An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  Was the freedom to gallop on a thousand-pound animal in a race run by both blacks and whites “false” at a time when enslaved men weren’t allowed to ride a horse in the street, for whites’ fear of what they might do if given access to four legs and such speed? Think how it must have felt to sit atop a horse and push the animal as hard as it could go, around the track, wind in your ears, hands shifting with the motion of the horse against its rough mane, the sound of its hooves and its breath coming hard through flared nostrils, the feeling of its legs gathering and reaching underneath you, the blur of the audience alongside the track, the sound of their hollers. Imagine being able to scream for the jockey of your choice in a city where your voice and body would have always been monitored for obedience and subservience, how good that must have felt to let your voice go, to call out, and to laugh with friends when your jockey—maybe even a friend or relative—had won.

  What a triumph that would have been, even if it was for a master’s profit, at a time when your body was still considered chattel. You were in control of that animal, working with the horse to reach the finish line first. This was your talent, to know an animal well enough to work with it, to know when to ease the reins and when to lean forward or sink lower into the saddle, to read the ear spinning and twitching, to have spent years learning how to let your body move with the horse’s until you and the horse were as one. You were responsible for the victory. And you, in the audience, were able to move and shout and laugh in those moments, watching the race, as engaged as everyone else. This is not to say that enslaved people at the races had the same rights and freedoms as the white and free blacks around them, but to think about the ways they could have created—created and claimed for themselves—freedom and autonomy, within the constraints of the racist law. The chance to ride a horse, and fast, the chance to cheer and celebrate and laugh together at the races when blacks were prohibited from gathering, the chance to see friends and take one’s children out for a celebratory event—this was a way for enslaved people to claim autonomy in Charleston, in ways that people enslaved on plantations or in more rural towns could not do.

  People claimed moments of time as their own, in the moments before and after church services (the only time they were permitted to meet as a group), or at public events like the circus and the races. They’d have stood to holler at the races, or chatted for a few claimed moments at the general store owned by a woman of color, as they bought a treat for their child or loved one with money they’d earned from their own extra labor or crafted goods.

  In Harriet Powers’s quilt, she placed the hand of God in the block that describes the story of Adam and Eve, with the legged snake, before it evolved into the legless creature we know today. Adam and Eve hold hands, and we can see Adam’s rib, alongside the all-seeing eye in the sky beside God’s merciful hand. And there is God’s hand again in the square at the bottom, second from the left. Powers described these scenes, “The red light night of 1846. A man tolling the bell to notify the people of the wonder. Women, children and fowls frightened by God’s merciful hand caused no harm to them.” Was this Comet Biela, with its streaking tail, which they say split into two in the 1850s? There’s Moses lifting “the serpent” that I myself thought was a scythe when I first saw the quilt, and there are the animals, “two of every kind, male and female,” boarding Noah’s Ark, and the freezing day “10 of February, 1895,” and the “rich people who were taught nothing of God” enduring “everlasting punishment.” There’s a multiheaded sea monster, and Jonah being swallowed by the whale. This is an artful melding of religion and local history, astronomical wonders and nationally recognized events like the darkening of the sky during the wildfires and eclipse, the Leonids, the coldest day, illustrated with the woman freezing at the well. Harriet Powers called her quilt “a sermon.”

  Were Eliza, Minerva, and Jane making story quilts like this? Maybe, and maybe not. They may have been making the detailed patterned quilts like the hexagon top Susan and Hasell stitched together, so popular at the time among the white Charleston master class, or maybe they made pinwheels, drunkard’s paths, or great star quilts of hundreds of tiny triangles.

  Harriet Powers was born in 1837, the year Susan moved back to Providence and left Minerva, Eliza, Juba, and Jane in her brother Winthrop’s hands. Harriet Powers was far younger than the women who lived at 6 Cumberland Street those few years, and she lived on a small farm, not in the city. She was born into enslavement and, according to Jennie Smith, used to talk about the days before the Civil War.

  But though Eliza, Minerva, and Juba’s lives were shaped by different forces, they could have shared the same sense of history and faith as Harriet Powers—the combination of biblical stories that would have made up their childhoods, their days spent in city churches, Bible meetings, or at plantation services. They’d have heard of those legendary local events—deadly cold days, meteor showers, a comet streaking across the sky—that their mothers and elders had witnessed. And they, too, would have seen those falling stars in November 1833. People would have cried out in the streets, afraid for their lives, praying at the end of the world, and the commotion would have woken Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane, and they would have emerged from their houses to the scene of falling stars that Harriet Powers drew in fabric fifty years later, herself only learning about the event from secondhand sources, like Jauslin. I think of Jane, whom I know now was a seamstress, and wonder if she ever made her own version of the meteor shower, since she might have seen it herself. Did she embroider or appliqué a scene as Harriet Powers did, making her own art inspired by those bursts of light racing toward the earth?

  Eliza, Minerva, and Juba were likely religious, given their era, and affiliated with one or another of the churches in Charleston, perhaps the Cumberland Street church, or the Mother Emanuel AME. African Methodist Churches were hubs of black society, for both free and enslaved people. Free blacks could also be members of St. Philip’s, where Susan and Hasell had inherited a pew, but people of color weren’t permitted to be buried in the cemetery. This led “five members” of the church, “all men of mixed race and part of Charleston’s ‘brown elite’” to “foun[d] the Brown Fellowship Society” in 1790. Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane, as enslaved women, were far from the elite brown class in Charleston; they were subject to the stratification of the city and the harsh limits put on the lower classes, including enslaved women. In 1803, free people of color founded the Minor’s Moralist Society to “educat[e] indigent children of color;” both of these societies, like the master class’ benevolent societies, included men only. These groups, Kennedy notes, built in the days after the American Revolution, were constituted of the “palest and wealthiest free people of color.” When Sally Seymour, a baker who built her wealth through her business and came to buy four enslaved people of her own, oversaw the marriages of her light-skinned children, she made sure they “marry well, and in Charleston ‘well’ meant light-skinned.”

  At church, if they were able to attend, Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane would have mingled with free people of color who, if they weren’t the “elites,” would have been a mix of middle- and lower-class free people of color. They’d probably have heard of Sally Seymour’s success, as she’d transformed herself from an enslaved woman “manumitted” by her “white male owner, and likely the father of her children” in 1795, to a wealthy business owner, who was able to leave a $1,600 estate and four enslaved people to her children when she died in 1824. One of Mary Ancrum Walker’s relatives freed an enslaved woman and her “mulatto” child, which likely indicates that the child was the master’s. One of Harriet Thorne’s (Hilton’s wife) relatives married a free woman of color, and the couple had several children in Charleston. It’s impossible to see, from here, where the lines between love and oppression lie. I don’t know what was true for Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane, if any of these women found love and partners who offered them solace in a world that treated them harshly, nor if any of them were raped by
or chose to partner with white men.

  It’s very likely they found community, though, at church and at the Saturday-night market, for example, where they could have chatted with friends from the Sea Islands around Charleston; these people would have brought seafood to sell—shrimp, crabs, mussels, herring, sea bass, or grouper—and talked in a language unique to the Lowcountry islands; the Gullah Geechee people speak not a dialect but a language that’s derived in part from the West and Central African languages that enslaved people brought across the Atlantic, and in part from English. The Gullah Geechee are descended from the enslaved people who were brought to the islands, and they’ve been able to sustain the culture’s language, music, and religious practices as a result of the isolation of places like St. Helena Island, where sandy beaches stretch long and wide—tourists’ enticements—amid fishing and farming communities that have been there for centuries. These farms are now threatened by development. On nearby Hilton Head, now heavily touristed, bargain travelers and those out for a splurge can relax at multiplex beachside hotels and golf resorts that are destroying the fishing and farming that once supported the Gullah Geechee communities there.

  If we look closely at the falling stars in Harriet Powers’s quilt (detail), we can see how the circles of the stars are made not of a single piece of fabric but of multiple small triangles. Powers cut out each triangle, one by one, and then sewed them—front side to front side, with running stitches along the edges, then folded out the triangles and pressed them flat in a process that took skill and patience. She’d have cut out a shooting-star shape in the blue backing fabric, and then set into the blue each orange shooting star, one by one. She’d had to have been precise in clipping away the backing fabric and fitting it to the stars—too much cut away and she’d have gaps, too little and she’d have lumpy stars. It took a great deal of skill to piece those small triangles and set the stars into the blue square. She used a machine—something Jane could have only dreamed of—in addition to working by hand. Maybe she sat near her stove so she’d be near the iron and could press each star flat after piecing it, before setting it into the fabric.

  I imagine what Jane would think, if she could watch Harriet work on that quilt with a machine in the 1880s, zipping across seams that would have taken Jane hours upon hours, bent over her project in low evening light with the fabric in her left hand while her right wove the needle in and out. Jane may have lived to see the distribution of home sewing machines in the 1850s. Maybe she, too, experienced the thrill of pressing her foot on the lever at the bottom of the machine, over and over, and watching the magic of the needle rising and falling into fabric, drawing a stitch in its wake.

  See how, in Powers’s quilt, some of the stars have moon-slivered centers? And some are flowered? Powers was using what she had on hand—scraps and castoffs—and carefully coordinating the fabrics she chose with the spirit of the image—a night sky, a bloom of a shooting star, its white burst leading its streak.

  In 1972, when Gladys-Marie Fry saw one of Harriet Powers’s quilts for the first time, she was taken to the “museum’s lower level,” and watched, in awe, as the quilt was lifted from its box: “[The curator] took me to a storage facility on the museum’s lower level. There I watched as she removed the quilt from a box and from its acid-free paper. I am not sure I was breathing while watching this process. But at last the quilt was spread out on a worktable and I was handed a pair of white gloves. Then the curator said, ‘I have to return to make an important phone call. Do you mind staying here by yourself for a few minutes?’ At that she left, and, alone now, I touched the quilt, felt the raw, unprocessed cotton inside, looked closely at the various pieces of calico and other types of fabric Harriet Powers had used, and examined her quilting stitches, which I observed were fairly large to accommodate the raw cotton in the middle layer.”

  The second quilt that we know Powers made, held in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian, was made with batting the unprocessed cotton that came from the fields where her family lived and worked, when they were enslaved by a small-scale farmer in Georgia. Cotton was picked in the fields and brought to the cabin, where the family plucked out the seeds by hand, and then laid the carded cotton onto the backing to provide a batting before the top was added; finally, it would have been quilted. Powers’s mother would card and spin cotton into thread that the master’s wife then wove into cloth. Batting—the cotton in the center of the quilt—was processed in the textile mills along with fabric. But for this quilt, the cotton was left unprocessed, sewn into the center of the quilt as close to the bolls from the field as one could get. The Boston quilt, Ulrich explains, has a lining but no batting in the center, and so it isn’t formally quilted—the stitches that go through all three layers in the final process of making a quilt—because there’s nothing that needs to be held together in the layers of the fabric. And its dimensions are all wrong for a bed quilt. This quilt, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues, was made to be displayed as art, not as a bedcover.

  Fry was the first to make the connection between the Smithsonian’s quilt and the Boston MFA’s quilt, and the first to research Harriet Powers further, to learn about her life, finding her last name and then her photograph as well as the narratives she gave to Jennie Smith, who bought Powers’s quilts. That day in the museum in 1972, she writes: “My thoughts tumbled over each other. Harriet Powers’s hands had touched this fabric, composed this square. The connection I felt with her at that moment was mystical. Then the curator returned. As I left, I remember thanking her for agreeing to see me on an unscheduled visit, but my mind was in a daze. There are two of them! There are two of them!” She used to sit in the Smithsonian each week, visiting with the quilt just as Powers used to visit Smith’s house to see the art she had to sell to help support her family.

  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes that this research on Harriet Powers’s quilt that was “begun in the 1970s” spawned interest “among art historians, folklorists, collectors, and quilters themselves,” and set these makers off in various pursuits. She notes that this research “is still bearing fruit today, in landmark exhibits like those featuring the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, or in the establishment of community-based projects like the quilting collective at Tutwiler, Mississippi.” Powers’s quilt has become “an American icon,” and the Smithsonian “recently displayed it in an exhibit of ‘American treasures’ alongside Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, and Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz.” When Alice Walker saw the quilt in the seventies, she wrote, “In the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quiltmaking, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling.” She writes that the quilt was made by an “anonymous Black woman in Alabama,” as this was before the story had been unfolded by Kyra E. Hicks, Gladys Marie-Fry, and others. But like the historians tracing Harriet Powers’s and her quilts’ stories, Walker recognized artistry in the quilt. As Ulrich writes, Powers was the product of her time, focusing on “sunbursts” and other images that were popular when she made the quilt; Powers’s work is the product of a decidedly American quilt-making tradition, with its range of patterns and styles, Ulrich emphasizes, concurring with Cuesta Benberry to dispel the myth that had been espoused earlier, that Powers’s aesthetic is a Dahomian one, brought from Africa. Powers was part of communities of women who were making quilts with similar images, but Powers is unique, Ulrich argues, as an artist who “innovate[ed]” on the forms that were popular, making them singular, her own. The colors she chose, the way she portrayed the whale and giraffes she likely saw in a circus, and the people staring up at the stars in fear—these choices are distinctly hers. These quilts are evidence of Powers’s aesthetic; her
combination of fabrics and figures, her arrangement and ordering of stories make these “sermon[s] in patchwork” art.

  It was a spring day, and I’d wanted to see the quilt ever since I first learned of it years ago, and then suddenly realized that it was here at the Boston MFA, just half an hour from my apartment. It was ten years ago, I’d just started quilting, and I was having a hard year. Working with the fabrics—the bright colors, the cotton in my hands—had been a saving grace. I came home from work, sat down at the tiny quilting sewing machine I kept at my dining room table, and I sewed—first quilts, and then, with the scraps, pictures. They were the only thing that made me feel better.

  I went to the museum because this quilt had been on my mind for years, and I suspect I’d internalized it. I’d gazed at images in books for years, devoured Kyra E. Hicks’ publication of sources connected to the quilts. I probably started making story quilts out of scraps because of my love for Harriet Powers’s quilts. When I visualize her quilt and the stories of her falling stars in the Boston MFA quilt, I fall in love all over again with the colors that riff and fall together and make a sense of tension, a story, of their own. When Powers’ quilt was shown at the Cotton Exposition in 1895, some people complained that her colors were too outrageous, that she must have been color-blind not to have seen the way they glared against each other. When I look at the quilts in a book, I love the colors, though I’m not seeing them as they would have been back then—vivid, saturated. Now they’ve faded under the years of sunlight they endured before they were bought by the museums.

  I walked through the museum, winding my way between objects in the folk-art exhibit. The quilt was only on display for a few weeks at a time, to protect it from sunlight. This was a sliver of time, my chance to see it. Finally, at the back of the exhibit, on one of the side walls, there it was: Harriet Powers’s work of art, and there, thanks to the work of Kyra E. Hicks and Gladys Marie-Fry, was Harriet Powers’s name and birth date and photograph, along with a description of each of the squares.