables, paper-wrapped meats, live chickens, eggs, and the dry goods just unloaded from a recently docked ship. She’d have passed all this with her young sons in tow, the threesome well attired. She’d have taken the best lodging on board with her sons on the ten-day journey north, and been accompanied by a male escort—a family friend, another couple or family.

  Newport didn’t look so different from Charleston. Its coast was less intricately niched than Charleston’s, with fewer nooks and crannies, but the harbor would have had the same air—that nearly identical market building, the two-story houses made of pine less grand than Charleston’s in the main square, but more lavish along the outskirts of town, by the shore. Along the harbor, there was the familiar hustle of the docks and market as sellers and buyers rushed in the midst of sailors, merchants, and yes, even in Newport, enslaved people for sale. Though there was no public auction block, many of the houses that still stand along the harbor served as sites of private sales of enslaved people. It’s hard for New Englanders to imagine this, sometimes—at least, in the informal surveys I’ve been taking for the last few years, though I find it’s changing more and more of late—but Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island, were slave ports, just like Charleston, South Carolina. Bristol even surpassed Charleston as the largest slave-trading port in the country in the late seventeen and early eighteen hundreds, thanks in part to the DeWolf family, who kept the international trade running until it was outlawed in 1808. As Joseph McGill and Keith Stokes told me, Newport’s market and city center were designed by the same man in exactly the same layout as Charleston’s and Barbados’s Bridgetown, one more thread that united North and South and the cities of the triangle trade. They were all part of the same circuit in the nation’s early years; they were all interdependent.

  Abraham has an oval face, slender arched eyebrows, a fine concave nose, and a narrow mouth. He smiles just slightly, so that the edges of his lips press into his cheeks and make his mouth look prim. He has thin lips. He has a thick double chin almost hidden underneath his high collar. His ears are set low, and his hair is brushed forward against his cheeks, dark curls dressing his forehead. He wears a fine buttoned c
oat, has narrow shoulders around that wide neck—in fact, his neck is impossibly long. The portraitist is off. No one’s neck can be this long. The object description of Sophia’s portrait states it might have been made by an artist “who was beginning his career.” Abraham’s miniature, which is said to have “an especially rich and elaborate case of gold, enamel, and seed pearls,” is attributed to the artist Vallée, a well-known French portraitist.

  When Winthrop sent a letter home in the 1850s, he wrote that Charles was as slovenly as his father. Maybe Abraham lost his money, or his mind, after his wife died. Maybe he was heartsick, depressed, sad. Maybe he stopped doing all that he should have, or he drank too much. We don’t know who he really was, nor what happened. In 1825, he lost his employ and sold his grand house on Meeting Street and moved to a smaller home, indicating he was in some kind of trouble. A year later, in 1826, he’d travel to Providence and die there, leaving his estate in the hands of Susan’s father to settle. Perhaps he’d traveled north to bring Hasell to school that fall.

  Abraham’s parents were educated enough to read and write and run their printing business. Like Hasell’s wife, Susan, Abraham’s mother, Mary Wilkinson (Hasell’s grandmother), was from Rhode Island. Perhaps they met when the family had traveled north. Mary was bold to move back home to Rhode Island as a widow, work as editor of a newspaper there, and then to move to Salem, Massachusetts, another port town (and, of course, another slave port), to found her own paper. She died on October 24, 1818, at seventy years of age; she outlived her husband Charles by forty-five years. Abraham was only eight when Charles died in 1775. I look for echoes of the loss in Abraham’s eyes, in that portrait, but all I see is the slender mouth, the long neck.

  In 1814, an enslaved woman named Jenny was given to Charles and Hasell by their grandmother, Mary Ancrum Walker. Jenny, in other words, was a gift. She is described as “a young sound negroe woman named Jenny” in the contract that notes her sale. Charles and Hasell were only seven and five, respectively, in 1814, and lived in that fine house near the battery with their father. Maybe Jenny was intended to help nurture the boys and ease the loss of their mother five years earlier. Maybe she was meant to help when their father was grieving. Did Jenny stay in Charleston after Abraham left in 1825? Did she get to escape? Did she live fifty more years to see emancipation? How many children did she have, if any? Whom did she love? I think of her life, try to imagine her in that three story house, carrying food upstairs to the boys or cleaning the floors or answering the door. I imagine her telling her story to the girl who worked beside her, talking about where she came from. Maybe she lived somewhere else in the city before she was sold to Mary Ancrum Walker; maybe she had a sister or brother nearby, whom she slipped out to see when she was given a pass to run errands for the Crouches. There she is at the entrance of the grand Crouch home, walking a block west to find her brother at the Russell house, or up to the Aiken-Rhett house, the “urban plantation” that’s still maintained in the city today as a museum. I see her at the back gate, speaking to the man who leads a horse back to the stables. She asks the man to bring her brother a message and a piece of fruit—a peach she bought at the market just for him.

  Mosaic quilts were made by “upper-class women in Charleston” who “came from and married into wealth, education, and influence.” Other quilts in the Charleston Museum collection were made by the planters, merchants, lawyers, and ministers. These were the ranks Susan hoped to join, yet she was conscious of being thrifty, asking for fabric her parents could get for less in the North, and for batting to use in the quilts (this was a difference as well, since most of these mosaic quilts were actually made to be coverlets, without cotton batting, unlike a typical quilt—Susan obviously planned to use batting and backing in her quilt). Still, she was able to buy yards of fabric new and cut them into pieces, in addition to reusing fabric the family had on hand from dress and clothes making. Susan, like those other women, “fussy cut” some of her fabric, selecting particular prints to highlight, like the bird’s head that repeats. “Selective cutting makes extravagant use of fabric, converting yardage into ‘Swiss Cheese.’ . . . This apparent lack of concern about economizing on fabric is yet another indicator of the economic standing of the makers.” Susan had been prepared for a life of homemaking as a middle-class woman since she was a child, making samplers and learning the needle arts. A description of one of her samplers is preserved in the Massachusetts chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America’s American Samplers. Susan was seven when she made it, in 1820 Providence. She stitched three alphabets and two phrases:

  “Behold the child of innocence how beautiful is the mildness of its countenance and the diffidence of its looks.”

  “Be good and be happy.”

  Ethel Stanwood Bolton writes in the 1920 introduction to the re-published collection of samplers, “The conclusion I draw from these incomplete premises I believe tenable: namely, that throughout the whole range of sampler poetry the only trace of originality to be found is in the signature and the dates.” She goes on to explain that most of the quotes included in the samplers come from Bible verses or common sayings, sometimes even local sayings like the New England phrase, “When this you see, remember me.” Indeed, Susan’s phrases are an excerpt from William Kenrick’s “The Whole Duty of Woman, Comprised in the Following Sections,” outlining expectations of a woman in the late eighteenth century. The whole of the excerpt Susan quotes is Section XI, “Modesty”:

  Behold the daughter of innocence! how beautiful is the mildness of her countenance!

  How lovely is the diffidence of her looks!

  Her cheek is dyed with the deep crimson of the rose; her eye is placid and serene, and the gentleness of her speech is as the melting softness of the flute.

  Her smiles are as the enlivening rays of the sun; the beauty of her presence as the silver light of the moon.

  Her attire is simple; her feet tread with caution, and she feareth to give offence.

  The young and the old are enamoured with her sweetness; she carrieth her own commendation.

  She speaketh not the first in the conversation of women, neither is her tongue heard above her companions.

  She turneth not her head to gaze after the steps of men; she enquireth not of them whither they are going.

  She giveth not her opinion unasked, nor stoppeth her ears to that of another.

  She frequenteth not the public haunts of men, she enquireth not after the knowledge improper for her condition.

  So becoming is the behaviour of modesty, so lovely among the daughters of women!

  Is there who hath forgotten to blush, who playeth with the wanton glances of her eyes, who replenisheth the cup when the toast goes round, and despiseth the meekness of her sister.

  Shame shall overtake her in the prime of her days, and the years of her widowhood shall be infamous as they are many.

  Of course, Kenrick is defining—and reflecting upon—gender roles, a woman’s proper place in society. A woman’s job is to remain quiet, to be gentle, not to speak over others or to gaze after men but to keep her head on her stitching. She who breaks these rules will suffer a life of widowhood.

  Though Susan, of course, didn’t have the opportunity to attend Brown like her husband did, she attended high school and was educated for her time and class. In 1830, when Susan was seventeen, Hilton, her older brother, encouraged her to complete her schooling “in case she should have to support herself in the future.” Three years later, at twenty, she’d marry Hasell. Her sampler, “chain and cross-stitched,” as Bolton notes, was just a training ground for the sewing she’d do all her life, making dresses for herself, clothing for her husband and children, quilts and bedcovers and other goods for the home. The stitches around her hexagons are perfectly even, tiny stitches. It’s hard for anyone who wasn’t raised like Susan, sewing by hand every day, to make such perfect stitches.

  While Ethel Bolton argues that samplers such as Susan’s ch
ildhood piece are unoriginal, material-culture studies theorist Roszika Parker would have taken issue with Bolton’s argument, noting that many women modified samplers and staid sayings to speak their own voices and undermine social strictures placed on women. Parker’s analysis focuses on the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, explaining how embroidery has both “constrained” women and offered them “a weapon of resistance.” She traces examples of samplers with images of power, along with other forms of subversion, like Polly Cook’s sampler, embroidered with, “Polly Cook did it and she hated every stitch she did in it.” Parker cites women who spoke out against the inculcation of femininity through embroidery. For example, “Sixteenth-century feminist poet Louise Labé of Lyon had no doubt that the demand for women to practice domestic arts prevented them from doing anything else . . . Domestic arts were equated with virtue because they ensured that women remain at home and refrain from book learning. Ignorance was equated with innocence; domesticity was a defence against promiscuity.” In the nineteenth-century middle class, femininity was bound up in the relationship between mothers and daughters: “The key to the hold embroidery and femininity established over middle-class women was that it became implicated in an intense relationship, shot through with as much guilt, hatred, and ambivalence as love.” The “cult of domesticity” relied upon the association of femininity, domesticity, and chastity. As David Jaffee notes, the development of the parlor as an important space in the mid- to late 1800s was part of this “cult of domesticity.” “The Bixbys, like many other provincial families throughout the northeast, fashioned a parlor for performing the rituals of social life.”