An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  If they were from Charleston or the surrounding Lowcountry, they’d have spoken in the Gullah Geechee language, with its quick turns and the uplift and downfall of sound. When English becomes Geechee, it’s almost indecipherable to my ears. This must have come in handy, to have a language that retained words from West African languages, that was difficult for people outside the community to understand. If one needed to tell a secret, if one needed to convey news of a relative who had been sold away, if one wanted to make fun of one’s owner, maybe language made some degree of liberty—and resistance—possible.

  “Thus, these seemingly isolated episodes reaching back to the nineteenth century and carrying forward to the twenty-first, once fitted together like pieces in a mosaic, reveal a portrait of a nation: one that is the unspoken truth of our racial divide.”

  —Carol Anderson, White Rage

  One May morning in 2015, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it was sunny and cold, the taste of spring still new. A horse-drawn carriage sat at the top of a hill near the center of town, amidst colonial homes. In the wagon, handmade casks held the remains of thirteen people who were brought to the state in the 1600s, enslaved. There was a chief present from Nigeria, the native land of the enslaved people. He’d been invited there to perform a ceremony to rebury the bodies. They’d been exhumed twelve years earlier, in 2003, when they were discovered during construction in what had been an African burial ground. Instead of continuing with construction and destroying the burial ground as has been done in many other places, the team stopped to alert authorities. The bones were exhumed, studied, and identified. And so the citizens of Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, a small state whose motto is “Live free or die,” a state composed of liberals and conservatives, the working class, middle-class city people, academics, and wealthy vacationers, chose to halt construction of the road and to build a memorial to the enslaved people there. They changed the plans they had for the city, dedicated those grounds for the memorial, and began a project that took more than ten years and changed the course of the place. On the morning I visited, hundreds of people gathered in the memorial square to witness the burial. A group of drummers played while men wearing black carried the caskets from a horse-drawn carriage, through the crowd, down to the memorial where the new grave awaited. The pine casks were made by a woodworker, fashioned to fit together in the shape of a heart in the new tomb. Hearing the drums, watching the pallbearers, the crowd was silent.

  That sunny day, the chief stood before the crowd. “I will start with Igbo, because that is my mother tongue, which the departed would understand,” said the chief. He wore a long white robe and a red cap, and he blew through an elephant tusk.

  “Is that okay, if I speak in Igbo?” he asked the crowd.

  The crowd called back, “Yes.”

  “I will speak in Igbo, and then I will translate. We are standing on a burial ground,” he said. “They were forgotten, as we say in Africa, ‘It is an abomination.’”

  The crowd was hushed and listening. The morning air was cold, and a wind blew across our heads.

  “People waited underground for hundreds of years for the action committee to take action—waited for the backhoe to come and dig them up—‘We have been stilled for a long time, and now thank you for finding us.’ We are not here to mourn them because they are mourned and grieved by those who knew them. We’re not here to honor them as individuals but as our ancestors. In this tomb and grave, you will find peace, always. We will grant them a quiet resting place—that’s why this road has been blocked off. When you want to be still and remember, you come here.

  He asked the crowd to repeat after him, in Igbo. We did.

  “These are elders and young people underground. We have some sense of their suffering from the research. We commit their graves to the ground. A grave is a ‘cave of honor.’ May God grant you everlasting peace.”

  The grave where the caskets were set, before they were covered. Behind them stand figures engraved with phrases written by the memorial artist, Jerome Meadows, including, “I stand for the Ancestors Here and Beyond,” “I stand for those who feel anger,” and “I stand for those who were taken from their loved ones,” “I stand for those who find dignity in these bones.”

  He blew again through the elephant tusk. He sprinkled soil that came from Nigeria and Zimbabwe and Portsmouth, the lands of the people whose bodies were buried there. He sprinkled it onto the caskets. As the crowd walked away, we walked over the engravings of petitions made by enslaved people for their freedom, as Mum Bett, or Elizabeth Freeman, petitioned for—and won—her freedom in Massachusetts in 1781. I think of Harriet Wilson’s words that “slavery’s shadow falls even there,” in the north.

  I think of Flora Stewart, born in 1750 in Virginia or New Hampshire, enslaved, who lived to be 118 years old. Her picture was published in the paper a year before she died. She wore fine clothes with ruffled embellishments, black gloves, a white ruffled collar, her hand on a cane. She lived through the American Revolution, the Mexican-American War, all of the so-called “Indian” wars, in which Native nations fought for their lands, and the Civil War. She died in 1868, six years before Juba Simons died in South Carolina, where we leave this story.

  As we grapple with how we’ll treat one another in a system built on genocide, the theft of lands, and enslavement, we’re confronted by more hate, we’re butting up against one another, never having had this conversation fully, never having had the sort of reconciliation that South Africa and Germany had to address their histories. Beverly Morgan-Welch said at the occasion of the burial in Portsmouth, “As we celebrate the country’s liberty and freedom and justice in documents that are beautiful to understand and live out, we have to understand that that freedom has not been afforded to everyone. We must understand this history or we continue to be confounded by how we live together.”

  A section of the “mosaic” quilt top with papers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

  How will we, as a nation, begin, walk through, this conversation?

  This past continues to reemerge fully into the present. Those phrases I heard back in college—“Go home, Yankee!” “The South will rise again!” “The flag is my heritage, not hate.”—are regularly in the news, as we begin to talk more openly about our collective history and to see that history emerge in pop culture. More Hollywood movies are being made about enslaved people and enslavement. Tammy Denease says this is a good thing but that she wants to see more varied representations of people of color, to see many black actors in Hollywood films and TV rather than just a few.

  I reexamine my teaching, every semester, asking myself which stories I’m teaching in my classes, and which I’m omitting. Which stories do I seek, and what do I have yet to learn?

  Pursuing the story of the quilt tops, interrogating this abrasion, has changed my life. I no longer see this country, these fabrics, the stories of the world around me, in the same way. I dive back into all the gaps in my knowledge of history, eager to listen, read, and learn more. I push myself to attend more events on campus and in my travels, to learn the histories of the places I visit as well as the nation I inhabit—and to keep learning it, knowing that history will never be static.

  After learning about the Bangladesh collapse, and of Gap and H&M’s horrific working conditions in Cambodian textile factories, I learn that Nestlé confessed to using enslaved people to fish in Thailand and tried to deny responsibility for using enslaved children to harvest cocoa on the Ivory Coast. I learn that the people who pick Florida tomatoes are, for all intents and purposes, indentured servants. I find that the region a few hours south of my new home in Michigan is the center of the US sex slave trade, and that, along the east coast, the sex slave trade now follows the same routes as the 19th century slave trade did, from Savannah to Charleston, up to Baltimore, then to Bristol, Salem. During a road trip one summer, when I stop at a rest area along Route 95, I close the bathroom stall door to find a sign that asks if I am being held against my
will, tells me that if I am, I should call this number.

  For me, learning this story will never be over.

  When I get inoculations before traveling, which seem to most Americans like easy preventatives, I think of those epidemics of smallpox, the Williamses’ fear of yellow fever, and outbreaks of cholera. I hear on the news that there’s a new cholera epidemic in Yemen. I know that when I’m in Bali, a low-risk region for malaria, I can to protect myself with bug spray, and in higher risk countries, I can take pills to prevent infection. These pills offer me far better odds than people would have had in the nineteenth century, than many people still have today in countries around the world. In 2015, the CDC reports, 212 million people were reported to be infected with malaria, and 429,000 of those people died from the disease, most of them children.

  Instead of buying more new fabric, I look for used fabric and unfinished projects. I recently bought a hexie quilt made from 1930s fabric and thought of Franklin, finishing his ancestors’ quilt tops one hundred years after they’d been started. Now, I piece together a backing for the 1930s top, add new cotton batting, and machine-quilt through its layers, completing what someone else left behind. There are thousands of such unfinished projects leftover from sewers who ran out of time, leaving behind clues to their eras, cultures, and tastes.

  I still feel the 1830s mosaic quilt and its papers in my hands, still hear the sound of the needle pulling through fabric—maybe Susan’s, maybe Jane’s. I see Jane’s hands in the light of fires in the hearth and candles on the tables, the glow on her face as she thinks about, let’s say, her brother who lives three doors down and shared fresh peaches with her this afternoon. How sweet they were, she thinks, as she directs the needle through the cotton and then back up again, drawing the thread through with that soothing ssshhhh sound. I think of the love between Boston and his wife Mary. The baptism of Francis, son of Isaac and Louisa.

  I think of Juba Simons, and imagine her walking through 1870s Charleston, stopping at a bakery her friend owns at the start of her day, moving through the pre-dawn hours to get to work. She’d have seen the light come up over the bay, glistening at the horizon and then blossoming into pinks and blues as it spread across the sky. She’d have saved every penny she could to help her children make new and better lives. She’d have known how hard she fought to live to see this day. She’d have walked down streets she’d known for decades, have witnessed their destruction and slow rebuilding after the war, have helped her community by supporting her church and schools, have seen friends beaten and murdered at whites’ hands, have seen friends emancipate themselves by fleeing or buying their freedom, have masterfully navigated an oppressive and ever-threatening system to make it to this day, and likely continued to work hard to support herself and her family.

  I see the photographer setting up his camera as he asks Juba Simons to settle into her seat and find stillness. I see her fold her hands in her lap, sit up as straight as she can, raise her chin, stare into the lens, and wait those few seconds the wet plate needed to record her image. I see her in that pause, the suspended quiet before her life goes on, and wonder what she thinks about in those seconds.

  I struggle to let go of these people from the past, to stop pushing to find more clues to their stories. I have found all that I can, for now.

  In 1838, Minerva is still alive, and she holds her baby boy, Samon, in her arms. Imagine that we see Minerva and Samon in a church in Charleston on his baptism day, with little Cecilia beside them, and Juba and her children and Eliza and Jane in attendance, too. There, let’s imagine, is the baby’s father, Minerva’s husband. It’s a day for celebration. This is a day of hope, even though she knows she is soon to face her sale at Susan’s and Winthrop’s hands. For today, there is only Samon. Do you see the baby in the church, surrounded by people who love him? Think of all the hope they feel that day, watching the water run across their child’s forehead. Here is Samon’s baptism and Bishroom’s marriage at a time when it is illegal for enslaved people to be married or to have a child baptized. Do you hear the voices singing behind Minerva, as she holds Samon in her arms and Cecilia leans into her legs? The whole congregation celebrates this day—mother and child survived the labor and birth, sweet Samon is healthy—and then, as the water falls across his head, he wails. What joy or relief or fear did his parents feel that day? They would know, with the baptism, that no matter what happens to him, he’ll find heaven.

  Here is the quietest moment, between Minerva and Samon. The world around them stops as she looks at her child. She is telling him, now, how much she loves him. She is urging him to know this, to remember her touch. And she tries to seal into her memory the soft nestle of his skin against her face as she bounces and shushes him back to sleep on her shoulder, soothing, the pastor and the people around her singing in words that become a blur; she closes her eyes and prays for her child.

  Illustrations Insert

  The three Crouch quilt tops (Susan and Hasell composed the one in the middle image together), which began the author's investigation into the lives of Eliza, Juba, and Minerva, the enslaved women who worked for the Crouch family.

  Detail of the back of the “hexies” of the Crouch quilt top.

  Older snippets, “maintained,” and “master for” (probably referring to master for a ship, an oft-repeated phrase in the quilt top papers), enjambed with typed text on yellow paper, probably from the 1930s.

  The three quilt tops. Susan and Hasell likely designed and assembled the one on the far left in the 1830s and prepared many of the hexagons for the other two, which Franklin likely designed and assembled with his family members in the 1930s.

  One of Emily Crouch’s watercolors, ships in the distance.

  Hexagon flower from quilt made by “a negro seamstress in 1780” on the Darsyton Hall Plantation, Charleston, SC. Images courtesy of the American Museum in Britain.

  Anna Williams (American, 1927–2010). Quilt, 1995. Cotton, synthetics, 76 1⁄4 × 61 1⁄2 in. (193.7 × 156.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift in memory of Horace H. Solomon, 2011.18.

  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.

  Cabin where enslaved people lived on the Wavering Place Plantation outside Columbia, SC, where the author visited at Shana Adams's invitation.

  The ruins of the “slave quarters” and the great Ceiba tree at San Isidro de Los Destiladeros in Cuba.

  Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy—enslaved women about to be subjected to medical experiments after they were taken to a plantation of Montgomery in 1845 to be the subjects of Dr. Marion Sims. Illustration of Dr. J. Marion Sims with Anarcha by Robert Thom. Credit: Courtesy of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Pearson Museum.

  Dr. Eliza Grier ca. 1897. She earned her medical degree from the Woman’s College of Pennsylvania, where, in the 1890s, female medical students embroidered this pillow sham, simultaneously proving and subverting their domestic training. Image courtesy of Drexel University College of Medicine.

  Detail of one of the squares of Harriet Powers’s Pictorial quilt. Powers’s description of this square is: “The falling of the stars on Nov. 13, 1833. The people were frightened and thought that the end had come. God’s hand staid the stars. The varmints rushed out of their beds.” Courtesy of Bequest of Maxim Karolik. Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

  Harriet Powers’s stunning Leonids Quilt. Harriet Powers, American, 1837–1910, Pictorial quilt, American (Athens, Georgia), 1895–98, Cotton plain weave, pieced, appliqued, embroidered, and quilted, 68 7/8 x 105 in. (175 x 266.7 cm). Credit: Bequest of Maxim Karolik, 64.619. Photograph © 2018 Museu
m of Fine Arts Boston.

  A Sermon in Patchwork by Harriet Powers. This quilt is held at the Smithsonian and is the first quilt Powers made. Courtesy of the Division of Home and Community Life, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

  Details of the Crouch quilt top with the “Havana” backing, along with “knowledge” and “friend.”

  Interior of the slave quarters at Magnolia Plantation.

  Joseph McGill in front of the Magnolia Plantations and Gardens cabin where enslaved and then free people lived.

  A section of the “mosaic” quilt top with papers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

  All images of the Crouch quilt top on pages 1, 2, 3, 14, and 16 of this insert are courtesy of the Historic Textile and Costume Collection, University of Rhode Island. Photos taken by the author.

  Sources

  The following sources directly and indirectly influenced the development of various aspects of this book. Sources are also listed by chapter, to more specifically cite information included in each.

  Collections

  The Cushman Collection & Accession Records, Historic Textile and Costume Collection, The University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI.

  Elijah Williams Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI

  MSS 9001-C Box 15, Crouch/Cushman, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI