by Rachel May
The back of the exhibit hall was dim, and there was a glass door leading to a hallway to the right of the quilt. A family walked behind me and through the door. I squatted down on the floor, dropped my things, and sat down cross-legged in front of the quilt. I lost my breath, stunned to see it in person—the people looking at the stars, Job, the whale, the animals of Noah’s Ark, the strip of stained fabric on the right side. I assumed the fabric was stained after the quilt was made, but as the stain is bound by the seams, it was made beforehand. “Why did she choose stained fabric?” asks Ulrich—questions to which we still don’t have answers. I looked at the red stars against the black square, at Job’s coffin, at the perfectly spotted giraffes, thinking about how she must have picked up that polka-dotted fabric from a pile, and settled on it with satisfaction, knowing it would become those creatures. How she cut the shapes out one by one, and then sewed them on, with patience, turning each square into a story.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the quilt, in the quiet space at the back of the folk-art section, thinking about the long trail, the many days, between Harriet Powers’s birth in 1837 and this moment in what we call the new millennium. Now, almost another decade later, I think of that moment when I got to see the quilt firsthand, and I imagine Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane, and the objects they could have made—sweetgrass baskets, inventively embellished clothes, quilts—that just haven’t survived, or if someone, somewhere, cherishes something made by an unknown woman, her hands that created that piece, which will never be attributed to her. Maybe, as Alice Walker argues, these four women, like so many, redirected their artistic skills into “everyday” objects and practices—making a perfect loaf of brown bread each morning, keeping fresh-cut flowers she’d grown herself on the dining room table, pulling dead buds from the blooming flowers in the garden. Maybe the woman who made the objects isn’t unknown at all, but is someone’s great great great great great grandmother, and the stories of her life have been carried down orally through each generation. It’s possible that somewhere, Eliza’s, Minerva’s, Juba’s, and Jane’s stories are still being told today, by their descendants.
I used to resent Susan and Hasell’s archive, the hexagon quilt that’s been so carefully preserved to tell the story of the white family, while silencing the stories of the enslaved women who made Susan’s life function and helped build her family’s wealth that carried her through her own personal tragedy. But I find myself turning now, as grateful for the archive as I am resentful of its erasures. Susan and Hasell, and Winthrop and Hilton, mentioned in their letters the enslaved people whose names might otherwise have been lost. They’re there in the letters, and in the contracts and estate records, their bodies misappropriated, disrespected, objectified—but also, ironically, their lives are more fully described there, too. If it weren’t for the advertisement of Jane’s sale, for example, I’d never have known that she was a seamstress. If it weren’t for Hilton’s and Winthrop’s hateful and dismissive notes about Minerva’s new baby, I’d never have known that she had a child that October; I wouldn’t have discovered his name unless he’d been listed in the sale alongside his sister Cecilia—a baby boy named Samon. I’m still angry at the ways the women are objectified by whites throughout the archive; in every instance in which Winthrop, Hilton, or Susan mention the women, and in every instance in which I find the enslaved women’s names in contracts, they are being documented as objects and possessions. I’m frustrated that I can’t find more about them because they were seen by Susan and Hasell, and the culture more generally, as only objects with prices and costs. I’m angry at Susan, Winthrop, and Hilton for betraying what I used to think were their abolitionist roots. But the mention of the names of the enslaved people offers an opening, to tell a different story than the one Susan and Hasell intended to preserve. The beauty of the tenderly preserved quilt tops is a frustration, too, in light of so much from the enslaved peoples’ lives that was not preserved; nonetheless, the quilt tops provide an unexpected key to stories I wouldn’t otherwise have known: Minerva, Eliza, Juba, Cecilia, Samon, Jane, William, George, John, Bishroom, and Boston. These are people we can come to know, even if ever so slightly. And with each detail, we learn that they lived full lives in spite of the conditions into which they were born.
8
Even There
The Fox, a sloop, The Betsey, The George, The Polly, The Harvest, The Friendship, The Nancy, Trial, Washington—all sloops except The George, which is a schooner. In 1811 and 1813 in Charleston Harbor, there are The Rambler, The Cock, The Dolphin, The Leader, The Little Sarah, The Patty—sloops and schooners, too. In 1835, there’s a sloop called Susan, in 1836, The Teazer, in the 1840s, The Bibilla, Eunice Ann, Mary-Gold, Abby, Northerner, and West Wind; in the 1870s, there are The White Star, The Whiz, a steamer, The Wild Goose II, The Wilful, and the Witch of the Waves. This last sloop/schooner, Witch of the Waves, built in Edgartown, Massachusetts, in 1873; there’s a renowned Witch of the Wave schooner that was launched from New Hampshire in 1851. I think of the lore of water witches, mermaids who could control the sea, and the busts of women set on the prow as if to push the ship forward; I think of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1830 novel The Water Witch, in which a Frenchwoman is kidnapped by a pirate and then saved by her beau, who follows the ship to rescue her, a romance.
Small mercantile sea-craft building was big business, and every ship is traceable. The shipbuilders, owners, and ports all dutifully kept logbooks that can lead us to the stories of what was carried in their berths—what sort of cargo, and whether that cargo was sometimes human. Studies have been made of these ships, digital illustrations of the trips that slavers made across the sea, by decade, have been developed, so that we can see the scale of this trade. If you live on the East Coast of the United States, in any state, you can find this history along your shores. It takes only a little digging.
Did you know that the first slaving ship to sail from the United States was built in Massachusetts, the state we hail as one of our most progressive? It was built in Marblehead, a town built on rocks with darling colorful colonial houses that rise up from the shoreline. I learned this story from the work of Lisa Braxton and Alex Reid, journalists who describe the Desire’s entry to Boston Harbor in 1638, carrying the first enslaved people forcibly brought to these shores in an American-built ship.
In Marblehead and Salem, there’s no marker about the Desire, no note about the salted cod that the fishermen caught there that was shipped to the Caribbean to feed enslaved people on the plantations, no marker about the enslaved people who must have worked along the shoreline and on the small farms in the area, tilling rocky soil to harvest food from the lands where Wampanoag people had always lived, or helping to build ships with their carpentry skills. Instead of marking these histories in Marblehead, there are white wooden plaques on all the houses with the dates the houses were built and the occupations of their builders. There are four yacht clubs, and every night in the summertime, two of them set off heart-stopping cannons at sunset, a tradition locals seem to cherish.
My mother grew up in the town next door, Salem, land of our witch trials, and I learned to sail with my grandfather at the “working man’s” boat club that was in what used to be the French-Canadian neighborhood, where he grew up speaking French with other immigrant families; this neighborhood had become, by the time I was in high school, the Puerto Rican neighborhood. My grandfather would bemoan the changing neighborhood, the new violence he perceived the Puerto Ricans to have brought, forgetting that his parents, too, had come to this country from another place and spoken a foreign tongue. French was his first language. I recognized and challenged his racism, but I didn’t know how deeply rooted racism was in that place. I didn’t know, back in high school—nor was I ever taught—the history of enslavement that northerners own.
I drove over the bridge from South County, Rhode Island, out of the woods where my house had sat tucked into trees (and before that, when the woods had been clea
rcut, set between fields) for almost two hundred eighty years. Every hurricane and northeaster snowstorm, I marveled at its fortitude. It still had most of its old leaded glass windowpanes, and the original wide pine floor planks. I never lost power in that house, even when everyone around me had. Maybe it was luck; maybe it was protected, somehow. I find myself beginning to believe in spirits.
I wound up the coast, past stone walls in green fields, past sections of woods, and then the bushes and trees fall away for the great reveal of the sea to the east. It sparkles, a promise in the distance. I think of all the people who were carried across that sea, by their own volition and against their will. I drove east, over the bridge to Jamestown Island, following the same trails George Washington followed so long ago when he met with Rochambeau, and then over another bridge to reach Newport. I turned into the cemetery that lines the main road that tourists drive all summer; they idle at the stoplight beside the cemetery, waiting to get to the restaurants, bars, and sailboats on the harbor.
I emerged from the car into the humidity of a hot July day, and met up with three women, one of their daughters, and Keith Stokes, a local historian. For decades, Keith has been researching and documenting God’s Little Acre, which he and his wife, Theresa Guzmán-Stokes, write about on their website, calling it “America’s Colonial African Cemetery.” On this afternoon, Keith told us stories of this place that you won’t hear at the docks where people pay hundreds to hold their boats for a night, nor at the bars where a man working the raw bar knifes open oysters and tourists drink into the morning, nor at the glamorous hotels buttressed by blue hydrangeas that spill over white picket fences and meandering stone walls. This cemetery stands outside the old town, protected by an iron gate along that busy main road and up a sloping, grassy hill.
Keith Stokes has an archive. He does the work Franklin did in saving Susan’s and Hasell’s quilt top and preserving, documenting, and donating the family collection of letters and furniture; he is a careful curator. Keith’s family has been in Newport since the 1800s, and he has photographs of his relatives sitting on great lawns, waists cinched in corsets, necks prettied up in ties, children in summer whites. He knows the stories of his ancestors who came from Jamaica, has visited the plantation where they were enslaved in the 1700s, has been made an honorary citizen of that country. He can hold photographs of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather. He is uncommonly lucky to know the whole of his past, to be able to hold the document that marked the 1770 “installation of Reverend Samuel Hopkins of the First Congregational Church in Newport,” to show an image of his great-uncle, Newport’s first “dentist of African heritage,” who graduated from the Howard University College of Dentistry in 1896.
Few African Americans can so fully trace their genealogies, as Keith can, back to the days of slavery. It’s often possible to trace to the Civil War, when the Freedmen’s Bureau was established and kept records of formerly enslaved people. But before 1865, the trail usually slips away because, of course, people were treated as property, bought and sold, not permitted to take last names, not permitted to stay with their families—sold apart from each other, trails lost and broken. I followed Eliza and Minerva and Juba and Jane from their previous owner to the Crouches to—what at first appeared to be a blank space. Or an opening into what we can only imagine are the threads that lead to their descendants. There are no existing contracts for the women in 1837-8, but the people who bought them are listed in the inventory, revealing where the women next lived. We know that W or Mr. Greer, in either case a city resident, bought Minerva, Samon, and Cecilia—so Minerva was able to stay with her children for the time being. George was sold to James S. Burges, who died in 1850; there’s no mention of George in Burges’ estate records. George’s trace in the paper archives ends. Jane was sold to Mr. Walker. Did she sew for his wife? Work as a maid or housekeeper? Winthrop appears to have kept Eliza for some time, probably continuing to rent her out to the man who had been renting her. John, age seven, was sold to Winthrop, and there’s no record of Juba’s sale. Maybe she got to stay with the boy who was probably her son, John, as well as Sorenzo, if Winthrop bought her and her sixteen year old son, too. I know so little about Eliza, except that she, Minerva, and George were allowed, when they were owned by Susan and Hasell, to rent themselves out and keep part of their earnings, the majority going to Susan and Hasell. Did they save enough to eventually buy their freedom, or that of their families?
When Keith and I first met, months earlier, at the Empire coffee shop (a fitting name for this story) in Newport, he told me he has a doll from his ancestors’ days of enslavement. This doll dates to 1830. She wears a brown scarf on her head, a belt over her apron and skirt, a plaid shirt, and a pair of bright red shoes, which peek out from beneath the skirt like a song of hope. How have those shoes stayed so vibrant in the course of almost two hundred years?
She has two eyes stitched on either side of a nose that juts out from her face with the gift of stuffing, and two high cheekbones. Her shirt is fraying at the edges, a piece made to do for a doll’s top, gathered at the neck, and tucked into the dirt-stained skirt and apron. This, too, is a raw-edged scrap, not like Harriet Powers’s pride of an apron with its carefully hemmed edges and two sunbursts appliquéd or embroidered onto its crisp white surface. But in the doll’s era, each piece of fabric would have been a treasure. The doll’s bright red toes are worn, as though she’s walked or danced in a child’s hands, moving across the surface of a table or the ground. Maybe, at one time, this doll had a friend or a husband with whom she walked and played. Maybe this doll accompanied her child to bed each night, tucked under the child’s arm to comfort her to sleep, comforts changing little from then to now. I think of Cecilia, Minerva’s baby girl, who might have played with a doll like this one, made by her mother or by Jane, from scraps of her other projects. I imagine the tenderness with which a woman stitched this doll together, the same love that inspired the embroidery of a sack by Ruth Middleton, recounting her great grandmother Rose’s gift to her daughter Ashley when the little girl was sold away from her.
Years after I saw a picture of Keith Stokes’s doll, I encountered a doll from the same era, 1830, in Galena, Illinois, hundreds of miles from God’s Little Acre and Newport, Rhode Island. I had followed Joe McGill to Galena, and found myself standing with a group of students in a house built in 1828. I was there to learn about the Kinzies, who came there from Missouri, and the enslaved people they brought with them. Of course, just eight years before the Kinzies arrived in Galena, in 1820, Missouri had been made a part of the Union through the Missouri Compromise, which permitted Missouri to join as a slave state, in tandem with Maine, a free state, and established the Mason Dixon line above which no slave states could exist. And yet, in 1828, the Kinzies brought their enslaved people to Illinois, a supposedly northern and free state, and their enslaved people remained enslaved.
Cloth embroidered in memory of Rose and her daughter Ashley; this piece is from the Middleton Place in South Carolina and is now exhibited at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
We visited Galena on a rainy April day, and the interior of the house felt even colder than the exterior. The group shivered through the tour, our arms crossed tight against our bodies. I imagined how a woman named Louisa, who lived and worked here, would have felt to have woken in the house early in the morning to light the fires, the chill she would have felt through her dress and petticoats, the wool shawl around her shoulders barely enough to stave off a piece of the chill.
On the floor of one of the front bedrooms, beside the small child’s bed, there was a tiny four-poster bed, within which lay this doll with a walnut head, tucked underneath a tiny handmade quilt of one-inch hexagons whose pattern was similar to Susan and Hasell’s quilt. These were calico hexagon flowers surrounded by white hexagons that made the “background” for the flowers. The calicos were flowered, red gingham, brown zigzags, so similar to the quilt I�
��d known these six years. A child must have made this quilt for practice, or her mother, teaching her child as she stitched for the doll, making her home the domestic space into which she’d have been proud to invite friends. This bedroom where the doll lay under her quilt was beside the front stairs, which led to the front parlor and front entryway.
Twenty yards away, toward the back of the house, there was another room under the gables, a room through which the chimney rose from the kitchen; this room was beside the back stairs, and Joseph McGill, the leader of The Slave Dwelling Project, who brought us here, had been waiting to see these stairs. Downstairs, minutes earlier, he’d asked our guide about these back stairs when she pointed out the fine front entrance and the fine front stairs and the piano that the lady of the house used to play.
Everything in this house is from the 1830s, when the Kinzies lived here, though these objects didn’t belong to their family; they’d been gathered and installed here to replicate how the home might have looked then. John Kinzie was an Indian agent, sent to Illinois to “manage” the Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Winnebago nations who lived in the area. John’s wife, Juliette, wrote an account of her time in Illinois, describing the Native Americans in all the offensive language that was common then—they were drunks, savages, children to be tamed and tended to by her husband, John. She wanted to observe their burial rituals, she mocked what she called “a powwow,” misattributing its purpose. She had nicknames for some of the people she respected least, and when we visited, the tour guide was eager to repeat these cruel nicknames for us, as if these were the names by which the people had wished to be known. When the guide told the names to us, she paused and chuckled, as if she was waiting for us to laugh with her.