Luisa Cazorla Torrado

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION Black Stitches: African American Women‘s Quilting and Story Telling

Supervised by Dr. Belén Martín Lucas 2020

International Doctoral School

Belén Martín Lucas DECLARES that the present work, entitled ―Black Stitches: African American Women‘s Quilting and Story Telling‖, submitted by Luisa Cazorla Torrado to obtain the title of Doctor, was carried out under her supervision in the PhD programme ―Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in Advanced English Studies.‖ This is a joint PhD programme integrating the Universities of Santiago de Compostela (USC), A Coruña (UDC), and Vigo (UVigo). Vigo, September 1, 2020. The supervisor,

Dr. Belén Martín Lucas Acknowledgements

I would like to say thanks:

To my mother, M. Carmen, for encouraging me to keep sewing every day, no matter what; to my sister, María, for always bringing new light whenever my eyes were getting weary; to my friend, Belén, for showing me how to adjust the quilt frame; to my supervisor, Belén, for helping me find a better thread and for teaching me how to improve my stitches; and to my sons, Alejandro and Daniel, for reminding me of the ―big pattern‖ whenever I would forget the reasons why I was sewing this quilt.

I couldn‘t have done this without your sustained encouragement and support during all these years. Table of contents

Acknowledgements ...... 4 Table of contents ...... 5 Resumo ...... 7 Introduction ...... 17 0.1.Objectives ...... 19 0.2. Methodology ...... 23 0.3. Structure ...... 26 Part 1: Shaping Herstory: African American quilts as witnesses of their times ...... 31 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American quilting tradition: from its beginnings to the late nineteenth century ...... 33 1.1.African American women quilters in the antebellum South . 33 1.2. The role of quilting bees in slavery times ...... 49 1.3. Some connections between abolitionism and quilts ...... 58 1.4. African American women‘s quilts in the postbellum years .. 80 Chapter 2. Transformations in African American quilting between the early twentieth century and contemporary times ...... 103 2.1. African American women quilters in the early twentieth century 103 2.2. The influence of African-American art in the Civil Rights era. A case in point: the Freedom Quilting Bee ...... 115 2.3. The revival of quilts within the African American tradition from the 1970s to the present ...... 140 Part 2: Exploring an ambivalent language ...... 169 Chapter 3. African American quilts in relation with other art forms 171 3.1. Material culture ...... 171 3.2. Painting ...... 175 3.3. Music ...... 185 3.4. Textile vs textual: Story Quilts ...... 197 Part 3: Stitching their own narratives: some connections between quilts and literature within the African American context ...... 211 Chapter 4. Representations of quilts in African American literature 213 4.1. The quilting trope in African American women‘s writing ... 213 4.2. Claiming African American women‘s past through their quilts: Phyllis Alesia Perry‘s Stigmata ...... 218 4.3. Quilts as a metalanguage: Faith Ringgold‘s Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky and Jacqueline Woodson‘s Show Way 233 4.4. Bed comforts to alleviate the harsh times: Phyllis Lawson‘s Quilt of Souls ...... 247 4.5. Telling their story in their own words: quilts in the Civil Rights era 273 4.6. Reconstructing the self: the symbolism of quilts in Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple and ―Everyday Use‖ ...... 283 4.7. Handstitched words: the quilting journal of Nora Ezell ...... 297 Conclusions ...... 321 Works Cited ...... 335 Primary Sources ...... 337 Secondary Sources ...... 337 Resumo

Durante séculos, as colchas feitas por mulleres estadounidenses de raza negra permaneceron alleas ao interese da crítica artística e do escrutinio historiográfico. Sen embargo, deste afastamento do foco de estudo académico non debería nunca deducirse a inexistencia de tales obras téxtiles, xa que a documentación que ten chegado ata os nosos días é mostra clara das raíces tan antigas desta actividade, tanto entre as primeiras xeracións de mulleres vivindo en escravitude, coma das xeracións nadas en liberdade (e así, sucesivamente, ata a actualidade). Co espertar dunha nova conciencia cultural en Estados Unidos a mediados do século XX, que amosaba unha maior permeabilidade a fomentar as identidades das minorías raciais e a equilibrar as tradicionais discriminacións de xénero, creceu un interese novo na cultura desenvolta por mulleres afroamericanas, xa fose dende o ámbito artístico coma literario. Ao mesmo tempo, a identificación (herdada de tempos inmemoriais) das tarefas domésticas femininas cun labor utilitario, non artístico e carente de relevancia cultural comezou a ser posto en tela de xuízo pola nova corrente feminista que xurdiu nas décadas de 1960 e 1970 e acadou enormes repercusións nese país. A rebelión contra ese tipo de pensamento que asociaba labor téxtil con ausencia de prestixio artístico veuse fortalecida por unha postura feminista que comezou non só a dotar de valor intrínseco eses traballos, senón que os empregou como símbolo reivindicativo dunhas obras tradicionalmente ―invisibilizadas‖ polo canon dominante (Parker 207). Así, a posta en valor dos labores de costura, e particularmente das devanditas colchas (entre outros factores, pola súa enorme riqueza e versatilidade) feitas por mulleres afroamericanas, converteuse nun poderoso símbolo de loita social, política e artística. Situadas na intersección de factores raciais, de xénero e, implícita e inevitablemente, de clase (non só porque a orixe desta manufactura xorde da necesidade do aproveitamento, senón tamén polas continuas tensións xerárquicas entre ―traballo artesanal‖ e ―arte refinado‖), as colchas feitas por esta comunidade de mulleres pasaron a converterse nun lenzo no que as autoras eran quen de expresar libremente, sen a tutela de tempos anteriores, as súas visións do mundo e as novas representacións de si mesmas como seres individuais pertencentes a un colectivo historicamente sometido. Unha das consecuencias de tal cambio de posicionamento cultural foi o progresivo aumento da investigación académica no ámbito da composición destas colchas, como instrumento de forte significado cultural polas razóns expostas. O afondamento no estudo sobre estes obxectos de facturación artesanal descubriu a súa enorme riqueza histórica como testemuñas dun tempo (o período que vai dende o século XVIII ata finais do XX) e lugar (os Estados Unidos de América do Norte) en que as mulleres, e particularmente as mulleres negras, eran mantidas á marxe das correntes sociopolíticas e artísticas do país. Sen dúbida, a confección destas colchas supuxo, dende as primeiras xeracións de mulleres afroamericanas, unha forma de resistencia tanto pasiva (polo mero feito de elaborar as súas propias obras, e incluso de darlles transmisión ás súas descendentes cando así podían) coma activa (nos casos en que as circunstancias permitían a súa utilización en foros de reivindicación fronte ao sistema imperante). En consecuencia, a utilización deste labor de costura como forma de expresar as súas protestas e esperanzas de futuro quedou reflectido nas pezas que se conservaron dende as décadas da escravitude en adiante (aspectos analizados nos capítulos 1 e 2 desta tese), se ben é imposible aventurar, sequera aproximadamente, unha porcentaxe que indique cantas desas primeiras colchas desapareceron, como tamén é imposible identificar cantas das que pasaron á historia coma ―composicións anónimas‖ tiñan coma autora a unha muller de raza negra. Sen embargo, si é posible argumentar hoxe cales foron algúns dos motivos que levaron a aquelas primeiras mulleres Afroamericanas a deseñar, crear e, na medida das súas posibilidades, preservar as súas colchas. En primeiro lugar, entre as razóns máis evidentes estaría non só a necesidade de supervivencia en condicións infrahumanas, senón que tamén debemos considerar o factor da obriga dentro das súas tarefas de servidume cotiás. Se ben no primeiro caso os materiais empregados eran frecuentemente moi humildes, e as condicións de traballo lamentables, a orixinalidade e beleza das colchas revelan un alto interese estético por parte das súas creadoras, e un innegable afán de perdurar dos seus traballos. Ademáis, resulta curioso observar as diferenzas entre as composicións elaboradas

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como parte da carga de traballo diaria, feitas por imperativo alleo de acordo cos criterios doutra persoa, e as elaboradas ao cae-la noite ou nos momentos de asueto, cando podían dar renda solta (dentro das limitacións evidentes) aos seus propios gustos e sensibilidades para crear colchas segundo as súas preferencias. Aínda máis salientable é, se cabe, a mera perseveranza por continuar afanándose coa agulla, por propia iniciativa, logo dunha xornada de traballo extenuante. Entre as múltiples motivacións detrás dese pulo creativo atópase a natureza terapéutica deste labor, que permitía ás súas autoras exercita-lo seu talento de xeito introspectivo pero tamén de cara á comunidade, coa que reforzaban lazos afectivos e sociais. A capacidade de xerar confort destes obxectos domésticos iniciábase, certamente, moito antes de pasar a cumprir a súa suposta función principal de protexer do frío a unha persoa deitada baixo deles. Esa capacidade empezaba a manifestarse, en realidade, dende o propio proceso de creación, xa que ofrecía á súa autora (se ben, frecuentemente, de forma interrompida) un tempo de reflexión e a miúdo un espazo de certo silencio no que era posible atopar unha canle de autoexpresión, nun contexto xeral que non adoitaba propiciar tal cousa para as mulleres. Non só iso: decotío, cada obra elaborábase como lembranza das experiencias vividas pola súa creadora, e ese carácter perdurador resultaba especialmente cargado de significado cando os remanentes das telas empregadas formaban parte da roupa, xa case estragada, de familiares e outros seres queridos. Este elemento, referente á conservación dun legado valioso dentro dun ámbito familiar, constituía unha poderosa motivación para a elaboración e preservación de ditas colchas, en épocas en que a transmisión dunha memoria interxeracional resultaba un feito case heroico. Pola outra banda, parte da versatilidade deste labor de costura radica na posibilidade de convertelo nunha tarefa que abranga a un grupo de persoas, con todas as repercusións que este feito ten. Así, a confección dun proxecto téxtil en común permitía outrora o fortalecemento de vencellos persoais e afectivos que dalgún xeito contribuían a mitigar a hostilidade derivada das duras condicións de vida. Ademais, a composición coral das colchas ofrecía a posibilidade de unir forzas na expresión de inquedanzas compartidas, creando un maior sentimento de pertenza e identidade.

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Outra das razóns pola que estes obxectos representaban unha ocupación tan estendida radicaba no seu posible uso político. En tempos en que as voces das mulleres negras eran sistematicamente ignoradas, a utilización destas obras como vehículo para expresar as súas loitas converteuse nunha ferramenta aparentemente sutil, pero dotada dunha enorme capacidade de amplificación para tales voces. Por mencionar só varios exemplos, na época da escravitude organizábanse exposicións de colchas coma abandeiradas da causa abolicionista, e dende mediados do século pasado continuouse empregando esta canle artística para denunciar outros efectos do racismo, dende a segregación ata o linchamento, pasando pola discriminación no acceso á educación. En realidade, a motivación social que alenta a confección destas colchas por parte de mulleres afroamericanas mantense ata os nosos días, como testemuña o amplo corpus de obras reivindicativas (a concienciación contra o SIDA, a loita contra as desigualdades sociais, a protesta contra os canons de beleza impostos, e un longo etc.) que se seguen compoñendo na actualidade. Resulta interesante comprobar que, aínda recoñecendo as evidentes transformacións que separan esas épocas da sociedade estadounidense actual, a mesma actividade artística mantén moitas das súas características a día de hoxe. Cantidades inxentes de mulleres afroamericanas continúan na actualidade a desenvolver similares proxectos de creación de colchas por razóns non tan afastadas das empregadas polas súas antepasadas: como necesidade creativa; como refuxio ante situacións persoais adversas; na defensa dunha causa social; como afirmación dunha herdanza cultural; para manter viva unha tradición artística particular, etc. Obviamente, o contexto histórico mudou enormemente, pero pódese dicir que o motor que impulsa ás xeracións contemporáneas a dar continuidade á tradición mantense intacto. As enormes repercusións deste arte tiveron unha importante incidencia (e seguen a facelo) sobre moitos outros ámbitos da cultura afroamericana e, por extensión, da cultura estadounidense en xeral, o cal é abordado no capítulo 3 desta tese. Por exemplo, as colchas afroamericanas comparten certos riscos con outras formas de expresión artística, tanto plásticas coma musicais. Con respecto ás primeiras, observouse a existencia de similitudes entre as colchas e certos estilos

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pictóricos, nos que se perciben influenzas estéticas mutuas. En canto ás conexións entre as colchas e a música afroamericana, existe todo un abano de elementos compartidos. Entre eles, poderíase destacar a semellanza de ritmos de certos estilos musicais, especialmente o jazz ou o blues, e a estética fluída de moitas destas colchas, que parecen facerse eco visualmente de ditas correntes musicais. As alusións (explícitas ou implícitas) que numerosas colchas establecen coa rica tradición musical negra son evidentes non só dende o punto de vista do estilo, senón na frecuente inclusión de referencias ás figuras máis representativas de dita música. En suma, as colchas seguen a funcionar como vertebradoras dunha parte importante do acervo cultural afroamericano, con implicacións en múltiples campos, incluído, ademais dos mencionados, o cinematográfico, coa proliferación nas últimas décadas de documentais e películas baseadas neste tema, como por exemplo How to Make on American Quilt (1995), Tar Beach (2010) ou The Quilt Project: Celebration of the African American Experience (2017). A progresiva aproximación destas colchas ao eido narrativo prodúcese coa evolución das obras iniciais cara ás chamadas ―Story Quilts‖, ou colchas narrativas. Supoñen un achegamento cada vez máis evidente a unha das facetas propias das colchas afroamericanas, que é a súa capacidade de narrar de xeito visual unha historia ou acontecemento. Se ben non pode afirmarse que este tipo de colchas xurdiran recentemente (consérvanse exemplos datados no século XIX), si é certo que as Story Quilts representan un paso máis cara á fusión da linguaxe visual coa linguaxe escrita, especialmente nos casos en que pequenos textos son integrados na superficie da colcha. Unha das primeiras en mesturar ambas formas de expresión, a artista e narradora Faith Ringgold, representa un achegamento a este carácter comunicativo das Story Quilts dende unha perspectiva multidisciplinar, fusionando varios formatos artísticos á vez. Unha utilización similar das colchas obsérvase nas seguintes xeracións de autoras, a medida que as técnicas de creación se diversifican e as linguaxes utilizadas en cada obra superpóñense entre si. Deste xeito, por exemplo, moitas autoras contemporáneas adoitan integrar nas súas colchas impresións fotográficas en tela xunto con acrílicos, textos escritos e unha gran diversidade de elementos engadidos, o que as

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converten en obras que trascenden o labor de costura e pasan a converterse en pezas artísticas dificilmente clasificables, e de ampla versatilidade. Con respecto á percepción, por parte da crítica, da estética das colchas tradicionais afroamericanas, xurdiu a finais do século XX unha corrente de pensamento (defendida sobre todo nas investigacións de Maude Wahlman, Eli Leon e Robert Thompson) que as ligaba fortemente coas raíces de produción téxtil herdadas de África. Certamente, a marca africana na composición das colchas (Thompson 208) levou a parte da crítica especializada a defende-la existencia dun estilo prototípicamente afroamericano, que estaría caracterizado basicamente por unha tendencia á asimetría e ao contraste explícito de cores chamantes, a disposición en vertical de finas franxas de tela, o uso de puntadas amplas e unha recorrente preferencia pola improvisación. Esta teoría foi rebatida nas últimas décadas, especialmente da man da artista, investigadora e divulgadora Carolyn Mazloomi, quen rexeita a existencia dun tipo específico de colchas afroamericanas, ao consideralo unha visión reducionista e limitadora da súa inmensa variedade e riqueza. En realidade, a defensa da primeira tese non debería entrar en contradición directa coa segunda, ou viceversa, xa que é posible argumentar a existencia das devanditas características como parte, e non como representatividade absoluta, dentro da ancestral traxectoria destas colchas. Dito con outras palabras, considero que se pode identificar unha corrente específica de obras cunclaro vestixio da herdanza africana, que conviven coma un estilo máis integrado na heteroxeneidade que conforma esta tradición. Por outra banda, ditos obxectos téxtiles supoñen un fértil terreo de interpretación tamén dende o universo da crítica literaria, entre outros motivos polo lóxico paralelismo que se pode establecer entre a creación literaria e a confección das colchas, sobre todo das elaboradas unindo multitude de fragmentos orixinalmente illados, chamadas ―de parcheado con retallos‖ ou patchwork. En especial, a similitude entre unha actividade e a outra pode observarse no ámbito da creación literaria feminina, debido á fragmentación do tempo dispoñible en exclusiva á escritura (Showalter, ―Common Threads‖ 149), ou mesmo á tendencia a crear universos corais a partir de pequenas unidades ou pezas individuais.

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No corpus escollido para esta tese (e analizado no capítulo 4), inclúense oito obras de autoras afroamericanas, pertencentes a diferentes xéneros literarios, dende relatos infantís ata memorias. En concreto, trátase das seguintes obras: a novela Stigmata (1999), de Phyllis Alessia Perry; os dous contos infantís Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) e Show Way (2005), de Faith Ringgold e Jacqueline Woodson respectivamente; a autobiografía Quilt of Souls (2015), de Phyllis Lawson; o recopilatorio de testemuñas recollidas por William Arnett e Paul Arnett baixo o título The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (2002); a novela The Color Purple (1983) e o relato curto ―Everyday Use‖ (1973), ambas de Alice Walker e, por último, o diario My Quilts and Me (1999), da artista téxtil Nora Ezell. Con respecto á primeira obra, a novela Stigmata, analizo fundamentalmente o valor da tradición de elaboración das colchas no seo dunha familia afroamericana con raíces na época da escravitude e vencellada fortemente ao poder curativo deste labor. Pola súa parte, as dúas obras infantís, Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky e Show Way, amosan a importancia da transmisión interxeracional desta tradición, no só como preservación da actividade cultural en si, senón tamén como atesoramento de acontecementos históricos que non deberían esquecerse. O relato autobiográfico Quilt of Souls presenta o poder restaurador destas colchas dende a perspectiva dunha nena que, debido ás circunstancias da época (Estados Unidos na primeira metade do século vinte) é trasladada á pequena localidade sureña na que vive a súa avoa, para ser criada por ela. Ese mesmo poder restaurador, que xoga un papel determinante na conformación da propia identidade e autoestima, é tamén un dos puntos de análise da novela The Color Purple, neste caso dende os ollos dunha muller que aprende a desenvolver unha nova forma de relacionarse consigo mesma e co resto do mundo (e, en particular, coas mulleres da súa contorna) en parte gracias á súa creatividade coa agulla. No relato curto ―Everyday Use‖ cuestiónase, así mesmo, a suposta incompatibilidade do uso práctico dun artigo material coa súa consideración como obra de arte, e a través do recopilatorio de testemuñas persoais recollidas en The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend abordo a longa traxectoria cultural na elaboración de colchas afroamericanas no seo da poboación homónima do sur

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de Alabama. Por último, analizo o diario autobiográfico My Quilts and Me, cuxas reflexións abren unha pequena fiestra ao interior do universo creativo da autora, na súa dobre vertente como escritora e artista téxtil. O criterio fundamental na escolla deste corpus baseouse na necesidade de ofrecer nunha mostra suficientemente ampla de xéneros que abordasen a temática das colchas afroamericanas e, por outra banda, primouse o feito de que todas as autoras das obras fosen mulleres pertencentes á mesma comunidade. Considerei que o corpus literario debería gardar coherencia co primeiro bloque da tese, centrado na influencia cultural das colchas feitas por mulleres afroamericanas dende finais do século XVIII ata o presente. Sen dúbida, a súa representación na literatura debía vir da man de autoras afroamericanas que teñan dadocontinuidade, coas súas propias voces e dende o terreo da escrita, a esta práctica centenaria. Todas as súas obras teñen en común a presenza das colchas como elemento altamente simbólico, e dotado de forza instrumental, no seo da cultura afroamericana. Este obxecto material, portador dun profundo valor inmaterial, é representado nas respectivas obras ben coma vehículo de transmisión dun legado propio, ben coma canle de comunicación entre múltiples xeracións, ou mesmo coma revulsivo fronte a submisión a unha forma de vida indigna e oprimente. Por ―forza instrumental‖, polo tanto, refírome á capacidade xeradora de cambio que xurde no propio proceso de composición da colcha, dende a preliminar fase de deseño ata o acto derradeiro (se ben pode tratarse dun ciclo sen fin) polo cal se transmite a outra persoa. Dito motor de cambio pode atinxir ao nivel individual (por exemplo, respecto a modificacións persoais da auto-valoración e auto- respecto, coma no caso de Celie, a protagonista de The Color Purple) ou pode afectar a toda unha comunidade ou grupo social, coma no caso das costureiras da aldea de Gee‘s Bend, recollido en The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend, cuxo proxecto de creación colectiva das colchas introduciu transformacións fundamentais na vida da comarca. As obras pertencentes a este corpus, polo tanto, destacan o carácter textual das colchas afroamericanas, dende un punto de vista da propia lectura que poden recibir (en ocasións, de feito literal: cando incorporan a escritura como acompañamento ou explicación das imaxes) e, nun sentido metafórico, porque a

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súa presenza enche espazos narrativos que tiñan permanecido baleiros durante séculos. A utilización da agulla en lugar da pluma como forma de rexistrar e comunicar os propios pensamentos, en círculos de mulleres con enormes obstáculos para acceder á alfabetización, dá á vontade narrativa destas colchas un significado moito máis amplo. En concreto, pódese considerar que a propia colcha actúa como substitutivo da páxina escrita en contextos históricos en que o acceso a esta última era inexistente. Pero, ademais, débese ter en conta o carácter subliminar presente na narrativa das colchas, o que as converte nun eficaz método de expresión de ideas de forma implícita ou encuberta. Afondando no concepto de ―Signifying‖ (connotación de mensaxes subliminares na comunicación interpersoal) propio da cultura afroamericana, poderíase argumentar que estas colchas cumpriron ao longo da historia unha función similar de transmitir información oculta, e só coñecida (ou entendida en profundidade) entre as persoas pertencentes a dita cultura. E é tamen desde esta perspectiva como se pode entender mellor o fenómeno do código secreto das colchas, xurdido nos anos 1980 (Katz-Hyman e Rice 390) e denominado ―Quilt Code‖, no contexto da rede clandestina anti-escravista que funcionou en gran parte do territorio norteamericano durante o século XIX. A utilización deste código por parte da comunidade negra coma ferramenta de escape e liberación de persoas escravas denota, unha vez máis, a capacidade de tales obras para crear e transmitir unha linguaxe propia, profundamente vencellada á sabedoría e os costumes dos membros de dita comunidade. Máis alá de cuestións historiográficas, é indubidable que o fenómeno do Quilt Code posúe un enorme valor conceptual dentro da construción da identidade afroamericana, mesturando elementos históricos, artísticos e lendarios que lle son propios. Non é de estrañar, polo tanto, o seu impacto en numerosos ámbitos, especialmente no literario. Por último, cómpre subliñar que tanto a elaboración de ditas colchas coma o seu tratamento en literatura continúan en permanente evolución, explorando novos camiños en ámbolos dous ámbitos. Así, por exemplo, a composición á man destas pezas leva incorporando, nas últimas décadas, novos instrumentos e técnicas que facilitan ou complementan o laborioso proceso creativo; ao mesmo tempo, no eido literario continúase a empregar a gran riqueza destas colchas como

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fonte de inspiración a través de numerosos xéneros, que van dende a novela ata o teatro, e dende a poesía ata a autobiografía. De feito, a entusiasta incorporación das colchas afroamericanas ao universo dos blogs, equivalente actual dos antigos diarios persoais en papel, supón un novo paso no incesante empeño por manter viva esta tradicional práctica artística, e demostra, unha vez máis, que gozan non só dunha rica bagaxe no pasado mantida ata hoxe, senón que defenden con firmeza as súas intencións de perdurar no futuro.

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Introduction

   Black Stitches

Introduction Ever since I can remember, since the earliest memories that I have of myself as a child, books have been part of my life. Although not so socially rewarding as other physical or sports activities in those years when one‘s group-belonging skills are being tested, I found the solitary act of reading so intimately comforting that those hours of disconnection from the surrounding world were truly worthwhile. It was a mystery to me how the ―simple‖ arrangement of words and sentences could make one travel in time and space, live spectacular adventures or even be left with the sensation, after turning the last page of a novel, that you had actually met a character that in fact did not exist. For me, the writers of all those stories worked nothing short of magic, and I wondered how it was possible to build so much, and create so much life, starting from the nakedness of a blank page. As I grew up, after a phase of infatuation with Latin American ―Magical Realism‖ and a period when I devoured anything related to Spanish Generación del 27 poetry, my reading interests gradually turned to women‘s literature and, due to my passion for the English language, I started to focus on the works by English-speaking female writers. The turning point of all this process came in my second university year within the Translation and Interpreting degree, when a lecturer‘s assignment to read Maya Angelou‘s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) opened up the gates to a world totally unknown to me until then. I remember myself sitting in my mother‘s kitchen and holding a copy of Angelou‘s autobiography in my hands, looking at the author‘s photograph on the cover and wondering who this extraordinary woman was. I believe that day my passion for learning about the lives of African American women (their large herstory and also their smaller stories) was born. Many years later, when I enrolled in the Interuniversity Doctorate Program in Advanced English Studies at the U. of Vigo, I did what I suppose is common ground for most students in the same situation: spend an awful amount of time trying to figure out exactly what the theme of my Ph.D. Thesis was going to be. Although in the beginning my research topic was meant to be centered on African American women‘s autobiography, an idea came to me that it would be more

18 Introduction

interesting to explore the world of African American women‘s (auto)biographies and their writings from the perspective of another art form that is also deeply embedded in their culture: their quilts. Truthfully, I am not well acquainted with sewing skills, but I had learned how to make a type of patchwork pattern when I was living in Ireland, and my interest for the craft (both regarding the techniques and also the origins of the tradition) remained latent inside of me for a long time. Thus, when the time came for me to decide on the topic of my research, I suppose that certain subconscious mechanisms started to work simultaneously. I also think intuition helped a lot in assembling several of the things I feel passionate about – although it took much longer than I had foreseen to put all the pieces together. I finally decided to unite those different focuses of interest under one theme, with the intention to investigate how African American women have historically used quilts and literature in a self-reflective way, and to what point the two forms of art parallel or support one another. Before starting to learn about African American quilts, I presumed that much of this practice had to be in connection with the process of constructing a story, be it fictional or real: the two, quilting and writing, are long and intimate processes of self-introspection, and both require large amounts of patience and faith. As it turned out, that initial guess proved true, because both have been used by African American women to express themselves with similar purposes and out of similar necessities. The ability to create so much out of so little (the blank page; the scattered scraps of outworn fabric) still amazes me today as much as it did when I was a child.

0.1. Objectives 

The primary objective of this dissertation consists in analyzing the symbolic and emotional meaning of the quilts made by black American women, as well as their impact on the African American communities through time, and as a consequence, on the American culture as a whole. In my attempt to do so, I consider it necessary to provide in the first place a historical context that traces the evolution undergone by these quilts since their earliest stages to our days, observing how their perception as a cultural object has changed with the passing

19 Black Stitches

of time. I wondered what truly prompted the earlier generations of African women brought to America as slaves to create quilts. It was likely that reasons other than practical necessity for warmth explained their quiltmaking interest, since the relatively few remaining examples from that era show a degree of attention to detail and aesthetics that would surpass mere functionality. Also, I figured that those pioneering quilters would incorporate much of their original sewing skills to the practice learned in America, probably blending the two traditions into a new form of quiltmaking that would be an art expression of its own. One of my objectives, therefore, was to investigate this process and to analyze its evolution into contemporary African American quilting. Considering that it is usually unnecessary today, for most quilters, to elaborate comforters out of scraps for survival reasons, what are their reasons nowadays to continue the centuries-old tradition? Why does the collective of African American women constitute one of the most outspoken quilting groups in America today? Equally important, I wanted to find out how the semiotics of quilts –that is, their capacity to convey a certain message through symbolic language– had been used by African American women, often inadvertently for the outsider‘s gaze until the late 1900s, and how these women artists decided to do it for a vast range of individual and collective purposes. The latter quarter of the twentieth century marks the beginning of an interest in this type of quilts by scholarly criticism, when studies on African American textiles, and quilts in particular, became widely published. The capacity of quilts to communicate messages raised the question of whether or not they formed a kind of language of their own and, if they did, to what extent and to serve what purposes. As I came to realize along my research, even if every quilt can be regarded as the transmitter of a particular story –if only, from the selection of the fabric or the patterns used in its elaboration–, in the case of African American quilts their communicative nature goes far beyond that common feature, since they constitute an articulated language that has been consistently employed by black women from the dawning of the United States until the present. During that chronological evolution, such quilts have performed specific functions that met the material, spiritual or artistic necessities of their

20 Introduction

makers, and have acted as living witnesses to the landmarks of their times, recording many of the stages that have shaped the country In the twenty-first century they continue to fulfil a similar role as interpreters of the social and political turmoil of today‘s American society, further spreading an ancient legacy. In particular, the resort to quilts as a means of expression by African American women presents itself as a twofold opportunity to first analyze them from a semiotic perspective but, equally, from the perspective of literary criticism. One of my interests is to explore how these quilts are approached within the literature created by African American women, and to what degree they contribute (or not) to the consolidation of a specific cultural consciousness, perceived from the stance of female gender and black race. Being so deeply ingrained in the African American culture as a whole, it was reasonable to expect that it would occupy a relevant place in the literary corpus of this culture. Besides, considering the mostly female authorship of all African American quilts, one part of this dissertation will be centered on examining how women writers‘ literary universes represent quiltmaking. In addition, I also intend to look into the artistic nature of quilts as they relate to other forms of African American art expressions, by outlining a comparison between the former and some visual and performing arts –namely, painting and music. The reasons why I consider it pertinent to establish such parallels are two. Firstly, in analyzing the aesthetics of African American quilts and their rapports to other supposedly unrelated arts, I hope to establish a perception of these artifacts not as isolated textile productions, but as belonging to, and turning into, works of utmost importance within the history of African American art. Secondly, a closer observation of the quilts‘ features calls into question the existence of an epitome of this art. It seems necessary to elucidate whether or not there exists such a thing as the ―all African American quilt‖, a so- called prototype of quilts that would include at least some of the purportedly inherent African traits, namely asymmetry, vertical arragement of fabric strips,

21 Black Stitches

use of bright colors, a rejection of conventional patterns and a fully-fledged taste for improvisation (Katz-Hyman and Rice 388).1 Although the theories supporting that paradigm may seem a little far-fetched and share a deterministic outlook –it would be similarly questionable to propose such a notion as ―the Anglo-American quilt‖ or ―the Anglo-American painting‖ –, I have thought it relevant to consider the extent of this claim, as it became a site of passionate discussion during the last decades of the twentieth century, with supporters and opponents of the thesis stretching the debate beyond the limits of art criticism. As quilts attracted attention among larger, non-specialized audiences, and the aftermath of the Civil Rights era gave rise to an accrued interest in race matters, it can be said that the above-mentioned theory met with enthusiasm and rejection on equally heated terms.2 In that sense, I hope that my dissertation contributes its own arguments to the discussion, in an attempt to understand more deeply the diverging cultural implications of one view and the other. I am interested in finding a theoretical approach that would include arguments from the two perspectives simultaneously, under the hypothesis that there may exist specific features of an African American style within the broader and heterogeneous sense of the term. In other words, I wonder if it is possible to claim the existence of certain aesthetic traits of the African American quilt practice without reducing it to a corseted current. If that is the case, what are the risks of deriving into a myopic vision (i.e., a simplistic condensation) of the tradition as a whole? In sum, my primary goals in the following chapters are to identify the significance of these quilts within their social and cultural contexts, but also with respect to their representation in other arts and, most particularly, in literature. Since a detailed immersion in all of these aspects at once would exceed the limits of a thesis research, I have decided to provide first an overview of the historical

 1 In their analysis of the material culture of slaves in America, entitled World of a Slave, Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice suggest as a likely cause for the tendency to asymmetry the mere prevalence of functionality over detailed attention to aesthetics, claiming that ―modern eyes can interpret as spontaneity or intentional asymmetry‖ what might well have been simple haste with the needle for practical reasons (389). 2 The emergence of a new interest from the western world in cultural matters –including textile artwork– related to or coming from Africa, in what some researchers call a ―Pan-Africanist ideology‖, can be intimately linked to the eruption of the Civil Rights movements (Clarke 8).

22 Introduction

role of these quilts and, on a second level, to analyze their treatment in African American literature taking as point of departure a selected corpus of representative literary works. With this aim in mind, I hope to cover an analysis of African American quilts that includes their social evolution but also their role(s) in the literary field, attempting to provide an ample enough vision of my topic of research.

0.2. Methodology  The use of documents other than the written text as informative of a past era, and particularly of communities which were originally deprived of that register, emerges as a necessary device if one wishes to gain better understanding of the cultural practices among those communities. Given the scarcity of written records exploring the lives and arts of black American women until at least the late 1800s, the analysis and interpretation of their surviving artistic work becomes of paramount importance for that task. Quilts, one of the forms of artistic expression that has accompanied these women since the earliest times until the present, and of which there remain extant examples today, embody a creative impulse that was not, despite all efforts, suppressed or dominated by the impositions of the surrounding culture. Instead, quilts became for many African American women an instrument for personal survival, as prove the continuous references to this tradition in the culture produced by subsequent generations of women. For the elaboration of this dissertation I have drawn on a variety of documentary tools, from published research on the topic to online articles, photographs and paintings, slave narratives, testimony narratives, extracts from journals in paper and digital format, and literary works. As a result, the qualitative research presented here –with the exception of certain purely quantitative analysis, such as those derived from statistical data– lies mostly on my interpretation of the afore-mentioned resources. Having no previous knowledge on the theoretical framework built around African American quilts, I started my education on the matter by reading a selection of the specialized literature, relying notably on the works by black quilt

23 Black Stitches

scholars such as Carolyn Mazloomi, Cuesta Benberry, Gladys-Marie Fry and Kyra E. Hicks. The latter‘s compilation Black Threads: An African American Quilting Sourcebook (2003) was an extremely useful tool in the long process of becoming familiar with the universe of African American quilts. This work helped me initiate my steps in the research, since it provides a detailed repertoire of specific bibliography, including references to published works, online articles, audiovisual material –ranging from documentaries to videotaped interviews, films, etc.– and other texts offering sociological information such as statistical data on the topic, past and present. Hick‘s compendium was an invaluable point of departure during my hesitant beginnings, when I still had not come to terms with the outline of my dissertation, though the overabundance and heterogeneity of documentation did not contribute to clarifying my purpose at those early stages. As part of this groundwork process, I have selected also a number of works that approach the practice of quiltmaking from a more global perspective, to gain insight into the particularities of the African American current(s). Laying this initial background is important to situate this specific tradition within the ancestral history of quilts at large, an art that has existed (and resisted) practically in every corner of the world. At the point of establishing this genealogy, one of the problems I encountered was the ever-increasing amount of bibliography devoted to the topic, which at times threatened to make this initial part of the process unmanageable. I then decided to narrow down the theoretical framework to a number of works that seemed reasonable, taking into account that it would also be necessary to draw on the most relevant literature derived from African American and Feminist studies. However, one of the initial challenges lay not only in the vastness of the available documentation, published and online, concerning the art of quiltmaking. The problem also had to do with the myriad of possible focuses of research within the field: that is, its infinite possibilities for analysis depending on the perspective taken. African American quilts, which have mostly been studied from a sociological perspective (i.e., their influence on the American and African American cultures) may also be explored from many other standpoints, for instance the specific role that they have played in the history of art, or in politics,

24 Introduction

or even their representation in the cinema, to name only a few. Since my objective is to offer an analysis of African American quilts from a multidisciplinary perspective which emphasizes their role in the literary field, I have decided to center my research on the following aspects: an overview of their social evolution and the representations of such quilts in the literature of black American female writers. Some of the quilts‘ connections with other types of visual arts will be outlined too, with the intention to further the background for the main topics of this research. Regarding the selection of the literary corpus to be analyzed, it is important in my opinion to provide sufficient variety with respect to genre, in order to shed light onto the topic from an ampler outlook. Hence, the eight selected works include memoirs, novels, short stories, first-person testimonies and children‘s literature, and though they can be said to share the common nexus of dealing with a particular kind of quilts, their literary backgrounds and the treatment given to quilts by the authors clearly vary. Besides, I thought it important to limit the extent of the literary analysis to the works written by African American women, in congruence with the overall spirit of this dissertation. I intend to study how such quilts have been treated in the literature by African American women writers, be it from a fictional or factual standpoint, to provide insights into their representations from inside the same culture. On the other hand, while I initially thought of organizing the works according to their fictional or non-fictional nature, soon I realized that this categorization would clash with the more relevant criterionm of chronology, since the first part of my research deals with the progressive evolution undergone by African American quilts. By chronology I do not refer to the publishing dates of each literary work, but to the time settings in which the stories unfold. Considering that this approach would be more coherent with the general structure of my dissertation, I have decided to organize the literary corpus examined in the third part so that it responds to the historical evolution analyzed in the first one. As far as the literary analysis of this dissertation is concerned, I would like to specify here that my main purpose is to scrutinize how these quilts are

25 Black Stitches

portrayed in the works of African American women, and to do it in a versatile manner. In order to study those representations from as broad a scope as possible, the corpus must necessarily be heterogeneous in form and content, as a reflection of the varied complexity and themes of the quilts themselves. In other words, it is my intention to observe how African American female authors have resorted to quilts as a metaphor for their writing but also as a narrative element –and sometimes, even employing it as a ―character‖ in itself that is crucial for the development of the story.

0.3. Structure  The present dissertation is organized in three parts, each dealing with a specific aspect of analysis. The first one, entitled ―Shaping Herstory: African American quilts as witnesses of their times‖, intends to offer a general view of their historical trajectory, highlighting the (apparently silent) presence of these artifacts and their contribution to the socio-politics of the United States. Such presence might have seemed, as I say, invisible or silent at certain times through history, but a closer examination reveals clear intentionality among the makers of those quilts to shape the course of the nation‘s events or, at the very least, to resist the drudgery of oppression with some hope and dignity. Using quiltmaking as a creative outlet provided these women with the opportunity to alleviate some of their heavy burdens and, equally important, offered them the possibility to elaborate objects that would remain for posterity, which explains much of their transcendence as cultural items. Therefore, this first part attempts to outline the many roles played by these quilts in the social and ideological arena, from the earlier works made by the first generations of African American women to the quilts of their contemporary successors. Along the process, their voices become increasingly louder and more distinct, in parallel with a growing awareness on intersectional racial and gender concerns in American society. The first chapter is devoted to the earlier phases of African American quilting, from the late eighteenth century to the period that immediately followed the end of the Civil War. The second chapter tackles how

26 Introduction

the tradition underwent profound changes during the twentieth century, especially from the second half onwards. I will deal here with the mutual influences between an emerging social mentality (propelled by a new interest in African American matters and the contributions of the feminist movement) and the quilts made by black American women in those decades. As will be observed, the relation between the two forces becomes symbiotic, each providing support and feedback for the other. The second part, ―Exploring an ambivalent language‖, consists of a single chapter which analyzes the communicative nature of quilts from several angles, in particular from the point of view of their multiple narrative capacities. I will also attempt to compare and contrast African American quilts with other visual arts such as painting or photography. While considering this background information as useful to contextualize the main theme of the thesis, it remains nonetheless a secondary aspect of it and does not constitute its core, which explains why only a brief introduction about the matter is provided here. The chapter closes with an analysis of Story Quilts, presented as a transitional stage between the first and the last part of this dissertation: the highly narrative nature of these quilts places them in an ―intermediate‖ position between the first quilts and the modern works that openly incorporate written texts onto the quilts‘ surface. Many of the earlier works did not use to include ―narrative language‖ on their tops, and tended to be variations of popular patterns (or the free elaboration of each quilter);3 on the contrary, it is not rare today to see contemporary artists adding the written word to their quilts. In consequence, the case of Story Quilts functions as an in-between phase, since they develop a more narrative nature due to the use of realistic figures and painting-like scenes. Finally, part 3, entitled ―Stitching their own narratives‖, studies how such quilts are represented in the literature of African American women writers, whose works are set in a variety of contexts. In total, in this last part I will analyze two novels, a memoir, a compilation of testimonies, a short story, a personal diary and two children‘s stories. This analysis constitutes Chapter 4.

 3 With some remarkable exceptions, like Harriet Powers‘ Bible Quilt and Pictorial Quilt (1886 and 1897 respectively), which will be discussed in more detail in section 4 of Chapter 1.

27 Black Stitches

The distribution of my analysis of such literary works are structured as follows, with a small introduction on each one of them: ∙ The retrieval of African American women‘s past through their quilts in Phyllis Alessia Perry‘s Stigmata (1999). The complex plot of this fictional novel traces back and forth the whereabouts of an heirloom quilt that used to belong to one of the ancestors of the protagonist, who had been an African slave brought to America. An interesting aspect of this work is its perception of quilts as conductors through time of the cultural legacy of a people, and as an instrument for individual and collective resistance. ∙ The analysis of illustrated works on African American quilts as a language in itself, through the study of two stories dealing with the Underground Railroad period (although pertaining to the slavery years, this constitutes a unique phenomenon within that era, and therefore I approach it separately). Faith Ringgold‘s Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and Jacqueline Woodson‘s Show Way (2005) are two children‘s stories that draw partly on historical facts and partly on fictionalized tales, creating a literary subgenre that would be too simplistic to label as one thing or the other exclusively. The work by the quilter and painter Faith Ringgold, illustrated by herself, retraces the history of Harriet Tubman, the self-liberated slave who devoted her life to guiding fugitives upwards to the free states and Canada. Jacqueline Woodson‘s Show Way also blends history and fiction in a tale that looks back onto the author‘s family tree, narrating how the members of the first generations struggled with slavery and the deep wounds of emotional and cultural disconnection. ∙ The impact of the Great Depression times on the lives of African American women: Phyllis Lawson‘s memoir Quilt of Souls (2003). This first-person account narrates the author‘s childhood years as she was sent by her parents to be raised by her grandparents living in a remote Alabaman village, at the peak of what has been called the Great Migration. The memoir is a recollection of Lawson‘s young, adolescent and mature years following the trajectory of her beloved quilt. ∙ African American women‘s quilts during the second part of the twentieth century, with special attention to the Civil Rights years, are analyzed from two

28 Introduction

standpoints: first, through the lens of the real quilters as witnesses of that era, as told in William Arnett‘s The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (2002), and second, through the fictional characters of two works by Alice Walker, the novel The Color Purple (1983) and the short story ―Everyday Use‖ (1973). Arnett‘s volume on the landmark quilts created in the small Alabaman village of Gee‘s Bend during the height of the Civil Rights movement offers first- person testimonies from the artists who made those quilts, and their accounts are therefore at a crossroad between the genres of autobiography and interview. Inevitably, it seems problematic to label this work as fully autobiographical, as will be explained in more detail when discussing the interviews compiled in the volume. With respect to the two works by Walker selected for this corpus, quilts play a pivotal role in the process whereby their respective female characters recover their lost self-esteem. Although the plot of The Color Purple extends over a broader chronological framework (it covers a large part of the twentieth century), the use of the quilt trope functions in this novel as a trigger for the rising cultural awareness, especially in matters of race and gender, which took place in America around the mid-century. I was interested in investigating the role of needlework, and in particular of the process of quilting, for the development of the novel‘s plot. Curiously enough, it turns out to be crucial not only for the unfolding of events, but also for the personal transformation of the protagonists. For its part, Walker‘s short narrative ―Everyday Use‖ shows an iconoclast vision of the significance of quilts as symbols of a minority culture during the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, when a new consciousness on African American matters was emerging in the United States. This story, which presents African American quilts in the light of that growing cultural awareness, puts into question many commonly-assumed ideas about ―high art‖ and its dichotomies with crafts and other artistic items that can be used on a daily basis. It also challenges the notion of what could be called ―cultural purity‖, in contrast with the more realistic concept of multicultural heritage, positioning the figure of the African American quilt at the center of the debate.

29 Black Stitches

∙ Finally, an introspective view centered on a quilter‘s life and art makes up the last section of the chapter, where I approach the journal by Nora Ezell entitled My quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter (1999). This diary acts as a connecting link between traditional and contemporary aspects of the art of quiltmaking within the African American community. It can be considered as a transitional stage between the twentieth and the twenty-first century, not only because it was published just at the turn of the new century, but also because it understands the capacity of the quilting needle to commemorate past events as much as to venture into unexplored paths. After the final chapter, the dissertation ends with the general Conclusions and the list of Works Cited, which may hopefully be of use for any other researchers interested in the same or related topics.

30 Part 1: Shaping Herstory: African American quilts as witnesses of their times

Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American quilting tradition: from its beginnings to the late nineteenth century

1.1. African American women quilters in the antebellum South

The origins of quiltmaking within the African American female community date back to the early times of slavery in America, as proven in official records documenting the sewing skills and the types and characteristics of the bedcovers made by those first generations of African women slaves (Fox-Genovese 120; Fry 22; Wahlman 25). It is reasonable to presume that the greatest part of those creations has been lost over time –even quilts made by white middle- or upper- class women dating from the same era are difficult to find– but, if we focus on their features, a number of questions immediately rise to our minds. What were the reasons that prompted those women to elaborate such amazing pieces of work? What aesthetic continuum, if any, did antebellum African American quilts owe to the African quilting patterns and, in any case, what are their connections to present-day African American quilts? Have those quilts been subjected to the powerful European American aesthetic influences, or is it possible to identify a twofold current, that is, a phenomenon of mutual influence in regard to pattern and style? The first question remains for me the most complex one, and it is a query that has long shocked quilt historians when observing the intricacy and detail of the artistic works made by those women living in appalling conditions. Some researchers have pointed at the long-held, common mistake of regarding antebellum quilts as the creation of white women almost exclusively. Until the first serious examinations of such quilts were made, it was generally believed that black slaves seldom quilted, either because they would be too exhausted after day- long excruciating labor, or because it would be almost impossible for them to gain access to the materials needed for the craft (Fry 37). However, the truth is that black slaves in the Old South did quilt regularly, and today‘s surviving pieces bear Black Stitches

witness to the degree of meticulousness and care with which they worked. These quilts are amazing not only for the complexity and variety of their designs and the remarkable use of colors, motifs and symbols, but most especially because they were elaborated under dreadful conditions, for a wide range of purposes, and they constitute silent testimony to a whole era which, until recently, has not been properly acknowledged. One of the first obstacles encountered by quilt historians, and especially by those interested in analyzing the particularities of the African American tradition, is the scarcity of historical references to these artifacts included in official documents of the time, which are often cited, nevertheless, in private accounts such as diaries and letters. As Gladys-Marie Fry explains,

[g]eneral historical accounts of nineteenth-century African-Americans, until recently, focused on the economic and political aspects of the slavery system. Data that dealt with African-American slave culture, either oral or material, were virtually excluded, except in some accounts written by Northern or foreign visitors. (6)

In fact, although there are numberless journal entries and letters by Southern white mistresses detailing their never-ending hours at sewing clothes for their servants and slaves, rare references are made about sewing as an enjoyable task, except when describing social gatherings such as quilting parties or bees, the latter being regarded rather as ―shared work, [and therefore] a pleasurable distraction with productive ends‖ (Lemire 118). This fact has caught the eye of experts in the socio-dynamics of life on Southern plantations such as Eugene Fox-Genovese, who emphasizes the idea that white women in the Old South did not use to regard quilting in particular, or sewing in general, as an appealing activity but were socially (and to a great extent, also economically) compelled to devote much of their time to needlework. It can be inferred, from their own personal accounts (Fox-Genovese 121), that sewing was but another tedious domestic obligation, of which they especially resented the making (or at least the cutting out) of clothing for the whole slave community living in their household. Despite the officially established idea that such clothing was mainly elaborated by the white mistresses aided by the female slaves, evidence shows that those garments were usually

34 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

made by the female slaves themselves, often under the directions of the mistress (Fry 17). This evidence corroborates the fact that official historical accounts of antebellum society in the South have consistently and repeatedly overshadowed (when not eliminated) references not only to the specific circumstances of the lives of black women slaves, but also to their own heterogeneous labor and skills. It is safe to claim that there exist solid footprints of the origins of quiltmaking in white North America, mostly propelled by the successive waves of migrants that settled there throughout the nineteenth century, spreading their sewing traditions along as they ―hopscotched across the country, [carrying] with them life‘s essentials, along with the skills to make new homes […] Quilts, or the capacity to make quilts, travelled with these migrants‖ (Lemire 117). However, little documentation has remained about the African American origins of this art. The earliest slave-made quilt of which there is evidence, a relatively well-preserved patchwork bedcover from the late eighteenth century, already shows certain features that seem to be at odds with its contemporary European American quilts. The presence of small pieces of woven textiles, instead of the most frequently used bits of printed fabric, as well as the star-shaped pattern and the contrasting effect of Navy blue colors against white, contribute to add a particular nature to this rare piece, and witness the emergence of a distinctive art tradition (Patton 35-6). Besides, apart from the scanty number of official records of this particular craft, based in part on socio-cultural prejudice but also on the actual historical circumstances of the time –such as the loss of many slave-made quilts during the war and its aftermath–, another recurrent problem is the little recognition traditionally given from academic stances to all kinds of female-related domestic handicrafts. The patriarchal consideration of domestic commodities as items of little relevance has usually applied to all homespun textiles, regardless of the aims and complexity of the piece, the intricacy of the design, the symbolic significance of the chosen pattern, or the artistic talent of the maker. Until recent times, elements belonging to the household comfort tended to be considered of limited importance in the eyes of social scientists, historians and art historians, since those items exclusively belonged to the domestic sphere –hence associated to

35 Black Stitches

femininity– and were usually overlooked, especially in comparison to other objects, such as written or photographic documents, historically perceived as the most ―reliable‖ sources of analysis from patriarchal standards. Besides, since needlework was traditionally circumscribed to the female realm, its activities were considered not only harmless to the social status quo, but of irrelevant significance within the artistic domain (Calviño 15). However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, due in great part to the efforts of feminist anthropology, a new and more encompassing tendency arose within the fields of cultural anthropology and social studies which began to place textile works under the spotlight of research, bringing a new valorization of these objects, which are obviously something more than mere material artifacts created for practical reasons. As another consequence of the aforementioned stereotyped ideas, the task of accurately documenting and restoring African American authorship to many antebellum quilts (many of which were wrongly attributed to the plantation mistresses, especially when the quilt was highly elaborated) has posed further difficulty to quilt historians, generally accustomed to associate the term ―American quilt‖ with the Anglo-American (also called European American) variety in exclusivity. This nomenclature, unchallenged until the flourishing of African American Studies within the academic context during the second half of the twentieth century, tended to range all American quilts under the same category, unaware of the specificity of the African American tradition and of its own historical and aesthetic peculiarities. A more subtle bias, underlying the mentioned argument of exceedingly hard toil and lack of time for ―recreational‖ or artistic activities, was the veiled assumption that slave women in the Old South might not qualify sufficiently for the artistic audacity and the creative talent involved in the craft. Moreover, in the few cases in which authorship was recognized to a slave, it was inherently assumed that her labor was the result of the white mistress‘s guidance and aesthetic talent, implying her inability to design and develop elaborated artifacts by herself (Fry 6-7). In this regard, some scholars have claimed a subversive component in the creative impulse that prompted African Americans to produce

36 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

works of beauty, as a means to repel the racist belief that art was exclusively the field for the educated white elite:

Whatever African-Americans created in music, dance, poetry, painting, etc., it was regarded as testimony, bearing witness, challenging racist thinking which suggested that black folks were not fully human, were uncivilized, and that the measure of this was our collective failure to create ―great‖ art. (bell hooks, Yearning 105)

Another interesting aspect regarding quilt-making by African American women in the slavery period is that the boundaries of ―race‖ and ―gender‖ are blurred to some extent, even if the socially-established hierarchical order remained unquestioned. Black slave women and their white mistresses were both expected to accomplish the tasks traditionally accorded to their gender (principally domestic labor and the care of children, sick relatives and the elderly) and, from that point of view, both shared a similar space, limited to domesticity and family matters. Some of these feminine-related chores, such as sewing, cooking and the nurture of dependent family members were the only terrain for their mutual coexistence, and the only common ground in which the racial difference was somewhat less pronounced as compared to their same gender category. In her study of the roles played by white female slave owners in the southern states, Catherine Clinton analyses the importance of understanding how the parameters of race, gender and social status worked together inside the complex habitat in which both white and black women lived: Just as racial elements played a central role in the system —somuch so that one can hardly disentangle color and class in the Old South— so sex is an essential factor for determining southern social relations. The difficulty comes in trying to separate out the complex elements that contributed to this hierarchical system. But the critical issue is not to weigh one causal element against another, to determine a paramount or subordinate status for each factor; rather, we must observe and understand how various elements interacted. (The Plantation Mistress 200) In this sense, a close consideration of both repressive systems as mutually supportive has been at the core of some of bell hooks‘ studies, in which she

37 Black Stitches

emphasizes ―the ways racism and sexism are interlocking systems of domination which uphold and sustain one another‖ (Yearning 59). Hooks‘ perception of interconnected oppressions can be useful in analyzing the complex hierarchies that prevailed in nineteenth-century America, where white male supremacy relegated African American women to the lowest positions of society. However, and even if plantation owners generally applied to slaves a Eurocentric division of labor based on gender attributions, black women in the slavery times suffered a curious ―equalization‖ to their male counterparts, if only outside the domestic realm. On the one hand, they were expected to fulfil their feminine tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, nursing or sewing, but, on the other hand, the gender question was effaced with respect to physical efforts, since no backbreaking labor was spared on them on account of their sex, and the same kind and amount of exhausting work was expected, and required, from women and men alike.4 In fact, contrary to what has been suggested by popular and filmic representations of the slavery system in America, slave women living on plantations were expected to work in the fields doing the same grueling tasks that male slaves did, and this was so even for pregnant women and nursing mothers, who usually brought along their babies to the fields to be able to feed them (Clinton, Plantation 201; Gray White 112). Taking into account that women, as a social group, were not expected to undertake physically harsh tasks (and, in fact, women belonging to the middle or upper classes were not even expected to work outside the home, according to the Cult of True Womanhood),5 only a thorough de-feminization process of black

4 Truthfully, this ―homogeneization‖ of genders happened only with respect to the physical labor demanded from slave women, since they were not spared any other kind of systematic sexual abuse. 5The Cult of True Womanhood, also called Cult of Domesticity, spread in the United States and in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, consolidating a conception of femininity based on ideals exclusively related to domesticity and motherhood. Supporters of this ideology believed in the benefits of separating members of society into clearly differentiated ―separate spheres‖ according to gender, with women belonging primarily, if not solely, in the domestic realm. After gaining considerable support in the Northeastern territories of the United States, it spread progressively into other areas of the country, having a profound impact on American society. Even from an etymological point of view, certain archaic remnants of the domestic conception of needlework were visible in terms such as spinster (which used to refer to both a woman who span and an unmarried woman) or distaff (in the past, meaning the tool used for spinning, and all traditionally female domestic labor).

38 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

women can explain that the above-mentioned ideology of female domesticity was not fully applied to them. As Deborah Gray White explains, the fact that black women were forced to carry out physically exhausting work which would have been unthinkable for white women was justified and developed upon notions of masculinization that tended to include them within the same abstract construct as black men. Gray White reflects upon this de-feminization of black women who, depending on the slaveholders‘ profitability interests, were assigned masculine or feminine tasks –or both. She argues that

all women worked hard but when white women consistently did field labor it was considered temporary, irregular, or extraordinary, putting them on a par with slaves. Swedish actress Frederika Bremer, visiting the antebellum South, noted that usually only men and black women do field work. Commenting on what another foreign woman sarcastically claimed to be a noble admission of female equality, Bremer observed pointedly that ―black (women) are not considered to belong to the weaker sex‖. (120)

Indeed, it has been noted that the demanding physical labor of working on the fields was accomplished by both women and men black (Madison 11, 33, 43); however, when the sun went down the activities became clearly gendered. For instance, men were sent to burn brushes, while women ―were compelled to card, spin, and weave cotton‖ (Foster 82). Under this perspective, black female slaves had to face both masculine- and feminine-gendered labor, and as a consequence they endured never-ending working days, which included toilsome labor outside the house, mainly cultivating or harvesting the fields, as well as inside it, such as children‘s care, domestic tasks and, very frequently, needlework after sunset, when everybody else was already sleeping. Angela Davis was one of the first scholars to notice the double bias with respect to Black women slaves, pointing out that ―where work was concerned, strength and productivity under the threat of the whip outweighed considerations of sex‖ (Women, Race and Class 6). This treatment is tantamount to the poignant remark made by Zora Neale Hurston that black women have historically been considered the mules of the world (Their Eyes Were Watching God 17); besides, as Jacqueline Bobo has contended, the expression is accurate not only with respect to the inhuman workload laid on

39 Black Stitches

them, but also to the absence of control over their own lives and bodies (73). In fact, it could be claimed that their fate was even bleaker than that of plowing animals, since the profound emotional suffering was to be added to the physical pain. Returning to the above statement about ungendered labor, the reason for that paradoxical consideration of black women both as feminine and as masculine beings responded to the ultra-utilitarian logic of the white male supremacy on which society operated in the antebellum Southern states. According to this logic, black women were considered as feminine beings only with respect to sexual, reproductive and domestic parameters, but as masculine or ungendered in every other regard. It is important to note that, despite this apparent ―equality‖ between black women and men with respect to physical work outside the domestic realm, there existed no such a thing as a truly egalitarian interaction between both sexes. In this sense, Susan A. Mann accurately points out:

[a]lthough slave women experienced a masculinization of their roles, slave men did not experience a corresponding feminization of their roles, despite all the attention academics have paid to the so-called emasculated Black male and the corresponding myth of Black matriarchy [...] Indeed, rather than either the equality or matriarchy claimed by some writers, it seems that slave households were in fact characterized by patriarchy. (154)

Certainly, with respect to domestic work, plantation owners did maintain the traditional western pattern of labor division according to gender assumptions, albeit this was not the case in many of the slaves‘ homelands, where tasks such as textile production were not attributed to women but to men. In some western Africa countries from which thousands of slaves had been imported to America, weaving and other sewing tasks were usually a masculine chore, but this cultural custom was not kept by the new country‘s ruling class (Fry 7, 13; Wahlman 25). Some research points at the fact that it is particularly narrow strip weaving that has customarily been a male activity in the African homeland (Spring 8). In any case, and as Fry observes,

40 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

[a]lthough men had traditionally been the textile artists in Africa, American plantation owners adhered to the European system of labor division. Thus, Black women became the principal weavers, seamstresses and quilters in Southern society. Quilts were produced by Black women for utilitarian and decorative purposes in both White and Black households. (15)

She argues that, even though textile production was transferred from male to female hands upon arriving in the new world, part of the ―African heritage‖ was indeed maintained (14), although it is difficult to assert to what extent it was done in a conscious manner and what was kept unconsciously from one generation to the next. Some researchers have drawn on this African connection to account for the extensive use of certain pattern designs in African American quilts. According to Maude S. Wahlman, ―most cloth in West Africa has been constructed from strips woven on small portable men‘s looms‖ (Wahlman 29), a factor which incidentally would explain the African American tendency to reproduce strip designs in quilts. The author suggests that the original reason for the repeated strip pattern in ancient and contemporary African American quilts derives from the fact that earlier West African men weavers were used to working on narrow looms, consequently producing narrow textile strips that would then be pieced together for the elaboration of larger fabrics such as ceremonial cloth or tent cloth (Wahlman 29). What is interesting as well about the notion of male production of textile in some parts of West Africa (apart from the anthropological interpretations of the cultural shift/displacement from one continent to the other) is the fact that African men tended to weave together, in small groups and on ―portable looms‖, paralleling the concept of female sewing circles or ―bees‖ that will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. Once on American soil, slave newcomers were divided into different lots according to sex and age and were attributed different chores, with all domestic work (obviously including sewing tasks) automatically bestowed upon the women. Official documents such as newspaper‘s advertisements certify a further

41 Black Stitches

division of labor depending on the skill level of the workers. The fact of belonging to the skilled-worker category was of the highest importance for both men and women because it usually implied better living conditions and a partial liberation from (or at least, reduced amounts of time devoted to) field work, but it could be argued that it proved even more crucial for the women, as only through full-time skilled labor could they escape from field toil. As Clinton expounds, ―ironically, woman‘s domestic role represented ‗freedom‘ to blacks, inasmuch as they [the black community] rightly perceived that it meant her [the black woman‘s] partial exclusion from the productive realm‖ (201). Unacknowledged by academic studies until recently, the fact is that skilled slaves represented a highly valued workforce of their time and played a determinant role in the flourishing economy of the South. Evidence of the high demand for skilled slave seamstresses has been documented by Gloria Seaman Allen in ―Slaves as Textile Artisans‖ (2001), where she highlights the great economic rewards offered in return for runaway seamstresses (9). Although infrequent on small plantations, larger plantations usually had groups of skilled people to develop specific tasks, of which textile activity stood out as a very productive one (Fry 22). Furthermore, being a skilled spinner, weaver or seamstress was a coveted position among the female slaves, since that could mean improving their living conditions: they gained access to better food, clothes and were more likely to live under the same ceiling as the plantation owner;6 it could even transform their own and their relatives‘ fate through the purchase of freedom. Among the several records (Brackman 63; Fry 16) of former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom after years of saving and borrowing small amounts of money, stands out the story of Elizabeth Keckley, well-known for her autobiographical narrative about life in bondage and later as a freedwoman who eventually worked as a seamstress for Mary Lincoln in the White House, entitled Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, originally published in

6 It is believed that the closer contact with the slaveholding family gave these women the opportunity to access better-quality fabric, more suited for durable clothing and finer quilting elaborations (Katz-Hyman and Rice 389). Yet, the likely advantages of living under the same roof with the white family increased their risk of suffering physical, psychological or sexual abuse (Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman 21).

42 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

1868. Keckley was allowed by her owners to sell her sewing services to upper- class white ladies, and through the money earned she managed to feed not only herself and her son, but also her owners and their family, who were facing serious economic hardship. Ultimately, she purchased her freedom and her son‘s, and in time she worked for Mrs. Lincoln, with whom she developed a close relationship. Paradoxically, although her autobiographical story was written with the aim of financially helping the then widowed Mrs. Lincoln, who was experiencing a period of scarcity, their friendship was finished upon its publication, as the book contained personal correspondence among both, which offended one of Mrs. Lincoln‘s sons (Benberry, Always There 40-2). Just like many of Keckley‘s quilts, made from Mary Lincoln‘s old dresses, worn out garments often served as the main fabric for the elaboration of such household textiles as bedcovers and comforters at a time when buying ready-made bed linen (and clothing) was uncommon, and needlework occupied a central place in women‘s lives. It was very usual to keep the remainders of old textiles for that purpose, as all goods were preserved and those old scraps, however torn out, ragged or washed out, were given further use for as long as possible. Apart from the practice of reusing as well as recycling textiles, slave communities were given periodical (in some cases, biannual) pieces of cloth in order for them to sew their own clothes and part of the slaveholding family‘s clothes (Fox-Genovese 128; Fry 17). As a result, most slave seamstresses divided their time among dressmaking, mending and quilting (and, on certain plantations, even spinning or weaving the cloth to be used for these activities). In Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South (2002), Gladys-Marie Fry provides several reasons why African American quilts from the eighteenth century onwards have been so difficult to preserve, and relatively few of them (in any case, fewer than other types of quilts) have survived to our days. As she explains, rough washings with lye soap did not help much in the conservation of these articles, and the very use of them, often placed on very coarse mattresses if not directly upon the floor, also contributed to their quick deterioration. Disasters such as fires, not infrequent in the log cabins, and acts of pillage committed by the Northern militia during and after the war did their part as well. Fry claims that

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another crucial reason for the numerous slave-made quilts that have been lost over time lies in the transitional period of emancipation. In the years that followed the end of the war, in many Southern states the word spread that Northern troops were devastating everything they found in their way, including the slaveholders‘ Big Houses and the slaves‘ cabins. The threatening warnings led a considerable number of former slaves to rush away carrying practically no possessions, for fear of been annihilated by the Yankee army. Presumably, many of the quilts left behind were eventually appropriated by their masters and mistresses, since a vast percentage of them became part of the slaveholders‘ heirloom and have come to our day as their family property (Benberry, Always There 21). However, the generally accepted belief that slave-made quilts were always elaborated out of poorer quality materials has also proved inaccurate. Even in the comparatively few historical registers that document quilt-making by female slaves, white prejudiced observers tended to assume that ―[s]lave quilt makers used an inferior grade cotton‖, and that ―[s]lave-made quilts always had a backing that was ‗make-do‘‖ (Fry 6), but it was a biased opinion that did not necessarily reflect the truth, since in some instances they were able to use the small amounts earned by selling home-made products to buy new fabric from the store (Fry 46). Besides, it was common to increase one‘s supply of fabric by exchanging remnants with other women, subsequently choosing the preferred combinations of patterns (Benberry, Always There 52). In Kentucky Quilts 1800-1900 (1982), Finley and Holstein analyze a piece elaborated by Mahulda Mize, a slave woman who commented to her family about the making of her Princess Feather variation quilt, once she had been released. Although there is no indication as to who designed it, Finley and Holstein presume that this work must have been made for Mize‘s owners, as ―[i]t is not likely that she would have been granted the leisure and the freedom to create such a thing for her own use‖ (25-7). Needless to say, middle- and upper-class white women had greater opportunities (in terms of material resources and time) to elaborate highly sophisticated needle-arts, but this argument should not automatically exclude the totality of quilts made by black American women, since, as we will see, some of them managed to produce high-

44 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

quality works and, not unusually, devoted part of their leisure time to engage in this kind of artistic creation. The type of fabric employed frequently depended on whom the quilt was elaborated for. If it was intended to be used by the plantation owners‘ family, the materials tended to be better quality and the patterns of a certain kind, according to the mistress‘s taste, who would then normally direct the sewing tasks. This was not the case, though, when the slaves sewed for themselves or their own families. Diaries and personal accounts of former slaves reveal their dislike for the symmetric patterns and the repetitive designs of the so-called Anglo-American quilts of the time, describing how, when making quilts for their own use, most slave women showed a preference for asymmetry and discontinuity of lines, and a strong attraction for improvisation.7 Quilts destined for the slaveholding family were thus made during the day, as any other domestic duty, and under the supervision of the mistress, who often worked on the piece as well; quite on the contrary, quilts made to remain within the slave family were frequently made at night, after all the mandatory tasks had been completed, or during the slave‘s ―spare‖ time, such as plantation celebrations and, in some cases, part of Saturday afternoons. Some plantation masters allowed for a periodical festivity among the slave community, during which they had permission to rest and organize a family meal and dancing. It was common to take advantage of the free day to prepare a quilting party, but these events were infrequent and quilters had to use all available time if they wanted to finish their craftworks. Although there is a belief that ―[t]he quilts made by slaves for their own use were different from those made according to the patterns prescribed to them as seamstresses‖ (Showalter, ―Common Threads‖ 149), it would be a mistake to infer that the former quilts were inferior in artistic quality than the latter. A quilt made for the slave‘s own use certainly lacked certain material advantages –usually, poorer quality of fabrics and less availability of time devoted to its making– but it fulfilled two vital aspirations: the functionality of creating covers for family survival, and not less importantly, the satisfaction of giving free rein to the quilter‘s creative impulse.

 7 The controversial consideration of certain patterns as belonging to the African American or the European American tradition will be dealt with more extensively in the following chapters.

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The fact that slaves devoted part of their ―own‖ time to make quilts for their own use, spending a considerable amount of it and personal sacrifice –since it meant prolonging their work allotment into the night, and often they spared no efforts in the design and meticulousness of their projects– is revealing of the importance that quilting had in their lives (Atkins 15). First-hand memories from former slaves, as the ones narrated in The American Slave (1972) by George Rawick, attest to how fond slave women were of the quilts they had created. For instance, at one point in this extensive compilation of slavery days in several Southern states, Rawick documents the moment when an ex-slave from Georgia reminisces about a slave quilter: ―Nancy was proud of her quilt-making ability. ‗Git ‗um, Vanna, let de ladies see ‗um,‘ she said; and when Vanna brought the gay pieces made up in a ‗double-burst‘ (sunburst) pattern, Nancy fingered the squares with loving fingers. ‗Hit‘s poetry, ain‘t it?‘‖ (Rawick, The American Slave 117). The latter consideration of these quilts as artistic pieces reintroduces the aforementioned question of why slave women in the American South, on top of their never-ending daylight tasks, endeavored to keep working at night on their quilting projects, and how they interpreted the significance of that extra work. In fact, the elaboration of these quilts responded to a variety of reasons, from the merely practical needs to the more intimate and spiritual ones. They were planned and made as a warming device, but also to decorate the inside of the cabin; to mark an important moment in their family‘s life; to create a physical item that could be passed on to the future generations; to find a moment of solace for themselves or, on the contrary, to confide the pains and joys of their lives to the other women sewing next to them. Within the African American context, the act of quilting is ―tantamount to providing an improvisational response to chaos; it constitutes survival strategy and motion in the face of dispersal. A patchwork quilt […] stands as a signal instance of a patterned whole in the African diaspora‖ (Baker and Pierce-Baker, ―Patches‖ 309). Although the most conventional use of quilts was as bedcovers (or even as the bed itself, in the case the person slept on the floor using the quilt as isolation device (Rubin 26), historiography has also recorded less usual practices, such as the making of small pallets in the fields to lie the babies down while their mothers

46 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

were working; as ironing boards; as cushions; and even as bundles for carrying (or, as described in certain slave narratives dealing with runaway episodes, hiding out) babies. In addition to these uses, Fry also points out that ―quilts had a religious function. Nineteenth-century sources mention their use in baptismal ceremonies. Quilts frequently decorated grave sites in accordance with the African tradition that the last articles used by the deceased were placed on the grave‖ (Fry 43). The same custom is mentioned in other depictions of burial ceremonies within African American communities, such as Roland Freeman‘s compilation of portraits of African American women quilters (18, 319). Therefore, it can be argued that, although primarily elaborated as utilitarian instruments, as everyday utensils and as warming materials, quilts played other notable roles within the slave quarters from an artistic and decorative point of view and, perhaps most importantly, they transcended both planes and carried a symbolic meaning, as we can infer from their use in all crucial events of bondwomen‘s lives. It is reasonable to believe that these needlework pieces played a crucial role in the lives of their makers, alleviating their psychological and spiritual suffering in a significant way: surviving in a hostile environment which prevented them from accessing literacy, let alone receiving artistic training, the making of these quilts can be interpreted as a tenacious way of writing their narratives, and as a defying strategy to transcend their circumstances through their quilted texts. From this point of view, the fact that they were, except in rare cases, not allowed to read or write did not mean they were incapable of transmitting their own personal stories by using the best possible tool they had: the needle. Besides, if we consider that they were also forbidden from managing their own family lives and even socializing freely with other individuals, the mere elaboration of these quilts must have contributed to the development of a sounder sense of identity and a deeper sense of community. In all likelihood, the very process of projecting and making their quilts, especially when working in groups, must have been a powerful act of self-expression and even an act of resistance (Freeman xv). The collective and cooperative elaboration of the quilts also bears a highly symbolic meaning in itself. Many quilt researchers, such as Barbara Brackman, Eli Leon or Maude Southwell, highlight the transmission of cultural links within

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the slave communities thanks to the recurrent use of certain patterns or colors; but the fact of gathering together to work in small groups is culturally significant per se. Another remarkable aspect, something which has caught the eye of many folk art researchers and social scientists covering this period of history, is the complexity of patterns and rich detail of many of those quilts. This fact, apart from evidencing the different aesthetic preferences of the quilt-makers, goes beyond artistic considerations and conveys a high symbolic value to these works; it is reasonable to presume that they were among the slaves‘ most cherished possessions, not only because of their importance in everyday life, but also for their high sentimental value. Given the dehumanized circumstances in which slave families lived, it is no surprise that those pieces, elaborated amidst awful circumstances and intimately related to their personal memories, became emotionally charged items and tended to be passed on to descendants for as many generations as possible, whenever forced separations of relatives or several other circumstances such as loss, everyday use, or sale of the quilts for extra income did not prevent it: ―The spiritual significance of these items has become the object of interest of many quilt and folk art researchers, intrigued by the deep symbolism and the free expression of creativity that can be perceived in the quilts‖ (Fry39). Most historical and literary accounts of life in the South during the antebellum and the post-bellum periods have usually excluded or minimized an African American perspective from their reports. Similarly, a parallel can be established with respect to the arts and crafts sphere, where African American artifacts have not usually been perceived as valuable artistic manifestations on their own, or at least not so until the last decades of the twentieth century. Inevitably, the critical reception of these needlework pieces, magnificent as many of them are, has always relegated them to the last and least significant position, revealing the three-fold discrimination suffered by their makers: gender, race and class. Since the creators of these quilts occupied the lowest step of the hierarchy operating in the Old South –they were not white males, nor were they free individuals and, obviously, they did not qualify as citizens– the product of their labor, however remarkable, has been traditionally ignored by art criticism. We

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must bear in mind the fact that most kinds of oppression the system imposed on slave men were suffered also by their female counterparts, who had to add other burdens associated to their feminine roles. Taking these parameters into account, it comes as no surprise that the object of study of this research remained nearly unnoticed until the late twentieth century‘s growing interest in African American arts, a fact which marked a turning point in the reception of African American artistic expression in general and a renewed valorization of its quilts, past and present, in particular.

1.2. The role of quilting bees in slavery times

Women living in the slave quarters accorded great importance to family gatherings and any other ritualized chance for socializing, which were usually limited to Saturday or Sunday evenings (Jones, Labor Love, Labor of Sorrow 13). Conforming to the social customs of the time, Sunday was also ―slaves‘ day off because of their owners‘ religious and cultural traditions‖, but the particular ways in which they conducted their religious beliefs on that day remained clearly different, and bore the obvious mark of an African heritage (White and White 32). It is necessary to consider first the concept of family and kinship within the context of American slavery. Since the ties with their original African traditions were severely cut and the European American conception of family was progressively adopted by the subsequent generations of slaves, a curious amalgamation of both systems emerged, having as a consequence the establishment of slave communities where European religious concepts with respect to marriage and sex were strictly observed, while African rituals regarding courtship, for instance, were nonetheless retained (Blassingame 157). Although slaves‘ notion of family differed largely from that of slaveholders –among other reasons, because there existed no legal bonding between relatives in the slave quarters, and their marriages were not officially accepted– there is no doubt that kinship relations played a crucial part in the life of slaves, regardless of how they were distributed along the cabins or plantations. In The Slave Community (1972),

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John W. Blassingame famously analyzes the nature of American slavery, reaching the conclusion that

[t]he family, while it had no legal existence in slavery, was in actuality one of the most important survival mechanisms for the slave […] The important thing was not that the family was not recognized legally or that masters frequently encouraged monogamous mating arrangements in the quarters only when it was convenient to do so, but rather that some form of family life did exist among slaves. (151)

Very frequently, Christian ideas of monogamy and single mating were instilled in the slaves‘ mindset via biblical teachings or simply through their coexistence with white households; this reinforced an Anglo-European family concept which incidentally helped prevent runaway attempts, or so was believed by many masters (Blasssingame 151, 162). Certainly, the distribution of extended family members varied from plantation to plantation, and whereas some cabins housed indistinctly female and male relatives and even members of different families, it was not strange to find gender-based distributions, in which case women slaves lived as servants in the Big House and the men slaves lived as field hands in the cabins or other outbuildings (Fox-Genovese 102-3). Whatever the model adopted, most slaveholders shared the custom of granting their slaves a few hours of Sundays for their own matters. However, this did not mean being totally released from work, since most often the allotted ―free‖ time was necessarily devoted to improving their own family‘s subsistence. Most slaves often used that time off to labor for their own families, which meant for the female members of the community a thorough cleaning of their homes and textiles, while the men usually tended to their small crops and other farming tasks (Genovese 567). The organization of sewing groups stands out as one of the most remarkable private activities developed within the slave quarters; like the quilts themselves, these gatherings were endeavored on the basis of practical reasons but also as a channeling tool for their makers‘ creative expressions. With respect to the organization of quilting groups, traditionally known as ―bees‖ or ―frolics‖ (Katz-Hyman and Rice 389), a third factor adds to their

50 Chapter 1. A historical overview of the African American Quilting Tradition

practical and creative nature: their relevance from the point of view of social bonding. These gatherings, where slaves from other plantations were sometimes allowed to join in, were characterized by a variety of recreational activities pivoting around the central act of quilting, which was most usually made by the women, although it was not infrequent for the children and, in some cases, for the men in the communities to assist during the elaboration of the quilts (Fry 52). Fry recalls that ―entertainment included the mandatory sewing, but there was also eating, drinking, storytelling, game playing, gossiping, singing, dancing, and even courting‖ (69). The same researcher explains the creation of these bees on account of ―the need for a social outlet and the need for warm coverings‖, as she argues that ―by the nineteenth century, slaves were generally given commercial blankets every third year. Quilts and other types of handmade bed coverings helped compensate for such meager supplies‖ (71). Apart from the material needs, it is important to emphasize the idea that behind the organization of these quilting parties was the necessary creation of a social network of their own, a social web which somehow escaped the white slaveholders‘ eye and their all-pervading control. In fact, it is not casual that the initiators and promoters of these periodical gatherings were the female slaves living on the plantations. Establishing such reunions brought a number of opportunities for the slave families to fulfil truly important needs, from the point of view of psychological relief and interpersonal communication outside of the working context. And, although Southern masters tended to distrust the gathering of slaves in considerable numbers (with the existence, in some states, of laws forbidding it), in general they permitted those festive reunions, because doing otherwise could ―ruin the morale of their labor force‖ (Genovese 40-1). In particular with respect to the quilting bees, it can be argued that their celebration was more relevant for the Southern female slaves than for any other social group that tended to hold similar gatherings, due to the formers‘ lack of a socially-sanctioned scenario for personal interaction. Besides, it is interesting to note that, although the female slaves were present (as workers) in the white ladies‘ sewing or quilting projects and acted upon the mistresses‘ instructions, the quilting reunions held among the former were not attended by any member of the

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slaveholding family, which means that only one group witnessed the other and, most importantly, that the black community managed to gather out of earshot and out of sight of their masters. This fact increased enormously the possibilities of intimacy among equals, as well as the development of a sense of identity and a sense of pride in the creation of a communal task that went far beyond any other menial chore and was charged with self-evident symbolic value. As Patricia Hill Collins has pointed out, gaining a sense of belonging and the communal support derived from it has always been at the core of Black feminist thought since its earliest stages (Black Feminist Thought 4). In the particular framework of cooperative quilting, the fact of undertaking such a collective endeavor exemplifies an attempt to narrate their own story in their own terms, released from external control:

Quilting offered slave women the chance to exercise their own imaginations. No white woman dictated their complex patterns, even if the pieces with which they worked were white women‘s scraps. No outsider interfered with the ceaseless flow of the gossip in which they delighted and through which they wove their own view of the world that usually impinged so heavily on their lives. (Fox-Genovese 184)

Besides, taking into account that ―all slaves were barred by law from owning property or acquiring literacy skills‖ (Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow 13), the collective turning of discarded scraps and other textile remnants into valuable domestic artifacts somehow challenged both constraints, as it targeted the double aim of producing a material good for their own benefit and transcribing a communal memory without resorting to the written word. In this sense, following the parallelism between the arts of quilt-making and storytelling, a simile can also exist between a collectively made quilt and a community‘s memoir, written by many authors and describing the individual features of their lives. As each quilter contributed a part of the whole unit (for example, one or several squares of the future bedcover), their personal and their people‘s stories were being narrated, displayed into a multi-layered work. Cecilia Macheski, in the introduction to her compilation of quilt-related narratives, entitled Quilt Stories (2001), focuses on the readability of women‘s sewing both individually and

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collectively, and emphasizes the notion that the historical exclusion of women from the literacy realm and their access to formal education inclined many of them to instead use the needle as their literary means of self-expression. She insists on the importance of the ―quilt-as-memory motif‖, which stands as an emblem for the cultural legacy of quilts passed down on subsequent generations, while drawing on the significance of female literary tradition ―as a giant, timeless quilting bee‖ (Macheski 3). Undoubtedly, group quilting (many hands piecing together fabric scraps in order to create a bedcover) helped increase a notion of collective consciousness as well as a space for spiritual relief where the quilters could give free ride to the expression of their most intimate thoughts, sorrows and hopes, unrestrained by the slaveholders‘ ubiquitous dominance. Examples of mixed-race quilting activity (leaving apart the already mentioned mistresses-run projects which were part of the slave women‘s labor) are extremely difficult to locate in the antebellum South, although some references illustrate particular cases of mixed-race needlework among specific individuals. Studies concerning the figure of the Southern mistresses and their cultural impact on plantation life highlight their infrequent sewing contacts with their black servants since, as Fox-Genovese points out,

slave women cultivated their own skills in quilting and thereby testified to their distinct Afro-American aesthetic sense and their own acute sense of fashion and elegance. Yet slaveholding women‘s accounts rarely depict mistress and slave as sewing together, unless it be in the unending task of preparing the ―negro clothes‖ or, occasionally, in the ordinary sewing for the household. (120)

Fox-Genovese‘s work, conducted primarily from the mistresses‘ perspective, emphasizes the fact that the unbridgeable racial gap between both groups of women rendered their interaction at certain domestic activities a very unlikely thing. Quilting for pleasure, and especially quilting for creative needs, might have required a sense of peer-to-peer comradeship and a feel of mutual trust which obviously did not often exist between them, and original records (mostly first-hand accounts by mistresses) testify to such an extremely rare circumstance. Consequently, very few instances of joint needlework have been kept to our days.

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One of them is described in Mary Lohrenz‘s study about a Tennessee mistress and her slave seamstress sewing together merely for recreational purposes. Lohrenz analyzes this kind of relationship through the mistress‘s diary, entitled Two Lives Intertwined on a Tennessee Plantation: Textile Production as Recorded in the Diary of Narcissa L. Erwin Black, published in The Southern Quarterly in 1988. The diary explores a rare case of biracial needlework within the slavery times, eluding commonplace assumptions about labor distribution on Southern plantations, as Benberry has remarked (Always There 24). There is also evidence of some mistresses who single-handedly elaborated quilts for their slaves, and even a case is known (and the item has been preserved) of a Texan mistress who sewed the wedding dress for her slave, called Sarah Tate. It seems obvious, however, that these were exceptional cases, since very often, even if the mistress herself took part in the sewing or initiated a quilting project, it was her domestics who carried out most of the actual labor. With respect to the latter example, records tend to show the plantation mistresses‘ preference for the initial stage of designing the patterns and cutting them out, while the piecing and quilting labor almost unexceptionally devolved upon her servants. Another striking example of biracial quilting within this context is the one narrated in The Bonds: An American Family (1971), which traces back the lives of Georgia Bond‘s family from slavery to the twentieth century Civil Rights movement. Its author, Roger Williams, focuses on the remarkable lives of this African American family, documenting the biography of Jane Bond, a woman born into slavery who eventually developed a close relationship with the plantation owner‘s sister, with whom she would make several quilts. Later in her life, in the postbellum years, Jane returned to a previous plantation, where she also engaged in quilt-making projects with the owner‘s wife, which resulted in their common elaboration of numerous quilts, approximately twenty of which have been preserved (Fry 33). Among the remarkable aspects of this case is the fact that it was the then ex-slave, Jane, who taught the white woman how to quilt instead of vice versa, as abounds in many primary sources of the time. In effect, quilt historians and American slavery historians have traditionally emphasized the teaching role of mistresses with respect to their servants, notably concerning

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domestic skills such as sewing. However, evidence shows (although it has not been so frequently exposed) that such teaching was sometimes undertaken by the servants towards their mistresses, and the sphere of needlecrafts is one of the best examples for this. Records collected by Blassingame (155) and Fry (16) suggest that the work of specialized domestics, such as seamstresses, was highly valued and, contrary to traditional belief, it was often them who transmitted their sewing skills to the mistress and not the other way around. A skilled seamstress working as a house servant usually had greater chances at avoiding some of the hardest physical labor than other bound women, but spending longer time on the slaveholders‘ premises also increased the risk of suffering physical or psychological abuse (Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman 21). On the other hand, it is no wonder that the slavery system, based on the double supremacy of white male individuals, left little to no room for interracial comradeship among women, an aspect which did not attract much scholarly attention until the second half of the twentieth century, when black and white women researchers placed the topic under the spotlight. As an effect, most analysis of the period focused on the predominant social dynamics from the point of view of race, but overlooked the study of the same tensions from the point of view of gender, thus leaving unexplored very interesting aspects that would help better understand the functioning of the system (Gray White 17; Jones, Labor of Love 6). More recent analyses, such as those conducted by the historian Thavolia Glymph (2008), stress the idea that ―the peculiar institution‖, that is, slavery, has prominently been studied from the standpoints of race, ideology and economics, whereas its scrutiny from a gender perspective has usually been neglected. As she claims, ―[h]istorians have long been interested in how questions of power and hegemony informed relations between slaves and slaveholders and between women and men. We have paid less attention to power relations between women‖ (Glymph 2). In her 2009 study of African American women‘s relation to work and family from slavery to the late twentieth century, Jacqueline Jones claims that the nature of the patriarchal hierarchy in which slavery must be inscribed, implicitly discouraged cooperation between women of both races, meaning that all they

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ultimately shared was their common submission to the white masters (25). The hierarchical design of institutionalized bondage, which placed white males on its top and black females on its lowest rank, inevitably deterred women of both races from establishing a sympathetic nexus with one another. In spite of the common complaints among slaveholders‘ wives about the exhausting management and training of slaves –Susan Smedes, daughter of a Southern planter, infamously stated that ―it was a saying that the mistress of a plantation was the most complete slave on it‖ (A Southern Planter 191)–, no other social group living on the plantations occupied an inferior position or experienced harder oppression than slave women, as they embodied the ―antebellum South‘s dual caste system [that forced] the power of whites over blacks and men over women‖ (Jones, Labor of Love 11). Jones‘s argument is supported as well by Deborah Gray White, who claims that ―black in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum Americans‖ (15). It may be helpful, in order to understand the specific nature of black women‘s oppression in nineteenth-century America, to broaden our perspective and consider them also in context with white women from the same period. Despite the logic and veracity of White‘s previous statement, it remains true that many white Southern women regarded themselves as the victims of the socioeconomic system in which they lived, as their abundant complaints through personal manuscripts prove. Tellingly, their very self-perception as the weakest link of the chain implies that these women completely overlooked the terrible fate of their same-sex counterparts, whose suffering they witnessed day after day. Historians suggest several explanations for such oblivion, namely the cultural consideration at the time of colored people as inherently inferior beings, a social construct usually unquestioned by most Southern whites, especially by those belonging to the slaveholding class and most particularly by women, unaccustomed to venting their political views. Another reason would be the fact that slavery benefited not only male slaveholders but also, and to a great extent, their wives, who certainly took advantage of the forced labor –to the point that their absence would have meant their own performing of such toil, or having to

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pay other women to do it. This explains, in part, why critics like Gloria Wade- Gayles described the historically ambiguous relationship between black and white women as one of ―step-sisterhood‖ with respect to gender submission, but as antagonism when regarded from other perspectives, namely those of race and social class (7). In any case, and apart from these arguments, a third consideration must be contemplated when pondering why racial inequality was generally ignored by white Southern women, and it is the overwhelming female exclusion from social or political matters grounded on, among other things, the aforementioned Cult of True Womanhood. According to this creed, the female sphere belonged exclusively in the domestic realm, as it was argued that women‘s most beneficial contribution to society lay in their skillful performing of domestic tasks through moral virtue and household care. Nurturing the family and devoting all their talents to the art of homemaking were considered a white woman‘s most valuable goals in life, something which could only be achieved through personal sacrifice and self- effacement, especially regarding public expression of their ideology or an explicit involvement in the political arena. Complying with this strict set of moral beliefs was therefore crucial for white women in order to acquire social approval, and few wished to face the perils derived from openly challenging it. Such perils, that could vary from being dispossessed of certain social status to being condemned to ostracism, together with the severe economic consequences entailed, kept a majority of white women in the South (including many who privately disapproved of the mechanics of slavery) from daring to stand up publicly against it. The quilt researcher Elena Calviño, author of a pioneering study in Spain about the textual interpretation of quilts, entitled The Quilt as Text: Reading Women‟s Culture in American Short Stories (1845-1988) (2006), has insisted on the idea that quilt-making, precisely because of its female-bound domestic nature, proved a major tool for disguising women‘s political action in the corseted nineteenth century American South (38). As it apparently stayed within the boundaries of the home sphere, traditionally female activities such as sewing or quilting did not pose a threat to the established patriarchal system, thereby allowing those women certain space for revealing their reformist opinions, mainly

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in relation to the temperance movement and the abolitionist cause. In a paradoxical manner, ―limiting‖ themselves to those conservative, suspicion-free tasks eventually led many to tread on an unexplored path, that of female incursion into social reform era. As Pat Ferrero explains, it was the gradual displacement of textile home-made goods by the industrialization process which produced the unattended consequence of appealing black women and poor white women (immigrants, often) to work outside the home, in factories and cotton mills. Ferrero argues that, even if the mid-nineteenth century Cult of True Womanhood emphasized the necessity to circumscribe female existence to the home, its effects were counteracted by the unstoppable growing process of the American economic market through the industrial revolution, which attracted new workers into the productivity system (31). Effectively, the transition from the agricultural to the industrial world became more and more evident in most aspects of women‘s lives, but with respect to textile products the transformation must have been more swiftly visible, since it suddenly uprooted their traditional place from inside to outside the home‘s walls. Also according to Ferrero, ―weaving and spinning were the first work processes to be mechanized, and cloth became factory-made‖ (23), simultaneously ―liberating‖ certain groups of women from the obligation of hand- crafting those goods and increasing their opportunities to join the labor market in significant numbers. As a result, the passage from one model to the other marked not only a transcendental shift in the economic system of production, but it partially re-defined white women‘s position in the American society, opening the path for a whole new means of public expression and protest.

1.3. Some connections between abolitionism and quilts

As previously suggested, open female incursion into the public arena was originally met with disapproval and rejection by the predominant morality of the time. The country, and more specifically its Southern states, did not envisage white women‘s stepping out of their time-honored domestic roles as a convenient change for society or for themselves, and pressures from conservative forces and True Womanhood promoters were more and more strictly exerted. However,

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similarly to the way in which some women decided to draw on their domestic tools to expose their denied access to creativity and intellectuality, so did many opt to brandish certain ―feminine‖ activities, principally those connected to needlecraft, to organize themselves and start voicing their pro-reform beliefs. Among the most remarkable causes defended by these white women were temperance (a social issue whose disastrous consequences were frequently suffered by the female population), which is reflected as well on quilts of the era through the choice of certain patterns and colors (Tracy 71), and the struggle for abolitionism, strongly rooted in the North-Eastern states, which also accrued notorious support among certain pioneering white women in the South. Although historical recensions of American anti-slavery movements have traditionally centered on their male campaigners, it is impossible today to deny the crucial role that women abolitionists (renowned and anonymous, black and white) played in the achievement of those goals. The researcher Nancy A. Hewitt has reflected upon this biased interpretation of the abolitionist movement in America, claiming that it was quite rare until the late twentieth century to find any specific studies on female abolitionists, therefore suggesting that theirs had been a sporadic, non-significant contribution, a notion that has been extensively denounced and proved wrong by many other contemporary women researchers (24). Besides, Debra Gold Hansen has analyzed a less known aspect of female abolitionism: the existence of deep internal divisions, even within same-race or same-class groups, based on divergent ideologies –for instance, the division between radicals and conservatives– or on a preference for certain strategies of action. If female voices have remained muffled in the history of abolitionism, the existence of opposing factions within apparently compact groups of women has been even more systematically ignored. Hansen emphasizes the fact that ―historians have often underplayed the discord within the women‘s antislavery movement, considering it less significant than the development of a feminist consciousness among some of antislavery‘s more prominent advocates‖ (60). Apparently, in the process of tracking back the pioneering steps of female abolitionist groups, the key aspect of internal dissensions among their members was overlooked, on behalf of a more

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transcendental concept of emerging feminist action. In spite of this, the profound sociocultural differences among these early women abolitionists and the insurmountable race divide made it impossible, in practice, to weave a fully integrated abolitionist sisterhood which prioritized gender consciousness over any other issue. Many of those discrepancies appeared as the inevitable result of a heterogeneous social background (consisting mainly of middle- and upper-class white women, and free black women), which increased internal divisions as to what kind of strategies should be used, as well as tensions between (among others) religious and non-religious factions, such as church-related and anticlerical currents. Several studies, on the other hand, emphasize the notion that women outnumbered men in abolition and reform movements in general (Robertson 101), probably due, in part, to the strict restraints placed on the former by society and their wish to transform those social structures. It is out of the question that, as Robert Shaw points, ―[w]omen played a key role in the emerging reform movements that attempted to redress the inequalities diving the nation‖ during the nineteenth century (American Quilts 99). In The Power of Cloth: Political Quilts 1845-1986, published in 1987, Jane Benson and Nancy Olsen specify the three most relevant ways in which quilting has historically been used for political reasons. Firstly, they point at the utilization of quilts as straightforward campaign tools, in a similar way to political banners and other symbolic emblems. Secondly, quilts have traditionally been used to mirror women‘s concerns regarding social problems, as is especially evident in the widespread development of signature quilts, designed to support certain causes such as temperance or the defense of women‘s rights through the embroidery of the participants‘ names in the quilts as a token of their commitment. Finally, Benson and Olsen identify a third utilization of quilts in the political arena: as a means to raise awareness on other, apparently non-affected citizens on a particular social issue, for example with respect to environmental or health problems (qtd. in Pershing 55). Evidently, gathering the courage to speak up, if only through the needle in some cases, must have been a daunting task for those mid- to late nineteenth

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century women. Not surprisingly, many women managed to relate sewing activities to political activism as a means to channel their protest; for instance, Susan B. Anthony chose a quilting rally in Cleveland as the background for her first speech on female suffrage (Bell 93). Undeniably, many obstacles were encountered by those who dared oppose and even campaign openly against slavery. First of all, the threat of social opprobrium permanently hung over them, together with a risk of rejection on a more personal level –even from relatives or friends. Frequently, they were scorned or ridiculed, and some of them were victims of racist attacks. On the other hand, male disapproval of women‘s implication in the abolitionist cause was very common, due to the prevailing ideology of the time. Even those who approved of their participation advocated for limiting it to secondary roles, with only a few cases of men activists who explicitly supported female participation on equal terms with themselves. These situations were commonplace at a time when patriarchal philosophies designed the whole social structure and, therefore, male reluctance was somehow ―predictable‖. What is more striking is the considerable number of white women abolitionists who, nevertheless, opposed female social activism (of both white and black women) on equal terms with men abolitionists. As Amy Swerdlow explains, the history of abolitionism ―is replete with instances of male objections to female leadership at the top levels of the American Anti-slavery society. But what is often forgotten or ignored is that there were women who opposed their own rights within the movement‖ (31). Certainly, a relatively small number of those women defended the end of slavery, but did not oppose the end of racism in a broader sense, or the end of sexism, as proves their rejection of black women in their ranks or the refusal to take active part in the movement, respectively.8 In trying to understand the reasons why these women involved themselves in the risky anti- slavery endeavor but at the same time rejected equality of rights for their own sex,

8 With respect to the racism inherent in many abolitionist and temperance movements, the black activists Frances Harper and Ida B. Wells frequently protested the exclusion of black women from those groups‘ membership. For instance, Harper denounced that not a single black female had been admitted to the Southern sections of the Women‘s Christian Temperance Union, while Wells criticized the indifference of many white anti-slavery women regarding the brutality of lynching (Carby 114).

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Swerdlow analyzes the case of the early New York abolitionist societies, whose female members held this paradoxical view. After noticing their strong connections to the city‘s flourishing bourgeoisie and the so-called evangelical revival, she concludes that the religious argument is vital to understand their positioning. In her opinion, the ever-growing industrialization of the city, which massively attracted waves of immigrants and a heterogeneity of newcomers, threatened their own subsistence as the privileged members of the white protestant class. As a consequence, they feared that the subversion of roles in the traditional family hierarchy would dismantle their preeminence as a social class, hence their strong attachment to evangelical ideas of morality and domesticity, and the exaltation of women as the keepers of traditional status quo (Swerdlow 44). Whatever the reason that prompted them to adopt such a paradoxical stance, it seems evident that religion did play a crucial role in the development of antislavery groups throughout the country. Since the Cult of True Womanhood articulated itself on certain moral and religious beliefs that prescribed the separation of two spheres according to sex (with men actively occupying the public spectrum and women passively staying within the private boundaries of the home), it is interesting to observe how some women managed to use moral considerations to fight for the opposite aims. In supporting a social cause such as abolitionism or any other reform movement, they were implicitly using the religious perception of women as moral guardians of society, since the mere fact of daring to speak in public was a revolutionary act. Women involved in these initiatives were claiming their say in the political field, as they were step by step improving their skills in activism and social leadership (Tracy 7). It is noteworthy to observe how some black activist women, although conforming to their contemporary ideals of female morality, opposed the notion that such virtues could only be attributed to women of a certain class and race. The subversive aspect of this thinking lies in the rejection that only middle-to-upper-class white women could be deemed as worthy of the authentic womanhood label. These activists noticed that it was external –political and cultural– conditioning that determined the destiny of black women in America, not ―natural law‖, and even

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dared point at the complicity of white women in the resulting state of affairs that subjugated their peers (Giddings 51). Particularly in the antislavery context, the interconnections between racial emancipation and emerging feminist ideas are consistent in many ways, and they can be perceived not only by the fact that certain women were trying to fight racial oppression, but because in doing so, they were challenging the prevailing status quo and broadening their rights as an oppressed social group per se. In the slow process towards equality, resorting to moral and religious arguments seemed a convenient strategy, a domain where women could operate without raising suspicions. Paradoxically, certain patriarchal beliefs such as the consideration of women as the keepers of morality or their self-effacement in favor of a greater cause were used by them to open many doors which had until then remained shut. It is interesting therefore to notice how a set of socially accepted values were instead used to transform the established system in an apparently harmless way, or in a less threatening one. In a similar way, it can be said that female education at that time was being demanded not to benefit women per se, but rather to improve their skills as mothers, especially towards their sons. As it turned out, the relationship between religion and abolitionism was evident, but it can be argued that there developed an even closer connection between religious creeds and women abolitionists, due to the prevailing ideology in nineteenth century America. Certainly, that connection became a useful tool to justify female involvement in what was, after all, a subversive act. In the case of free black women activists, the church symbolized the double shelter of its physical premises and a metaphorical refuge against social harassment from those opposing abolitionism and female active participation in political issues. As Shirley J. Yee explains, ―church fund-raising activities were […] acceptable and popular projects engaging free black women, who found that through such activity they acquired organizational experience that could be adapted to antislavery and community self-help activities‖ (58). Besides, the coalition between church- related fundraising and quilting activities has been a solid one throughout the nineteenth century in America, since it often proved a very effective strategy to collect remarkable quantities of money in a relatively short amount of time and

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use of resources. The organization of raffles and auctions of group-made quilts became widely spread during those decades, especially through the piecing and selling of ―signature quilts‖ –those which bore the embroidered names of the contributors. It was a common procedure, in the case of signature quilts, to demand a variable amount of money depending on the place where the names were to be embroidered, ranging from a minimum 2 cents per block to as much as 50 cents if the donor wanted their name inscribed in a relevant position on the pattern, mainly in the hub of the wheel or flower motif (Cozart 45). Furthermore, the Christian conceptualization of women as especially sensitive beings and as embodiment of the sacred link of motherhood implicitly sanctioned their speaking in favor of slave families and of slave mothers, by appealing to sentimental matters. But, apart from moral considerations, it should not be underestimated the historically prominent role of Christian churches in America as epicenters for social activism, a shaping element of American society from its founding days to the present. For black communities, the church served both as social setting and as ideological platform, where religious sermons and songs easily blended with political claims (Arnett and Arnett 12). Undoubtedly, the church as the physical building but, broadly speaking, as a collective institution aptly ―addressed secular and spiritual matters‖, acting as a coping mechanism for countless generations of African Americans (Tucker 121). Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially since the 1830s, women belonging to the different Christian branches spread throughout the country found in their premises a more than convenient context where to initiate their anti-enslavement protests, as proves the significant number of church-related abolitionist societies and the religious affiliation of their members.9 In the words of Julia Roy Jeffrey, ―[o]btaining sacred place legitimized the antislavery platform and reinforced the moral and religious imperative claimed by its advocates. Women felt at home in this space where they so often made up

9 One of the most renowned African American antislavery groups was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and sections such as the Women of the First Presbyterian Church of Color or the Female Baptist Association were founded by black abolitionist women during the nineteenth century. It is estimated that over 20 societies were created by African American women between 1827 and 1841 in New York and Boston only (Boylan 136). Besides, the historical connections between Quaker principles and the abolitionist cause have been thoroughly expounded (Sklar 318- 9).

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the majority of the congregation‖ (29). What is more, Yee places church-related activities at the starting point of free black women‘s incursion into the feminist movement, considering crucial initiatives that developed inside the church, such as petitioning, fund-raising or lecturing. Although at the outset some black male leaders, including prominent abolitionists and members of the clergy, criticized a scenario they regarded as a ―departure from propriety‖ (Yee 115) since it involved female public activism, their opposition eventually dissipated, easing a gradual transition from antislavery issues to more general racial discrimination protests, to women‘s rights vindications. The fact that most black women living in the so- called ―free states‖ were used to leaving their homes on a daily basis to meet their wage-earning occupations made their involvement in the antislavery campaign a less threatening one, in the eyes of the patriarchal system. This was not the case for white women campaigners, most of whom belonged to the middle classes and did not use to have an occupation outside of the domestic realm (Yee 116). In rear view, it is quite a paradox that a conservative institution, one that has traditionally hindered women‘s equality with men, eventually supplied a prominent place in the transition from domesticity to the public platform. In any case, the building of a political space, from public rallies to temperance meetings or church gatherings ―furnished both an ideological basis and an organizational structure‖ that would be consistently used by black women before and after manumission (Gilmore 147-8). However, the efforts to create an all-female anti-enslavement coalition did not crystallize into a fully integrated group from the point of view of race. Socioeconomic disparity and the pervasive issue of racial segregation made it extremely difficult to merge as a heterogeneous group into the same organization. Among the reasons that explain why female abolitionists failed to produce an integrated strategy are a different priority of scope and deeply-rooted racist prejudices, as proves the fact that black activists were very often barred from antislavery societies (Yee 93) or, in the rare cases where accepted, they were tacitly expected to play a subservient role: ―Like white women, black women organized regular fund-raising events to support the press and antislavery lecturers, but within the racially mixed societies […], black women occupied a

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subordinate position to white leadership‖ (Yee 110). In this sense, and concerning failed integration, Anne M. Boylan has also pointed out that

[t]he ideal of cross-racial cooperation to end slavery often proved elusive, and attempts to achieve it were extremely controversial. When white female abolitionists engaged in public agitation and figuratively embraced free black women, their opponents conceived images of racial ―amalgamation‖ and presumed their loss of all claims to feminine virtue. (120)

Apart from the inherent divisions based on race and class standards, some studies have reflected upon the different scopes of action prioritized by each community. Although a small number of white abolitionist women supported the inclusion of black women as peers among their ranks, more often the perspective of setting up interracial societies did not appeal to them, and initiatives to launch such groups were usually dismantled at an early stage. While groups such as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) and the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) accepted and, to a certain extent, even promoted interracial membership, other organizations, notably the Ladies‘ New York City Anti- Slavery Society (LNYCASS), were extremely belligerent in this regard (Yee 91). It can seem a paradox, to our eyes today, the existence of white antislavery associations whose members opposed, nevertheless, equal rights for their black colleagues, but such complex notions as racial equality and abolitionism should not be confused, particularly in that historical period. White abolitionist groups certainly campaigned against the injustice of bondage, but this did not translate in a belief that black people should enjoy the same rights in parity with whites. When applied to sex-derived differences of status, this supremacist notion becomes all the more evident. Actually, it is impossible to deny that to most middle- to upper-class white abolitionist women, the prolongation of an underclass of black people, and especially of black women, remained vital to assure their own status and lifestyles. As some scholars have pointed out, the institution of slavery, in spite of its profoundly sexist nature, was also hugely beneficial to the white women collective in general, hence their disinterest in questioning or dismantling it (Wade-Gayles 7).

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On the other hand, although both communities vindicated the end of enslavement, their tactics and approaches were far from similar. Whereas the white branches related strategy to socioeconomic background (with middle-class groups mainly involved in charity tasks and upper-class membership more prone to taking political action), black activist women tended to center their efforts on all-black groups, relegating other considerations. As Boylan explains,

African American women‘s decisions molded multifaceted instruments of benevolence, mutual assistance, self-help, and social reform that differed materially from the single-focus groups of white women. Excluded by virtue of their race from white conventions of feminine respectability, African American women were more adventurous in speaking out on public issues, combining abolitionism with community uplift, and challenging the pronouncement of male leaders. (135)

I presume this double scenario, where white campaigners were mainly race- conscious and their black colleagues were predominantly class-conscious, is due to the fact that the former usually acted upon racist considerations and feared integration, while the latter group centered all their efforts on the deprivation suffered by African Americans as an underclass and tried to cater for them. They perceived the situation of black communities throughout the country as one of global discrimination and acted on all levels to ease that burden, promoting self- improvement and self-education strategies, providing family relief and a network of mutual assistance, under a radically different perspective from their white colleagues who centered on the slavery issue and properly ―feminine‖ activities such as teaching or looking after orphans and the elderly, for instance. Moreover, black women‘s displacement from the focus of patriarchal requirements allowed them, to a certain extent, to step into untrodden paths, and their relationship to black men, which was comparably less dependent, let them undertake more audacious initiatives within the emancipation cause. On the one hand, the fact that they were inevitably more self-reliant than their white counterparts led many of them to venture into unexplored paths, but on the other, their exposition to public scrutiny and criticism must have been extremely taxing. Besides, their self-reliance and resourcefulness, together with

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other historical concepts such as survival under extreme conditions in the slavery period, or their resilience as mothers and workers must have added to the ―strong black woman myth‖, a stereotype that black feminist scholarship has been trying to countermand for the last decades. In particular, the mystique of a black superwoman had the damaging consequence of spreading the idea that no burden was too heavy for their shoulders. One of the collateral assumptions that spawned from this stereotype was the commonly accepted notion that the strength and endurance of ―indestructible‖ black women had a castrating effect on their male counterparts (Wade-Gayles 37). These clichés, which quickly took roots and solidified, started to be questioned with the emergence of a black feminist criticism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but they have lingered as prototypical images for much longer. For instance, Melissa Harris-Perry revises in Sister Citizen (2011) the multifold negative effects and the heavy burdens that the ―strong black woman myth‖ has laid on the shoulders of countless generations of African American women (21-2, 187). As previously noted, the perception of the super strong black woman was exploited by the mechanics of slavery; and still, it contradicted the very notion of True Womanhood, according to which, women were delicate and physically fragile beings, unfitted for menial work or any such effort. True Womanhood principles were endorsed by the free black community, whose better-off members strove for acceptance within the mainstream society by proving respectability, moral decency and industrious lifestyle. Paradoxically, in the process of qualifying for such standards, gender roles within the accommodated free black communities replicated the patriarchal scheme of female submission and women‘s confinement to the home, echoing the same relationship pattern that existed between white men and women. At the same time, it eroded the economic independence of black women from their black partners which had existed since the slavery days, consequently placing free black men as providers for the family unit, at least in the middle- to upper circles. This hardly applied, however, to most families belonging to the working-class spectrum, since the necessity of subsistence placed wage-earning requirements on both husband and wife. Most frequently, black women living in the free states worked outside (as well as

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inside) their homes, often in unskilled or underpaid trades such as those of housekeepers, cooks or laundry washers. Despite being doubly relegated on the workforce scale for being women and black, their work provided them with a salary and the capacity to transcend the domestic walls causing no commotion. In fact, another racial gap emerged between black and white women with respect to the type of work that each group had access to or exclusion from, and this controversial issue would become endemic in American society until modern times. Black feminists, namely bell hooks, criticized Second Wave white feminists who, between the decades of 1960s and 1990s, protested against the domestic enclosure of ―leisured‖, middle-class white women whose access to the work market was not socially permitted. The paradox, here, partially lay in their family-related domesticity, while black women on the contrary had been historically denied the possibility to choose either option (hooks, Feminist Theory 2). Since slavery times, African American women had been uprooted first from their native lands and then from their own families, being forced to labor outside (while also inside) the home. In hooks‘ own words,

[Betty Friedan] did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without home. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife… [S]he makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. (1-2)

Although black feminist scholarship has abounded in its criticism of the invisibility of race and class in much of the mid-twentieth century mainstream

10 hooks refers here to Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking essay The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize the following year), where Friedan protests about white middle class American women‘s reclusion in the home and advocates their integration in the professional field, along with further political participation and representation.

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feminism (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 7), not until relatively recently has such intersectionality been considered. Maya Angelou perfectly summarizes the equation when she writes that ―[t]he Black female is […] caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power‖ (Caged Bird 209). As an example of this search for the recognition of intersectionality, in her above paragraph hooks poignantly notices that staying at home (and becoming bored by monotonous housework while their husbands developed a professional career) had not even been an option for black women; besides, white women‘s liberation from domesticity would certainly entail black women‘s undertaking of the same roles. Equally important, there existed a painful contradiction in regard to the historical role of black women as caretakers of white women‘s children, while they had not been allowed to raise their own offspring, or not in the manner they would have wanted. It is clear, then, that female integration in the workforce from the late nineteenth century onwards became a radically different experience for the diverse groups of women, depending on their racial, social, and economic status, as well as on the urban/rural variable. Still, certain features were shared by most abolitionist circles of women. For instance, they had in common an interest in personally involving themselves in the cause, taking the initiative to organize campaigns and events that provided money or goods for the movement, thus producing a revolutionary spark; as Jeffrey expounds, ―by the act of making goods designed to carry a political and public issue into the household as well as into less private places, antislavery women, perhaps unconsciously, once again made elastic the definition of their sphere‖ (117). In The Civil War Sewing Circle (2011), Kathleen Tracy analyses the role of female aid societies since the outbreak of the war in 1861, especially to support the Union, through the donation of bedcovers and the collection of funds to supply the Union army. According to Tracy, women spontaneously created and staffed these sewing circles, which gradually became more organized, as the war developed and demanded larger supplies of bedding (7). Also, throughout the

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nineteenth century the trajectory of quilting in America was substantially transformed, as the economic and human resources adhered to its production. Hence, it is interesting to observe how during this period ―[t]he powerful effects of industrialization and large-scale migration transformed North American quilt culture […] Settlement stimulated commerce and distribution channels grew, spreading the output of factories across great distances‖ (Lemire 117). In this sense, researchers have pointed out the increasing chances, during the 1850-1875 period, of gaining access to a greater variety of fabrics thanks to the discovery of new techniques and the improvement of means of transport; Roderick Kiracofe, for instance, argues that the discovery of new dyes ―meant that a whole new range of colors was available for the weaving and printing of textiles […]. Rapid expansion of the railway system put these new fabrics within reach of every woman who wanted to buy them‖ (103). Kiracofe‘s argument, however, fails to acknowledge women belonging to social groups other than white middle- and upper-classes, such as enslaved black women, immigrant or working-class (black and white) women, for whom the late nineteenth century‘s upcoming of new textiles or the expansion of the sewing machine, which Kiracofe also mentions in his argument, presumably did not alter their traditional quilt-making habits in a significant way. As explained earlier, slave women used many different kinds of fabrics and materials to elaborate their quilts, from remnants of good quality fabrics to rags, from cloth woven by themselves to even flour or tobacco sacks, but it is quite unlikely that they could benefit to a large extent from those advancements, or at least in significant numbers; besides, their ancestral custom of using plants and herbs for dyeing cloths and wool has been well documented (Fry 44). In sum, Kiracofe‘s point of view can be accurate with respect to the Northern states, where resources and infrastructure were well established, but not so much so in the South, where access to new textiles was hindered and the socioeconomic situation was utterly different, with a more heterogeneous set of quilt-makers. If we take into account that the concept ―Southern quilters‖ included not only white female quilters who took to it out of necessity, leisure or contribution to social causes, and that many black Americans (mainly living in the Southern territories at that time) devoted themselves to the same task, regardless

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of age or status, it is reasonable to consider the existence of a higher heterogeneity of quilt-makers in those states, along with a wider range of purposes for making them. In any case, it is reasonable to accept that the increased industrialization and the ever-augmenting use of factory-made cotton did contribute to access more versatile forms of quiltmaking to wider groups of women across the country, especially since the late nineteenth century onwards. Insisting on this supposed ―democratization‖ of the use of high-quality cotton for the elaboration of quilts, certain researchers have even stated that ―European immigrants to America, along with the grandchildren of slaves, shared a common material idiom, however diverse the circumstance of the making […] The democracy of quilt-making favoured skill over monetary resources‖ (Lemire 123). If I completely agree with the second half of Lemire‘s statement, it seems a bit too optimistic to support the idea that white and black quilters, at least until well into the twentieth century, enjoyed equal capacity to use, in quantity and in quality, a similar kind of material for the making of their quilts. On the other hand, a point Kiracofe and many other writers tend to agree upon is that of regarding the special connection between quilts and pro- emancipation fund-raising societies, acknowledging their use as profitable merchandise (those fairs, sometimes called Sanitary Fairs because of their roots in the Sanitary Commission, raised extraordinary amounts for the time, reaching over one million dollars), as treasured family objects or, from a more pragmatic perspective, as much-needed bed covers at such hard times (Kiracofe 108-9; Benberry, Always There 32). An interesting example of quilt created exclusively for the purposes of raising funds to support abolitionism is the ―Evening Star Crib Quilt‖, dated circa 1836, and which was sold at the very active Boston Anti-Slavery Society‘s Lady‘s Fair (Shaw, American Quilts 100). Apart from the inherent value of the piece as an instrument in the struggle against bondage, this crib quilt showcases an early blending of figurative and literary language through the art of quiltmaking. Consisting of seven rows of nine stars each, its central part is inscribed in indelible ink with a short poem addressing white female readers to reflect on the

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cruelty of slavery for black women who are separated from their children (Shaw, American Quilts 100), merging iconic patterns with written (in this case, poetic and political) text. Furthermore, Barbara Brackman also explains that, among the variety of products offered at these fairs were free-labor goods, such as cakes made from sugar not produced on plantations, or clothing made from cotton manufactured by paid workers; besides, abolition mottos were usually inserted into many of the items for sale, from needle-works to any other domestic items, such as pen wipers, watch cases, china and even candies (Brackman 83, 85). The impact of the creation and sale of these homemade objects on society was not little, because they transcended their normal, everyday use to become discreet (or openly defiant, in certain cases) vehicles of social change, and it is not excessive to claim their influence on public opinion across the country, although their contribution is not so easily ―measurable‖ as other forms of action such as public speeches, press campaigning or legislation initiatives. Through the circulation of these quilts, however, it can truly be stated that ―[t]he most private household article, used to cover a bed, had taken on a clearly political message‖ (Jeffrey 117). It is quite of a sad paradox, however, that slave women were also ―forced to make comforters and quilts to be used by Confederate soldiers on the battlefields and in hospitals‖ (Pershing 60), as it is contradictory, as well, the fact that the cotton and thread used for the elaboration of pro-freedom quilts usually originated from slave‘s labor. Ironically, when the war broke out many white Southern women, who had grown accustomed to manufactured goods, often had to learn from the enslaved ones how to spin, card and other ―pre-industrial handicraft processes‖ in order to supply the necessary textiles (Ferrero, Hedges and Silber 79). Another reason why quilts occupied a prominent place at those venues –to the point that a minimum of 250,000 quilts, probably more, were distributed by the Sanitary Commission (Kiracofe 109; Tracy 30)– was their highly symbolic choice of shapes and colors, especially the blue and the red. In Brackman‘s words, ―quilts and the Civil War are two elements which shape American myth‖ (5), and it is evident quilts played a relevant role at many other reform movements that

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were erupting at that time, apart from abolitionism. Furthermore, some noted abolitionist women even contributed their own needlework, like Charlotte Forten, who attended quilting frolics to help produce bed covers for antislavery fairs, or Lydia Maria Child, whose cradle quilt exhibiting a famous abolition poem inside of it has been allegedly preserved (Brackman 85). With respect to the symbolic use of these artifacts in the antislavery crusade, certain icons such as the star (typically featured in the so-called North Star quilts, which symbolized a reliable guidance in the dark for runaway slaves), the Union Flag, the Chain and the Underground Railway pattern, purportedly displaying secret codes for fugitives, appeared in a recurrent way, as reflect abolition publications and other antebellum records (Benberry, Always There 31). In this sense, it is very interesting to observe how ―[t]he names of familiar quilt patterns were changed to reflect the sentiments of the cause: Job‘s Tears became Slave Chain, Jacob‘s Ladder became Underground Railway, and North Star was named after the star that guided slaves to freedom‖ (Kiracofe 108). In Hearts and Hands: The Influence of Women and Quilts on American Society (1987), Pat Ferrero, Elaine Hedges and Julie Silber reflect upon both female implication in the antislavery cause and the curious effect provoked by a changing nomenclature in the patterns‘ names, as they assert that

[b]eginning in the 1830‘s, slavery was an issue discussed and passionately debated throughout the country; it seemed to have had a special resonance for women. The naming and renaming of quilt designs was a way for ordinary women to express their concerns and ideas. Patterns which had for years had Biblical or domestic references were given new, more relevant names by women who had current social concerns on their minds. (69)

Although it is very difficult to confirm accurately such evolution in the terminology of quilt patterns, it clearly reflects a change in their makers‘ mentality and, from a broader perspective, an increased social awareness on the matter of slavery and emancipation. But the connection between quilts and abolitionism exceeds their use as commodities in benevolence fairs, as bedcovers for Union soldiers, and even as symbolic imagery through their meaningful

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patterns. It extends its influence to the complex issue of active resistance from the slaves themselves, especially with respect to those who risked their lives by fleeing North in search of freedom. Contrary to old theories holding that passivity and docility reigned among the majority of slaves (Genovese 595; Rawick 56), their rebellious and belligerent attitude against their oppression does not need to be insisted upon nowadays, and the extensive literature on insurrections, revolts and runaway slaves bears witness to this. The specific use of quilts as guidelines in the fugitives‘ pilgrimage to freedom has become a controverted topic since the beginning of the twenty-first century, mainly due to the publication of works claiming that link, such as Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard‘s Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, published in 2000 and which triggered a heated debate on the topic. According to Tobin and Dobard, quilts were used as a secret code among escapees and their helpers, transmitting precious non-written information as to which direction to take or, as Michael K. O‘Riley claims, whether the next stop in their ―railroad‖ journey would be a safe one (55). Drawing on ancient codes existing among West African tribes, Dobard and Tobin establish a similar connection for the enslaved people living on American plantations, arguing that ―the tradition of encoding secret signs in textile designs, mostly done by women, continued in the New World, where remembered African signs were combined to create unique new creolized symbol systems‖ (Dobard and Tobin 10). Similarly, slave quilts expert Gladys-Marie Fry insists on the idea that ―[q]uilts were used to send messages. On the underground railroad, those with the color black in them were hung on the line to indicate a place of refuge (safe house)‖ (Fry 65). Their theory suggests the existence of a very complex network of people involved in the creation and diffusion of such a code, which would have been certainly useful, given the fact that most slaves were illiterate and the display of quilts in open view was a perfectly safe strategy. In my opinion, however, it is extremely difficult nowadays to prove that such code systems were widely spread and that, as a result of their shared knowledge, great numbers of slaves reached freedom. In my view, although different sources point in that direction, claiming

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doubtlessly that nineteenth-century quilters designed a ―network of safe houses‖ explicitly for that purpose (Bernier 24), I remain skeptical about the likelihood of this phenomenon as a vastly extended procedure. Certainly, it would require from the fleeing slaves (who usually traveled at night, crisscrossing faraway plantations) a deep familiarity with the meaning of the patterns in each area and their clear visual perception from long distances. Wahlman has pondered on the notion that ―American quilts are meant to be seen from a distance, while on a clothesline after being laundered‖, so that ―[i]n the nineteenth century such innocent decorative textiles, with their improvisational traditions, could have easily communicated directional signs to people wishing to escape‖ (39). However, easiness does not come to mind when we consider the real circumstances in which fugitives attempted to find their path to freedom, which certainly would not include a calm contemplation of the drying quilts on display. From a historical stance, there is very little scientific documentation on this hypothesis, but this should not undermine what, from an anthropological perspective, can be viewed as an extraordinary tool for self-awareness and self- empowerment. Furthermore, references to secret codes only known to the slave communities also appear in other aspects of plantation life, such as the use of certain eye movements to communicate in silence (especially with respect of the whereabouts of runaway slaves), or particular body movements and postures whose meanings were foreign to the slaveholder‘s culture (White and White 71- 2). On the other hand, I do believe that quilts‘ patterns can reflect specific ―units of meaning‖ within the whole composition, and that in some cases the choice of color and design can relate to certain objectives from the maker‘s perspective. Certainly, the use of specific patterns, often known under very symbolic names, may reveal a particular intention from the quilter, be it to record important biographical events or merely for the sake of aesthetic expression. Simultaneously, there exist abundant sources detailing the procedures and functioning of the Underground Railroad, a network of free black people and antislavery white people who cooperated with each other to provide safe hiding places and give material and emotional aid to runaway slaves escaping the

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Southern plantations (Farrington 36-9; White 72-3) However, the hypothetical connection between this network and a semiotic use of quilts appears in my view as quite unlikely, at least if considered as a very widespread tradition. The perpetuation of African iconography in the quilts made by African Americans, an issue which will be dealt with in section 4 of this chapter, accounts for the will of the enslaved people to maintain their own cultural heritage, but it does not automatically follow that such icons were used for the Underground Railroad purposes. The remarkable support given to the Quilt Code thesis by readers and a part of specialized critics undoubtedly has contributed to a positive self-image within the African American community, and it may be based on what Laurel Horton links to a subjective, emotional belief, arguing that ―the idea is appealing and popular because it lends itself to a personal, experiential, and materialized connection to ‗the fabric of America‘s memory‘‖ (210). Whatever the case, the successful adherence from a vast American readership to the aforementioned thesis goes beyond the mere interpretation of veracious facts and exists on a more intimate level, the one concerning the complex perception by American citizens of one of the most appalling periods of their nation‘s history. In conclusion, although it is impossible to categorically affirm (or deny) the existence of such a code, it has been highly influential for a considerable part of modern African American society, as it includes the notions of audacity, cryptic symbolism developed by an oppressed group to outwit the dominant one, and the use of creativity to forge their own way to freedom. Finally, I would not like to end this chapter without briefly referring to Harriet Tubman, one of the most prominent Black abolitionist women, whose deeds are known to us thanks to her biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, dictated by herself to Sarah Bradford and first published in 1869. The figure of Tubman merges nineteenth century‘s concepts of gender, race, slavery and activism in an extraordinary way, especially if we consider that slave Black women were at the lowest step of the social hierarchy of her time. She was called then, and has gone down in history, as ―the Moses of her people‖ due to her leading of dozens of runaways from Maryland to the Northern states and to Canada during 11 years. Having obtained freedom thanks to supporters of the

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Underground Railroad network, she later contributed to it in a major way, conducting numerous expeditions of other enslaved people seeking freedom. Based on Tubman‘s extraordinary achievements, her profile by Ann Petry entitled Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad (2007) unveils interesting aspects of her life, such as her elaboration of a quilt to celebrate her future marriage to John Tubman, a free Black man living on her same plantation who did not approve of Harriet‘s pursuit of freedom and who would eventually abandon her. The quilt appears in the novel as a symbol of Harriet Tubman‘s personal and spiritual evolution, as her coming of age and as her most valuable good. When six years later she undertook her own escape, Tubman was sheltered by a woman who collaborated with the secret organization. Not knowing how to pay the woman back, she decided to give her the quilt, ―the only beautiful object she had ever owned‖ (Petry n.p.). Without a doubt, Harriet Tubman represents one of the most prominent figures in female abolitionism, initially as a clandestine raid leader and later as an active participant in the Civil War and as an organizer of the network operating from the North. After the war ended, she extended her struggle to the emerging women‘s rights movements, also becoming an influential speaker for that cause (Lowry 371). It can be argued that both vindications stem in fact from a similar fight for liberation and, as scholarship at the turn of the century began to focus more specifically on the role of women in abolitionism, broader attention was brought to Tubman‘s public figure, and frequently one movement has been used as metaphor for the other, drawing on a simile between the cruelty of bondage and female submission to men. Reflecting about the influences of one reform movement on the other, the famous American abolitionist Abby Kelley stated that ―[i]n striving to strike his [the slave‘s] irons off, we found, most surely, that we were manacled ourselves: not by one chain only, but by many: in every struggle we have made for him, we find we have been also struggling for ourselves‖ (Melder 244). Tellingly, however, Kelley does not consider any female component for the ―slave‖ or ―former slave‖ term, whereas her inclusion under the denomination ―we‖ seems to apply exclusively to herself and other white

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abolitionist women. Besides, Kelley‘s identification of ―bond people‖/ ―former bond people‖ exclusively to their male members reminds us of what bell hooks called the equation of ―freedom with manhood‖ (Yearning 59), simultaneously ignoring the black female component both in the (ex) slave group and in the reformist group too. This double invisibility that black women have historically suffered lies on the fact, also according to hooks, that ―[w]hen black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women‖ (Ain‟t I a Woman 7). Within this context, the cultural significance of artifacts homespun by antebellum women, and especially by black (enslaved and free) women has become a subject of larger and larger appeal to contemporary quilt history scholars (Shaw, American Quilts 168). In fact, although many abolition quilts have been lost or damaged over time, and the extant pieces are extremely difficult to assign to a specific date or authorship, it is interesting to observe how contemporary American women are trying to recover that part of their history through a revival in antebellum and Civil War quilts, as shows the prolific number of related publications since the latter decades of the twentieth century onwards. In many of them, as in Brackman‘s Facts and Fabrications (2006), Hopkins‘s Civil War Legacies (2012), or Etherington‘s The Blue and the Gray (2013), the focus is placed on designs and fabrics from the decades prior to the war, emphasizing the role played by those quilts –and their makers, when known– in the context of social and political reform of nineteenth-century America. Due to the paucity of authentic quilts preserved from that era, the reader of these publications is presented with a reinterpretation of the original pieces by contemporary quilt-makers, who elaborate reproductions of the original designs through the use of similar patterns, colors and symbols. However, the scarcity of those historical works cannot account on its own for this contemporary appeal, and other reasons should be explored as to why this particular set of needle-works have become so popular in recent years. Among them is the increasing attraction, in our consumerist society, of all kind of artifacts related to the American slavery era, as can be perceived through other cultural productions such as the cinematographic and the literary. A special interest can be

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felt in Western societies nowadays with respect to the functioning and hidden details of ―the peculiar institution‖, which of course includes its artistic manifestations and folk crafts. Yet, the focus is usually placed from an exogenous perspective, and as a consequence the anthropological curiosity seems to be turning into a hunting for exotic memorabilia. Kiracofe reflects on this phenomenon arguing that ―[m]isinformation makes the quest for accurate knowledge in this area particularly difficult. Stories and myths abound as to ‗such-and-such‘ a quilt being slave-made, often with the intention of increasing the value‖ (200). Although he does not specifically mention it, an immediate connection can be made with Tobin and Dobard‘s Underground Railroad Quilt Code, not only because an actual link between the quilts presented in the book and former slave women has not been proved, but because their supposedly clandestine messages would (and did) enhance its marketable assets. Certainly, we live in a society ―where ‗folk art‘ is an expensive commodity in the marketplace‖ (bell hooks, Yearning 117) and that consumerist hunger has reached this type of artistic creation in a more than remarkable way.

1.4. African American women’s quilts in the postbellum years

Although the end of the Civil War brought about a vital transformation in American society and formally the legal end of slavery, everyday life conditions did not change substantially within the African American community, or in any case happened at a dramatically slow pace. The old social order was kept through the same hierarchy that placed white men on its top and black women at its lowest rank. With respect to the kind of labor developed by the latter, ―[f]ieldwork, as in the prewar period, was not black women‘s sole occupation. While some were hired to do domestic work for whites, all had to do the domestic tasks necessary for the survival of their own families‖ so that, in general, ―[b]lack women‘s own domestic work did not change very much as a result of the war‖ (Weiner 209).11

11 As Géraldine Chouard explains, some mistresses were taught how to sew by their ex slaves after the war (―Patchwork‖ 69). This idea is also relevant from the point of view of racial empowerment, since it meant that former bondwomen were transmitting new skills and knowledge to the Southern ruling class in a publically recognized way.

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Besides, post-slavery working conditions did not alleviate to a great extent their toll on black womenfolk, whose burdens and responsibilities did not decrease; as Jacqueline Jones claims, ―the need for a [black] woman to labor rarely abated in the course of a day, a year, or her lifetime‖, despite the fact that these black rural women ―ironically were labeled part of a ‗lazy‘ culture by contemporaries and recent historians alike‖ (108). Obviously, the upcoming of freedom was welcomed both by black (free and enslaved) people and abolitionists, but the social status of many former slaves changed in a painfully slow manner, since the traditional white supremacy was maintained in the racial segregation through domestic service and the sharecropping system. Little change happened in the earlier postbellum period and in fact, a fear of Union soldiers was commonly felt by African American women on many Southern plantations upon the end of the war, in 1865 (Weiner 186). This fear was often shared by their white counterparts, as they also suffered pillage and abuse from the Northern troops; as one ex-slave reminisced, ―[w]hen dem Yankees cum up ter de house I wus mi‘ty skeered […] Dey wint in de big house an‘ took de new quilts and counterpins an‘ put dem under deir saddles; dey burnt de gin an‘ all de cotton on de place‖ (Fry 40, qtd. from Rawick, Mississippi Narratives 251). With respect to the gradual acquisition of rights by ex-bondwomen, access to property and the recovery of old family goods became as well a long and often sterile process. An extended list of expectations that remained unaccomplished (such as non-discriminatory measures or a public reparation of former slaves‘ dignity) included also the difficulty for African Americans to recover old family belongings, such as textile artifacts, that had vanished during the war period or in the following years. In some cases, the impossibility for an African American family to recuperate such works into their own heirloom symbolized to a certain extent the weak status quo suffered during the Reconstruction years –which began shortly after the end of the war in the ex-slave South (Gaither 18)–, and the perpetuation of power and property in the same hands. Such misappropriation of their needlework was not, in any case, a new phenomenon, since it had become customary for the slaveholding class to introduce slave-made quilts in their family

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trousseau during the decades prior to the beginning of the war, in 1865. As Nancy Williams, a Virginia ex-slave, recalled, ―[I u]sed to quilt de prettiest quilts you ever see…. Used to sell ‘em to de white folks; de best ones Missus hers‘f would buy‖ (qtd. in Genovese 557). Thus, this culturally-approved despoilment of those goods continued in the aftermath of the war, presumably through their purchase or other forms of acquisition. Unluckily, many of the most beautiful African American quilts passed into white families after the end of slavery and even well into the twentieth century, contributing to the scattering process of African American quilt culture. Proof to this is the donation of several quilts by former slave Rebecca Rascoe from Bertie County (North Carolina) to the white farm- owners for whom Rebecca and her husband labored. The most remarkable piece, a complex elaboration called Pine Cone, consisted of ―thousands of folded pieces of fabric, sewn to a foundation fabric, in a design circling around and radiating from a central point‖ (Sullivan 124); furthermore, both that quilt and a miniature replica that Rebecca had made for the landowner‘s daughter‘s doll remain today with the latter. On rare occasions, upon emancipation certain ex-slaveholders returned their needlework to their ex-bondswomen for free, instead of selling them to their original makers or any other interested purchaser. These women were thereby able to reincorporate into their family heirloom a part of their treasured handicraft and to pass it onto subsequent generations, but most African American families were not as fortunate. North Carolina-born Jennie Neville, a very skilled seamstress who had been renowned for her needlework, received from her former slaveholders a considerable number of the quilts she had made under slavery. As evidence of how valuable these quilts were to herself and her family, the restored goods were preserved with extreme care instead of being used, ―even in deprived and difficult times,‖ and subsequently transmitted through several generations as a very prized heritage (Sullivan 108). On the other hand, there exist a number of reasons that account for the relative paucity of African American quilts dating from the postbellum era. Among them, pillage from Yankee soldiers; the fact that most of those quilts must have been overused and outworn (carried under truly difficult circumstances,

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being often the only warming resource for whole groups during the rural exodus); or simply the impracticability of carrying along all their belongings when abandoning the former slave quarters, together with those stranded along the way (Ramsey and Waldvogel 64). The very process of leaving their cabins may explain the subsequent difficulty encountered by quilt historians in dating these quilts and establishing their authorship. Given the transmission of ownership from one group of women to the other during the Reconstruction, it has become extremely complicated for contemporary critics to determine whether those pieces are the product of former slave women or former slaveholders. Again, records claiming black authorship of a quilt being transmitted to a white family are difficult to find, but it can be argued that they testify to yet another symptom of ―cultural re-appropriation‖ of a dominant group over the other, a concept which will be considered further on in this chapter. Besides, the quilt scholar Cuesta Benberry has argued, in A Piece of my Soul (2000), that among the reasons why more quilts made by former slaveholding women have been kept than those made by their servants during the same period is the fact that the latter were subjected to harder treatment and were more frequently recycled, easily becoming deteriorated (23). Following a similar argumentation, Jane Benson and Nancy Olsen have reflected (The Power of Cloth 1987) upon the idea that women belonging to oppressed groups have historically produced fewer artistic quilts than those made by their oppressor counterparts. According to this belief, women‘s needlework bear witness to the social systems in which their makers lived, and more particularly ―[q]uilts, both by their presence and absence, offer evidence of social inequality‖ (qtd. in MacDowell et al., Quilts and Human Rights xv). Focusing on quilts that are considered relevant from the historical point of view, and contrasting the different time and economic resources of their authors, Benson and Olsen claim that

while quilts were made by women from every class and ethnic background, the majority of historic quilts which have survived are undoubtedly the creations of middle- and upper-class women. Poor women, with more demands on their time, probably created fewer quilts, and these were usually made for daily use. As a result, fewer of these

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quilts have survived, thus limiting our knowledge of the full range of women‘s experience. (Qtd. in MacDowell et al., Quilts and Human Rights xv).

Although I would not endorse the idea that poorer or oppressed women made fewer quilts, it is evident that they were in general more conditioned by material limitations than other female groups in their capacity of elaborating and successfully preserving their needlework. I fully agree, however, with the notion that underprivileged women felt the additional burden of exploiting their resources, meager as they might be, to the best of their capacity and probably for the survival of their own kin, leaving at certain periods of history little margin for artistic explorations. This said, I reckon that the aforementioned non-existence of quilts by women that were rendered invisible during their time does not reflect such lack of creation, but rather their lack of historical recognition. Drawing a parallel with Virginia Woolf‘s famous quote about the scarcity of female authors in literature: ―I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman‖ (A Room of One‟s Own 51), a similar reflection can be made about textile arts and any other form of artistic creation which have gone down in history as the product of an ―unidentified maker‖, being the quilt, as some have remarked, the most anonymous of women‘s domestic and creative work (Bank 11). In the case of quilts elaborated in the Southern states of America, and particularly in times of economic hardship, such anonymity may well lead us to think that underneath lay the name of a black woman artist. In fact, it is not unreasonable to believe that a considerable amount of the quilts currently exhibited as of Anglo-American authorship may have had a different origin. Mazloomi has forcefully claimed that ―[t]here are exquisite examples of antique quilts in museums across the nation whose origins have been attributed to Southern women of European extraction, but if those quilts had voices, they might well speak of dark hands that manipulated tiny pieces of fabric with nearly invisible stitches (Spirits of the Cloth 13). Although there exists a relatively small amount of nineteenth-century quilts having been ascertained as the work of African American women, it is impossible

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to determine accurately how many of the thousands of unattributed quilts from the same period can pertain to the African American legacy (Shaw, American Quilts 168). In other words, the impossibility of such certification must not be taken as proof of an absence of African American authorship during the early quilting tradition in America. Some researchers have drawn on the relatively small figure of pre- emancipation quilts made by black women as evidence for the lack of an autonomous tradition, suggesting that most of those quilts were in fact created according to the prevailing European American style, and that ―all were made for the slaveholding family‖ (Katz-Hyman and Rice 387). However, there exists documentation proving the opposite: that in reality ―slave women made quilts for their own use and for sale, on their own time, in their quarters‖ (Allen, ―Slaves as Textile Artisans‖ 10). This notion counters the previous idea that bound women elaborated quilts solely under the control (and aesthetic taste) of the slaveholding class and exclusively for the latter‘s profit, and it suggests a firm interest among black women seamstresses to engage in the task of quiltmaking for the benefit of their communities and of themselves. Indeed, during the late nineteenth century, the badly damaged economy in the Southern territories made it rather difficult for ex slave women, now turned for their most part into sharecroppers‘ wives, to gain access to fabrics and other quilt- making tools, which resulted in a widespread use of feed sacks such as fertilizer packages (Arnett and Arnett 100) and other such ―sturdy packaging materials‖ for the elaboration of their quilts (Kiracofe 118). The use of these ―plain, coarsely woven cotton muslin bags with the label ink-stamped on‖ which had frequently contained flour or sugar, but also ―cornmeal, horse feed, tobacco, potatoes, salt, and dog food‖ would return as ―lifesavers‖ during the Depression years, several decades later (Kiracofe 232). Obviously, this is not to say that general living conditions worsened in the early postbellum years for former enslaved quilters, but it is reasonable to consider a decline in their access to certain commodities and household resources, such as textile materials, at least during a transitional stage during the harsh period of Reconstruction.

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This limited access to fabric is at the root of a controversy regarding prototypical African-American quilt-making style. Authors such as Wahlman or Leon regard the Log Cabin and the Crazy Quilt patterns, both very popular in the late nineteenth century, as specifically African-American techniques, drawing on the access of slaves and ex slaves to little scraps from garments belonging to the slaveholding class or, to put it in other words, to their unlikely access to top quality, larger textiles (Finley and Holstein 25). Log Cabin quilts, ―normally constructed around a central red block called the chimney [reifying] the warmth of the hearth‖ (Calviño 248), ―were immensely popular during the last quarter of the 19th century‖ (Kiracofe 152). For the elaboration of this pattern, quilters used little strips of fabric in such a manner that ―each ‗log‘ overlaps the one before, until a square of the desired size is formed‖ (Kiracofe 152). Some researchers insist on associating the origins of this pattern to an African heritage, arguing that ―most cloth in West Africa has been constructed from strips woven on small portable men‘s looms‖ (Wahlman 29), a factor which would explain the African American tendency to reproduce strip designs in quilts, as commented earlier, in section 1.1. The author suggests that the original reason for the repeated strip pattern in ancient and contemporary African American quilts derives from the fact that earlier West African men weavers were used to working on narrow looms, consequently producing narrow textile strips that would then be pieced together for the elaboration of larger fabrics such as ceremonial cloth or tent cloth (29). However, the relationship between both concepts is not easily demonstrable, due to our lack of evidence dating from that period; as accurately pointed by Ferrero, Hedges and Silber in Hearts and Hands (1987), ―what strip quilts we in fact have are twentieth-century examples‖ (48). In any case, it is interesting to consider the plausibility of an African American origin for this pattern in the use of the standard Euro American Log Cabin design. In this sense, Leon suggests that it is reasonable to analyze the impression made by African American aesthetics on mainstream American quilting techniques, arguing that ―[E]uro-Americans might have been exposed to Afro-traditional patchwork for generations before they began to use the Log Cabin pattern […] Might the cross-cultural influence have gone from black to white?‖ (27-9). Although it is utterly difficult, today, to

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explore such a hypothesis because of the comparatively smaller corpus of nineteenth-century African American quilts we have, this aesthetic influence should not be utterly discarded and is even quite possible, since style influences operated on all directions and from one group of women to the other. Beyond strip (or Log Cabin) quilts, a consideration of purely African ancestry can be made extensive to any other trait of African American quilt- making, because contemporary reception of this art tends to focus on a presumed African linkage that would permeate every African American work, a hypothesis that has not been proved: Since we know of many twentieth-century black-made quilts which have distinctive African design qualities, we might assume that we are going to find [this cultural persistence] in nineteenth-century quilts as well. To date, however, only two documented nineteenth-century black American quilts, both by Harriet Powers, have been found which clearly show this link. (Ferrero, Hedges and Silber 48) Consequently, the mere fact of taking these modern examples as representative of postbellum African Americans‘ culture implicitly presumes immobility in their aesthetic preferences, as though their style (imagining there existed only one) had remained unchanged through generations. This scenario seems quite unlikely, since all types of quilts made in America have permanently been influenced by the ebb and flow of changing fashions or other external circumstances, and this obviously includes quilts made by African Americans at any moment of the country‘s history. In Signs and Symbols (2001), Wahlman supports the generally accepted belief that ―African American women preserved many African textile traditions and passed them on from generation to generation‖ (25) through what Benberry reluctantly termed ―an unconscious cultural memory‖ (Always There 15). Besides, also according to Wahlman, such thing as a certain African American quilting style somehow remained unaltered from the nineteenth century onwards, hence the elaboration of modern quilts following the same aesthetic continuum.12 Although her first claim is fairly admissible from an

12 Out of the 104 African American quilts portrayed in Wahlman‘s Signs and Symbols compilation, only 7 were elaborated before 1900, and 3 even pertain to the twenty-first century. On the other hand, none of the African American quilts presented in Leon‘s Models in the Mind: African

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anthropological point of view (it seems reasonable to agree with the idea that an African cultural heritage was brought to America and was preserved on American soil), her second theory lacks solid material evidence, for it is impossible to categorize the huge array of quilts made by African Americans after 1865 as belonging to one particular prototype. ―Just as there is no single African- American experience‖, concludes Robert Shaw, ―there is no single type of African-American quilt‖ (American Quilts 167). The second pattern mentioned, the Crazy Quilt, consists for its part in the combination of patches of variable sizes in a supposedly improvised way, which paradoxically requires a meticulous fitting of all the pieces into a unitary whole. Figurative motifs, usually representing animals or flowers are sometimes appliquéd to the fabric, which also stands out for its visually attractive show of embroidery stitches (Kiracofe 147). Precisely this randomness of the design, which suggests higher freedom and space for creativity, has appealed quilters who considered it ―the pattern with the least amount of discipline and the greatest measure of emotion‖ (Otto 8). Albeit, the popular identification of this style with the African American folklore can be perceived as non-exempt from a certain racial prejudice, since it implies notions of haphazardness and nonchalance and presents their makers as comparatively less skilled than others to elaborate more exquisite needle-arts. Reflecting on this dichotomy, hooks has suggested that the Crazy Quilt style was originally created by slave women lacking textile resources and was later imitated by white leisured women who took to it as a kind of recreational entertainment, for this pattern is a time-consuming needlework which requires a specific arrangement of the pieces so that they can be properly assembled (Yearning 119). In Models in the Mind: African Prototypes in American Patchwork (1992), Eli Leon explores the differences between Anglo-American and African- American quilt-making on the one hand, and between African-American and what

Prototypes in American Patchwork dates prior to 1900 and, in fact, many were made in the late decades of the twentieth century. Hence, it seems quite daring to take modern or contemporary African American quilts as representative of nineteenth-century African American aesthetics, especially as contemporary trends include a wider heterogeneity of styles (some of them quite similar to the so-called ―Anglo-American tradition‖) that are not contemplated in these books.

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he calls ―Afro-traditional‖ quilt-making, claiming that this category ―subsumes a seemingly heterogeneous mix of qualities that depart from Euro-American standards […] while conforming to norms that crosscut a broad spectrum of African cultures‖ (31-2). Although Leon clearly states a distinction between the ―Afro-traditional‖ and ―African-American‖ concepts (sometimes embedding the latter into simply ―American‖), Models in the Mind actually presents quilts made by African American women in the late twentieth century as epitomes of an almost unconscious continuation of the African aesthetic that somehow was ―carried in memory […] to survive the Atlantic crossing and thrive on this continent‖ (3). Twenty-four years after the publication of Models, Leon declared in an interview that his original interest in European American quilting standards, popularly associated to more traditional patterns, suddenly shifted to the study of quilts made by African American women when in 1981 he happened by chance on a sample of surprising features and unexpected beauty. His statements in that interview reveal a vindication of the uniqueness of these quilts of African ancestry, but it is precisely that ―uniqueness‖, that differentiated nature, what highlights the exoticism of these quilts, as if uprooting them from all kinds of influences and contact with many other American quilting traditions. This attests to some sort of perception, by the culture of the dominant society, of the creative production of minority groups as incomplete, failed or imperfect instead of as artworks according to their own terms and parameters. Thus, the emphasis on the uncommon or ―special‖ traits of these needle-arts tends to focus on their allegedly acceptable exclusion from a broader categorization as American quilt-making, which in fact, they are too. In any case, it seems too restrictive to conclude that there existed such a thing as a ―quintessentially African-American format‖ (Leon 2) and to believe that African American women‘s designs practically limited themselves to two techniques in the years that followed the war; we now know that some of those craftswomen not only had access to a variety of fabrics but also developed highly sophisticated works whenever they found the chance to do so. In fact, among the rare extant examples that we have from that period, one of the most outstanding works is that elaborated by the well-known Harriet Powers (1837-1910), a former

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Georgian slave whose art has increasingly attracted critics and the general public‘s attention since the last decade of the twentieth century. Powers‘ two remaining works, Bible Quilt (1886) and Pictorial Quilt (1897) are extraordinary examples of the use of appliqué techniques, an influence attributed to the African heritage derived from the Dahomey (currently the West African state of Benin) culture, which Powers introduced in her pieces.13 In the only extant photograph of Powers, dating circa 1900, she is wearing a peculiar apron where figures related to both African and Masonic cultures are appliquéd onto the fabric (Farrington 39). Although simultaneous contact between Powers and West African textile traditions might seem unlikely (international slave trade had already been banned in America almost thirty years before she was born), there is evidence of Dahomey African people being transported to American soil many decades later. This fact has inclined art historians such as Lisa E. Farrington to speculate with the possibility of Powers being acquainted since an early age to the Dahomean textile techniques, consisting of cutting out figure-shaped templates to appliqué them onto quilts and other clothing items (42). According to Marie-Jeanne Adams, Powers‘ Bible quilts retain certain traditional African techniques such as the vertical display of the descriptive squares, a typical feature of African strip- woven textiles (Wahlman 71). Furthermore, Adams also speculates about Powers being acquainted with those traditions via ancestral transmission, probably even ―by hearsay only from other, older slaves‖ (73). Whatever the exact chronological origins of such a transmission, a West African heritage can be clearly perceived in both quilts, especially through the aforementioned appliquéd silhouettes representing human and animal figures, and the disposition of the patches or squares in lines, as if to visually narrate a non- verbal story. This latter aspect is crucial when analyzing nineteenth-century African American quilts, notably if compared to other traditions; there seems to exist a tendency, also present in African textile designs, towards the elaboration of visually meaningful stories and their disposition in several vertical or horizontal

13 Powers‘ Bible Quilt and Pictorial Quilt are on display at the National Museum of American History, Behring Center, and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, respectively. They can be accessed through the following links: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_556462 and https://collections.mfa.org/objects/116166

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stripes, resembling pictorial techniques such as today‘s collages or even vignettes. Powers‘ two quilts, visually similar although with certain compositional differences, evidence a powerful narrative will: from their peculiar dimensions, much wider than long (Benberry, Always There 43) and the segmentation of the fabric into individually framed ―paintings‖, to the disposition of the figures as in suspended motion. The ―Pictorial Quilt‖, elaborated a few years after the Bible Quilt, was commissioned by the wives of Atlanta University professors as a gift to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees (Wahlman 72), and it is even wider and containing more scenes than the previous one. Both represent religious episodes and mythical or historical events, such as certain meteorological phenomena that took place in Georgia through the nineteenth century, including falling stars from a meteor storm and an extremely harsh snowfall (Hicks, This I Accomplish 63). These subjects, arguably of utmost importance to herself and other people in her community, found a way to be graphically exposed through this textile imagery, with such an eye-catching result that ―[h]er quilt is considered by quilt historians to be the ‗Mother of All Story Quilts‘‖ (Allen 88). As explained by Eva Grudin,

religious quilts are not uncommon in the American tradition. Indeed, we can point to hundreds of examples with Bible verses and religious pieties inscribed on them. However, illustrating Bible stories on quilts is unusual, except among Southern black quilters. From the 19th century until the present day, deep religious feelings, coupled with the impulse to narrate, prompted these quilters to translate Scriptures into cloth. (40, emphasis added)

With respect to Grudin‘s initial statement, some scholars not only support the idea but have gone so far as to declare that ―the making of Bible quilts was idiosyncratic to southern black women‖ (Benberry, Always There 43). Others argue that it is a little too daring to overtly attribute black authorship (of either African American or African Caribbean ancestry, from the waves of Haitians migrating to New Orleans since the late eighteenth century) to the religious quilts of the period that have been located. On pointing at a 1775 Bible cloth from New Orleans made by a Creole woman as the earliest evidence we have of this type of textiles, Lisa E. Farrington ponders that ―[a]lthough it cannot be proven that these

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textiles were made by a black woman, certain features indicate strong continuities with African techniques and ideographic symbols‖ (71). What is truly remarkable about Powers‘ only two surviving works is the fact that she envisioned and elaborated a kind of artistic and narrative quilts which bore no resemblance with any other previous quilt in America –or at least, no evidence has been found of a similar prototype before her day. This means that Powers made two very rare decisions: to design a storytelling format through the sequencing of several ―visual episodes‖ and, on top of that, to favor a quilting technique inconsistent with most American quilting conventions until that date: her resort to appliquéd figures instead of the more traditional piecing together (Perry, ―African Art and African-American Folk Art‖ 38). Both features hint at another aspect frequently remarked about Powers: her intuitive relation with vernacular art and her profound spiritual faith, which undeniaby sparked off her creative vision. Furthermore, this capacity to blend a painting-like form of expression with her religious beliefs has been underscored by Beverly Lemire, who claims that ―[a]s with so many women of her time, the quilt was her imaginative canvas and reflected the faith that sustained her‖ (118).14 In This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers‟ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces (2009), Kyra E. Hicks speculates about how customary it was for women of African descent to use Bible-related motifs in their quilts, and in that case, what would have prompted them to do so (26-7). In her study, Hicks hypothesizes that the recently emancipated black women living in the South found a way to express themselves and proudly exhibit the fruit of their creative efforts through local fairs, and especially through the annual Athens Colored Fair, increasingly popular and which lasted at least between 1886 and 1903 (26). Following Grudin‘s argument that biblical inscriptions abounded more often in black Southern women‘s quilts than in any others, it is conceivable that a reason for this may have been the specific context of their living conditions, given that they had to endure such distressing experiences, and spirituality granted them a considerable source

14 Some studies have observed the parallel between the act of painting (traditionally male) and the act of quiltmaking (traditionally female). In Artists in Aprons: Folk Art by American Women (Dewhurst et al. 1979), the term ―mistresspieces‖ is coined in reference to the works of art produced by women quilters.

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of relief and self-support. Powers being a deeply religious woman, it is logical to envisage quilt-making as the tool she chose to express her faith; however, and contrary to what for many years was commonly thought, she was not, as her contemporary Clara R. Jemison wrote, ―a poor, ignorant slave who could not read, and whose only knowledge of the Bible was the stories told her by others more fortunate‖ (Hicks, This I Accomplish 30). Jemison, the white assistant editor of a local newspaper and author of the 1895 article where she analyzes the Bible quilt in those terms, probably based her statements on common popular belief that black people, especially black women, were all illiterate and consequently any knowledge transmitted to Powers must have been conveyed orally –let us remember that under slavery, it was forbidden by law to teach a slave to read and write (Genovese 41, 186); after emancipation, the dominant segregationist culture continued to hinder black women‘s literacy. Apart from the deprecating epithet (―ignorant‖) she used, and even if Jemison‘s words were based on stereotyped assumptions of the time, her whole argumentation turned out to be wrong, as Powers herself would claim. One year later, she detailed in her only surviving letter some relevant aspects of her biography, notably the elaboration of at least four quilts and the moment she ―commenced to learn [to read and write] at 11 years old‖ (Hicks, This I Accomplish 38). In that revealing letter, Powers explains how one of her works, a star quilt which had entered a Colored Fair association at Athens, Georgia, was awarded the first prize; besides, she recalls how her renowned Garden of Eden (eventually named Bible) quilt was bought from her by Oneitia Virginia ―Jennie‖ Smith (Hicks 38), a young white art teacher who had been impressed by the originality and skillfulness of the design. According to Hicks, ―[m]ore than twenty-five quilters were individually named in various newspaper articles‖ (21) reporting on the second annual Northeast Georgia Fair, held in Athens (Georgia) in November 1886. It is not clear yet whether Black women were allowed to participate in that fair, but considering the chronological proximity from the official ending of slavery, it seems very likely that interracial participation was not permitted –or, at best, permitted only on a separate ―Negro building‖ (21). Also according to Hicks (25), a similar, Black-only fair was held in the same town

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only a few days later, and the local newspapers reported quite extensively on the details of both exhibits, even describing the works submitted by certain quilters; however, no specific mention is made of Powers‘ quilt (or at least it is not singled out by name in any of the articles), which is at odds with its visually outstanding qualities and how quickly it became a sought-after work of art. Proof to this is the fact that many of Powers‘ contemporaries unhesitatingly remarked the originality of the piece, which seemed to belong in an art gallery rather than as a regular bedcover. Diverse speculations also arose with respect to the unusual disposition and unknown purpose of this piece. Benberry, for instance, wondered why the quilt was made ―in this odd shape‖, and whether it was possible that it was ―designed to be hung on the wall rather than put on a bed‖ (Always There 43). Of a different view is Wahlman, who suggests a very specific purpose for the quilt, unrelated to decorative aims, as a wall hanging, or practical ones, as a coverlet. Drawing among other things on Julia Peterkin‘s novel Black April (1927), where references to Southern black quilt-making traditions abound, Wahlman claims that these quilts might have been used in religious ceremonies, arguing that ―[b]oth Powers‘s textiles would […] make spectacular baptismal robes, with a horizontal display of religious messages across the back‖ (73). Pondering also other relevant facts, such as Powers‘ photograph with the Masonic symbols attached to her apron hinting at ceremonial uses, Wahlman speculates that Harriet Powers may have been ―a conjure-woman or an elder member of a Masonic lodge, or both‖ (74). I consider both hypotheses to be based on sound arguments and equally possible; on the one hand, there is evidence of her artistic self-awareness, at a time when that was extremely rare for black former slave women, and on the other, her belonging to a Masonic or similarly secret organization would have prevented her from openly declaring it.15 Besides, either scenario would confirm the strong attachment she showed to her quilts, also supported by her choosing to pose with the symbolic apron in the aforementioned photograph (it is important to

15 Increasing support for this theory was gathered during the documentation for a 2001 film, The Harriet Powers Film Project, by Andrew Ferguson, Gladys-Marie Fry and Maude Southwell Wahlman. For further information, visit: http://www.harriettpowers.net/Harriett_Powers_Film_Project/Project_History.html

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acknowledge that photographs were at that time a very precious object, and every detail was carefully considered). More important than her membership in religious or ceremonial circles is, to my view, the narrative layout of her works, because this fact clearly points at her penchant for telling stories through the use of traditional textiles or, in Grudin‘s phrase, ―the impulse to narrate‖ (40). Certainly, her skill did not go unnoticed, as proven by the widespread success of her quilts. Jenny Smith, the aforementioned art collector and teacher, recalled how ―fascinated‖ she had been as the piece had ―captured her eye‖, describing the whole process until she acquired it in these terms:

I offered to buy it, but it was not for sale at any price. After four years Harriet sent me word that I could buy it, if I wanted it. […] She arrived one afternoon in front of my door in an ox-cart, with the precious burden in her lap encased in a clean flour sack, which was still further enveloped in a crocus sack. She offered it for ten dollars, but I only had five to give. After going out and consulting her husband, she returned and said ―ownin ter de hardness of de times, my ole man ‗lows I‘d better teck it,‖ and not being a new woman, she obeyed. After giving me a full description of each scene with great earnestness, and deep piety she departed, but has been back several times to visit the darling offspring of her brain. She was only in a measure consoled for its loss when I promised to save her all my scraps. (Hicks 27-8)

In this revealing first-person account, Smith mentions several aspects of the ―transaction‖ which are worth some deeper reflection. To begin with, she emphasizes the amount of time that elapsed between the moment she first laid eyes on the quilt until its author finally authorized its selling, clearly against her own will and only due to ―the hardness of the times,‖ in Powers‘ own words. One can truly imagine the dire necessities in which Black emancipated people in the South must have lived during the decades following emancipation, and Powers‘ final acceptance to let go of her treasured quilt, which otherwise would not have

16 Jenny Smith‘s handwritten text, which dates from 1891 approximately, is now kept at the Textile Department of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

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been traded ―at any price‖, bears witness to that. Moreover, Smith establishes a curious analogy, choosing to depict Powers‘ attachment to her piece as something that reminds more of a mother-child link than what would be expected from an author and its purely creative work. In particular, Smith highlights the extremely careful wrapping of the quilt when Powers appeared at her front door, the detailed description of its features as she interpreted the meaning of each scene, and the fact that she even came back ―several times to visit the darling offspring of her brain‖. Taking into consideration that Powers, as many other (especially black) women had to go through the tragic personal loss of beloved ones and frequently of their own children at very young ages, I reckon that the analogy is quite symbolic within this context; in a letter by Powers a few years after selling the quilt, at age 58, she claimed to be the mother of 9 children, 6 of whom had died. It is reasonable to picture in one‘s mind the emotional bond that presumably many women in similar circumstances developed with their creative works; in this case maybe even more so, since through her works she reinterpreted, in a very personal way, certain subjects to which the artist felt very close: her spiritual beliefs and some remarkable events from her native Georgia. The intimate connection between Harriet Powers and her quilt is also evident in that, as Jenny Smith stated, Powers was ―only in a measure consoled for its loss‖ upon the promise to receive new fabric from which to elaborate the next piece. Besides, her insistence on thoroughly describing the contents and symbolic meaning of each patch or ―scene‖ of the quilt reveals she was aware of its quality as a pictorial/textile work of art and, maybe to some conscious or unconscious level, of the contribution she was making in continuing part of the African heritage as it merged with the culture of the new continent. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the idea that both West African aesthetic customs and American features concerning religion and history somehow fused together in her quilt, and her will to leave written testimony of its textual and contextual meaning are proof of its transcendence. But Smith‘s words are also telling in that they summarize the three-tier submission that Powers had to endure when letting go of her quilt: obviously the racial and class domination which forced her to do so, but simultaneously there is a gender subordination, as reflected in Powers‘ soliciting her husband‘s approval

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to sell the quilt for the amount offered. The unfair transaction, whereby her original work is transferred to a well-to-do white woman in exchange of 5 dollars, is an example of both economic coercion (Powers was not in a position to freely negotiate the price) and cultural appropriation, because a very specific item from one minority culture was being assimilated and literally appropriated into the dominating one.17 The complex concept of ―cultural appropriation‖, usually applied to the artistic interpretation of elements from a culture by ―outsiders‖ to that community, is used here in the sense of acquiring property, under oppressing circumstances, of a peculiar artifact that would have contributed significantly to its original community. According to James O. Young,

[a]nything that has been appropriated by force, outright theft, deceit, or coercion (and this can be the result of inequities between groups) remains the property of the original owners. When a work of art has been wrongly appropriated from a culture in one of these ways, the culture does not need to appeal to the cultural significance principle. It already has a sufficiently strong claim on the property. (101)

By ―cultural significance principle‖, Young refers to the notion that a community may claim the return of certain artistic or cultural works of particular ―aesthetic, historical, or other value to [its] members‖ (91), but the principle would not even be necessary in this case, due to the unfair conditions of the exchange. On the other hand, I would specifically object to the widespread notion that the acquisition of relevant artistic works by economically powerful cultures may be more convenient in order to guarantee their conservation. This concept, called the Rescue Argument to follow Young‘s terminology (102), has been the source of much debate and controversy for the past decades. I consider this argument to be racially biased, as it regards minority cultures as unfit for the preservation of their own artistic legacy; at the same time, it can be extremely harmful for those cultures, by dispossessing them of significant parts of their intellectual and artistic baggage. The Rescue Argument, which has been historically used to exonerate certain authorities from committing cultural theft,

17 The approximate equivalent value of 5 dollars in 1891 is 142 dollars in our days, according to MeasuringWorth.com

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has proven to be a feeble excuse in most scenarios and I would certainly not apply it to the Bible quilt‘s case. For all the above-mentioned reasons, Smith‘s acquisition of Powers‘ quilt represents an act of cultural misappropriation, not only because of the evident act of subjugation of one racial community to the other, but because of the historical and symbolic meaning of the quilt itself. Of course, I do not intend to argue that ―external‖ interpretation, or even manipulation, of an artistic element from a determined culture may represent in itself an act of cultural (mis)appropriation. Most artistic manifestations derive, in one way or another, from the evolution and interpretations previously made of an original element and, as a consequence, any kind of artistic activity that is continued and interpreted within the same original source or community could be accused of such appropriation. To the contrary, I fully agree with Maya Angelou when she states that ―all art […] belongs to everyone who appreciates it‖ (qtd. in Braxton 191). Besides, from today‘s postcolonial perspective, traditionally-assumed ideas are being constantly challenged, and a revision in fairer terms of black female authorship in all venues of artistic expression –even when that expression was repressed or constrained by slavery– is all the more necessary. In their introduction to The Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930 (1986), Bets Ramsey and Merikay Waldvogel argue that African American women had never quilted until they were ―trained‖ by Southern white women and, merely by stating this, there is an implicit suggestion as to the enslaved women being unfamiliar with the process of piecing fabric scraps together to elaborate covers. According to Ramsey and Waldvogel,

[i]t is known through records and family accounts that during the period of slavery some women trained household help to quilt. Some splendid slave- made quilts have been carefully preserved and cherished by their owners. A few generous owners have donated these quilts to museums where they may be appreciated by a wider audience than within a private collection. After emancipation, having acquired quilting skills, black women made quilts for themselves with whatever scraps they could gather and in whatever form they chose. (3)

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I also object to the notion that this ―household help‖ (euphemistically referring to the enslaved women) started to create their own quilts in their own taste only after the end of the war, after allegedly ―having acquired the skills‖. Also, as I have previously argued, they were actively creative both during and after slavery, irrespective of the specific kind of quilts that many were forced to make following the mistresses‘ instructions. On the other hand, their claim with respect to the generosity of those who over time decided to donate the quilts to public institutions can also be controversial. If we consider that the term ―owners‖ refers in this context to their legitimate authors, then it is acceptable to consider their decision as an act of great generosity; quite the contrary, if the same term alludes to the mistresses and their descendants, who became very often the illegitimate heirs of these works, then the consideration of generosity seems extremely unfair on their makers as well as on their own descendants –and, by extension, on the African American cultural heritage per se. Finally, with regard to the quilt‘s aesthetical value, it is relevant to reflect on the number of private collectors, institutions and simple onlookers who marveled at its qualities and desired to acquire it. When in 1968 the quilt‘s keeper, Professor Harold Heckman, considered that the artwork belonged in a museum and ―should be retained for general benefit‖ (Hicks, This I Accomplish 60), he sent it through the post to Doris M. Bowman, then the Needlework Specialist at the Smithsonian Museum, who recalled her first impression in these terms: ―[i]t just came in the mail and we opened it and we were just floored…. It was so different from anything we had ever seen‖ (Hicks 60). Certainly, the piece must have seemed extremely original to the Western audience in the 1960s, and even more astonishing for the taste of late nineteenth-century spectators. Its already mentioned representation of human and animal shapes provides them with a remarkable dynamism, as if ―captured‖ or photographed while moving. This peculiar feature has led some critics to appreciate similitudes with the famous Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, acknowledging Powers‘ innovative talent and her skillful merging of traits from several continents. As Farrington argues, ―Powers‘s treatment of ambiguous ground planes, streamlined forms, and certain figural motifs prefigure the ‗jazz‘ cutouts of French modernist Henri Matisse, and at the

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same time point directly to Fon and Kogo imagery‖ (41). Powers‘ figures, which precede in approximately sixty years Matisse‘s well-known collages made from cut paper called ―Jazz series‖, bear a striking resemblance to the latter, in their dynamism as well as in the use of bold colors and the unsteady shapes of animals and geometrical figures. In a sense, it can be said that Powers‘ style provides a preamble to Matisse‘s works from a figurative perspective. In sum, the two Harriet Powers‘ extant quilts are living proof of African and African American merging cultures, and their aesthetic legacy goes beyond a specific time period or a particular quilting style: it is a broader symbol of black American women‘s experience and sensitivity, and of their contribution to the cultural and historical richness of the country. This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that black women have been elaborating quilts for a variety of reasons and usually under repressive conditions since the first generations arrived in North America in the early seventeenth century. Although the historical circumstances evolved and their degree of personal and material independence gradually increased, the resort to making quilts as a means of emotional expression as an outlet for their creativity is a continuum throughout the nineteenth century, reaching our day. Even if there is evidence of black-made quilts during the antebellum years (a fact commonly denied until findings carried out in the late twentieth century), it is extremely difficult nowadays to gather a solid corpus of works, since a relatively small number have survived.18 Many of them have been lost during both the antebellum and postbellum period, often as a result of overuse, poor conservation conditions, appropriation from an external culture and the mass exodus that took place after the war, among other factors. Besides, enslaved women managed to elaborate their own personal needle- works, following their aesthetic preferences, apart from those quilts they also made according to their white mistresses‘ dictations. This is of key importance, as it reveals a high autonomous voice within their quilt-making tradition, and is proof of their free-spirited creativity. This becomes even more relevant if we

18 In an article entitled ―Slaves as Textiles Artisans‖ (2001), Gloria Seaman Allen notes that ―[d]ocumentary evidence for slave women engaged in […] textile crafts […] is scattered and has been largely overlooked‖ (1).

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remember that access to any other form of intellectual or artistic activity was denied them, and needle-work was one of the very few outlets they had to express themselves. This intimate necessity found greater meaning and continuation thanks to their collaborative work in quilting bees, which played many transcendental roles in their lives, especially as a socializing means and as a powerful device for psychological relief. Besides, the bees provided a crucial tool in the development of their own material culture, helping construct family heirlooms to be conserved from one generation to the next, whilst contributing to maintain some common traits of their African inheritance (O‘Riley 54). Also, I have analyzed the relations between quilts and several branches of the abolitionist movement, concluding that feminist and anti-slavery currents not always ran hand in hand; in fact, they did not merge into a global strategy, and advocates from each group often failed to support the other‘s (presumably similar) aims. Despite this, abolitionism did contribute to further women‘s situation in society, as many of them started to step forward and out of the enclosed circle of the home. At the same time, the introduction of quilts as a means to promote the cause turned out to be very successful, as women found a new way to blend their political and creative concerns towards a transcendental purpose. Besides, I have explored the implications that the slave liberator Harriet Tubman made on the history of black abolitionism, and how the Underground Railroad has become a universal symbol in the fight for emancipation and self-empowerment of oppressed peoples. Finally, I have explored the changing status of African American quilts once the war ended and emancipation was proclaimed. During the Jim Crow years that ensued, black women managed to keep their solid cultural tradition regarding needle-arts alive, both before (in the Reconstruction, when many of their quilts were lost for different reasons) and after the harsh times of economic deprivation that arrived with the Great Depression. Among the greatest black American quilters of whom there are records, Harriet Powers and her two only remaining quilts have gained for themselves a specific place, becoming a milestone in all history of African American quilting, due to their enormous cultural legacy.

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Chapter 2. Transformations in African American quilting

between the early twentieth century

and contemporary times

2.1. African American women quilters in the early twentieth century

In this chapter, I analyze the evolving role that African American quilts have played since the beginning of the twentieth century, especially with respect to their cultural and political connotations within the artistic field. Particular attention is drawn to their changing status as a result of the post-Depression times, in the 1930s and 1940s, when a renewed popular interest in the crafting of quilts affected the African American tradition, which in turn also had an influence on the broader scenario of American quilts. Moreover, I explore the Freedom Quilting Bee project, which emerged in the 1960s in rural Alabama during the peak of the Civil Rights movement, as evidence of how quilts developed a social and political function for many African American citizens and, most notably, for Southern rural African American women in the post-Jim Crow period. Finally, I provide a brief revision of traditional art criticism as to the diverging criteria which recognize art status to certain disciplines such as painting and other plastic arts, but not those derived from the needle. At the turn of the century, large numbers of African Americans moved from the agrarian Southern states to the industrialized North, during what came to be known as the Great Migration. Among the main reasons that sparked such an exodus were the effects of the Jim Crow laws, which imposed discriminatory treatment based on white supremacy in every imaginable aspect of life (Buss 10). Besides, the hope for better job offerings and educational opportunities for the families migrating from the countryside to the cities, stirred up expectations of Black Stitches

more dignified living conditions (Ramsey 186-7). The Great Migration, considered to have lasted from 1914 until World War II, brought about a displacement of many low-skilled (from the point of view of market demands) African Americans to work in the urban territories of the North, often also under precarious conditions. Jacqueline Jones has pointed out that, because of the fragility of the sharecropping system, many black women who had remained on their own at the farms –especially single mothers, wives and unmarried daughters– were forced to move up North, only to ―discover that while the southern countryside continued to mirror the slave past, in the towns that past was refracted into new shapes and images‖ (109), referring to the ghettoization suffered by black communities in the cities, and how the double discrimination based on race and gender persisted in the twentieth-century urban landscape. Interestingly, black women‘s willingness to leave the rural South and their drive to pull their families out of the poverty-deemed circle of sharecropping contrast with the commonly believed notion that ―women were more ‗conservative‘ than men, less quick to take chances or to abandon the familiar‖ (Jones, Labor of Love 99). This traditionalist concept, probably rooted in other considerations such as the smaller number of runaway slave women as compared to men, is proven inaccurate if we observe the fact that, in many cases, women not only led their family‘s migrating process, but often did so by themselves or carrying their children, to the point that they ―participated in this gradual migration in disproportionately large numbers‖ (Jones, Labor of Love 98). Within this context, new aesthetic tendencies appeared, changing the aspect of many American homes. In her study of quilts made under the Great Depression era, entitled Soft Covers for Hard Times (1990), Merikay Waldvogel observes the impact of both the industrialization process and the 1929-derived economic crisis on women living in the South, particularly analyzing different counties within the State of Tennessee. Although her work focuses mainly on middle-class white women quilters from that state, her research also reveals interesting aspects about the pieces made by coetaneous black women quilters living in the same area. During the prosperous 1920s, the time-honored custom of elaborating by hand domestic items such as counterpanes was becoming progressively outdated,

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while manufactured products were instead gaining ground. The decade of the Roaring 20s, with its thriving economic pulse and flourishing technology, transformed part of American households thanks to the improvement in transports and the modern domestic devices which gradually eased the living conditions of many American homemakers (Kiracofe 186). Industrial commodification of traditionally artisanal goods, from needlework to edible items, turned them for the first time in the history of the country into marketable products, ready to be distributed on a nation-wide scale, supported by a more advanced infrastructure and a vigorous industry. A little later, a new quilting fad, based on craftwork and a reverence for antique textiles or, in general, any object preserved from family ancestors, became known as ―Colonial Revival‖, considered ―brief if enthusiastic‖ and having its peak in the 1930s and 1940s (Katz-Hyman and Rice 387): ―[i]t was a popular word in advertising, as was any term that evoked nostalgia. Quilts were the perfect accessory to complete the colonial look, and many quilt patterns were sold under the labels of ‗Grandmother,‘ ‗Mother,‘ ‗Romance,‘ and ‗Patriotism‘‖ (Kiracofe 198). As a result, it became fashionable to retrieve old family treasures from chests and wardrobes. Either by dusting off their heirloom quilts or by transferring the patterns that publishing companies were already circulating around the country, white women from industrial or semi-industrial backgrounds took to that style of quilting with a renewed interest; for their part, rural women simply carried on making quilts and any other type of bedcovers following a vast number of traditions, as they had actually never stopped. The connection between antique items and a nationalist fervor, also promoted by textile-related companies, took advantage of an unconscious association between colonial days and the defense of traditional ideas of family, domestic life and a patriotic spirit, as these were considered to be at the core of white American values. One of the elements that favored this revival, as Waldvogel noticed, was the fact that all businesses related to the textile field were expanding their capacity at an amazing pace; from a diversification of fabric supplies to a swift diffusion of

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fashionable patterns, quilt-making was now less the product of individual creativity and more the outcome of a blooming market:

[l]arge and small entrepreneurs saw the money-making opportunities in quiltmaking and introduced new time-saving products to encourage thousands of reluctant women to ‗make a quilt.‘ For years traditional quiltmakers had followed the same time-consuming tasks: making patterns, marking and cutting fabric, and sewing pieces together. (Soft Covers10)

Although Waldvogel includes rural as well as urban women as beneficiaries of the modern advances in technology and distribution, it is difficult to fully picture Southern rural black women among them, especially considering that most belonged to economically underprivileged classes, and as a result their access to manufactured products and fancy order-by-mail designs would often be hampered. For example, it was not infrequent for these women to trade their own domestic products, such as eggs or butter, in exchange for fabric, consequently working at an unsteady pace, through ―scraps‖ of time whenever the raw material was available (Benberry, A Piece of My Soul 9). Besides, African American women became to a lesser extent affected by those early twentieth-century changes because they were more used to following their own traditions and relatively unconcerned with respect to external influences, such as mainstream trends of the day. For example, their aesthetic taste had historically disliked strictly symmetric patterns or a too orthodox layout, which had been the standard measure for many Anglo-American quilts during decades –contrariwise, appliquéd motifs, which had been a significant part of African American tradition, became extremely popular during the ―Colonial Revival.‖ For these reasons, African American quilt designs did not undergo the same homogenization process experienced by the more general current, as black quilters were usually less prone to suffer those sharp fluctuations of style. In part, that homogenization of patterns was due to certain marketing strategies and to the rise of needlework publications, which fostered the tendency of ordering samplers via mail, namely among middle-class customers. The most sought-after designs, usually in soft colors and reminiscing of romantic or early

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nineteenth century overtones, became associated with an idealized vision of patriotic times, and were imitated by quilters once and again, becoming the hallmark of the era. Although ordering samplers through the mail was within reach of an increasing number of women (and, certainly, a much cheaper method than buying manufactured bedspreads), the most economical alternative was simply to copy the patterns featured in the newspapers. For obvious reasons, this must have been the option chosen by most rural women, as well as the free exchange of patterns among themselves. Also contributing to the afore-mentioned homogeneity was the decision taken by certain companies to rename regional and traditional patterns, so that many of them fell into disuse. For example, a Cincinnati needleart company chose to replace the well-known Southern name ―Rocky Mountain Road‖ (or ―Crown of Thorns‖) with the more modern ―New York Beauty‖, probably in an attempt to make the design more alluring for a wider audience. In spite of this, ―[n]o Southern quiltmaker would have made a quilt with a Yankee name during the Reconstruction period,‖ claims Waldvogel (20). Furthermore, researchers such as Linda Pershing have analyzed the complex issue of pattern-naming, reaching the conclusion that one of the reasons why it is so difficult today to identify earlier (that is, pre-nineteenth century) pattern names lies in a chronological confusion. According to her, many pattern names ―previously attributed to the Colonial period or to the nineteenth century were more likely coined in the twentieth century, either by pattern companies or by quilters who participated in patriotic or nostalgic trends, such as the Colonial revival of the 1920s and 1930s‖ (56). Another characteristic trait of this Revival fad was the obsolescence of Crazy quilts, which had been so in vogue during the prior decades. In spite of that, the Crazy pattern, one of the most appreciated designs throughout African American quilt history, was not forsaken; rather, its apparently chaotic style and bold colors were temporarily left in the background, as more orderly compositions became the national fashion. As evidence to the fact that Crazy quilts were never completely discarded, there remain the numerous examples conserved from the early decades of the twentieth century, dated from both pre- and post-Depression years (Benberry, A Piece of My Soul 41-2).

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By contrast, the pastel tones preferred by the new current seemed to match better the neat and very symmetric designs that were typical of the Revival. A hypothesis for this change in color and composition may be the necessity, probably on a subconscious level, to look back on the country‘s history and focus on its patriotic days as a form of collective self-assurance. In this sense, it may not be purely coincidental to see the choice of pastel hues and the consistency of patterns on the one hand, with the troubled times and a fear of uncertainty on the other. Arguably, the return to a romanticized past, perceived in every aspect of the home from furniture to textile decoration, mirrored a psychological reaction to the hardships of those years. In his Introduction to Soft Covers for Hard Times, entitled ―From Making Do to How-To‖, Robert Cogswell reflects on the way in which mainstream American quilting traditions evolved from the pre-Depression years to the 1930s and 1940s, observing how most of the women who had easily grown accustomed to relying on ready-made covers were forced to ―unlearn‖ their dependence on manufactured goods and recuperate their needles to elaborate their own bedspreads again (xi). This process reminds us somehow of the Civil War times when Southern white women, as was previously mentioned, needed to (re)learn their spinning or sewing skills from their black counterparts, who having lacked access to the manufacturing processes, had never quit those skills. In any case, this particular period in the history of American quilts, which meant a temporary setback in the global industrialization process, had among its side effects a return to home making artifacts and an idealized vision of domesticity. Thus, a renewed interest in old-times crafts and pre-industrial quilting became widespread for a majority of urban women, while those living in a rural setting did not alter dramatically their sewing habits. As summarized by one African American woman from rural Tennessee when interviewed by Waldvogel about the impact of the 1929 crash, ―We didn‘t know there was a depression […] We were living like we always had‖ (Soft Covers 48). On the other hand, specialized exhibitions and fairs, which had been so popular during the nineteenth century, remained attractive outlets for many women interested in the quiltmaking process, from magazine editors to

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seamstresses and, in general, middle-class homemakers hoping to reproduce the tendencies of the day as accurately as possible. Interestingly, though, another side effect derived from the mass production of fabric and the aforementioned revival was a change in focus with respect to what could be called ―aesthetics leadership‖: it was not any longer the fruit of a community of women who chose to favor one design over another or transmit a particular taste through generations. From this moment onwards, nationally acclaimed quilt designers became the point of reference that dictated the modern patterns, and their prestigious opinions held the highest influence on quilters across the country. Only, this time the so-called quilt gurus of the era were not quilters themselves, but merely designers whose popularity enabled them to select, according to their own preferences, the compositions that would set the standard for so many women nationwide. Consequently, it can be assumed that the new leadership reduced, in practice, the chances for grassroots quilters and other minority groups to have a more significant voice on a national scale and, to a certain degree, to remain limited as specific ―regional‖ or ―vernacular‖ varieties. And yet, the pulse of African American quiltmaking with an aesthetic interest was still throbbing in the Southern area, despite the lean times and the sparsity of materials to work with. Such shortages were partially solved, among other things, by resorting to newspaper backing or bleached feed-sacks for the background of the composition and for the lining (back side) of the quilt.19. These customs, which nevertheless were not exclusive to black women quilters, contributed to keeping the tradition alive, and proved to be especially useful at times of material dearth. With respect to the aesthetic aspect of most Southern rural black-made quilts dating from the 1920s and 1930s, a similar distance is kept from the mainstream style and, generally speaking, there is arguably a rich eclecticism which again does not allow quilt researchers to classify these quilts as belonging to one specific fashion or kind. As Benberry insists, it is a constant in African

19 Since wooden barrels were replaced by cloth sacks as flour containers since the early nineteenth century, their use for quilting became widespread, and it was fostered by millers‘ companies, who encouraged the use of increasingly refined cloth sacks in quilts. This continued until the first half of the twentieth century, when paper substituted cloth as the predominant packaging. (Waldvogel 62-7).

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American quiltmaking to avoid exact repetition of the proposed pattern, as well as a preference for apparently shocking or ―chaotic‖ choices, usually inspired by a strong sense of improvisation and an off the beaten track style. Through her accurate research of Arkansans quilters in A Piece of My Soul where she documents and analyzes works ranging from the early nineteenth century to the late years of the twentieth century, Benberry claims that many black quilters, also during the Depression years and beyond, continued to practice a pragmatic amalgamation of mainstream and personal aesthetics when projecting their quilts, so that from their ―family legacy came the informal, improvisational piecing techniques, and from the published newspaper source came the formal, conventionalized concepts‖ (15). In addition, another remarkable aspect of Depression-time quilts elaborated by black Southern women is the surprising resemblance to other arts, especially to early twentieth-century paintings which we tend to identify with well-known white European and American artists. As happened with Harriet Powers‘ quilts, once again the name of Henri Matisse comes to mind, if we think of his peculiar figures which seem to float in space, together with his bold use of color and the predominance of certain motifs such as sharp, bright stars and vibrant palm trees. These features, as well as the cut-out botanical motifs which are characteristic of some of his paintings, stand out in several African American quilts from this period, namely some remarkable works made in the early 1930s in Wheeler Dam Village, Northern Alabama. In the early 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) set up a development project to promote economic investment in one of the regions most deeply damaged by the effects of the Depression. Among the black Americans who settled in the area for the planning and construction of a dam around the river, between the states of Alabama and Tennessee, was Ruth Clement Bond, wife of the officer in charge at the construction. In the segregated South of those years, Ruth established a connection with other women from the neighboring areas, joining them in their quilting reunions. As she observed them make quilts according to the patterns in vogue, one day she developed the idea of suggesting a different type of quilt, one that symbolized the black presence in the construction

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of the new infrastructures being built along the Tennessee valley. She conceived a visually powerful design, that of a black man from whose fingers emanated bolts of lightning, as if symbolizing the introduction of electricity into the lives of the black rural community. The figure she pictured is standing, almost dancing, under a palm tree, and on his other hand he is holding a guitar or banjo. Although Ruth Bond never made the quilt herself, her design was highly favored with the valley community, since at least three other women elaborated different versions of it. Probably the most outstanding rendition of Bond‘s designs was made by Rose Marie Thomas, who created a visually powerful quilt that would become known as ―Black Power Quilt‖ (Soft Covers 80-1).20 Ruth Bond‘s remarkable designs include the figure of a black man working under a crane on a construction site, and a black fist holding tightly a lightning bolt, in a landscape presided by the American flag. All the quilts have in common a certain aesthetic style and the chosen topics: black workers contributing to the industrialization of the Southern rural states in the aftermath of the Depression. But, apart from the personal connection spontaneously created by Bond as the creative mind and the other women as the actual quiltmakers, several things are interesting about these textile portraits. First, their choice of male figures as representative of the African American involvement in the modernization of the South might have gone unnoticed at the time the quilts were made, but it is a shocking decision from our contemporary perspective. Certainly, one can argue that artists have historically used as their source of inspiration the surrounding people or events they were witnessing, and from that point of view, these women‘s work simply reflects that reality, just as it celebrates the significant role played by black community members in the advancement of certain regions of the country. Still, our contemporary vision of African American quilts as belonging to a certain type characterized by a set of ethnic, aesthetic and thematic features seems to be at odds whenever confronted with works which, despite being the product of African American women quilters, do not display such features. However, by doing so, we are indirectly ―inferring that black people are a

20 Held in the Museum of Arts and Design in New York: https://madmuseum.org/views/fabric-change-quilt-art-ruth-clement-bond

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monolithic group who must adhere to a preordained and imposed aesthetic and are prohibited from exhibiting any diversity‖ (Benberry, A Piece of My Soul 37). Although Benberry particularly refers to the controversy that surrounds African American-made quilts from the point of view of expected style and choice of design, a similar argumentation can be used for the appraisal of Bond‘s designs and their representations by the TVA women. As previously discussed (see section 1.1), there exists a mistaken but widely extended belief that the mechanics of slavery introduced, from that era onwards, gender equality among the members of black communities. Quite on the contrary, they also operated under a patriarchal system –only one which lacked some of the attributes of the white patriarchy, as for example the right to property and other exclusive privileges accorded to white males (Mann 157). Even so, researchers on African American studies such as Diane K. Lewis insist upon the notion that ―black women have tended […] to see racism as a more powerful cause of their subordinate position than sexism,‖ thus identifying racial discrimination as their primary source of oppression and gender inequality as a secondary one (41).21 Furthermore, just as structural racism uses certain psychological devices to instill in the mentality of the oppressed a sense of self-deprecation, so has patriarchy consistently struggled to infuse in women a similar self-image of inferiority and subordination, historically trying to persuade them of the convenience of male leadership and prevalence in all aspects of representation. All these things considered, it seems quite likely that these Depression-era Tennessee quilters would choose to portray black male figures as symbols of the advancements of their race, although one can assume that their choice would probably have been more female-focused only a few decades later, with the emergence of a new gender awareness and the so-called Second-Wave Feminism of the 1960s. Secondly, an analysis of Bond‘s designs from the purely artistic point of view shows her interesting figurative imagination, and a rich symbolism. Other

21 In reverse, hooks argues that white women mostly prioritize gender inequality over racism as the highest source of oppression for African American women, overlooking the inevitable interconnection of both factors as the basic ground for such discrimination (hooks, Sisters of the Yam 3).

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elements which appear with variations in the alternative versions of her designs lead the viewer to interpret the artists‘ choices under a range of different possibilities. Thus, the presence of a figure in the shape of a white hand reaching from one margin of the quilt as if to touch or even push the black man in Bond‘s ―Black Power Quilt‖ may receive varied interpretations also regarding its symbolic capacities, since the hand-shaped motif could equally represent an electric bulb shedding light on the human figure. When asked to explain the meaning of her design, she expressed it in these terms: ―[i]t represents the black man moving away from the hand of the law. In spite of the law, he is moving to become independent and to become an important part of society‖ (Soft Covers 80- 1). Other quilts dating from the same period and also elaborated by black Southern women seem to challenge long-standing conceptions of African American folk art. This is the case with Benberry‘s aforementioned example. Here, a quilt made circa 1940 by a black Arkansan woman named Dorothy Lambert White, is analyzed as antithetical of black quiltmakers‘ tradition, namely because of its unusual choice of pattern, block disposition and overall topic. The work, entitled Nursery Rhyme Quilt, comprises twenty-eight blocks depicting characters from popular children‘s tales, embroidered on a white background, crayon-colored by hand and hot ironed in order to prevent the colors to fade on the fabric after washing, a common procedure in the early twentieth century (Fisher 111).22 Several things are problematic when ascribing this kind of quilts to the African American tradition. Truly, as Benberry contends, it is necessary to broaden our perspective with respect to what is or what is expected to be a traditional African American quilt, because failing to do so would mean to ignore the whole complexity and heterogeneity of styles and sensitivities included under the term. However, when confronted with works like the Nursery Rhymes Quilt, it

22 Made by Dorothy Lambert White and reproduced in Benberry, Piece of My Soul 103, available at https://books.google.es/books?id=Bne4P- tRUS0C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=Dorothy+Lambert+White+nursery+rhyme+quilt&source=bl &ots=vnNwuie6JW&sig=ACfU3U206IH82Jj9- cpsTuJBx_wWDXvPog&hl=gl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjlwqjXm7PpAhVFyhoKHeSPD3wQ6AE wCnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=Plate%2049&f=false

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remains a difficult task for any contemporary spectator to acknowledge such ascription. Apart from the physical presentation of the blocks, which are very neatly arranged simulating a pink and white chess board, other features in the quilt are equally surprising. For example, the fact that the artist chose to depict children‘s characters (all of them white) that represent traditional white European fairy tales such as W. W. Denslow‘s Humpty Dumpty, C. Perrault‘s Mother Goose or T. Preston‘s Hey Diddle Diddle, is arguably infrequent within the vast corpus of early twentieth-century quilts made by black American women. Furthermore, Dorothy White did not design the pattern herself or received it from a friend quilter, neither did she get the inspiration from a newspaper, which were seemingly the most typical sources for black women quilters at the time, mainly in the rural South. On the contrary, White purchased the transfer design from a printed manufacturer, exactly like ―the other hundreds of quilters across the nation who made this same quilt,‖ as Benberry reminds us in A Piece of My Soul (37), and this very notion calls into question, once again, a too narrow vision of black female quilting tradition that still holds today. In sum, although the repercussions of the Great Depression on (especially Southern) African American women was remarkable from a socio-economical perspective, it did not have an excessive impact on their quiltmaking tradition, namely regarding styles and material resources, since they did not undergo extremely abrupt changes if compared with the previous decades. As a consequence, it can be said that their quilting techniques remained somewhat unaffected, or at least less affected, by the positive and negative changes experienced by most white American quilters of the early twentieth century: they did not benefit highly from increased industrialization, but they did not undergo other processes such as massive homogenization or the commodification of textiles, either.

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2.2. The influence of African-American art in the Civil Rights era. A case in point: the Freedom Quilting Bee

Of all the elements which influenced and boosted the emergence of anti-racist struggle in mid-twentieth century America, arts and crafts may be regarded as one of the most powerful, yet underestimated forces to have contributed to the Civil Rights movement, which lasted approximately from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. Rooted in the early years of bondage and in a state of permanent revision and evolution, the persistence of a specific African American art tradition destabilizes the idea that aesthetics played only a secondary role within the liberation movement, since the stifling experience of slavery had presumably reduced black Americans to ―a cultural zero‖ (Locke 2, qtd. in Bernier 19). Several arguments firmly contradict that belief. Firstly, there is strong evidence today of a very dynamic artistic activity among black American communities throughout their history. Already in 1978, John Michael Vlach questioned outdated and racially-prejudiced anthologies on African American art, criticizing the lack of a comprehensive study of that tradition during the earlier centuries, namely from the seventeenth to the nineteenth. In The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, Vlach tries to flesh out that shameful omission in American visual art history, by bringing some light onto it. Indeed, the multiple remains that have been found throughout the Black Belt region (South-Eastern states, from Virginia to the Eastern part of Texas) of creations elaborated by black artists and artisans, confirm the existence of a rich artistic tradition, one which transcended the limitations of its day and managed to merge form, function and meaning (148-9). Secondly, there has usually been a strong opposition from western academics to acknowledge folk art as high-quality or ―serious‖ art, and this fact has only contributed to hamper specialized research on the matter. In particular with respect to textiles, it is interesting to observe the different critical reception and status that such work tends to receive from a western perspective, as opposed to its consideration in most African cultures. Christopher Spring, for instance, has

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noted that ―[t]his imbalance is partly due to our Western notion of the distinction between fine arts on the one hand and ‗crafts‘ on the other. No such distinction exists in African societies, or if there is a distinction it could be said to be the reverse of our own‖ (7), in the sense that textiles occupy a very relevant position in all aspects of African life. Thus, the aforementioned association of traditional artistic forms such as painting or sculpture with ―high art‖ and the consideration of crafts as menial work and, as a consequence, less prestigious expressions, have contributed greatly to the undervaluation of popular (and often, anonymous) work carried out by black Americans during the Civil Rights protests. This essential difference of treatment in the categorization of both art types is readily perceived, among other things, in the kind of critical reception accorded to each. Prestigious artworks tend to be formally and aesthetically analyzed, in such a way that there develops what could be called a ―dialogue‖ between author and critic –or, in any case, between author and audience. In contrast to this, the author‘s identity of artisanal work is very frequently not known, or shared by a number of other authors and, inevitably, diffused within the more abstract ―communal work‖ category (this often results in the attribution of a piece of work to generic labels based on ethic groupings, especially when the author‘s identity is ignored).23 Besides, another factor counteracts the likelihood of handicrafts of being included in the prestigious art world, and it is their functionalism. The fact that most of these items are at the same time practical objects –that is, utensils that can be used on a daily basis– does nothing but downgrade their value and status as art pieces. Their everyday nature is usually associated to a poorer aesthetic relevance, following the traditional concept that true art must appeal exclusively to the spectator‘s sight or mind. According to this conventional Western assumption that utilitarian and artistic items occupy inherently different spheres, the fusion of both concepts into the same category turned out to be an extremely long and troubled

23 Tellingly, the mere observation of comparative studies between, for instance, sculptures by white Western and African artists reveals this highly asymmetric and unbalanced relation: while the former are always studied from a specific and even biographical context, the latter are most usually unknown or simply referred to as belonging to a certain chronological, regional or tribal group.

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process. As a matter of fact, until recent years it would have been very unusual to contemplate such practical objects as textiles –ranging from bedcovers to clothing, or from lace to embroidery– in a world-known museum or a reputed art gallery, since domestic textiles have traditionally lacked such recognition as works of art. Despite this, certain analysts consider that rudimentary practices held by African American quilters only acted in their benefit. For instance, according to the researcher Joanne Cubbs, the shared custom among Southern rural quilters to publicly display their quilts outdoors onlyadded to their diffusion and advantage, as it turned the pieces into highly recognizable and attractive artifacts:

[i]ronically, the functional nature of their art –the life of their objects as quilts– assisted in the dissemination of their aesthetic efforts. The utility of their creations, which would compromise their identity as ―art‖ in other cultural worlds, made them more ubiquitous and ever available for viewing and contemplation. (Cubbs 28)

In my opinion, however, this did not prove true –not just for Southern rural quilters, but for all black quilters in general. The utility of their work did ―compromise their identity‖ as prestigious art (regardless of the larger visibility they could achieve through their open-air display) for the simple reason that quilts, as domestic items, tend to be popularly associated with the female sphere, and as a consequence, historically devoid of cultural prestige. And yet, the folklore production by African American women has historically gone far beyond traditional assumptions on the significance of this type of creations. It has served a number of purposes, from the merely material to the aesthetic and, of course, spiritual, considered both from the individual and the collective benefit. As Alma Billingslea-Brown claims, ―[a]rticulating the values, beliefs, and ethos sustained and re-created in diaspora, the African American folk matrix enabled displaced African people to establish differential identity, affirm group solidarity, resist dominance, and ‗recall home‘‖ (2). Although the application of the term ―diaspora‖ may appear conflictive with respect to the latter part of the twentieth century, when the majority of black American citizens had been living in the country for more than three centuries, it

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can also be argued that a sense of cultural alienation with respect to the mainstream society had not abandoned the African American community, hence the appropriateness of the phrase.24 Besides, the use of folklore by African Americans, especially women in the context of quiltmaking, served as a language to transcend those cultural barriers and occupy their own place as cultural creators, albeit the external rejection to be acknowledged as such. Fortunately, social change started to become more and more visible toward the last part of the twentieth century, triggered by the liberation movements that were taking place at that time. Specifically, Janet C. Berlo has observed that ―many diverse trends came together in the 1970s to cause changes in both the art world and the quilt world. Several artists who are not, strictly speaking, quilters have been influential in destabilizing entrenched ideas about high and low, art and craft, painting and textile work‖ (28). A turning point in the progressive consideration of quilts as works of art came in 1971, when the first major exhibition of quilts was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (Hicks, Black Threads 217). The exhibition, which would become a landmark event in the history of American quiltmaking, was revolutionary in the sense that, for the first time, it placed quilts on the same level as conventionally high-standard artworks such as paintings and sculptures –in fact, the Whitney had never before held any other art form apart from those (Cadogan 125). This implicitly challenged the notion that folk art does not deserve high-status recognition, thereby opening the doors to a whole new conceptualization about the importance and significance of that art. Within the broader frame of the Civil Rights protests, these complex ideas clashed blatantly with a more conservative conceptualization of art. Especially for black American women, the Civil Rights era ignited the lengthy battle to redefine their creative impulse, based on their own aesthetic and cultural beliefs. An illustrative example of this is Jessie B. Telfair‘s famous Freedom Quilt (1963), which reflects at once the changing political atmosphere and the rising of

24 For further information on the concept and extension of the black diaspora, see The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), by Paul Gilroy, and New Perspectives on T"he Black Atlantic (2012), edited by Bénédicte Ledent and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez.

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a new artistic sensibility within black American women‘s networks.25 Telfair‘s quilt represents her protest after being fired from her job as a cook in retaliation for having registered to vote, replicating several times, in large letters, the word ―Freedom‖, echoing the motto of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), ―Freedom Now‖ (Shaw, American Quilts 268). Besides, Telfair‘s choice of the colors red, blue and white as symbolic of the American flag, combined with the active role that the SNCC had throughout the Civil Rights period, turns the Freedom Quilt into a very powerful combination of textile art and political change. Amid this artistic and social context, groups of African American women started to get actively involved in the increasing contestation and the search for identity expression, providing the breeding ground for new struggles. Thus, in the late 1960s a small and isolated black community in South-Western Alabama engaged in a revolutionary adventure, one that would gain the admiration of the rest of the country, and become part of American quilt history. In her study on the cultural phenomenon that rose in Alabama during the 1960s, entitled The Freedom Quilting Bee: Folk Art and The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (1987), Nancy Callahan portrays a thorough analysis which, nevertheless, bears some racial bias, as it adopts a primarily white prism that seems to align active entrepreneurship and art criticism on the white side, and a certain degree of passivity or insouciance on the black one. After analyzing the mechanics of this pioneering female cooperative and its impact on the broader artistic scenario, I will try to argue why Callahan‘s account is undertaken from a racially-biased perspective, even if her work sheds much-welcomed light on the functioning, impact and historic significance of the Bee. Situated in a rural area surrounded by the Alabama River, the region originally called Gee‘s Bend had historically been an isolated spot due to the difficult accessibility to the terrain. One of the main consequences of this fact was the lack of contact and influence with other communities, to the point that cultural exchange with people from outside the area by the mid-twentieth century had

25 Held at the Folk Art American Museum in New York: http://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/583/jessie-b- telfair;jsessionid=4FD3DF218DA1795354C71429AB4FC9A0/objects

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become utterly rare. Precisely because the area had remained geographically and culturally unrelated to external influences (the region was self-enclosed due to the peculiarities of the topography), the probabilities of setting the background for such a rich cultural phenomenon were extremely low. Arguably, their confinement sprang also from historical reasons, because most of the adjoining fields were the property of white landowners whose interaction with the black population was practically nonexistent. All these historical and geographical conditions marked the destiny of these artists, whose ancestors were already ―so firmly rooted in that place that they stayed put on that peninsula […] after the Civil War and established a tightly knit community that during the Great Depression was declared one of the poorest places in the United States‖ (Arnett and Arnett 7). Certainly, the 1929 crash repercussions marked the beginning of dreadful times for the Gee‘s Benders, when the merchant who lent them credit to produce their crops died and his heirs arrived to seize every farming tool, cattle and stored food ―[a]s though the intruders were vultures disposing of their prey‖ (Callahan 35); the black residents entered then a period of starvation, which did not supersede until recovery aid came from the Farm Security Administration programs. Although black women from that area had been elaborating quilts of striking beauty and originality since the settlement of the first African American generations, those works remained mostly unknown for anyone outside of the region. As Patricia Hill Collins has pointed out, the double-edged weapon of the confinement of all-black communities (notably in the rural Southern areas) has as much preserved as alienated black cultural traditions: ―[w]hile essential to the survival of African-Americans, the knowledge produced in Black communities was hidden from and suppressed by the dominant group and thus remained extant but subjugated‖ (Black Feminist Thought 10). Particularly in the case of this small spot on the banks of the Alabama river, which was at the time the quintessential all-black enclave in the country, such isolation certainly complied with Collins‘s argument: it helped conserve cultural wisdom, at the price of perpetuating also racial segregation.

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Despite this, a rare twist of events happened in Gee‘s Bend, producing a series of unexpected outcomes. In December 1965, a small number of women living in that village started a project that would materialize, only a few months later, in the cooperative that forever changed the history of Gee‘s Bend. Assisted on an early phase by Francis Walter, a young priest involved in the Alabamian Civil Rights movement, those women initiated a type of collaborative work that would soon render its fruits and transform their ways of life (Callahan 3). The idea of creating a quilting cooperative easily took root and by the first half of 1966 the initiative had become a reality, with a flourishing industry providing employment to a remarkable number of Gee‘s Benders. Walter, who had become mesmerized after seeing by happenstance a string of some of those quilts drying off on a clothesline, had been immediately ―caught by the quilts‘ bold, inventive op art design‖ (Callahan 3); this genuine interest in a kind of folk style never before seen, marked the beginning of what would be nationally known as the ―Freedom Quilting Bee‖. As Walter expressed it:

[w]hat grabbed initially was the boldness, the aggressiveness, the assertive patterns so different from white Appalachian quilts that are tight, sometimes tedious and seem introverted. These were extroverted quilts. The contrast was evident immediately. The Gee‘s Bend quilts reminded me of the school of hard-edge geometry, painters such as Frank Stella and Barnett Newman. They did not conform readily to anything in traditional art other than painting.26 (qtd. in Callahan 42)

The feeling of being confronted with awe-inspiring designs was shared by many other outside commentators who saw them for the first time. For instance, Doris O‘Donnell, an employee of the American Embassy who had coincidentally got in touch with the Bee, also felt admiration for the originality and distinctive style of the quilts, whose ―dynamism [resulted] from their combination of geometry and brilliance in juxtaposition of primary colors‖ (qtd. in Callahan 53),

26 The Appalachian area, etymologically related to some early Native American settlements by the same name, occupies part of the Eastern side of the United States, from Northern Mississippi to the Southern area of the State of New York, historically affected by high levels of poverty and unemployment.

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an opposition which ―gave them a wonderful, almost Mondrian style‖ (in Callahan 53). Remarkably, both O‘Donnell and Walter coincide in their appreciation of unconventional choices of tone and design, in the sensation of movement derived from those choices reminiscent of painting and, most interestingly, in the use of human-related adjectives such as ―bold‖, ―assertive‖, ―extroverted‖ or ―dynamic‖, which reveal the lifelike nature of the quilts (qtd. in Callahan 42). But this shows several other things too. On the one hand, Walter‘s comparison with two American painters and O‘Donnell‘s parallel with the famous Dutch artist suggests that the quilts‘ beauty standards were to be measured in accordance with a clearly Eurocentric male vision. On the other, even if O‘Donnell and Walter acknowledge the impressive color and shape combinations, their remarks underlie a certain discomfort or reluctance to fully appreciate such daring designs, as their use of the terms ―aggressiveness‖ or ―crudeness‖ (55) reflect. This dichotomy between the attraction toward the aesthetics of Gee‘s Bend‘s quilts and a subtle rejection of their ―crude‖ boldness is a continuum throughout the history of the cooperative. The dichotomy also emerged from the conflict between an intuitive appreciation of the unique designs of the quilts and their impressive style, on the one hand, and the impossibility to elaborate and commercialize them on a large scale without altering their original spirit in the least way, on the other. As Walter acknowledged, ―[t]here is no way to take an authentic religious or utilitarian object, turn it out by the profit motive and not alter its construction‖ (72), and this remains a fact even if the proceedings derived from that alteration reverted to the community who created the project. Equally important is the notion of cultural reception accorded from external viewers who employed white artists‘ standards as the measuring reference to review the quilts. As will be discussed later on, a comparison between one art production and the other will prove problematic, as there has permanently been a tendency to use European American works as the reference measurement, instead of valuing African American creations according to their own aesthetic standards –or, even, as a source that inspired European American artists.

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With respect to the Bee‘s principles, this clash was evident from an early stage. Inevitably, an important drawback experienced between the cooperative and the traders who got involved in the project was triggered by differences in their cultural languages. By this expression, I refer to the difficulty to accommodate the peculiarities of a local, rural system of quiltmaking to the requirements set by the companies interested in commercializing those quilts, whose main aim was to secure a broad spectrum of potential buyers. The fact that both groups were, especially in the beginnings, speaking different languages is perceived in the tensions that arose originally about the style features displayed by the quilts. The tensions partially derived from a self-contradictory impulse among the representatives of those companies (initially only from New York, but eventually from many other cities throughout the country) that felt attracted by the unique designs shown in those quilts. At the same time that such an appeal originated from a kind of quilt elaboration that was unparalleled with any other, a certain pulse to ―domesticate‖ or adapt that style was sensed in their requirements for specific characteristics, as if there existed a certain fear to mass-produce those works in their original state. This is clearly perceived with respect to pattern style as well as color preferences or even quilts‘ dimensions. As regards pattern choice, there was a clash between the vivacity and boldness of some of the motifs quilted by the women from Gee‘s Bend and the tendency from outside to reframe them into more familiar or traditional references, probably bearing in mind the (presumed) taste of white Northern quilters. It is important to bear in mind that most of the companies which marketed the quilts were managed and staffed by white workers, and it can be inferred that their target customers would be, if not exclusively, mostly white middle-class women. As a result, the use of bold and very bright colors, often displayed in unconventional and even shocking manners led many of those Northern companies or their mediators to demand a softened choice of colors, in an attempt to subdue what they considered a too wild aesthetics for their target customers, mostly white quilters unfamiliar with the Bend‘s flare (Callahan 82).

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Notably, the very pre-assumption that a broader audience from outside that village would not be able to fully appreciate the ―raw‖ beauty of these designs exactly in their original nature, is in my view a clear example of the enormous cultural gap between one language and the other. In the process, the tendency to tone down the original artistic expression so that it became ―palatable‖ for the recipient group (which is, in itself, a reductionist approach, since it presumes that such an aesthetic adaptation was necessary in the first place) reveals more symptoms of cultural miscommunication, as it modifies and translates the original language into the second one in a distorted or unfaithful manner. Fortunately, this clash did not result in an artistic impoverishment of the designs. Aesthetically, what eventually triumphed was the uniqueness of the quilts, the untamed style and inspiration that can be perceived in those designs, and the powerful artistic voices of their individual makers, some of whom will be discussed later in this section. Even if the production strategies needed to undergo certain adaptations, the soul of the quilts remained unaltered and free, and this triumph is visible in each of the works. On the other hand, apart from the choice of more modern patterns, the evolution in style from the early days of the Bee to the later years can be noticed in the type and quality of fabric that was at hand. From the poorest swatches available in the beginning, which were made of worn-out denim, to the rich silk and velvet scraps donated from some New York fabric houses when the cooperative became publicized, the improvement in the textile quality is remarkable (Callahan 29). Together with the significant betterments in the material quality of the quilts came an unquestionable improvement in the living conditions of their makers. But, especially within its first two years of existence, the co-op was faced with a number of obstacles, many of them concerning the necessity to adjust their whole elaboration process to a different methodology. The first problem encountered by the cooperative was to create reproductions of the same specific designs while maintaining similar levels of quality, which was difficult because many differently-skilled quilters worked on them. Although the resulting works displayed, logically, diverse levels of quality,

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the cooperative members opposed the idea that wages should be related to the amount of labor accomplished per hour. As they regarded it, hourly wage was unfair because it translated into the most skillful ones being paid proportionately more, while the slowest or weakest quilters (usually older or suffering from some physical impairment) deserved and needed the wage as much as the better qualified ones –or even more so. This idea that the profits made by the group should be shared on equal terms by all its members also relates to their sense of community and reveals levels of solidarity which clashed with the outsiders‘ commercialization logics, more used to equating profit to result. Secondly, the quilters needed to adapt part of their traditional methods and introduce considerable changes in the ways they operated. For instance, at the first stages of the cooperative many of the quilts were being made in scattered places, as the women reunited in different houses without following a predefined schema. A specific location for the cooperative‘s headquarters was crucial if they wanted to work coordinately and more efficiently, ―rather than fragmented at home‖ (Callahan 63), and they managed to build the facilities for their workplace in 1969, more than four years after the cooperative had been established. Clearly, many other difficulties challenged the stability of the group as progress was being made. Among them, the poor working conditions were not a minor issue. For example, a white New York designer who cooperated in the project as a mediator, reported after her stay in Gee‘s Bend that the lack of the most basic quilting resources (from scissors or thimbles to good quality fabric) was so appalling that she wondered how the women could even manage to make their quilts. Reflecting on this chronic scantiness, she concluded that the women at the cooperative did not ―realize the handicap of inferior equipment‖ (Callahan 75), since ―[i]t always had been that way‖ (qtd. in Callahan 75), and consequently they were accustomed to making do with what little they had available. Besides, the dearth of appropriate tools had a clear impact on certain aspects of the resulting quilts, and on the very elaboration process:

[t]he quilters had good cotton thread but they used flour bags for the backing as always. […] They would beat or bat cotton from their own fields to make batting. They would beat it and flail to try to make it flat

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and smooth. Of course, it never was smooth. There were places with no batting, places where it was lumpy or too thick, and it was very hard to quilt through. (Callahan 76)

The practice of using leftover cotton, hand-carding it and usually beating and fluffing it with a stick or a branch is a common feature among generations of black women quilters, with roots that can be traced back to the pre-emancipation years. In a similar manner, the tradition of using feed or flour sacks as backing for the quilts (after having bleached and ironed them), and the custom of home-dying the sacks with plants to dissimulate the soil are repeated characteristics in many first-person accounts of Southern black quilters, covering a time span that goes from bondage to the 1960s and 1970s (Fry 44; Kiracofe 232; Ramsey 186). On the other hand, the fact that most of the Gee‘s Bend quilters initially had to combine working in the project and working in the fields, presented problems for the accomplishment of schedules and deadlines. Furthermore, their field labor was so intensive that many of the women‘s fingers had become deformed, and it was impossible to acquire thimbles which fitted them (Callahan 76). Unquestionably, the heavy and multiple burdens carried by black American women, especially those living in the rural South, did not stop them from developing a particular creative impulse or their will to take leadership. In this sense, the Alabama Bee experiment is very revealing as to the capacity of southern black women to surmount extremely hard circumstances by making use of their cultural resources, once again turning the art of quiltmaking into their tool for survival. Consequently, in spite of all the trouble encountered, the project that loomed in this Alabamian region undoubtedly succeeded. Aside from the above- mentioned political atmosphere of the time, which favored the emergence of new ways of interracial cooperation framed in the Civil Rights context, a number of other reasons may explain its success. In parallel with the emerging sensibility, there seemed to originate a taste for aesthetic artifacts that many identified as African-style artistry, and a connection was made between those ethnic items and support for the black liberation movement.

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Hence, it was not by chance that the peak of the Civil Rights struggles, which occurred in the mid- to late 1960s, coincided in time with a growing appreciation for this kind of handicraft, following a reinvigorated interest in African style that can be best observed in the black Southern quilts of the day. Thanks to the publicity acquired from nationwide media, it did not take long for this aesthetic current to transcend local barriers and reach practically every corner of the country, even if, in hindsight, the process was not exempt from a certain degree of cultural adaptation and even appropriation. Probably, the most negative criticism that can be made of the Gee‘s Bend endeavor is a certain alteration in the ancient quiltmaking customs of the Black women who lived there, as Walter regretted when reflecting upon ―something lost immediately in the commercialization of the Bee‖ (41), although this had to do more with the elaboration practices than with the originality and spirit of the designs per se, which in my opinion survived the whole process. Actually, the key concept of ―commercializing‖ the quilts explains by itself many of the positive and negative consequences that happened thereby. As regards the latter, such commodification eventually turned the quilts not simply into beautiful utilitarian objects, but into salable goods, inasmuch as their value was now derived from their capability to reach and appeal to greater numbers of people around the country. This could have been a destabilizing element for the quilters‘ community, partly because it introduced the monetary system as the measure of reference and, especially, because it placed their work‘s value halfway between the practicality of everyday objects and the prestige of art, ultimately being considered as neither one thing nor the other. Thus, bringing the quilts into the grand-scale market set a range of new standards by which to measure their quality and their interest in comparison with other similar works, replacing the criteria normally used by art critics (conceptual originality, composition, subjective taste of the maker(s), etc.) for other market-oriented criteria. Besides, the transformation of folk craft into salable work usually risks introducing a debasement element in its appreciation as art, especially if the artisanal object becomes mass-produced or turns into a popular consumption product, which may in itself become another instance of

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cultural appropriation by an external and dominant group. Although this depreciation does not affect other artistic fields (let us consider, for instance, how commodified works by well-known painters or musicians retain their previous prestige), its impact is much higher on collectively-made handicraft, especially if its authors remain anonymous for the larger audience and their work is primarily seen as merchandise. Notwithstanding this, the positive impact on all levels triggered by the cooperative‘s success meant real and sustained transformations in the lives of its members and contributed to make their work recognizable beyond the limits of the Gee‘s Bend territory. The Bee‘s accomplishments enabled the quilters, among other things, to establish and improve their working conditions, to engage in the economic development of the region and, perhaps most importantly, to be in charge of an autonomous project that relied on their own talent. Even though, as has been argued, their degree of autonomy (mainly with respect to certain working strategies or the negotiation of deadlines) was not high in the early phase, their independence increased considerably as the organization became more firmly established. In addition, the quilters‘ contribution to the flourishing of a new industry in a time and a place where employment opportunities were extremely low, undoubtedly boosted their self-esteem as individuals and as members of the collective. From a cultural perspective, it is also telling to observe this community-oriented project in contrast with the usually individualistic work style that white societies tend to prioritize. Simultaneously, their creative talent fostered the recognition of an art tradition that had been until then kept invisible to the rest of the world, giving salience to one of the most important African American contributions in all of America‘s cultural history. From an even broader perspective, the connection that established itself between black liberation supporters and the Bee became a most fruitful one, having an impact on the nationwide struggle. This fertile relationship could be perceived from the early days of the cooperative and stretches on to the contemporary work carried out by the Bee, as the result of this interesting cultural experimentation. Among other things, it included the personal and political involvement of those (individuals and companies) who got in touch with the

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project, the critical acclaim of a unique type of black Southern artistry and a dramatic betterment in the life conditions of its members and their families. Proof of this is the fact that at one point the Bee became the largest employer in the area; besides, approximately 30 percent of all the quiltmakers living in the whole region became involved in the joint project, some of them on a full-time basis (Arnett and Arnett 12). A graphic example of the close relationship between the fight for Civil Rights and the Freedom Quilting Bee happened on the occasion of the construction in 1969 of the much-awaited co-op‘s sewing center, which was literally built by its members and other Gee‘s Bend inhabitants. In fact, the building of the new facilities was itself full of symbolic meaning. The process to build their own sewing center was not exempt of racially-charged conflict. Since most of the fields surrounding Gee‘s Bend were owned by white farmers who refused to sell even a small part of their lands to black people, it was a daunting task to find a place where the co-op could aspire to settle and develop their venture. In fact, black citizens had been harassed by the local authorities for their involvement in the black voting rights protests, to the point that some of them were evicted from their land (Callahan 231). After many attempts, the quilters found an elderly white man who accepted to sell them several acres and the project to build up the center was started, but the process was highly symbolic of how, by acquiring that spot of land on previously inaccessible territory, the quilters were conquering a new space of freedom and an outlet to claim their rights and express themselves. Estelle Witherspoon, one of the founders and a very charismatic leader of the Bee, orchestrated a series of acts to celebrate what the community had achieved ―through the re-enactment of the civil rights struggle‖ (Callahan 95). Whole groups of quilters and their families attended the initial works at the building site while singing gospel hymns and folk songs, officially naming the place The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Sewing Center (Callahan 99), in remembrance of the charismatic leader‘s stay in the Bend in 1965 during one of his political tours around the South (Cubbs 20).

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The repercussions of the quilters‘ active involvement in the liberation movement were ample and eventually had a significant influence on the life of that Alabamian region and, by extension, on all the Black Belt area. Their political commitment meant that many of them joined the marches –some even went on the Selma to Montgomery march led by King in 1965– and were consequently sent to jail (Callahan 231-2). But this process also had a positive impact on their growing sense of independence, which simultaneously boosted their gender vindications. As the quilters grew more and more self-reliant and started to earn their own wages, old family dynamics became shattered, resulting in new balances of power for many of them. Though some men initially resented, if not openly opposed to, their wives‘ venture in the cooperative, the quilters‘ perseverance sowed the seeds for the first outgrowths of the project, fostering their sense of self-worth as individuals and as community leaders. As Aolar Mosely, a founding member of the Bee, recalls, male reluctance to their women‘s organization was especially strong in the early days, when little to no gain was being made of the quilts, but it swiftly diminished as their work started to produce economic profit: ―When they first started, we worked for nothing till it got to something. When we began to work by the hour then we got to something. The quilting bee has done something for Gee‘s Bend in a lot of ways. It‘s done brought us a long way‖ (Callahan 158). And it did really bring the quilters a long way. Upon realizing that they were attaining higher agency over their lives, the struggle for independence started somehow to reach a deeper level, thus touching on issues of gender inequality. At the same time, one of the aspects most valued by the Freedom quilters was their mutual commitment to the cause and the strong bonding created with one another. This sense of sorority, which transcended the physical activity or the economic interest and reached a more personal level where creativity and human connection worked hand in hand, is common in history to the experience of all other quilting bees, even if each is determined by its time and place conditionings. For the women who integrated this one in particular, the bond was extremely solid, as they shared a very specific set of circumstances, and the failure or success of their endeavor could entail dramatic changes in their world.

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The success of the cooperative did not simply bring about an outlet for their employment, for many remunerated for the first time, but also gave them access to Social Security, a retirement pension and other benefits such as the opening, in the mid- 1970s, of their own Day Care Center, which provided care for the children of women employed at the Bee –and, over time, of any woman working in the area. As Callahan (195) points out, this also resulted in a generational change that substantially advanced their educational standards, as it enabled the women to school their children, even providing them with an access to university studies, which would have been quite unlikely otherwise –and had actually been out of reach for themselves. As a logical outcome of all this, most Freedom quilters welcomed the positive role played by the cooperative in their lives, pondering as well how the quilts had gradually replaced field labor, more grueling from the point of view of physical endurance, and much worse paid (Callahan 211). From the point of view of artistic preservation, and following a continuum in the history line of African American quilting, there can be observed in the Bend a firm interest in keeping track and retaining certain local treasures, as they carefully transmitted that knowledge across generations. A good example of this is the rare ―Chestnut Bud‖ design. This pattern, representing that fruit and frequently displayed in sharp, contrasting colors, was rooted in this specific area, and, as far as the quilters could remember, originally it only existed in that region (Callahan 184). As argued above, tradition has usually taken one generation of women quilters to transmit their knowledge and even certain aesthetic preferences to the next one. But the peculiarity here is that a lack of exchange with outside communities tended to create a very personal, almost secretive style, similar to a native language only known to its small number of speakers. Within this context, the Chestnut Bud quilt elaborated in 1966 by Lucie Marie Mingo, where she displayed a sharp contrast of black appliquéd chestnut shapes onto a bright white background, gained broad attention when a famous New York magazine publicized it extensively.27 The uncommon pattern, together with others such as

27 Held by The Souls Grown Deep Foundation: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/lucy-mingo/work/nine-appliqu%C3%A9- blocks%E2%80%94tulip-variation-quiltmakers-name-chestnut-bud

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the Pine Burr (or ―Cuckle Burr‖) pattern, were exquisitely designed figures projected on the minds of extraordinary quilters, where virtuosity and free artistic expression complemented each other. In the case of the Pine Burr design, the curious motif involved, as Callahan pointed out, ―hundreds of tedious swatches that unfold before the eye in breathtaking, three-dimensional effect‖ (175).28 Within the Bend‘s aesthetic tradition, a proper name stands out for the genuine style of her designs and for having created a truly personal taste: Mary Lee Bendolph, who operated both from within the cooperative and as an individual artist, in a similar way to other Bee quilters who preferred to alternate the communal activity with their personal working styles. She belongs to the African American quiltmaking tradition that makes it a principle to create quilts that are unlike any other and which do not fall easily under a specific category or label, resembling large and magnificent paintings rather than just bedcovers. Among the striking features present in Bendolph‘s quilts, there is a tendency to elude strictly-patterned designs, preferring instead a free-flowing rhythm, as if the patterns had been randomly or even whimsically arranged. Her apparently chaotic compositions reveal, upon closer observation, a harmonious mixture of color combinations, shapes and lengths, often producing in the eyes of the beholder a sense of surprise or playfulness. 29 As will be argued in more detail in the following chapter, a certain recognition of the beauty of improvisation and a freer, more natural expression of the quilter‘s state of mind resembles other typically African American art forms, especially within the fields of music and dance; nevertheless, this should not be interpreted as the conclusion that all or most African American artists, or quilters for that matter, show a preference for improvisation. In Bendolph‘s case – although she participated with the cooperative, her personal style is especially distinct from any other—, it is also accompanied by a reluctance to reproduce an already existing pattern or even replicate one‘s own design, to the point of refusing to elaborate two look-alike quilts (Cubbs 10). Her will to create one of a kind designs, following the dictates of her personal artistic desire to create totally

28Accessible on the following link: https://archives.alabama.gov/emblems/st_quilt.html 29For a catalogue of her quilts visit The Souls Grown Deep Foundation‘s website: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/mary-lee-bendolph

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different quilts, testifies to her individualistic style (Arnett and Arnett 128). Although this feature is also present in many other Bend‘s quilts, Bendolph‘s are much more peculiar because it is almost impossible to follow a fixed pattern in her works and, even when there exists a determined motif, the intricacy of the color combination alters the overall perception of the figures. With a special attraction for geometric compositions with sudden colorful strips breaking the dominating tonalities, many of her works resemble a landscape crossed over by bold and unexpected brushstrokes. This avoidance of predictability is a choice consciously made by the author, who explains as follows how she finds inspiration in the physical world around her, then abstracts it into geometric planes:

[m]ost of my ideas come from looking at things. Quilts is [sic] in everything. Sometimes I see a big truck passing by. I look at the truck and say, I could make a quilt look like that […] I can walk outside and look around in the yard and see ideas all around the front and the back of my house. (Cubbs 9)

As is usually the case with other plastic artists such as painters or sculptors, Bendolph evidences a necessity for the artistic mind to translate objects from the surrounding world into a new physical reality. Michele Wallace contends in Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2004) that artists tend to resort to their immediate physical reality in search of those stimuli, then interpret them through the lens of their subjective vision, even if becoming familiar with art training or exposed to artistic media has not traditionally been considered as relevant for the uplifting of a downtrodden community (117). What is more, Bendolph‘s work carries above-mentioned animist beliefs and expands them into the spiritual essence that remains in worn-out clothes, thus turning each quilt into a collage of memories from the people who used to wear those clothes. As Joanne Cubbs claims, ―there is an implicit understanding that patchworks symbolize and preserve the spirit of those whose garments were salvaged to make them‖ (13), and Bendolph explicitly acknowledges this reality. Apart from the aesthetic peculiarities, other features contribute to the uniqueness of her work. For example, Bendolph showed a fondness for continuing

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to use denim fabric and other coarse work-clothes even when these were gradually replaced by softer or better-quality scraps. According to her, the custom of recycling relatives‘ work-clothes is a way to pay homage to one‘s family‘s heritage and to the dreadful conditions in which they toiled, to the point that this transformation of discarded scraps becomes a powerful symbol of resilience, ―a metaphor for surviving hard times‖ (Cubbs 14). From a similar perspective on how recycling clothes from our beloved ones is an attempt to acknowledge and keep their memory alive, Bendolph pushes the idea further and creates double-sided quilts, thereby elaborating two bedcovers in one, two works of art over a single medium, as pages from a family scrapbook. Once again, the originality and interest to preserve such rare designs bear witness to a well-established tradition that seemed to exist nowhere else. All in all, even if drawbacks appeared along the way which challenged the viability of the Freedom Quilting Bee project, and changes were inevitably introduced in their lore, there is no doubt that what was gained outweighed what might have been lost. In return, the quilters managed to bring to life unexpected goals, and accomplished a feat which gave them a say about how to change their futures. This fact not only ―put food in the artisans‘ bodies‖ and ―clothes on their backs‖, but also ―paid for doctor bills and light bills. It educated their children. And it gave them a sense of their own human worth‖ (Callahan 246). Once again in history, quilts opened a way for African American women to resist a very hostile environment, turning their knowledge into a tool for their own advancement, and bringing shift opportunities where there had existed none. As regards the cultural influence that the project held on the national scenario, it contributed to challenge long-established considerations on art and artistry. In fact, as Melanie McKay and Maaja Stewart claim in a 2005 article entitled ―‗The Tradition of Old People‘s Ways‘: Gee‘s Bend Quilts and Slave Quilts of the Deep South‖, Western museums have traditionally been so inflexible when it comes to challenging old notions on art, that the appearance of the Bend‘s quilts and their exhibition as art pieces made a breakthrough in the field (156). However, McKay and Stewart‘s statement that ―[m]odern Western culture has assumed that art is created by individual genius, and not by the kind of

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community participation present in Gee‘s Bend‖ (156) is in my view only partially true, and it reveals how pervasive those very Western concepts on art are, even for critics trying to challenge them. Certainly, community craft is a key aspect of the Gee‘s Bend machinery, and obviously the cooperative would have never succeeded without that collective spirit. Yet, their quilts do testify to truly ―individual genius‖, if one simply makes the effort to consider the artists individually and contemplates their works as statements on their own terms. Furthermore, the mainstream perspective also drew heavily on gender-based discriminatory notions: contrarily to prestigious art –conventionally man-made and profusely studied– domestic textile art has traditionally been produced by women, whose works have for the most part gone unnoticed or unappreciated to canonical criticism. Consequently, until the late decades of the twentieth century, when the emergence of new theories on racial and feminist struggle actively questioned conservative concepts on art and creativity, these textiles had not usually been regarded as worthy of specialized study. Remaining until that time doubly irrelevant (because of their practical qualities and because they were thought to belong exclusively in the domestic sphere), these textile artifacts started to gain recognition due in part to the blossoming of the Civil Rights era, which vindicated a reexamination of all African American culture, be it historical, literary, political or artistic. This new paradigm, in fact, not simply aimed at considering black American artists‘ creation as worthy of higher critical attention, but it also attempted to introduce a debate on terms such as cultural hegemony, aesthetic values and material culture. In her interesting reflection on artistic production as being historically dominated by white patriarchal canons, entitled Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995), bell hooks protests against the subconsciously internalized process by which most black (women and men) artists not only accept the standard concepts of art and aesthetics but even strive to conform to their criteria. For this tendency to be reverted, hooks ponders, it would be necessary for black artists, critics and spectators to become more visibilized, a process which has not yet proved totally successful –even as of today.

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It is true that the number and significance of African Americans directly involved in the artistic field has increased in a notorious way but, as hooks denounces, despite considerable efforts made since the late decades of the twentieth century, that realm is still exceedingly self-referential and mainly focused on white male production. Even so, the new perspective did introduce significant changes within art criticism and reception. Regarded from a non- ethnocentric position, the concept of folk artwork started to be differently perceived to the eye of the viewer, and the presence of African roots in many African American artifacts became a growing source of interest. In the process, a change in sensibility appeared as well. As a token of this changing sensibility, the famous essayist, poet and writer Maya Angelou reflected in her essay Wouldn‟t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1994) on the African approach to the very concept of art:

In many African religions there is the belief that all things are inhabited by spirits which must be appeased and to which one can appeal. So, for example, when a master drummer prepares to carve a new drum, he [sic] approaches the selected tree and speaks to the spirit residing there […] He assures the spirit that he will remain grateful for the gift of the tree and that he will use the drum only for honorable purposes. (33)

This belief that objects created by the human hand are in some way or another animated by a human force is a continuum in many African cultural traditions –and consequently, also in the evolution of African American art and needlework. Sculptors like Bessie Harvey, for example, have frequently expressed their belief that there exists a god-like presence in all things from nature, including the wood she works with, acknowledging that this spiritual force has a clear impact on her work (McKenna et al 270). Likewise, quilters recognize the powerful impact of those beliefs on their design, color and pattern choices, and countless mirror it in their quilts, for instance through the inclusion of luck charms and other ancestral reminiscences. This can be seen in the use of very irregular and apparently chaotic lines, aiming at distracting the evil spirits which are believed to reside alongside human beings,

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since those malign spirits are supposed to follow straight lines, and would get lost at the view of confusing or asymmetric patterns (Fry 67). Similarly, other practices such as the inclusion of protective charms, usually hands, at several parts of the quilt can as well be tracked back to African traditional beliefs (England and Johnson 48; Wahlman 112). Besides, there also exists the African and African American custom of covering up the interior walls of a house with sheets of newspapers or magazines (Arnett and Arnett 100), in order for the devilish ghosts to become distracted in their reading and so forget to disturb the house‘s inhabitants (Wahlman 95). There is reason to believe this practice of filling the inside of the rooms with pictures from papers or magazines was consistently spread, as it can be reflected in other African American artistic fields, such as photography or painting (Patton 163-4). This cultural practice is also present among the Bend‘s quilters. This necessity to provide as much aesthetic comfort to one‘s home as possible, in extremely humble conditions, has been noticed by researchers specialized in Alabaman black communities of quilters: ―In the Bend, along with many frontier and poor households elsewhere, quilts often provided the only color and decoration (other than newspaper-covered walls) in unadorned living spaces‖ (Arnett and Arnett 39). As an example of this, when interviewed by the researcher Nancy Callahan in her afore-mentioned study, ―Ma Willie‖ Abrams, one of the first women to join the Bee and mother of its alma mater Estelle Witherspoon, showed how most of her ceilings and even the floor were covered with selected pictures cut out from newspapers (209). In fact, the covering up of walls with printed photographs for decorative purposes was a traditional practice among African Americans, especially those living in poorer backgrounds (Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture 120). As if reproducing a quilt pattern, perhaps a Nine Patch design where solid colors and patterned fabric intermingle, Abrams‘ inner decoration shows not just her passion for assembling an array of meaningful images together, but also recalls the African tradition to divert harmful spirits from one‘s dwelling. Furthermore, there is evidence that there existed, within the black quiltmaking tradition, a custom to add an unrelated piece of fabric (maybe a

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scrap showing a non-matching pattern or color) to the quilt, as a means to transmit a symbolic or even religious message (Thompson 209). Even if Nancy Callahan‘s extensive study is highly informative and helps shed light on a crucial episode of African American quiltmaking –and, by extension, of the history of the Black Belt during the Civil Rights turmoil– I find several aspects about this analysis questionable. First, in Callahan‘s work, the leading voice and the perspective taken are clearly those of the white people who became involved in the Bee project, thus assigning a secondary role, almost as if mere recipients of the help, to the black quilters who set up the Bee, as commented above. This biased approach seems to suggest that these women held a more or less passive attitude and gradually joined the cause –with a few exceptions– as participants or contributors and not as the flesh and bone, and therefore the primary leaders, of their own endeavor. Truth be told, Callahan devotes the second half of her study to give voice to some of the most remarkable artisans in the organization, but their accounts are mostly intimate or biographical, leaving little room to their leadership in the managerial tasks. In my view, it would have been more pertinent to count on their own perspective during the construction phase of the Bee, implying that their involvement touched on every single aspect of the project and not merely (or mainly) on the process of quilt elaboration itself. On the other hand, it is also thought-provoking to notice how racial tensions influenced the quilters‘ acceptance of aid offered by white outsiders, being as it was, in Callahan‘s words, ―a moral example of blacks exploiting white help rather than turning away from that help‖ (246). In rear view, it certainly seems that a combination of forces such as those emanated through the Freedom Quilting Bee would have been utterly difficult, if not impossible, at any other period of time before (and maybe, also after) the historical moment where it happened. Arguably, awareness against racial discrimination and poverty-stricken communities was high among progressive citizens around the country at that time, and interracial cooperation was underway in different fields and to different levels of success, especially as desegregation policies were being implemented.

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All things considered, what remains most disturbing about the Freedom Quilting project is not the evolution undertook by the quilters to be able to make their works profitable in a sustained way, or the racial tensions encountered along the way, but the fact that they actually lacked mere access to any other source of employment, lived in one of the poorest and most racially segregated regions in the country, and no significant effort had been made until then to redress the situation. Fortunately for this group of quilters, their long-practiced skills in developing a very peculiar art form opened doors for them which would have remained shut otherwise. From a broad perspective, thus, the Freedom Quilting Bee fostered a new validation of folk quilting as fine art; more concretely, it helped emerging women artists to find their own expressive voice by integrating the meanings and richness of folk creation into their innovative work (Billingslea- Brown 65). It can be argued, therefore, that the conquests achieved by the Freedom quilters mirror, in a way, the advancements reached through the Civil Rights movement on a larger scale, and the foundations of those conquests grew on such solid grounds that the cooperative remains an icon of the struggle to this day, more than half a century after its birth.

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2.3. The revival of quilts within the African American tradition from the 1970s to the present

From a general perspective, the 1970s marked a time when the revived attraction for quiltmaking swept the country from one corner to the other and regardless of race considerations, continuing uninterruptedly thereafter. In fact, it has been claimed that ―[q]uilts rarely were treated as historical artifacts‖ until that decade, when their cultural significance became increasingly noticed (Katz-Hyman and Rice 388). The blossoming feminist movement of that era reclaimed the needle as one of the precursors to feminist art, and as such they saluted the work of female quilters as symbolic for that new gender awareness (Smucker n.p.).

The movement for gender equality was accompanied, to a greater or a lesser extent, by the movement against race discrimination that erupted in America during the same years; it is considered that the combination of both propelled not only new forms of artistic creation, but also new perspectives of scholarly research (Beaulieu, Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative 6). Particularly with respect to the former aspect, the growing atmosphere of artistic freedom which impregnated all aspects of cultural expression in the last decades of the twentieth century in the United States reached unprecedented peaks within the African American context. It is interesting to ponder why, precisely at a time when increased access to manufactured textiles and a general improvement in the living conditions of many African Americans made it unnecessary to continue the quiltmaking tradition, their interest in this craft became nonetheless revived, focusing their attention back on it in a remarkable manner. Janet C. Berlo has suggested that the art of quiltmaking in the era of store-bought covers can be explained on accounts of the spiritual comfort that it still provides: a space for solace and fully-fledged creativity for countless working women (4). In the dawn of a new context when ready-made bedcovers (some of them, industrial reproductions of patchwork coverlets) were more available and easier to maintain than ever before, the question rises as to why so many black American women stuck to their needles, continuing the tradition with a renewed interest.

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Several reasons may account for this. First, a vindication of the needle among African American women during that time period can be interpreted as the full expression of their own style preferences without those constraints derived from economic deprivation. As availability of fabrics raised their diversity and quality standards, many black American women quilters were able to expand their options as regarded pattern design and combination of hues, which in turn resulted in quilts of daring innovation. The ―art-quilt movement‖, in the words of Teri Klassen, opened new windows for artistic experimentation, in compliance with the airs of change brought by those years (303). Following this expanding sense of freedom, some of the artists chose to explore new means of expression, developing mixed media works which reflected their passion for the merging of several plastic arts to create a whole. Besides, the gradual liberation from textile scantiness had other types of impact on their works. It can be argued that the late twentieth century was the first time in history when creating quilts became a fully optional activity for many black quilters, in the sense that it stopped being an urgent warming-up necessity under extreme poverty and, as a consequence, a matter of survival for whole communities. Although this necessity still existed (and remained during many decades) for those living in rural or impoverished settings, a considerable number of quilters were capable for the first time to decide whether they wanted to retain the tradition of elaborating home-made quilts or not. Besides, most black women were now liberated from the exhausting obligations that the task of quiltmaking had demanded them in the past: they were ―no longer required to raise their own cotton or make hand-carded batts‖, nor did they have to ―strip bark for dye, use coarse thread, or depend upon scraps and worn-out clothing for patchwork‖ (Ramsey and Waldvogel 64). Let us remember that, until the last quarter of the century (and, in the Southern rural areas, even later), quilters not only had to raise their own cotton, but also flatten it out until it acquired the appropriate consistency (Arnett and Arnett 122, 138). The improvement of living conditions during the century dissipated that necessity for self-survival reasons, and the art of quilting became, in time, a leisure-time labor among women of very different conditions. In fact, it can be argued that the mere act of elaborating one‘s own textiles, whether for decorative

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purposes or as practical items for self-consumption, progressively became a sign of socioeconomic betterment in many African American households. Equally important, a second reason for that late-century revival would be their release as autonomous artists from the aesthetic dictations that outside agents had historically exerted on their own personal styles. If under slavery black American women were often forced to follow the dictations of white American decorative standards which dominated quiltmaking, in the early to mid-century other external impositions appeared, in the shape of specialized publications or strict commercialization requirements, as has already been exposed. However, the higher degree of cultural independence reached by growing numbers of African American women during the last quarter of the century brought along a broader sense of freedom in the creative field of textile artistry, as reflect countless works from this period. Aesthetic emancipation opened the path for avant-garde styles, developing experimental work such as visually stunning Story Quilts or paintings which incorporated quilting techniques. Non-coincidentally, the 1970s inaugurated a time when part of the social and political struggles deployed in the previous decades were starting to render their fruits, and important advancements were being made against racial and gender discrimination, also regarding cultural practices (Otfinoski 170). In the words of Alma Billingslea-Brown, for the black American population, the 1960s triggered especially relevant changes, since that was ―not only a time of intense political activism, but also a time of historical revision, shifting consciousness, and cultural affirmation‖ (1). The ―aggressive Black liberation movement‖ of that decade, as Floyd Coleman called it, triggered an increasing interest in black American art expression, especially in literature and music but gradually also on visual art manifestations (Coleman 85). The proponents of this Black Aesthetic aimed at dismantling ―Eurocentric cultural sensibilities‖, introducing instead a new consciousness based on the African American artistic and cultural heritage (Mitchell 10). At the same time, an emerging current of scholarly criticism started to bring to the fore a series of historiographic accounts that would thereafter take the parameters of gender and race into consideration, in what Kathleen Blee calls ―history from the bottom up‖ (322). This, together with a broadening sense of

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freedom in experimental fields of artistic creation, enabled black women artists to push beyond the traditional boundaries of art forms, exploring new venues for self-expression. If during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance brought about a time of racial and cultural awareness (Farrington 76), the last decades of the century gave way to a revival in the exploration of those issues, with a clear impact on the artistic field. One of the pioneering works on the issue, William Ferris‘s Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts (1983) tries to unearth the roots of such art, claiming the intimate connection between creating quilts and creating music within the Southern African American landscape (7). This growing atmosphere of artistic freedom began to provide an answer to Alice Walker‘s famous rhetoric concerning the impossibility for African American women throughout history to develop their creative spirits. In In Search of Our Mothers‘ Gardens (1983), she wonders [how] was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year, century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person toread or white? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exit? (234). Probably for the first time in American history, black women had now the possibility to explore that intimate impulse and find their own voices through artistic means. Although they had never, in fact, remained completely silent with respect to their creative expressions (their recurrent use of music, sewing and other forms of art bears witness to it), the late part of the twentieth century opened doors for them to channel that need in growingly unrestricted manners. In fact, although certain analysts have hinted at an interruption in the black quiltmaking tradition, which would have purportedly been resumed in the last decades of the twentieth century (Ramsey and Waldvogel 64), the truth is that black women never ceased to create quilts, for a variety of reasons and aims, north to south and east to west of the nation. As Eva Grudin has poignantly stated, ―the impulse to create quilts has remained intact and is still vital in the black community‖ (7).

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Further, their capacity from this time on to reach larger groups of prospective audiences could translate into their developing of more self-reliable styles, rendered visible to unprecedented numbers of viewers. Another significant change with respect to the previous decades was an emerging awareness of the relevance of their work, which for many started to be considered as a truly artistic and cultural phenomenon. Some critics have claimed that black American quilters had traditionally been unaware of their artistic nature, regarding themselves instead as practical women with a particular skill in the domestic craft of making beautiful bedcovers from scraps. Joanne Cubbs, for instance, argues this with respect to Southern quilters belonging to the aforementioned Freedom Bee (―The Life and Art of Mary Lee Bendolph‖ 12). Other voices have gone much further, to the point of questioning the quilters‘ ability to recognize their own artistic labor. Jonathan Holstein, while tracing the physical similarities and cultural differences between quilts and paintings, contends that the evidence of the former (e.g., use of sequential images, manipulation of figures and tones to create optical effects, etc.) is nevertheless overcome by the latter: the cultural gap between one form of creation and the other, since needlework was purposefully alienated from ―high art‖ (The Pieced Quilt 113). Following this line of thought, Holstein maintained that quilts started to be considered art only when a conscious manipulation of geometric forms was established in traditional arts, which then became applied to other art forms as well (The Pieced Quilt 114). However, to accept this notion would be to implicitly acknowledge the traditional canonical definition of art genres which for centuries had refused to accept quilts as one of them. Not only that: assuming that argument would equal to assume what Toni Morrison has denounced as prejudiced criticism applied to African American art in general. According to her, the traditional canon tended to sanction that African American art only exists ―when it measures up to the ‗universal‘ criteria of Western art‖ (―Unspeakable Things Unspoken‖ 6). To regard the quilts made in a certain community as artistic objects only when and if they conform to an exogenous standard is truly a flawed (and biased) approach to the richness and complexity of that community as art maker.

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Furthermore, Holstein pointed at the non-intellectuality of traditional quilters as one of the reasons for the lack of artistic status of their work: Implicit in the act of creating a painting is the intellectual process which ties the work of an artist to his [sic] aesthetic ancestors and his [sic] peers, and places it in the history of objects specifically made to be art. This is precisely the quality which was absent in the making of pieced quilts. The women who made pieced quilts were not ―artists,‖ that is, they did not intend to make art, had no sense of the place of their work in a continuous stream of art history, did not, in short, intellectualize the production of handcraft any more than did the makers of objects in the vernacular tradition the world over. (The Pieced Quilt 115) Holstein‘s diagnosis of this unawareness among quilters of their own creativity has also, in my view, been extensively proven incorrect by the legacy of quilts (not only African American) that have been preserved. Patricia Mainardi, for instance, emphasizes the care with which many women quilters have treated the fruit of their work and creativity, occasionally even signing and dating them, or leaving in their wills ―specific instructions as to who should inherit them‖ (qtd. in Showalter, ―Common Threads‖ 150). The remark may difficultly apply to black quilters of old times not because of a lack of interest on their part, but because of historical reasons that prevented their use of writing (or simply the possibility to leave a will), but this is not indicative of their unawareness as art makers. In the first place, traditional quilters were keenly interested in joining and preserving the ―continuous stream of art history‖, as shows their intergenerational transmission of knowledge and skills, proof of a willingness to validate and honor that tradition, preventing it from falling into disuse. Secondly, the cultural importance and sentimental value of this art played a vital role in the quilters‘ preservation strategies, an element which is not usually present in other sanctioned art forms. In the third place, how could anybody prove whether quilters actually ―intellectualized‖ their creation process or not, when scarce written records (few with respect to white American quilters, and practically non- existent with respect to their African American counterparts) of their reflections on this art existed?

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It is certainly difficult, or rather impossible, to assert such a thing if we consider that black quilters not only left no written evidence of their needle art until the late nineteenth century, but remained historically illiterate for more than three centuries. Besides, first-hand accounts from African American quilters, especially in the form of journals, which have appeared since the last decades of the twentieth century, testify to this necessity of introspective reflection, similar to the internal dialogues expressed in letters or interviews by painters or writers throughout art history. This will be analyzed in further detail in section 7 of Chapter 4. In view of these considerations, I disagree with the restrictive classification of art types which tended to exclude needle art from its ranks, and also with its inclusion on account of its similarities with painting techniques, be it the manipulation of geometry or any other trait. Raising the cultural status of quilts only in accordance with other consecrated arts would not, in my opinion, do quilts justice for their own merits, and it would only consolidate the traditional framework. With respect to the African American currents in particular, their deep aesthetic sense and an intense desire to elaborate startling designs, together with an interest in creating very personal works while contributing to one‘s cultural heritage, proves that black women quilters did see themselves as artists, only not in the conventional sense the term is most often employed. In other words, these quilters had an awareness of their creative talents, but in general terms they did not label themselves as ―professional‖ artists, nor did they expect to reach critical notoriety or have their works exhibited at museums or galleries, as in fact they have achieved. In this sense, it is fair to acknowledge Cubbs‘s previous appreciation as truthful, but it is equally important to bear in mind that external sanctioning of an artist‘s work does not automatically add to (or even determines) their talent. The difference with respect to the previous decades was that a new sense of self-worth and cultural importance of their craft emerged among them, and this led many to claim their own places, revolutionizing long-held concepts on who controls and defines art.

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Being historically disallowed to participate in the hierarchical system underlying art diffusion and the management of museums and galleries, black quilters and their work had traditionally remained outside of the closed circuits orchestrated by mainstream art curators. The socio-cultural revolutions that bloomed in the mid-century, especially in the 1960s, paved the way for the articulation of new perspectives, not only regarding race, gender or class but also with respect to the meanings and definitions of art itself. However, these achievements also exacted a price, and did not come free from controversy. In fact, the change of perspective necessary to broaden the concepts of fine art (thus including quilts, among other artifacts) was met with strong opposition from those reluctant to enlarge the traditional category of high art. As Michael James contends, ―[d]omestic practices, especially those involving needle and thread, have suffered in cultural contexts that have valued and conferred legitimacy on the work of ‗professionals‘ (historically, well-educated and well-traveled white males‖ (qtd. in Berlo and Cox Crews ix). The prerequisite for amateur or aspiring artists to have some formal training has historically been one of the obstacles keeping them on the margins of artistic circles. Since most African American artists up to that moment usually lacked such training, their removal from core positions and their staying outside of the spotlight and even of art criticism had been the norm: ―[i]ntellectual elitism, certain academic ways of thinking about creating art, leads to the insistence that the process of a folk artist […] is so radically different from that of an artist who‘s been trained‖ (hooks, Art on My Mind 25). Certainly, those ―ways of thinking‖ dominated by the cultural elite had great difficulty in acknowledging black women‘s productions as artistic creations in their own right, especially when these appeared in such iconoclastic ways as quilts. According to Rozsika Parker‘s argumentation in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1986), it is not by chance that the historical (and sharp) division of categories between art and craft was made in relation to matters of socio-economic class and sex. While traditionally male activities such as painting were culturally valued and their makers considered

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artists, similarly creative work developed by women, such as needlework, was not only unpaid but even expected to be done for free by the latter on account of female self-sacrifice, and obviously the performers were not perceived as artists but as artisans (5-6). Further examples of the prestigious type could include music or sculpture, whereas embroidery, cookery and in broad terms all domestic-related artistry would customarily be ascribed in the second category. Besides, the economic retribution accorded to plastic artists, in contrast with quilters or embroiderers, who usually provided their home‘s textile works in return for nothing, established a clear differentiation as to which activity was profitable and socially rewarded (Parker 81). The social change that opened the gates for a reformulation of art criteria was firmly supported by those feminist thinkers who saw in needlework, and especially in quilting, a vindication of women‘s historically demised creativity. There had existed, anyhow, a tendency among some feminists to identify needlework with the limitations of the domestic realm and, through its connotations of a ―minor‖ activity, these thinkers tried to dissociate themselves from the needle (Parker 6). Yet, this was an implicit assumption that sewing- related labor was of lesser value, and the notion became challenged by a subsequent feminist current, namely from the so-called second wave era onwards, that attempted to revise the role of needle art in women‘s history. This new perspective aimed at emphasizing the strengths of female textile work, emptying it of its conventionally-attributed pejorative sense (Parker 206-7). Moreover, patchwork quilts became iconic representations of women‘s struggles, as they symbolized individual female genius within a collaborative context –be it from the point of view of generationally-transmitted skills, or from the emotional bonding created among women quilters. In the words of the feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, quilts became thereafter ―the prime visual metaphor for women‘s lives, for women‘s culture‖ (qtd. in Showalter, Sister‟s Choice 161). For African American women artists in particular, conventional art criticism was especially indebted to them. Since their contributions had persistently been silenced, Walker‘s above-mentioned lack of artistic voice turned into what hooks

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calls the ―subjugated knowledge‖, or the gap in American art history where ―blanks‖ must be investigated and recovered, thus fulfilling ―the collective yearning to know more about ourselves as black people in the diaspora‖ (hooks, Art on My Mind 28).30 These blank spaces, which respond to the invisibility practices imposed from the dominant culture, started to be actively vindicated by black female artists and researchers since the eruption of the 1960s feminist movements. Precisely this effort to trace and claim the creative efforts of black women in America underpins much of the work developed by a number of quilters from the 1970s onwards, whose endeavor reached new peaks at the turn of the century, and continues to do so nowadays. Among those revolutionizing visual art in general and African American art in particular, stands out Carolyn Mazloomi, founder in 1984 of the Women of Color Quilter‘s Network (WCQN), an impressive and pioneering effort to bring together as many black American women quilters as possible. Her initiative, which in the following decades would prove immensely valuable as a research center and as a forum for both insiders and outsiders, was progressively accompanied by a number of publications where the author explores different aspects of the craft, from the late twentieth century to the present. One of the many challenges encountered by the WCQN concerned the controversial consideration of African American quilts as belonging to a specific aesthetic current, as claimed by certain white scholars from the late 1970s onwards (Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth 10). Their consideration of African American quilts as sharing a set of features that made them unequivocally heirs to the African quiltmaking lore was based on the observation of certain repeated traits in a number of quilts made by Southern African American women. Although the features themselves may in fact retrieve aesthetic traditions from their African forbears (Thompson 208-10), to conclude that they epitomize the essence of an African American quilt is both inaccurate and unfair. Mazloomi

30 The long-term psychological effects of the African diaspora, explored repeatedly in the artistic and literary production of black women, have been described as a traumatic experience of non- belonging, whereby the descendants of the African homeland are scattered and emotionally uprooted around the world (Busia 197).

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summarizes the phenomenon as follows: ―These experts defined African American quilts by such traits as vertical stripes, bright colors, asymmetry, improvisation, symbolic forms, multiple patterns, large stitches, and large design elements. While many scholars embraced these criteria for defining African American quilts, others found them narrowly stereotypical‖ (Spirits of the Cloth 14). The fact that many (or all) of these traits were present in some African American quilts should not lead us to believe that they are distinctive of a whole culture, inasmuch as nobody would claim strictly symmetric patterns, for instance, as a defining feature of every European or European American quilt. Therefore, claiming the above-mentioned characteristics as the quintessential African American quilt understandably angered many WCQN members, who ―scoffed at the phenomenon of outsiders creating the definition for something alien to their own cultural references‖ (Mazloomi, Spirits 14). In fact, the broad consideration of African American quilts as sharing a number of common characteristics resembles the phenomenon historically suffered by women artists as a whole, as Rozsika Parker regrets when pondering that ―painting by women has been set apart from painting by men and […] women‘s art, in all its diversity, has been described as homogeneous‖ (Parker 4). Implying that all female painting, as well as all African American quilting can be clearly identified and enclosed within a subcategory is a restricting strategy, and as works from both fields reveal, a clearly untrue statement. Furthermore, if according a set of pre-established notions as ―distinctive‖ of any art form is in itself a reductionist and narrow-minded practice, the proclamation of that judgment from analysts who did not belong to the same culture only contributed to aggravate the controversy. It really seemed that there existed a necessity from the dominant culture to ascribe the outputs of the minority group as being clearly limited to a particular style, as if secluding them in a specific category rendered their comprehension easier. This tendency to label ―the other‖ and to delimit their characteristics as unmovable (even through time and space, since their proponents regarded the African diaspora as the conductive

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channel of all that knowledge) underlies a recurring need for the mainstream culture to fix and therefore control minority groups. The belief that true African American quilts should necessarily display the already mentioned traits, although firmly supported in art circles, started to be debunked by many African American women quilters, both unknown artists and reputed scholars (most notably Benberry and Fry), and it has lost considerable support to this day. On the other hand, and in an attempt to establish a more comprehensive conceptualization of the term ―African American quilting‖, some quilt historians have propounded the existence of several subcategories. Thus, based on their historical origins and their style, the German scholar Schnuppe von Gwinner classified them into four groups: those made by slaves according to European American standards, those clearly bearing the imprint of their African heritage (like the stripe and appliquéd patterns), those which blend traditional African styles with European American motifs and, finally, those made by white American women folowing black themes (such as the ―Underground Railroad‖ or the ―Radical Rose‖ patterns) (152-6). While Gwinner‘s taxonomy can be questioned (for example, due to her inclusion of white women‘s quilts as part of the African American quilting tradition) or even considered incomplete (because of the absence of African American women‘s quilts that do not follow any of the mentioned trends), it is doubtlessly an interesting approach to the quilts‘ categorization, mainly because it goes beyond the European-American versus African-American polarity. Gwinner‘s classification contemplates the works directly reflecting ―the constructive techniques of African textiles‖ (154) as one of the currents, but not as the only existing one, within the whole tradition. Despite the inevitable difficulties to ascertain exactly how the African American production differed from other types (Katz-Hyman and Rice 387), this is a useful attempt at settling the debate about the existence of a pure and single African American quiltmaking style. Following Gwinner‘s view, there would exist such a specific current, but only as an integral part of the global trajectory of this art, not as its only representative.

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Another remarkable aspect of the establishment of the WCQN was the notion that, for the first time, it offered the possibility for black women quilters throughout the country to exhibit and share their own works, obtaining peer feedback on every aspect of their creative process. This meant that an outlet existed from now on where they could vent their accomplishments, aspirations and challenges, and where the experience of elaborating quilts needed not be an isolated (even when developed in small groups or bees) practice anymore. Also, it provided an environment where unconventional color combination or atypical pattern displays were not rejected, but even welcomed. To exemplify this, the quilter Sandra K. German described how she had felt a ―stranger in a strange land‖ (qtd. in Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth 135) after being required to make quilts following instructions on specific combinations and techniques. As she instinctively refused to comply with those requirements and followed instead her own artistic impulse, she decided to make a quilt as a tribute to the WCQN, called Honey Bees, Buttermilk and Blues (1993), claiming her gratitude that ―[t]he network ensure[s] that diversity in quiltmaking is valued, encouraged, and preserved‖ (Mazloomi, Spirits 134-5). Mazloomi‘s interest in preserving the knowledge existing on this African American art form is also evident through her extensive compilation of published and digital research on the matter. As observed all along the history line of this craft, the strong will of their makers proves to be a crucial element for its conservation and transmission. Although, as has been argued, it is impossible to categorize contemporary African American quiltmaking in strict terms, certain thematic features can be observed as frequently repeated. Two aspects are recurrently displayed in the works of African American quilters toward the end of the century, and they all testify to a revisionist tendency: on the one hand, a necessity to rewrite the racial struggle from a female perspective, and on the other, a claim to reconsider representational issues concerning African American women‘s image, both literally and metaphorically. As regards the first, the emphasis is placed on the proper names, known and unknown, of women who have fought racial discrimination since the beginning of

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African American history to contemporary days (Allen 4; Grudin 16). Yet, these female names have usually been neglected in historiography, hence the necessity to reclaim their contributions and legacy; in the process, many quilters reveal an indebtedness to the role of family, especially to their female members, who strove to end oppression and to transmit their commitment on to the following generations. Together with these demands, there exists, as quilt artists and critics have often acknowledged, a deep connection between African American quilts and a sense of spirituality, not understood as a religious component but as a source of inner strength. In particular, Mazloomi links this personal force with African American women‘s strategies ―to survive, and thrive, while carving out new identities and new ways of expressing their spirituality‖ where African belief systems and American cultural traditions blend into each other (Quilting African American Women‟s History 13). Moreover, the tribute paid to female ancestors is made visible through the incorporation of photo transfers onto the surface of the quilts, in some cases ―reinterpreted‖ through the use of different layers of patterned fabrics, giving the women‘s faces and bodies a three-dimensional effect (Mazloomi, Quilting African American Women‟s History 36). The use of photographic elements is especially meaningful in the elaboration of these works, for they underscore the importance of locating family legacies and, to a broader extent, the reconstruction of a black collective memory that managed to outlive centuries of racial and cultural invisibility. Photography and its connections with race and class have been explored by scholars interested in describing the link between access to graphic imagery and the impact of its cultural representation. In this sense, hooks argues that ―any theoretical discussion of the relationship of black life to the visual, to art making, makes photography central‖ (hooks, Art on My Mind 57), as gaining access to visual portraits and settings from a black position introduced unprecedented changes of perspective. Applying this notion to the quilts made by African American women in which photography (usually portraying the quilter‘s ancestors) is combined with fabric to create a new unit of expression, the artist can offer a different rendition of space

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and how it is constructed. For example, in her 2007 quilt titled Where I Come From, the artist Bisa Butler displays a horizontal black-and-white photograph of enslaved families contrasting with a multi-color quilted female portrait whose face is composed of a variety of patterned strips of fabric.31 Interestingly, her choice to lay out the woman‘s figure as foregrounding the quilt functions as a metaphor for the role of black American women throughout history, and it is especially relevant as it stands at the front of times of hardship and bondage. As Butler wondered, probably none of those who got their picture taken ever saw the result, even though it was likely the first time they had been photographed (Mazloomi, Quilting 36). Still, Butler‘s decision to illuminate the grey picture with the woman‘s colorful portrait through the use of bright scraps adds an unexpected meaning to the quilt, reversing traditional representations tending to minimize or overlook antithetic heroes. In this quilt, the superposition of small fabrics to elaborate the woman‘s face creates a three-dimensional effect and produces in the beholder a sense of interpellation from the woman‘s poignant gaze. Also, other details, including the artist‘s embroidered name on one side of the quilt, or the framing of the whole picture with several textile reproductions of the American flag, add further implications to it. Butler‘s signature reminds the viewer of the proximity and inevitable parallel between art quilts and paintings, denoting her self-awareness as an artist and claiming a more prominent position of black women‘s role in American history. The use of photography, present in other art works by African American women apart from quilts, is a recurrent element as an expressive instrument because it helps the artist to tackle conflicting issues of race and visual representation. Arguably, it is an appealing tool for those quilters/painters interested in graphic creation as it channels past and present episodes of African American life. As an example of this, the artist Deborah Willis elaborated in 1994 a quilt entitled Date Unknown, where she mixed the yo-yo quilting technique with photo transfers of some of the first pictures she took with her father‘s camera –an

 31 Further examples of Bisa Butler‘s extraordinary quilts are available at https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/09/quilted-portraits-of-black-figures-by-bisa-butler/

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object unaffordable to many people during her childhood.32 The quilt‘s elaboration process, as Willis explained, triggered mixed memories of her family and of her own early interest in visual art (Mazloomi, Spirits 50). Also by the same artist, the photo quilt No Man of Her Own (1992) presents in its center a picture she had taken as a child of one of her aunts, framed all around by fabric as a medallion in a traditional quilt.33 As Willis explained, she found it extremely useful to insert family photographs into the language of quilts, a technique which has permitted her ―to express [her] emotions visually‖ (Willis, ―Searching for Memories‖ 225). Furthermore, it can be said that photography has been intensively employed by artists who, like Carrie Mae Weems, found in the camera lens a powerful way to re-interpret reality and confront generally-assumed stereotypes on a common past, addressing ―identity and color consciousness in the African American psyche‖ through the combination of several art media (Robinson, Bearing Witness 156-7). The reinterpretation of racial episodes in American history as seen from the eyes of black women artists is a cultural phenomenon that has produced dazzling works in the fields of textile creation, painting and the fusion of both. Particularly in the quilt context, there is a non-coincidental production, in quantitative and qualitative terms, of works concerned with racial injustice that highlight black females as holding leading roles. For example, the multiple references to Civil Rights activists such as Rosa Parks, artists such as Josephine Baker or Nina Simone, and more recently, political leaders such as Michelle Obama reveal that vibrant pulse to re-create and claim a black female impact that had traditionally been muffled. With respect to the second aspect that seems to predominate among late- century and contemporary African American quilts, the issue of self-concept and

32 The technique consists in the integration in the quilt of pictures printed on photo linen, a pre- sensitized photographic product (Willis, ―Searching for Memories‖ 226). 33 A reproduction of this quilt can be seen at the following link: https://books.google.es/books?id=hS46Q_CJOXYC&pg=PA220&dq=Debora+willis+no+man+of +her+own&hl=gl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-npfNrb3pAhWi2- AKHZtFBzMQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Debora%20willis%20no%20man%20of%20her%20o wn&f=false

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representation of black women in American society, quilters have been making a conscious effort to help modify pejorative notions. In many cases, the quilters have used their art to contribute to eradicate negative images by elaborating socially-committed works as ―sites of resistance to denigrated constructions of Black womanhood‖ (Hood, ―Resistance‖ 141). In the case of the quilter and researcher Kyra Hicks, the process of becoming actively involved in this reconstruction was sparked by a series of personal events, namely the discovery of the work carried out by the artist Emma Amos advocating race and gender equality (Mazloomi, Quilting 76) and the contemplation of the quilts shown in Eva Grudin‘s 1991 outstanding exhibition, entitled ―Stitching Memories: African-American Story Quilts‖ (Hood, ―Resistance‖ 143). Simultaneously, Hicks described a process of introspection and self-questioning as the engine that set her needlework (despite lacking formal training) in motion (Hood 144). Indeed, some of Hicks‘ most remarkable protest quilts have to do with white society‘s perception of black female figures, regarding both their physical appearance and their expected social behavior. As her quilt entitled She Believed There Was More suggests, behavioral patterns created by elites seem to place women, and especially black ones, in certain predetermined positions, expecting them to live according to those standards, thus perpetuating them. Whenever an African American woman decides to defy the traditional order and step out of its limits, Hicks argues, there emerges a shocked reaction by some members of the majority society, who digest with difficulty such daring moves (Hood 161). The folk quilter Yvonne Wells, for instance, explains how her quilts tend to appall conservative viewers and quilters, who instinctively ―fold their arms in front of them as if to protect themselves‖ from such iconoclastic designs (Grudin, Stitching Memories 10); that is, from a kind of quiltmaking which escapes their more conventional aesthetic conventions. In Hicks‘ above-mentioned quilt, a simple Nine-Patch pattern in which solid, red squares intersperse with pale ones, as though imitating a chess board, the inscription with the quilt‘s title highlights the words She and More by contrasting the dark tones of their letters on a clear background. The last box or

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square, the only one which breaks the chromatic symmetry, as it is in bright and unexpected green, features a black woman‘s leg leaving the scene, as if stepping out of the framed reality and into the unknown.34 As the artist acknowledged, the use of coded messages, such as the color green symbolizing hope and freedom to carry a different life, adds meaning to the work, and may inspire other black women to adopt a new perspective on their possibilities and stances within the broader society. Literally, that freedom is represented in the quilt by the tearing off of its last section as it portrays the woman‘s limb entering a completely open space (Hood, ―The Culture of Resistance‖ 144). Hicks insists on fighting traditional patterns of beauty and expected lifestyles among African American women in several other works. In her Cinderella quilt (1995), she depicts the famous scene from the fairy tale where Cinderella is leaving the palace only minutes before the clock strikes midnight; however, instead of signaling 12 it is about to indicate 30, which refers to the author‘s age when she made the quilt.35 As the quilt suggests, there is a rejection on the part of the artist to abide by the heavy social pressure on women reaching middle age to follow certain requirements, namely those related to marriage and motherhood. Her antithetic representation of Cinderella as a rebellious woman who refuses to become a wife and a mother only because society expects her to, is also supported by other details such as the unrealistic beauty standards regarding her body or her too large shoe size, which would not comply with the mythicized fairy tale (Hood 156-8). Similarly, another work by Hicks, Black Barbie (1997), includes a reinterpretation of the world-known Barbie doll whose physical features are not only unrealistic for any woman, but could be even considered as antithetic for black women.36 The doll‘s easily recognizable traits, which most often include pale skin, light blue eyes and blonde straight hair, lie at the opposite extreme of most African American women‘s appearance, which seems to suggest that concepts of beauty or fashion do not really apply to them. Hicks admitted having elaborated the quilt ―after noticing how, in several ads for the doll, the

34 Image available at http://blackthreads.com/about-kyra/ 35 Image available at https://www.eleanorlevie.com/speaker-topic-detail.php?ID=1 36 Image available at http://blackthreads.blogspot.com/2009/03/barbie-turns-50-black-barbie-quilt- by.html

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black version was usually photographed behind the white version and rarely had a name of her own‖, a message she underscored by including in the quilt the statements ―Barbie, American doll, was never intended for me‖ and ―Black Barbie has no name‖ (Mazloomi, Spirits 95). Although the original doll, introduced in 1959, was available in both dark- and light-haired versions, the model that eventually settled as the company‘s icon was the afore-mentioned blonde character, becoming representative of an idealized female beauty standard and life-style. The quilt, portraying a black woman of different skin hues, showcases the pointlessness of the black version created over two decades after the first one, which does not take into account the diversity of black women‘s appearance and, even as of today, still tends to represent them as endowed of ―European facial features, light brown eyes, and long, flowing black hair‖ (Hood, ―The Culture of Resistance‖ 160). The idea that black women had always and naturally desired to emulate their white counterparts is at odds with certain customs that lived on during slavery and are revealing of quite an opposite tendency. For example, the documented existence of the so-called ―Topsy-Turvy‖ dolls (Katz-Hyman 185), which black little girls would play with, can act as a subversive antithesis of ill- intended stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima or the famous ―pickaninny‖ character, omnipresent as well in the popular representations of black Americans for decades. These Topsy-Turvy dolls, portraying a black head on one extreme and a white one on the other, allowed slave young girls to pretend they were playing with a white doll while in the presence of white people. By covering the face with the dress and turning the doll over, once they were not being watched, the girl had a black doll to play with (Dance, From My People n.p.). This suggests that, despite the external pressure and the overwhelming beauty canons that dominated all society, black American women strove to retain their own aesthetic standards, even under bondage and starting at a very young age. It also hints at the idea that the impulse to conform to mainstream white standards became gradually subsumed in the unconscious mind of the African American collective, remaining generally uncontested until the rise of awareness that emerged in the late 1950s Black movement.

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In a similar vein to Hicks‘ Black Barbie reinterpretation, numerous contemporary quilts made by black American artists have tackled specific issues concerning certain physical traits, with an emphasis on hair. Given that beauty standards relative to hair have traditionally placed European American features (that is, fair and usually straight hair types) at their core, black women‘s natural appearance has always been in conflict with this idealized representation, which seems to perpetuate the standard that should be imitated. ―Unsurprisingly,‖ writes Emilia María Durán-Almarza, ―hair has turned into the physical marker over which issues of racial identity have frequently pivoted‖ (―(En)Gendering the Black Atlantic‖ 6). As the quilter Sauda A. Zahra explores in her work dated from 2007, Raising H.A.I.R (Healthy Acceptance of our Image and Roots), there seems to be, in the psyche of many African American women, a conflicting relationship with their sense of self on account of how their hair is perceived by ―a western standard of beauty‖ (Mazloomi, Quilting African American Women‟s History 160). According to Zahra, this phenomenon, fostered by mass media messages and the manipulation of language, continues to produce a clash in their internal perceptions (160), which would explain their frequent exploration of the theme of hair aesthetics through the creative process of quiltmaking. Pondering on this dilemma, Paula Giddins claimed in her groundbreaking essay When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) that African American women have been struggling with two (at times, opposed) aesthetic ideals since the early twentieth century, revealed by the ―irony of wanting to approximate White standards of beauty in such a race- conscious era‖ (186). Although African American publications tended, since those early days, to encourage black women‘s appreciation of their natural physical traits, it is safe to assume that social pressure to adapt their appearance to white beauty canons continued to be overwhelming. The implications of this requirement to conform to white beauty codes had a deep impact on the lives of African American women who would not abide by them, including socioeconomic consequences and grave career obstacles (Banks, ―The Black Side of the Mirror‖ 23). The observation, on the part of contemporary black women quilters, of how these standards have damaged self-perception and excluded many

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women‘s natural features has sparked a hair revolution of its own, which can be noticed in the media nowadays. It is not by sheer coincidence that contemporary African American quilters have focused their attention on this and are tackling such aesthetic considerations by comparing old and current perceptions of their hair, be it or not in contrast with the ideals presented by mainstream society. Artists such as Nedra Bonds have reflected upon the effect that these external demands have on African American women‘s self-esteem, and her quilt My Hair clearly exemplifies this. Having experienced herself the ordeal of complying with ―society and family expectations‖, Bonds designed a quilt which reflected every hairstyle she had ever worn, in her attempt to conform to a physical requirement that was always out of reach. Her quilt documents this apparently never-ending process, until the day she realized it was as exhausting an aspiration as it was frustrating, and decided to have her hair cut (Hood, ―The Culture of Resistance‖ 154-5). Her choice to let go of these bondages represents black women‘s contemporary efforts to liberate themselves from external norms and to overcome Western beauty standards and establish self-referential aesthetics (Hood 156). Similarly, current quilts by African American artists portray a more inclusive view of their own hair varieties, as can be observed in Viola B. Leak‘s Addressing Hair quilt (2007), which deploys a range of tools used to treat African American women‘s hair.37 Other works, such as Cynthia Catlin‘s Big Hair (1995), pay tribute to African American women‘s roots by placing at its center a hand- painted female portrait wearing a Cameroon-style ―hair sculpture‖ (Mazloomi, Spirits 32-3). Precisely in consonance with the spirit that seems to stand out in many twenty-first century African American quilts, the point is not simply to criticize or oppose pervasive clichés that promote what Paula Giddings calls ―Anglicized features‖ (186), but to counter them through the exposition of self-acknowledged models of representation. Hence, the inclusion of powerful women who do not seek to validate their own worth from external sources (evident in so many contemporary quilts portraying bold African American women) functions as a

37 Image available at https://saqa.z2systems.com/np/clients/saqa/product.jsp?product=103&

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clear reinforcement of this tendency. As a result, quilters highlight in their works the positive model set by creative and free-spirited black women, running the gamut from anonymous figures dancing in African attire to well-known characters who have had a profound impact on history. In fact, the tendency to rebut certain popular stereotypes that have historically affected (and continue to do so) African American women‘s image is shared by many contemporary artists. This is especially evident in the context of advertising, due to its multiplying effect on society, and as a perpetuator of certain beliefs. Since the earlier formats that utilized the consumption product as a self- referential marketing strategy (e.g., packages reproducing slogans and easily- identifiable images), the impact of advertising on the social construction of black American women is unquestionable. The reinforcement of ―racist images of the obese mammy, the unkempt welfare mother, and the hip-shaking woman of the street‖ (Wade-Gayles 7) found no critical contestation until the voices of black feminist thinkers started to be heard in the last quarter of the past century. One of the earliest and most pervasive models, related to the famous Aunt Jemima cookery products, was introduced in 1889 and swiftly gained popularity, immediately becoming an epitome of the black woman homemaker (Mazloomi, Quilting 128). Originally displayed in the packaging of pancake flour under the name of that mythicized character of the ―good-natured, loyal, ad trustworthy‖ servant (Billinsglea-Brown 25), Aunt Jemima represents the white nostalgia for an old-time black maid dating back to slavery days. However, there is no evidence of an over-abundance of this prototypical character in those times, and facts tend to suggest that it was more the fruit of Southern pro-slavery propaganda than a reflection of reality. As Patricia A. Turner argues, the conventional description of those Mammies makes their predominance quite unlikely: not many of them would be, as described, overweight and aged, since their access to food was scant and life expectancy was low for most of them (Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies 44). Even so, its perpetuation in popular culture through mass-produced commodities and fictional characters accounts for an interest on the part of ―merchants eager to create a past that never was‖ (44), or which at least was not so pervasive. The massive distribution of black memorabilia portraying this kind

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of figures, circulating mostly between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Civil Rights movement, aimed at continuing the idea that black American women were synonymous with domestic servitude (Grudin, Stitching Memories 164). According to the myth, this house worker seems to joyfully embrace all her burdens (never-ending domestic labor in service to others) with a childish smile permanently on her face, as if showing gratefulness for her own servility. This fantasized imagery has been tackled by many African American artists and intellectuals from the twentieth century onwards, as part of a collective effort to redress highly derisive representations of blackness and womanhood. Characters such as the ―mammies‖ and ―uncles‖ have had a negative impact in matters of race identification whose effects have stood for long in the collective consciousness. ―[T]hese type pictures‖, wrote William S. Braithwaite in his article, ―have degenerated into reactionary social fetishes, [descending] into libelous caricature […], which has hampered art as much as it has embarrassed [the black population]‖ (―The Negro in American Culture‖ 34-5). More to the point, since the emergence of a black feminist thought, it has been of prime importance to challenge derogatory representations of their identities, because they tend to perpetuate deeply entrenched racist and misogynist beliefs: As part of a generalized ideology of domination, these controlling images of Black womanhood take on a special meaning because the authority to define these symbols is a major instrument of power. In order to exercise power, elite white men and their representatives must be in a position to manipulate appropriate symbols concerning Black women (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 68). Hence the necessity to oppose and overcome those distorted visions or ―controlling images‖ which shape a definition of black womanhood as eternally holding the disadvantaged position, be it from the class, gender or race stance. Among their many derogatory depictions, black women have customarily been portrayed ―as sexually deviant, as the dominating matriarchal figure, as strident, eternally ill-tempered wenches, and as wretched victims‖ (Bobo 33). Precisely because the aim was to culturally topple those manipulations of myths, the use of quilts as popular culture/ folk artifacts to challenge cultural misconceptions can be

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considered as symbolically more powerful than any other contestation strategy. For contemporary textile artists, this has been a recursive concern, as evidence the numerous quilts that try to demystify such referents. As typically happens with the phenomenon of cultural stereotypes, the character being submitted to that process tends to be caricatured and ridiculed, and its original features overexploited, in a ―bald exercise of power‖ of the dominating class over the subjugated one (Parks 177). Although it may seem a paradox, the supposedly hyperreal representation of that figure does not result in a more human portrait: on the contrary, the real person that it allegedly portrayed becomes dehumanized and objectified, like ―cardboard characters rather than multidimensional people with actual lives‖ (Bobo 36). Contemporary black women quilters have become significantly involved in the reverse struggle: their quilts try to re-humanize the manipulated version of the original black servant with all its nuances and, in some cases, from a perspective that vindicates her power. As an example of this, a 2000 quilt called Aunt Jemima‟s Debut: I‟se In Town, Honey, by Tracey Rico, summarizes most of the controversies associated with this popular figure. Its maker assembled a series of Aunt Jemima‘s images on the black background of her quilt top, as though symbolizing the sequences in a film or the vignettes in a comic. As Rico claimed, this ―stereotypical happy slave totally devoted to the service of her White family‖ was the quintessential of a ―lost paradise‖ whose underlying idea was the attribution of harsh domestic work to black women –thereby relieving white women from the burden (Mazloomi, Quilting 128). Rico‘s quilt, which intersperses photo transfers of the Mammy character from Victor Fleming‘s film Gone with the Wind (1939) with reproductions of the original flour sacks, is a visually shocking rendition of how this kind of clichés have been circulated and maintained in the collective unconsciousness for more than one century, with devastating effects up to the present. That Aunt Jemima continues to be a disturbing icon for countless African American artists is observed through their repeated exploration of this figure. From sculptures to painters, many have felt compelled to dignify her and liberate her from the racist and sexist stigma of this character. An example of this is Freida

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Tesfagiorgis‘ painting Aunt Jemima‟s Matrilineage (1982), where her double heritage of African roots (symbolized by African sculptures and textiles) and African American lore (represented by a multi-colored star quilt on the background) contribute to outplay Aunt Jemima‘s history of oppression (Farrington, Creating Their Own Image 266-7). Simultaneously, other artists like the reputed Faith Ringgold have tackled the same subject, only from a different perspective. In Ringgold‘s Who‟s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983),38 the focus of debate is placed not on the stereotypical character (presented here as an accomplished caterer, instead of a domestic servant), but on the treatment given to it and how it has been incorporated as a destructive symbol in the collective consciousness. As Alma Billingslea-Brown explains, what Ringgold attempts to question through her quilt is the notion of backwardness and guilt placed on the Aunt Jemima icon, when in fact she is not the one that should be blamed: ―[t]o expose and confront the hatred, fear, and guilt associated with this quintessential mammy image, Ringgold constructs a narrative in which Jemima is […] rendered as the ‗ultimate female survivor‘ in all her human complexity‖ (63). By formulating this approach to her perception of the mammy figure, Ringgold suggests that it is precisely an ―external‖ manipulation, initiated from the white society but maintained by the black culture and integrated into the black consciousness, which has turned the image itself into such a pejorative symbol. Besides, just as Tesfagiorgis‘ work blended the African heritage with the African American popular folk tradition, Ringgold‘s quilt adds yet another cultural ingredient from their common African roots, by including an open and ambiguous question in the end, ―Now Who‘s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?‖, an element reminiscent of traditional African dilemma tales (Billingslea-Brown 64). Ringgold‘s attempt to vindicate the stereotypical black maid figure was in open confrontation with the values supported by the Black Aesthetic movement, which emphasized a positive representation of African Americans in all their facets, and consequently a firm rejection of all artifacts or concepts related to their long past of submission. Yet, as Michele Wallace has argued, including past

38 Image available at https://www.sutori.com/item/untitled-63ca-5ae3

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stereotypes from African American history in contemporary approaches to visual art contributes to deepen knowledge about that past –not in terms of approval, but in terms of cultural understanding (Dark Designs 121). Since one of the main objectives of black nationalism was to project ―images, myths, and symbols […] linked to a new conception of racial pride‖ (Billingslea-Brown 24), Ringgold‘s proposal seemed to clash with it from an intellectual stance, despite sharing the common interest in debunking conventionalized racism. Unlike most African American artists and critics, who apparently established their critique of Aunt Jemima from what could be called a vertical perspective (that is, the strict hierarchical system of racial relationships), Ringgold adds another dimension to the problem in her rendition of the mammy: a horizontal scale which would move from ―inside‖ to ―outside‖ the field of black American culture. Her quilt, in fact, suggests that a fair consideration of all elements from African American history and popular culture must be made not solely from the perspective of class struggle, but also through the capacity, from members pertaining to that culture, to assess those objects regardless the prejudiced view that some ―cultural outsiders‖ may hold (Billingslea-Brown 25). Ringgold‘s theoretical argument for this quilt is grounded in her choice of a successful and independent woman, clearly at odds with the very essence of the mammy myth (and where the heaviest negative criticism was generally laid on). As a result, her innovative position manages to undermine the social construction that tended to identify African American women‘s fate with the quintessential black female role of domestic caretaker. Likewise, a more recent work entitled Mammy‟s Golden Legacy (2012), by Laura Gadson, attempts to pay homage to those black women who acted as forerunners for today‘s artists, particularly in the fields of drama and the cinema.39 In her descriptive quilt, Gadson confronts two representations of Mammy: one, the stereotypical image of the famous movie character in Gone with the Wind, and the other, a portrait of Hattie McDaniel, the actress who in 1939 became the first black person to win an Academy Award, as the quilt reads. In the background, the display of the Oscar-awarded black actresses and actors reminds us that, since the

39 Image available at https://columbusmuseum.com/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/and-still-we-rise- race-culture-and-visual-conversations.html

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first statuette was given in 1929, only 17 of them have recognized performances by black artists (and, tellingly, as few as 9 of them were bestowed on women, of whom only one in a leading role). The quilter highlights the proper names of those women actors as a tribute to McDaniel, the pioneer performer whose role has been so unfairly criticized, since without her, ―the journey toward today‘s opportunities would never have begun‖ (Mazloomi, And Still We Rise 110-1). In sum, it can be said that Aunt Jemima protest quilts encompass the two main issues mentioned above: the interest in fighting the country‘s racial conflict from a female perspective and the necessity to call on trial every prejudiced representation of African American women. Remarkably, it is not in the spirit of these quilters to dwell on the calamities embodied by those figures, from the perspective of both gender and race. To do so would be, as Jacqueline Bobo has noted with respect to black feminist criticism, ―self-defeating in that it diminishes any hope for change‖ (35), and as the quilters‘ works prove, their main aims are in closer rapport with redressing the imbalance through art than with simply insisting on the maleficent effects of those distorted images. Their strategy of using the female language of quilting in order to transform the destructive messages of those myths into self-validating works of art demonstrates that their minds are following that reconstructive effort, instead of solely denouncing their distressful past. Proof of this is the fact that such aims, to which other issues have progressively been added since the wake of the new century, continue to be at the core of contemporary African American quilting art. In conclusion, in this chapter I have discussed the pervasive role played by quilts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from the perspective of African American culture, notably as a social and political tool towards resistance and change. If in the early decades of the past century those quilts started to reach increasing freedom of expression from mainstream dictates, in the mid-century they became a metaphor of the ongoing revolutions that questioned status quo regarding race, gender and class in America. Finally, from the last decades to our days we have witnessed a revival of African American quilting across the country, encouraged by the ever-rising atmosphere of creative freedom and progressively- acquired civil and women‘s rights. As a result, growing numbers of black women

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artists have taken to exploring new forms of creative activity, mirrored not only in the textile field but also in other venues such as painting or writing –and, in some cases, through the merging of several of them. Before finishing this section, I would like to emphasize the fact that black women in America have been instrumental in the continuation and transmission of their own ancestral quiltmaking, and their efforts along history prove they were clearly aware of the importance of doing so, regardless of the changing political tensions and excruciating difficulties they had to face.

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Part 2: Exploring an ambivalent language

Chapter 3. African American quilts

in relation with other art forms

Since African American quilts, especially in modern times, are in connection with such a variety of materials and may represent so many possibilities of expression, their resonance with many other art forms is increasingly evident, and continues to be explored by quilt artists at present. In this chapter I succinctly analyze some connections of this quilting tradition with other forms of African and African American folk expression, particularly with respect to painting and performing arts (music and dance). While significant connotations of certain art forms such as photography have already been approached, I consider it relevant to explore here the links existing between quilts and other art fields of huge importance in the African American culture.

3.1. Material culture

Concerning elements from the material culture, an African heritage is evident in contemporary quilts, for instance through the representation of artifacts ranging from sculpture or ceramic to architectural designs. As regards the former, it is interesting to observe how certain African-related artifacts such as tribal masks are echoed in many contemporary quilts, often elaborated by artists ―consciously seeking a reconnection with Africa‖ and tracing the history of that continent ―to establish a tie with their ancestral past‖ (Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth 18). For some quilters, ―the term ‗family‘ also embraces Africa‖ (Grudin 66), and the connection can be so strong that they intuitively attach part of their personal biographies to a collective African heritage, thus including in their quilts explicit references to objects and symbols they associate with these origins –from combs or musical instruments to legendary gods (Grudin 63). In a similar vein, quilt artists such as Allyson Allen show a tendency to recreate those African roots by integrating in their work specific aesthetic references, namely African fabrics, Black Stitches beads, cowrie shells, etc.40 Allen, like many of her counterparts interested in retrieving this common nexus, tends also to depict in her quilts visual representations of the continent through a narrative aesthetic. In these cases, the approach is intended from a physical perspective (through the use of African items, like shells or original prints) as much as from a cultural one (through the conscious effort to give continuation to this link). Sometimes, these quilts resort to the traditional Log Cabin framework to deploy a series of images or ―windows‖ (as in one of Allen‘s homonymous quilts) in an African setting, and visual references to artifacts like masks and drums are profuse (Allen 16-22). Likewise, another quilt by the same artist, entitled Judgment Masks, offers the optical illusion of mirroring masks, or of colorful stripes drawn upon a face, through folded and cut pieces of fabric placed in opposite angles (Allen 20-1). In like manner, a reference to African rituals and beliefs is present in modern and contemporary black quilts by means of sacred icons, like protective charms and other spiritual symbols. A frequent inclusion of hand- (and at times, also feet-) shaped figures in the quilts shows the cultural link with this African ancestry. Such talismans, known as ―mojos‖, originally derive from the Fon religion of Vodun, common in Northwest Africa (Farrington 30), and are analogous to other sacred symbols present in African American quilts, be it through the use of certain textiles (for instance, the Nigerian cloth called adire, which uses a sacred dye), or through the representation of physical objects that are considered protective against any harm (Farrington 30). As regards the aforementioned aspect of African influences on architectural designs, black quilters often share a tendency to reproduce building styles that abound in the Southern areas (if not exclusively), the origins of which can be traced back to West African regions. By way of example, some of Sonie Ruffin‘s quilts portray several versions of a type of building which may mirror a type of architectural design typical of the Mande tradition, in the Western area of the African continent (Ruffin 68-9; Thompson 197). This building design, characterized mainly by the simplicity of its round shape and a conical thatched

40 See images of her works at her website: https://kuumba421.wixsite.com/quilts421/images Some others are also available at https://www.actaonline.org/profile/allyson-allen/

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roof, was probably originated in the Mali area, but expanded swiftly during the Mali empire and was incorporated into other parts of the African continent and also into America, where subsequent generations blended it with local traditions, thereby losing track of its primal origins (Thompson 197). Likewise, other quilts mirror a type of housing design known as ―shotgun‖, a building dating from 1800s onwards and heir to African and Caribbean cultures (Patton 59). It usually consists of a single floor and a quite narrow, rectangular structure, where rooms are placed one after another, without a hallway, and following a backwards direction. The aesthetic effect of these houses is that of a thin façade and an elongated shape, having usually a second door at the backside. This peculiar design, considered ―the central building type in the development of an Afro-American architecture‖ (Vlach, ―The Shotgun House‖ 275), is echoed in both old and contemporary quilts, frequently following a repeated one-block pattern. Good examples of this are Sarah Moore‘s Schoolhouse, elaborated around 1920 (Ramsey and Waldvogel 65), where the shotgun design is reproduced over a 16-same block pattern, or also Sonié Ruffin‘s homonymous quilt, which introduces a personal reinterpretation of the same architectural type inspired by an early twentieth century quilt (Ruffin 60-1).41 An even more paradigmatic example of this fusion can be observed in Melrose Plantation, a quilt created around 1960 by Clementine Hunter, a ―field hand, laundress, maid, nanny, seamstress, and cook‖ living and working in Cane River, on a Louisiana plantation which was already renowned for its ―African House‖: a Cameroon-style house with protruding eaves (Farrington 235-6).42 Although there is no factual documentation explaining how this typically African design appeared in Louisiana, the most solid hypothesis points to the link between a former woman slave who later owned the building and her African parents‘ descriptions of such buildings in the homeland (Patton 33). African House, which appears on the left side of the quilt, is mirrored on the right with another

41 Image available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/10060630@N06/8003522762/ 42 Held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image available at https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/melrose-quilt-86334

173 Black Stitches construction also of African origin, Yucca House, used for a time as a hospital for the plantation‘s workers, and probably the first house to be built on the premises (Grudin 30). But, whatever the particular reasons why African House and Yucca House came to be transplanted into America, the relevant fact is that subsequent African Americans noticed their symbolic meaning and incorporated them in their own cultural production. By choosing to portray in her quilts these house designs, archetypes of an African legacy, Hunter restored part of that heritage, while at the same time integrating it into the American folklore and giving it art treatment. Furthermore, the artist (who was a remarkable painter on canvas and mural, and a skillful basket weaver too) developed a narrative ability to chronicle for posterity relevant events that happened in the village, such as harvestings, festivals, and other folk life scenes (Farrington 237), therefore sharing this trait with other narrative quilts, called Story Quilts, typically present in the African American tradition (to be analyzed in section 4 of Chapter 3). Hunter, who excelled primarily as a painter and attained recognition as such (there exist an estimated 5,000 paintings of her creation), resorted to quilts as if directly transposing the canvas into the fabric —that is, by eliminating the usual batting and backing of quilts and simply stitching her ―textile painting‖ onto some paper (Grudin 30). Although some hypotheses point at this as a sort of ―continuation‖ of her preferred art form on whatever material she might have had at hand (textile, in this case), other sources claim that her quilts, of which approximately ten remain, were actually used as bedcovers (Grudin 30). In either case, Hunter‘s amalgamation of both artistic forms proves that she regarded them as equally suitable for her visual creativity, and that quilting by no means was to be relegated to a minor art in relation with the more prototypical form of painting. Once again in the trajectory of African American material culture, the architectural imagery present in these quilts accounts for both an effort to retrieve lost or incompletely documented aspects of a rich, common history, and as a reflection on how following generations of artists contribute to their survival.

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3.2. Painting

The African American inclination to carry out apparently unplanned or purely improvised designs has given rise to countless studies on its similarities with other art forms such as abstract expressionism in painting and jazz style in music, as commented above. With respect to the first (its connections to jazz music will be approached at more length later on), it can be noted that such comparison interestingly refers us to some of the features shared by both groups of artists, namely a rejection of conventional or predominant aesthetics, an interest in creating works according to their own free-flowing, intuitive impulse, and the recurring use of geometric shapes together with an estrangement from realistic representation. Such visual techniques can be readily perceived in many mid- twentieth century African American quilts, although some researchers have also detected a similar connection between that painting style and other quilting practices, such as the Amish tradition. Curiously, the sharp differences between the African American cultural trend and the Amish one other did not hinder the emergence of a common link with abstract painting, which can be noticed, for example, in a shared reaction against mainstream designs, even if their reasons for opposing the predominant taste were quite different. From a philosophical stance, it seems clear indeed that Amish and African American cultures regarded quilting in dissimilar ways. According to Heather Cadogan, Amish communities followed the norms dictated by the Ordnung, a ―code defining the rules of social order‖ which also established ―acceptable manner of dress, including what colors may be worn‖ (―Artistic Creation: Amish Quilts and Abstract Art‖ 126). Hence, this set of varyingly strict rules indicated the aesthetic paradigms that Amish women quilters were expected to observe, and which ranged from a sobriety of colors to avoidance of representational figures. Besides, there was a recurring tendency to use and reuse the same fabric with which they made their own clothes, always trying to eschew unnecessary boastful exhibitions of ornament. Although most African American families traditionally tended as well to give new life to old scraps by making quilts (and other needle works) out of them, their reasons for this were mostly based on material

175 Black Stitches practicality and a dearth of textile resources, not the religious observance of strict aesthetic norms. Also, it can be perceived that African American preference for less homogeneous designs and a clear instinct for unconventional rhythms stemmed from a strong impulse for freedom, as opposed to a sheer rejection of popular European American quilt designs, which was mainly the case with Amish quilts. Despite the differences, certain features that are present in both traditions interestingly merge in a common preference for, among other things, geometric shapes, block colors, and the use of many small subdivided strips of cloth to create broader strips and arrange them in Log Cabin designs (very frequent in the African American tradition) and the combination, especially in the Amish trend, of different color shades to make one block or part of a quilt, which produced a curious effect in the overall aspect of the work. As Cadogan remarks, ―[w]hile not intentional, this often led to a more visually interesting quilt than one in which perfectly matching shades were used‖ (129). But the most interesting aspect of establishing a comparison between the two quilting traditions and abstract painting is the fact that in many cases the quilters‘ works precede, sometimes by several decades, the paintings elaborated by European and American artists such as Klee, Mondrian or Stella. For instance, the pieces analyzed by Cadogan in her comparative study reveal that most of the quilts were made approximately two to five decades prior to their pictorial counterparts. By the same token, although the European or Anglo-American frameworks are often employed as the reference model for analyzing African American quilts‘ aesthetics, many of the latter take precedence in time over the former, contrary to what is commonly assumed. Indeed, these conventional assumptions have led some art historians and critics to analyze quilts, almost instinctively, in the light of officially approved painting standards. In other words, the artistic language of black American women quilters is rapidly contrasted and compared with the artistic language of world-wide famous white male painters, as has frequently happened to the work of Gee‘s Bend quilters. For example, the art historian Alvia Wardlaw, in her profile of the black quilt artist Annie Mae Young, recurrently compares her work with the collages of the German Kurt Schwitters or with the modernist period of the Spanish Pablo Picasso –paradoxically, Wardlaw

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begins her review on Young by praising her individuality, and by complimenting how she ―deliberately removed herself from the traditional local arena of women quilters‖ (Arnett and Arnett 98). Although I am not criticizing the comparative exercise per se, which can be assumed as logical and pertinent between different art currents, it may be time, nowadays, to attempt the task in reverse sense, and start analyzing the influences received by prestigious Western art from a variety of other art arenas. Unquestionably, in some stances the African or African American imagery not only pre-dates the aesthetically similar European American painting or sculpture but is even used as the source of inspiration for the second (Harrison 55- 6). At the turn of the century, l‟art nègre, as were known the paintings and sculptures of African origin, exerted a strong influence on the European artists of the Modernist period, setting in Paris its main focus of irradiation (Archer-Straw 51). For example, painters Matisse and Klee imbued their work with such African influences in a very significant manner (Clarke 8, 46). By the same token, Picasso‘s early twentieth-century works reflect African influences in their stylized representations inspired by their contact with Western African sculptures and masks. As a result, it is reasonable to argue that African and African American aesthetics clearly exerted an influence on certain currents of plastic arts, namely the abstract and cubist works that emerged in the first decades of the past century. Likewise, a parallel between African textile artistry and those trends of visual arts can be drawn when comparing traditional West African cloths with certain geometric paintings by the above-mentioned artists. This taste for an irregularity of designs and the beauty of apparent imperfection show that the two quilting cultures used creativity as a quiet weapon of resistance, clearly rebelling against the dictates imposed by the majority culture. In connection with this critical reaction to white mainstream quiltmaking, both African American and Amish communities developed certain features that are present in the painting movements that blossomed during the first decades of the twentieth century, namely avant-garde currents such as abstraction, expressionism and fauvism. As previously noted with respect to Harriet Powers‘

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Bible Quilt and Ruth Bond‘s post-Depression designs, this confluence of styles can be mirrored in works from both realms. In this case, such resemblance can be felt through a resourceful treatment of fabric and a strategic disposition of color tones, and especially through an iconoclastic view of the overall composition, with artists from the two cultural communities paying less attention to perfectly symmetric ornaments, as was customary at the time. Avant-garde painters from the early twentieth century in the European and American arenas were similarly striving to re-imagine and re-interpret art from a radically different perspective, confronting conservative art canons and inaugurating a new time in which the artist struggled to give free rein to their intimate conflicts and emotions. Expressionist painters, for instance, emphasized the necessity to honestly express human emotions and perceptions of reality, while abstract painters aimed at condensing physical shapes into geometric figures. Revolutionizing not just the academic sphere but any other aspect of society, Surrealist and Dada artists connected psychological theories on the unconscious mind to the full-fledged, unhindered expression of the individual‘s inner world. Although the fusion of varied art media such as canvas and fabric did not develop until many decades later (and is very much in vogue these days), there is evidence of an approximation of both media during the first decades of the past century, as the concepts of what was art and which physical medium best conveyed that art were materializing into something new. Society as a whole, and artistic and literary circles in particular, were hastily evolving and acquiring new referents, with the resulting effect of many previously accepted notions on politics and art being called into question. Still, even if there exists today a general agreement among historians on the decisive influence generated by certain political leaders in the whole Civil Rights struggle phenomena, the role played by African American artists and the extent of their impact continue to arise a variety of opinions among researchers. In the first place, there is arguably a difference in the degree of influence between performing artists (mainly actors and musicians) and plastic artists (such as painters or sculptors), since the former could affect a much broader spectrum of

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society, especially if their names reached certain popularity through advertising or other mass communication media. It follows that black women quilters, whose art form would be framed in the second group, did not occupy a relevant position in the artistic agenda (with rare exceptions, quilting had not even been considered art, and many met that new categorization with reluctance); in spite of this, I regard their contribution as more relevant than it may appear at first sight, and certainly deserving higher recognition. On the other hand, even if it was more difficult to create material culture (as compared to other artistic customs such as dancing or singing, which were frequently compatible with work since slavery times and more easily performed), it is evident that there existed a conscious and voluntary effort to preserve those artifacts, as they bore physical testimony to their lives.43 Such effort can be perceived in the manner in which their creators and keepers strove to retain them and pass them on to the following generations, not only with textile artwork but also through ceramic pieces, basketry and, obviously, the prolific slave narratives which have been the source of close scholarly attention for the past decades. As Celeste-Marie Bernier argues, this interest shown by African Americans to conserve their own material culture has overcome indescribable difficulties, and fortunately ―the survival of works from the eighteenth century on down to the present day proves that an art tradition persisted, irrespective of white attempts to censor, persecute or marginalize black visual culture‖ (7). However, critics do not seem to agree on the transforming capacity of visual arts within the framework of African American liberation. In her interesting article ―The Culture of Resistance: African American Art Quilts and Self- Defining‖ (2001), Yolanda Hood retakes the debate about black women artists‘ contribution to overcoming the aesthetic rules dictated by a homogenizing white elite in America. These explicitly or implicitly imposed norms have historically subjugated women, marginalizing in particular those whose physical appearance

43 For example, the contemporary African American artist David Hammons considers visual art more demanding to create than ephemeral art expressions such as music, since the former requires from the artist a specific time, place and material resources to elaborate their work (qtd. in Bernier 1).

179 Black Stitches did not conform to that idealization; in the case of black women, these norms have been a source of continuous self-depreciation and traumatic frustration. According to Hood, the contributions made by black women artists to challenge the status quo have not been taken into account in a consistent way, as did happen (or happened to a greater extent) from other fronts such as the literary expression or the field of social research, especially regarding the crucial impact of black feminist thought. Thus, Hood suggests that ―an exploration of African American women‘s material-culture productions can reveal other important sites of resistance‖ (142) alongside the efforts made from those and other fields. But, as mentioned above, there is not unanimity with respect to the prominence that Hood accords to those productions in the development of black and black feminist liberation. hooks, for instance, laments the minor role frequently given to that type of artistic creation within the context of that struggle and across successive historical periods: In black liberation struggles –whether early protests against white supremacy and racism during slavery and Reconstruction, during the civil rights movement, or during the more recent black power movements– the production of art and the creation of a politics of the visual that would not only affirm artists but also see the development of an aesthetics of viewing as central to claiming subjectivity have been consistently devalued. Taking our cues from mainstream white culture, black folks have tended to see art as completely unimportant in the struggle for survival. (Art on My Mind 3) Although I completely agree with the idea that affirming one‘s own subjectivity is vital to the development of a community‘s expressive language, I also consider that visual arts did play a more than significant role in the long process from slavery to (social, cultural and spiritual) freedom that hooks mentions. Truthfully, that role may not have gone down in history as a groundbreaking aspect of the movement, but its impact on the black cultural network remains undeniable. More concretely, the very fact of preserving and updating the centenary tradition of making quilts reveals a firm intention to create something tangible and culturally meaningful, some material elaboration which would persist in time, on top of producing artistic objects which were visually

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pleasant according to their own standards of beauty. Also, according to Hood, it is necessary to recognize the fact that ―the African American art quilt also functions as a material artifact that affords African American women the opportunity to struggle with their own self-concepts and to define and re-define themselves as African American women‖ (142). Finally, I would like to reflect on the relatively insufficient attention accorded to this artistic corpus, and how, based on the tremendous quality and originality of the works, larger repercussions should have been attained by their authors, especially with respect to their diffusion on an international scale. Again, the triple discrimination triggered by the coordinates of race, gender and class prejudice bears a toll on every cultural production, with as a consequence a tenuous diffusion of this remarkable artistic practice beyond the country‘s frontiers. In some particular cases, the combination of quilting with other art forms has reached astonishing peaks. Among those who have been able to transcend conventional art methods and merge them into works of polyvalent meaning is the aforementioned and renowned artist Faith Ringgold. Having worked closely together with Mazloomi at several stages of her career, Ringgold‘s work, initially in the traditional plastic arts of painting and sculpture, evolved towards more flexible formats, namely mixed media where textile, paint and narrative discourse blend into new ways of representation. Her Story Quilts, which combine ―her love of craft and painting with her love of storytelling‖ (Otfinoski 171) amount nowadays to more than a hundred works (171) and evidence the versatile possibilities of blending textile, narrative and painting formats. Although Ringgold‘s Story Quilts have been the object of extensive analysis from a textual or narrative perspective, I have chosen to adopt here a more global perspective, observing how she combines genres and formats to create multifaceted works of art. Certainly, I consider that the richness of Ringgold‘s contribution lies in the versatile treatment of quilts which, in her hands, become textile paintings endowed with a written meaning. As a result, it is extremely difficult to ascribe

181 Black Stitches them to a single category of art medium, expanding as she does the boundaries of quiltmaking. Ringgold‘s unconventional quilts, ―particularly attuned to issues of race, gender and black history‖ (Grudin 50) exemplify a three-fold strategy to criticize the historical absence or invisibility of black women from most political and cultural domains, and to celebrate the rare occasions when they managed to overcome unimaginable obstacles to make their voices heard. Curiously, the artist‘s approach challenges this damaging exclusion from every relevant sphere by representing them not only as significant figures (although she certainly gives them prominence in her work), but also as anonymous middle-class black women, especially underrepresented in a large part of African American visual art (Grudin 52). The natural interaction in her quilts of unknown and highly successful black women speak to her interest in normalizing the advancement of her peers from an intellectual and socioeconomic perspective. In her 1991 French collection, consisting of 12 works influenced by or related to the European pictorial tradition, Ringgold deploys a particular revision of some of the most notable paintings from that corpus, though envisioning a revolutionary approach by setting the focus on the African American woman‘s perspective. This innovative outlook challenges conventional format (she includes quilted textile and a narrative description made up of 10 to 14 explanatory texts accompanying the paintings) but also, and more importantly, it defies historical appropriations of art from the dominating culture, as she turns the spotlight onto black American female characters who become protagonists in each story. In the collection, later compiled as a retrospective of the exhibition under the title ―Dancing at The Louvre‖ (1998) by the exhibition‘s curator Dan Cameron, Ringgold introduces a new perspective that calls into question conventional hierarchies within art historiography.44 Thus, she revisits world-known artists such as Da Vinci, Picasso or Van Gogh, placing them among iconic figures from African American history such as Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale Hurston or Malcolm X to create a juxtaposition of both planes which destabilizes generally assumed stereotypes. Her choice to present both types of characters as cohabiting

44 The exhibition can be visited online at The New Museum Digital Archive: https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/317

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within the European atmosphere (mainly, the French settings of very prestigious paintings) proves extremely powerful, in that it provokes a reversion of traditional roles and canons. Thus, the leading role given to black women in Picasso‘s Demoiselles d‟Avignon or Matisse‘s La Danse and Odalisque unsettles Western traditional representations in art history; similarly, the inclusion of notable African American characters, mainly female, within intellectual and artistic European settings also brings to the forefront the historical exclusion of those figures from most cultural domains.45 In Dancing at the Louvre, the first work in the series, Ringgold‘s choice of character disposition reveals the intentional prominence given to black American women, who appear in the foreground of a Louvre room where some of Da Vinci‘s most famous paintings are on display (Cameron 20-1).46 The fact that she decided to portray these women, who represent Ringgold herself and her young granddaughters, as occupying the stage center and enjoying themselves under the attentive gaze of the Mona Lisa, is highly symbolic of her interest in debunking generalized clichés on art production and art reception. Equally interesting is the fact that Ringgold‘s conflicting ideas about maternity and artistic career are reflected in the text illustrating the quilt; the narration, describing her own contradictory feelings towards motherhood, contrast with the Da Vinci background paintings where ―the maternal function is idealized‖ (qtd. in Cameron 21). Also, the inclusion in her works of numerous family members, most notably women, seem to convey the idea of cultural transmission and, given the political and artistic context (the panel is inspired by several journeys to Paris that Ringgold took in the 1980s with her family), also the notion of black female empowerment as embodiment of racial and gender advancement. The mere juxtaposition in her quilts of historical figures and world-reputed artistic talents with anonymous black women of all ages is in itself a powerful attempt at

45 See for instance her Picasso‟s Studio (1991): https://www.mutualart.com/Article/The-Nasty-Women-of-Art-History-And-Why- W/A81B6289D6D2D150 46 Image available at the Gund Gallery‘s website: http://www.thegundgallery.org/2019/08/dancing-at-the-louvre-1991/

183 Black Stitches destabilizing long-held perceptions based on conventional art criticism and historiography. Besides, the notorious inclusion of black American women leaders among some remarkable white male personalities represents Ringgold‘s incursion in a terrain slightly explored during the twentieth century: that of racial struggle being waged on the artistic arena through visually striking images. Certainly, Ringgold‘s works foreground black female figures in settings which are rarely attributed to them: for instance, their predominance in her quilts within intellectual frameworks testify to her advocacy for presenting her peers as universal cultural referents. In the accurate words of Alma Billingslea-Brown, black artists during the 1960s ―understood the image to be the workshop of meaning. As part of the human storehouse of knowledge, images in art and elsewhere give form to perceptions at a given moment in time and project future plans and actions; they can shape behavior‖ (Crossing Borders Through Folklore 24-5). Furthermore, and in connection with the already-mentioned emphasis on continuing the cultural transmission of this art, Ringgold undertook an adaptation for children of Harriet Tubman‘s life story, entitled Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992). In this work, which will be analyzed in further detail in section 3 of Chapter 4, the artist depicts on page-size colorful vignettes the most significant episodes in the life of the famous nineteenth-century abolitionist and liberator of runaway slaves. Conceived as a visual book and not as a quilt or a painting per se, this work bears nevertheless both marks, if one considers its powerful illustrations and the cultural references made by the author to the imagery of quilts as ―conductors‖ to freedom for many runaways all along the Underground Railroad. Interestingly, Ringgold‘s choice of target audience for this work is in itself proof of her commitment to preserving her African American heritage, while paying tribute to the role of quilts and quiltmakers during the slavery years.

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3.3. Music

Finally, one of the most striking connections of African American quilts with other art forms is perceived in their rapport with music. The influence of black music on different venues of expression exists on a multiplicity of artistic spheres, but it is probably best reflected in visual formats, most notably painting and quiltmaking. Examples of the first kind are offered by black painters such as Laura Waring, Gaye Ellington, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas and Charles Alston, whose work witnesses to the influence of African American rhythms (Farrington 82, 191-2; Bernier 81, 177) in a way that resembles the effect produced by a significant number of African American quilts.47 In fact, Bearden‘s work is strongly connected with the black quilting tradition, as proven by paintings such as Quilting Time, which reproduces a prototypical gathering of quilters and their families in a black rural setting (Grudin 25). More particularly, Bearden‘s paintings and collages have been associated with quiltmaking techniques, to the point that the artist admitted to having a personal interest in reproducing the traditionally black female practice of quilting bees when developing The Street, a mixed media work inspired on ―the call and recall of blues and jazz forms‖ (Bernier 177), reminiscent of West-African rhythms (White and White 80). Precisely with respect to ―the call-and-response structure of West African- based music‖ (Davis, Blues Legacies 54), Patricia Hill Collins has reflected on the highly participative nature of this musical genre, arguing that ―[t]he fundamental requirement of this interactive network is active participation of all individuals‖ (Black Feminist Thought 213). Thus, a parallel can be drawn between on the one hand the call-and-response format, and on the other its representation in visual arts, notably through the collective quiltmaking practice, a tradition firmly rooted in the African American culture and which emphasizes the personal voice of each woman quilter to create a common work of artistic and practical value at the same time. In fact, beyond these similarities within different fields of the visual arts

47 In Waring‘s and Alston‘s paintings, for instance, the enormous impact of jazz on black American life is emphasized through the representation of dancing figures and paint strokes that evoke the characteristic beats and apparently arrhythmical patterns of this music style.

185 Black Stitches realm, such as quilting and paintings, critics analyzing the nature of African American literature have identified certain traits that can also be associated to African American quiltmaking. For instance, it has been argued that black American writings frequently present ―polyrhythmic, uneven, short, and explosive lines‖ and that their subject matters tend to reflect ―a collective and personal lifestyle‖, with great predominance given to the musicality and sonority of diction (Mitchell 11). I will deal in more detail with the relationships between African- based musical rhythms and the construction process of African American quilts in the chapters devoted to the quilts‘ treatment in literature.48 On the other hand, Bearden‘s The Street not only assimilates the progressive piecing of layers of fabric in an artistic manner, but it even underscores the preference for free-follow improvisation during the assembling process, simultaneously resonating with both black music and quilting. In so doing, Bearden echoes ―jazz rhythms by replacing dissonant sounds with ‗dissonant colors‘ to provide ‗an entirely new significance‘‖ (Bernier 180), which is in fact what the art of quiltmaking aims at achieving: making sense of scattered fabric scraps by creating a whole new unit. What is extremely interesting in this regard is the profound connection between a rhythmic taste and its reflection on a visual aesthetics of clothing and quiltmaking. Since the early days of African American communities in the South, this nexus became evident in the changes introduced by slave women in textile production: The polyrhythmic, improvisatory, and physically vivacious nature of black dance does indeed reflect a more general cultural aesthetic [to the point that] as slave women became heavily involved in the production of cloth and clothing on nineteenth-century plantations, the designs of these items began to display a different aesthetic, whose clashing colors and irregular patterning also informed

Suffice it to say now that those music styles (call-and-response, field hollers, etc.) originally had a double impact on the lives of the black enslaved people: as musical expressions they helped alleviate the burden of a life in chains, but they also articulated a new form of communication which over time gave shape to new artistic languages. For example, Imamu Baraka‘s study on the origins and influences of black American music, called Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) extensively draws on the links between these music traditions and the emergence of a new current of African American literature during the twentieth century.

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the artistic design of African American slave quilts. (White and White, African American Expressive Culture 81-2) Quilters have once and again reproduced that seemingly disorderly mixture of bits and pieces through the use of collage-like techniques, a strategy which matches perfectly the nature of these music genres. In The Blues (1995), Cathleen R. Bailey explores the visual impact of arranging, in a manner that at first seems unconnected, heterogeneous references to blues music and to what blues denounces: racial abuse and discrimination (Mazloomi, Spirits of the Cloth 68). As Bailey acknowledged, she felt impelled to approach those feelings of suffering and injustice in a discarnate way, and in doing so, her quilt visually reflects in textile the same powerful vocabulary that blues songs do through their lyrics. Significantly, the bond between jazz and visual arts in black American history has been continuously explored by critics, noting that ―the improvisational and hybrid forms of the blues [and] work songs have since come to represent not only a category of knowledge and a mode of thought, but a kind of art‖ (Billingslea-Brown 2). As claimed by several art historians, the ―off-beat phrasing‖ produced in jazz performances has left its imprint on many other creative expressions of the black American people (Thompson 207). For example, some researchers have related these musical movements to the particular styles of the quilts from Gee‘s Bend, in the compilation The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (2002), noting that ―the feedback effects [of this push and pull ritual technique] have mesmerized and inspired generations of […] quiltmakers‖ (Arnett and Arnett 108). As a token of this, the editors of such work focus on a particular quilt, called by its author, Missouri Pettway, Path Through the Woods (1971), and argue that it ―could easily be titled Syncopated Rhythm. Using two simple ―notes‖ –pink and jersey gray rectangles– this one‘s unusual movements and relationships echo elements of jazz‖ (78).49 Many black women artists have noticed this profound connection and reflected on its effects, both on their own work and on a global perception of

Image available at https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/missouri-pettway/work/path-through-woods-quiltmakers- name

187 Black Stitches black visual arts. As part of this mutual influence, there exists an implicit recognition of the role of both art forms as conducting threads in the conservation of black American culture, from its origins to the upcoming generations. For instance, in her preface to Mazloomi‘s staggering volume on contemporary African American quilts, the noted painter, quilter and sculptor Faith Ringgold has pondered that ―[a]long with jazz, quilting is the uniquely American contribution to world art that bears the legacy of our African legacy and carries it into our common future‖ (Spirits of the Cloth 8). Particularly with respect to its influence on fabric, Thompson also explicitly links textile practices inherited from certain West African countries as Niger, through the Mande tradition, with African American quilts, as seen in the ―deliberate clashing of ‗high-affect‘ colors […] in willful, percussively contrastive, bold arrangements‖ (Thompson 209). This tendency to avoid exactly matching rhythms, preferring instead a visual clash in the distribution of patches or stripes, vividly resembles the apparently chaotic cadence of jazz, where notes seem to stretch in endless chains of sound, producing non-syncopated beats and seemingly ―broken‖ melodies. As a result, a strong connection is explicitly established between quiltmaking and other forms of art expression, such as dance or music, within the African American culture (Brown 12). What is more, Heather D. Russell expounds that there exist clear similarities between, simultaneously, black American quilting, jazz music ―whose structure is based on improvisation, breaks, […] and juxtaposition‖ and black women‘s literary production (Russell n.p.). Further evidence of this fusion is provided by contemporary artists such as Carole Harris, whose outstanding workpiece Take Me to the River (2001) exemplifies a merging of painterly aesthetics with musical sources.50 As Harris states:

[m]ost of my work is about evoking the same warmth, rhythm, energy and movement found in African American music, blues and jazz in particular. Some of the techniques I employ in my works are the use of repetitive

50 Visit her gallery at https://www.charris-design.com/CHarris_gallery_home.html, where a section entitled ―Singing, Dancing and All That Jazz‖ focuses on her fusion of music and quilts.

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patterns, forms and color juxtapositions as well as manipulations of spaces and textures against large areas of negative space. (Qtd. in Huff 24)

Unlike patchwork ―rhythms‖ that appear in other quilting traditions such as the European or Anglo-American ones, the repeated patterns that Harris describes here do not follow a specific order, and they avoid the exact correspondence of endings among pieces of textile, which would create a synchronized ―movement‖. In its place, the combination of forms and strips of cloth are placed either in improvised manners or according to a deliberate effort to produce ―interrupted‖ flows of rhythm, where the stressed beats do not occur at the usually expected places. Although, as discussed above, it is not convenient to categorize African American quiltmaking (or any other of its art expressions, for that matter) as strictly pertaining to a rigid block, the tendency to recreate these traits appears so frequently and is reincorporated into so many contemporary works, that it does seem to account for a conscious effort to reproduce this cultural component. In other cases, the interest in emphasizing this musical echo is reflected in the manipulation of traditionally ―orderly‖ patterns, such as the Log Cabin, to produce a similar sense of unmatched pieces with a nevertheless harmonic effect. In her atypical version of the Courthouse Steps pattern, which she named Log Cabin Variation (Red, White, Blue) (1995), Roberta Jemison reinterprets the disposition of the blocks in such an unusual way that it is initially difficult to identify the pattern.51 While most Log Cabin compositions make it a priority to create a global perception of the design through the appropriate combination of dark and light colors displayed in horizontal and vertical rows, Jemison‘s quilt willfully produces the opposite effect, until the viewer‘s eye grasps the overall disposition. The strategic combination of dark-colored patches mixing with parts of the blocks, and the alternation of the Courthouse Steps in different positions create a trompe l‘oeil, which only a more attentive ―reading‖ can decipher. This manipulation of pre-existing patterns can be associated with the innovative treatment of music material that African American music managed to do in the creation of their own musical styles (Huff 19).

51 Image available at https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/20000040038

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Apart from these examples of musical influence on quilting, which seem to be mostly related to abstract design, there exist other modern and contemporary quilts where the connection with African American musical roots is realistically presented. Interestingly, many of those quilts elaborated recently by black women in America pay tribute to relevant figures of their cultural and political history, and among them, the presence of performing artists, namely musicians and dancers, is remarkable (Allen 42-3; Grudin 90-1). Particularly, repeated references are made to the jazz and blues singers Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and to their enormous cultural contribution. In special, several quilts from the turn of the century have portrayed Holiday‘s famous ―anti-racist‖ anthem, the disturbing composition ―Strange Fruit‖ (1939), either through direct mentions it or by means of visual similarities with the album jacket that reached popularity after the song was released, and which portrayed the somber profile of a tree from where several bodies hung. In her interdisciplinary analysis on how black women singers of jazz and blues have contributed to topple both racism and sexism, entitled Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), Angela Davis devotes a whole chapter to scrutinizing how ―Strange Fruit‖ was conceived and how it became the emblematic song it is today. Initially rejected by several first-rate music companies for fear of boycott and other forms of retaliation, the song was finally released by a small label, becoming inextricably attached to Holiday‘s name from then on (Blues Legacies 195). Although this attachment may seem the outcome of a string of casual circumstances (the lyrics were initially written as a poem, and only eventually was Holiday convinced to perform it), ―Strange Fruit‖ marks the inclusion of this singer in the ranks of so many other black women artists who ―exposed the brutality of lynching through activism and art‖ (Billingslea-Brown 60). Written by the poet Lewis Allen, the lyrics describe the glooming scenario of Southern lynching as the source of ―a strange and bitter crop‖ inundated with ―[b]lood on the leaves (and) at the root‖ (Davis, Blues Legacies 181). This powerful imagery is reflected in some of the afore-mentioned quilts through the use of deep purples, bright reds and a sharp contrast of black and light shades for

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the outlining of the tree‘s profile. In her 2007 quilt by the same name as Holiday‘s song, the artist Viola B. Leak created a visual recreation of the forceful lyrics, conceiving it as her personal tribute to the singer (Mazloomi, Quilting African American Women‟s History 96-7). In the quilt, the dramatic rendering of the somber landscape where several human bodies are hanging from a tree explicitly echoes Allen‘s lines, and the visual impact is equally troubling, with the added element of scattered buds of cotton bearing resemblance with Ku Klux Klan rites.52 Although not as extensively researched as anti-lynching campaigns led by male figures, it is currently known that women were actively involved in the same cause, and that their contributions were vital for the movement (Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past 68). On some rare occasions, the actions of black women who waved the anti-lynching banner were recorded and acknowledged –for example, Ida B. Wells‘ personal involvement in it, after having witnessed the lynching of some of her closest friends (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 25; Lerner, Black Women in America 196)— but mostly their names, like the names of the victims, have remained anonymous in history. Yet, these women‘s common interest in fighting the cruel and brutal practice of lynching is unquestionable, and their strategies, though not specifically gender-oriented, did tend to function as networks of female solidarity (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 157). Proof of this interest is the repeated approach of this theme through quilts by black women artists up to the present, as will be discussed in more detail in the following section, dedicated to Story Quilts. What is certain is that while, as Angela Davis acknowledges, Holiday‘s interpretation of ―Strange Fruit‖ remains today one of the most brilliant examples of ―the intersection of music and social consciousness‖ (196), its rendition in textile art by black women quilters adds yet another element to the equation, that of material culture in its relation with those two parameters. Arguably, when Holiday turned that work into her ―personal protest‖ song (Davis, Blues Legacies 186), or when many other black female artists confronted racism in its multiple varieties, it was not only themselves they were employing their artistic talents for,

52 Image available at http://quiltindex.org/beta/results/?keywords=Viola%20LEAK%20STRANGE%20FRUIT

191

Black Stitches but for each and every black woman in the country. Consequently, black women found in needlework the venue to express their individual and collective concerns, and to do so in an artistic and (implicitly) political manner. Likewise, when a quiltmaker currently chooses to trace back and honor the work of pioneering black women artists such as Holiday, it is not uniquely the jazz singer that she is aiming her message to, but to a global community of anonymous women still fighting today for self-empowerment and racial justice. Together with jazz and blues, spirituals became another recurring source of inspiration for black women quilters. If the former music styles predominated in the decades following the achievement of emancipation, spirituals or ―work songs‖ prevailed during the slavery period, expressing a collective yearning for spiritual, physical and material freedom (Davis, Blues Legacies 4-5). Interestingly, though, spiritual songs gradually turned into gospel music as the original sense of collective struggle to free themselves as a people became more entangled with the dominant culture‘s religious practice. For its part, however, blues gained more relevance than gospel since the early twentieth-century, as it openly tackled a wide range of personal issues, including emotional and sexual ones, traditionally banished from popular music (Davis, Blues Legacies 3-6). In any case, what remains unquestionable is the profound African roots of all those musical styles, and how their continuities until the present, in all their contemporary variations, have permeated African American cultural at broad (Ferris 29). Regarding the representation of gospel music, work songs and spirituals in quilts, the emphasis is made as much on the emotional effect produced by this genre as on the powerful message delivered by the lyrics, which are often physically inscribed in the quilt itself. Although inspired not on a strictly-speaking spiritual song, but on the hymn ―Lift Every Voice and Sing‖, which became emblematic of the struggle of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, the artist Julia A. Payne gave full prominence to it in her 1995 quilt Expressions from the Soul. As she stated upon completing the quilt, the idea of overcoming religious and racial prejudice and working toward a more peaceful coexistence of cultures led her to use African

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textiles in traditional American quilt patterns, together with an explicit reference to the African continent and the lyrics of the above-mentioned hymn. Thus, it can be argued that the fusion of several art forms has become an extraordinarily useful channel to convey the social, political and creative concerns of African American women artists since the past few decades until our days. Certainly, there exists a tendency in African American artistry to explore and communicate its creative impulse through a variety of media, in a fluent, flexible and heterogeneous way (Billinsglea-Brown 2). The versatility of this mixture, as proven by the quilts discussed in this chapter, opens endless possibilities of addressing a range of concerns not just from different angles, but through the use of apparently unrelated, yet compatible, languages. As proven by the poet Ntozake Shange and the painter Romare Bearden through their visual poem I Live in Music (1994), the impulse to transcend the traditional barriers of one format and stretch its limits to reach another channel is the best way to give creativity free rein. In their joint work, a harmonious combination of words, painting and the sonority of black music blend to provide a rare tribute not only to those art formats, but to all other means of artistic expression within the African American culture. In this interdisciplinary work, Bearden‘s paintings clearly foreground a taste for contrasting tonalities, flowing figures that seem to come to life from the canvas, and the effect produced by collage-like techniques, so present in countless quilts made by black American women from the late twentieth century onwards. As co-author Shange reflects, several art types are so intrinsically related to each other in her mind, that it is impossible for her to consider one apart from the other, and the fusion of those varieties is the only artistic language she conceives of (Shange and Bearden 31). Symptomatic of this tendency is the work by other African American artists who have attempted to blur the boundaries between one visual format and the other, namely between the rigidity of painting and the flexibility of textiles. As a token of this evolution, it is interesting to observe the work of artists such as Sam Gilliam, who explored the changing effects spurred by abandoning the stretched canvas and letting it free-fall loosely, visually turning it into fabric material, like a tapestry or a quilt (Patton 221-2). This preference for keeping movement and

193 Black Stitches plasticity, the ―draping quality of fabric‖ over the rigid format of other art pieces, is found among many modern art quilters (Shaw, The Art Quilt 108), probably because of an emotional identification with the original materials and to distance themselves from conventional painting formats. Also in an experimental vein, other creators such as Alvin Loving, avoiding as well the limitations of traditional painting, felt inspired by the rich quiltmaking tradition within the African American culture and, as a consequence, introduced revolutionary perspectives on their work as visual artists. In Loving‘s case, what produced that spark was the coming into contact, in 1971, with the groundbreaking exhibition ―Abstract Design in American Quilts‖ (curated by Jonathan Holstein, author of the homonymous compilation) which took place in New York and introduced a new conceptualization of quilts as art work and as items of profound cultural significance. As a result of that encounter, Loving claimed to have suddenly ―understood these quilts and the people who made them‖ (Patton 225), and the impact can be noticed in Self-Portrait No.23 (1973), a hybrid work that blends traditional quilting techniques, painting experimentation and even sculpture, since the overall piece acquires a specific shape and volume as it hangs from the wall or ceiling.53 In fact, it also integrates a certain musical component, presenting ―an unexpected visual rhythm, reminiscent of bebop [or] jazz‖ (Patton 225), thus confirming the close relationship between aesthetic creativity and music in African American modern art. The higher plasticity and ductility of fabric in comparison with the limitations of rigid mediums such as the canvas or the mural has been exposed by artists who acknowledge having turned to the quilt medium as a result of this (Huff 24). Additionally, it could be argued that working with textile has historically been a more efficient and versatile tool for women, not simply because of their greater access to it if compared with the canvas, but also and more importantly, because this medium adapts itself better to the female time frame, dominated by highly fragmented labor. Since traditional working patterns have accorded women not only an intimate relationship with the needle but a higher tendency to multi- tasking chores with frequently interrupted work hours, the closer attachment of

53 Image available at https://www.reddit.com/r/museum/comments/hc1zwp/al_loving_selfportrait_23_1973/

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women artists to fabric seems only logical. More specifically, the work scheme usually associated with quiltmaking, which stood out for its continuous interruptions, resource exploitation and even simultaneity with other activities, facilitates a deeper connection between women, especially those with a higher creative impulse, and this artistic medium. Contrary to other visual arts, quilts provide an outlet for their makers which is immensely versatile (particularly, since the introduction of other elements, such as beads, shells, buttons, acrylic paint, photocompositions, etc.) and offers endless possibilities both from an aesthetic and a functional point of view. With respect to the latter, it is not of minor importance to consider that the process of quiltmaking involves (or may involve) working with small units which are at a later stage pieced together to create a larger composition. The fact that such pieces can be easily handled, modified and moved from one place to another, contributes to explain why it became such a successful and extended practice among women artists since its beginning. Given that it is in the nature of quilts to allot space for continuous re-shaping and alteration depending on a variety of circumstances (to the point that, in some cases, a new quilt emerges from an old one), it seems likely that such ductility attracted female creators towards quiltmaking, in preference over other artistic mediums. Besides, the art of making quilts responds to a double vocation: on the one hand, the artist often feels inclined to follow their most intimate calling and elaborate a piece which is entirely personal and reveals their emotional universe but, on the other hand, individualism is sometimes substituted by a collective purpose whenever a quilt is made by a group of artists, frequently for an altruistic aim. This double nature of the process of quiltmaking, which allows for individual authorship as well as for collaborative elaboration (or even for the mixture of both, for instance when a quilting bee develops a specific artist‘s design) perfectly explains how many women artists managed to explore their artistic voices while also relying on emotional bonding and the value of cooperative work. Before concluding, it is relevant to observe that in close relation with the role of music in African American quilts is the symbolic reference to dance, frequently appearing also in many contemporary works. Given the enormous cultural significance of dance for African cultures, this folk tradition has been

195 Black Stitches maintained and continued in America, adopting multiple varieties (White and White 72), and such practice has been commonly reflected in a broad range of artistic manifestations, including quilting, up to the present. Certainly, the art of dancing has historically been of vital importance within the black American communities, so powerful and culturally charged that originally it was even perceived as threatening and riot-inducing by white authorities in times prior to emancipation (O‘ Riley 54). As evidence of this, dance is usually referred to by quilt artists either as representative of the movement for black liberation due to its subversive power, as expression of a people‘s immaterial culture, or as tribute to the most remarkable dance styles and dancers. As has been noted (Genovese 233-4), the evolution of traditional West African religions into later African Christian ramifications was closely linked to the treatment of certain folk customs, dancing and singing among them. In fact, the practice of dance was originally forbidden in certain Christian creeds to which slave communities converted after several generations on the new land, furthering the cultural distances between a group that integrated music and dance as part of their worship and another one that tended to ban them (Genovese 233-4). As a result of this, a significant part of the original African culture faded away, as it melted into the new practices that were emerging from their contact with the white mainstream social group. Hence, the subliminal idea underlying many of these black female quilters‘ work is to claim the original source of their rich culture, giving prominence again to the act (and art) of dance as understood by their forebears, also in its connections with religion and the individual and collective spirit. While many quilts approach this topic by straightforwardly celebrating African and African American rhythms (Mazloomi, Quilting 52), some place the figure of a particular dancer, Josephine Baker, at the center of their attention, as a revolutionary character in the struggle against racial prejudice in the performing arts field (144).54 Also, because Baker represented an ideal of liberation from conservative puritanism and an openly subversive attitude against traditional

54 See, for instance, Faith Ringgold‘s American Collection #4: Jo Baker‟s Bananas (1997) at https://blog.nmwa.org/tag/faith-ringgold/

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clichés, many contemporary quilts pay tribute to her contribution (Archer-Straw 119). Other quilters, still, specifically reclaim traditional African dance rites and reflect them in their work, celebrating those ancient roots and the persistence of an emotional link with their ancestors‘ land (Allen 17). In sum, contemporary black women quilters seem to have taken relay of a cultural African ancestry that was already present in the earliest stages of African American history, and have acknowledged its profound impact on their individual and collective identities. Their conscious effort to recuperate this connection and integrate it in their quilts is further evidence of the necessity to give continuation to a frequently interrupted cultural legacy. Moreover, the vibrant connections of these quilts with multiple forms of expression, ranging among others from visual to performing arts, prove that quiltmaking is a truly versatile medium where the artist is free to explore her own voice without restricting herself to the limits of a specific art convention.

3.4. Textile vs textual: Story Quilts

The evolution of quilts from figurative, geometric or traditionally-patterned designs into narrative stories is one of the most extraordinary aspects of African American modern quilts. Since the second half of the past century, it is considered that conventional patterns and blocks began to be replaced by innovative, free- style designs (Calviño 137) which, in some cases, turned into visually narrative works and the development of a new artistic language. But in fact, the tradition of making Story Quilts dates back in America to the eighteenth century, and they are still a remarkable part of the country‘s contemporary quilting practices (Ezell 14).

Although some authors establish a differentiation between ―Story Quilts‖ and ―Art Quilts‖ (sometimes also called ―Picture Quilts‖ or ―Illustrative Quilts‖), I do not consider this nomenclature effective for the purposes of my study, and will instead specifically use the first term (Story Quilts) to refer to those quilts which display an image or a set of images in a narrative manner. The recurrent comparison between the arts of ―narrative‖ quiltmaking and painting seems even more pertinent for some analysts, who have pondered on the reasons why these

197 Black Stitches women artists prefer to hold the needle instead of the paintbrush. Mary Elizabeth J. Huff, for example, has pointed at the closer familiarity of women with cloth, claiming that the relationship between women and textiles is an ancestral one: ―[t]hey have washed, ironed, mended, sewed, slept on and worn all manner of material. So they know what to expect of fabric as an artistic medium‖ (62). Those researchers who prefer to distinguish both concepts usually resort to the physical features of the quilt (for instance, disposition or size) or to its functionality to derive their classification. Thus, the category of Story Quilts would encompass those ―created to record a particular story, event, or series of events‖, and are usually composed of ―a single image […] or several blocks, similar to traditional album quilts‖ (Allen, Quilted Pages 3). This definition, which seems to describe this kind of works in a clear and succinct way, leaves nevertheless a relevant issue unacknowledged: how is it possible to establish an objective division to differentiate them from Art Quilts? If we follow Allen in our search for an answer, the distinction would lie in the fact that ―[a]rt quilts are usually smaller than traditional bed quilts, […] are often more heavily embellished, [and] are intended to be displayed as wall hangings‖ (Allen 3). Yet, the problem arises when we are confronted with quilts which seem to fall under both categories simultaneously. For example, many quilts contemporarily made by African American women include features pertaining to the Art Quilt definition (conceived as art pieces rather than as bedcovers and enhanced with adornments or other materials) but also to the Story Quilt type (intended as the visual narrative of an episode or event). To establish a strict categorization is, in this sense, highly problematic, and adds to the limitations that tend to constrain countless works by black women quilters nowadays. Conversely, resorting to the term ―Art Quilts‖ as an all-encompassing group which would include, among others, abstract and narrative quilts as sub-types, is favored by other contemporary currents of research. Thus, the characteristic of Art Quilts as pertaining to the purely aesthetic field and not to domestic use underlies the definition of the quilt researcher Robert Shaw, who specifies that ―[a]lthough [art quilts] usually have the same basic structure as a traditional quilt, most are

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intentionally non-functional, made to convey their creators‘ artistic visions instead of decorating a bed or providing warmth‖ (The Art Quilt 7). Yet, this identification of artistic quilts with their supposed non- functionality remains problematic, as it implicitly excludes from the definition those other quilts that were designed with the double intention of being art works and useful objects. This is especially contradictory with an African-based cultural mindset which considers equally important the aesthetic and the practical aspects of art. Even from the antebellum period, ―[e]nslaved women, who hailed from societies that understood art as simultaneously useful, beautiful, and symbolic, were unfamiliar with the Western ethos‖ (Farrington 26). Thus, from a womanist perspective the concepts of art and utility are not only compatible, but even complementary, since it was considered that being able to create an artifact which can also be put to practical use only added to the merit of the maker. Besides, if the false dichotomy craft versus fine arts may and should be contested (as has already been exposed), the functional versus art quilt must be equally questioned, since it does not provide fair treatment to the countless quilts which would not meet the requirements for the prestigious ―high art‖ category. Also, the theory that an artifact must be either a piece of art or a useful object instead of both simultaneously would thus imply that all artistic items which can serve for a specific purpose (e.g., from a ceramic piece or a richly woven carpet to an architectural design) are failed in their aesthetic aspect because they are put to use. This is why certain scholars admit to the deceiving nature of inflexible nomenclatures within this context, concluding that ―the urge to categorize has an inexorable tendency to become an end in itself, and when it does, it invariably bypasses the essential meanings of the art it attempts to describe‖ (Shaw, The Art Quilt 12). In relation to the Story Quilt/ Art Quilt disambiguation, even though Allen‘s proposal to combine both concepts into the ―Story Art‖ term seems to be an interesting strategy, I am inclined to also dismiss such nomenclature, since it is extremely difficult in my view to differentiate one subtype from the other. For example, if one takes the previously-discussed quilts by Kyra Hicks, She Believed There Was More and Cinderella, it seems impossible to specify the reasons why

199 Black Stitches they should qualify only as one type and not the other. Since they present features usually applied to Story Quilts (they represent a scene that can be easily interpreted or ―read‖ by the viewer) and to Art quilts (they were presumably elaborated to be displayed as a mural or painting, instead of as bedcovers), it would make no sense to prioritize one category over the other in their ascription. As a result, I prefer to consider solely the subtype of Story Quilts as one particular classification for those quilts deploying a narrative message, and to leave any allusions to the term ―Art‖ as applied only to certain quilts aside, since it is problematic and may lead to confusion. With respect to the so-called Art Quilts within the African American context in particular, the classification becomes an especially delicate issue if we observe works from the earlier African American tradition (for instance, old and anonymous bedcovers, or broadly speaking any traditional quilt) that would not be included in the category, even if the aesthetic skills and artistry shown by their makers are evident. By extension, the term could apply to any quilt, belonging to any cultural tradition or chronology, which the viewer would subjectively perceive as a work of art. As a result, I have envisioned to limit the taxonomy in this section to the Story Quilt type, leaving further considerations aside —and, in any case, it is always convenient to bear in mind that the terms art and artist depend on conventional considerations. Although it is not completely accurate to argue that African American quiltmaking evolved from abstract or symbolic to narrative (let us remember, for instance, the impressive Bible Quilt made by Harriet Powers soon after the abolition of slavery, where the scenes are displayed as if ―to be read‖), the tendency to create narrative quilts did not become popular until the last decades of the twentieth century. Provided that the artistic language had evolved towards more complex and versatile practices, the creative process of designing and piecing quilts gradually incorporated the transmission of visual stories through the use of figurative language. The possibility to use this format, frequently through appliquéd figures, opened a window to unexplored forms of creative communication, in which stories could be told in a visual manner by making use of the ancestral tradition of

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quilting. This offered the chance, for the creative women who wanted to tell a story through images, of favoring quiltmaking over conventional plastic arts, the former being probably a more appealing (and often more familiar) medium, and one which did not require specific formal training. For the task of establishing a classification of Story Quilts, it is necessary to observe how the narration is constructed, depending on whether the image is accompanied by text, or not. Very often, the information is conveyed exclusively or almost exclusively by a series of such images, producing an effect similar to a string of photographs or small paintings placed together, whose communicative capacity does not require for the concurrence of texts to transmit the intended message. Although many Story Quilts tend to bear this common feature, it could be argued that certain quilts containing a single but highly communicative image qualify as Story Quilts too. For this to happen, the common or assumed context must be meaningful enough to get the message through. For instance, this is the case with Allyson Allen‘s work called The Runaway (2012), which solely presents the whip-lashed torso of a black man and a few smaller references to spiritual symbols and to the African continent (Allen 65). Apart from the quilt‘s title, no other written information is added, but the presumed knowledge on the viewer‘s part of the atrocities of slavery leads the quilter to remain certain of succeeding in her communicative purpose. Likewise, in another work by the same artist, entitled Sarah‟s Quilt, only two dark figures are portrayed on a light background: a young girl and a horse.55 Accompanying the image, though, the word ―Raffle‖ in bold occupies approximately a quarter of the quilt, and a short text announces the upcoming auction of the little ―mulatto‖ girl (as it literally appears on the quilt‘s panel) for one dollar (Allen 63). In these two cases, regardless of the lack of a set of images and even in the absence of any written explanation, the narrative purpose is fulfilled without difficulty, on the grounds of a presumed shared knowledge. Other times, this type of quilts may present either an abundance of images or text, or (rarely) of both elements altogether. In the first case, the story

55 Image available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/76493629@N05/9267179676. Other quilts by the same artist can also be accessed at https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/7/14/1222921/-DK- Quilt-Guild-Allyson-Allen-Quilts-Photo-Diary

201 Black Stitches developed by the quilt is supported by a variable number of textile pictures (either elaborated exclusively with cloth, or by resorting to printed and/or painted fabric), producing an effect which could be compared with a succession of scenes from a film, or a group of pages from an album if displayed simultaneously. The special relation between African Americans and photography, as mentioned before, seems to come alive once again through the creation of this genre of quilts. As has been claimed, the possibility for black citizens, especially women, to own a photographic camera had been, until the post-emancipation times, quite meager. Their access to photography meant that, for the first time in history, the black American population was able to present the surrounding world in their own terms, to portray reality from their own angles. In a sense, it meant arguably much more than the mere access to technological advancement: the camera lens provided the chance to explain the world through their eyes, becoming the observers instead of the observed, the subject instead of the object. This also had an impact on how racial (mis)representations started to be challenged, as had already happened with the black artistic revolution that stemmed from the Harlem Renaissance of the early to mid-decades of the twentieth century. Gaining the capacity to reproduce their culture from the inside found its echo in different artistic media: for example, blues gave a few women singers and songwriters the capacity to explore the concerns of thousands of black women that had theretofore remained silenced (Davis, Blues Legacies 56-7); in literature, some pioneering writers took to describe the black female experience from their chosen perspectives, becoming the main agents in that sort of description almost for the first time (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 83-5). In the field of visual arts, Story Quilts function in a similar way to both artistic media, only without resorting (or very slightly) to the linguistic form. As Gail Andrews Trechsel argues, ―[w]hile it can be argued that all quilts tell a story, picture quilts use literal illustration, stitched in fabric, to communicate with the viewer‖ in a manner that could be assimilated to visual narration (qtd. in Ezell 14). Because they may depict a full story approaching a vast array of subjects, their message can be even more compelling than abstract quilts, and because the choice of that

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subject is made by the quilt artist herself, they may also become instruments of protest, denounce or self-empowerment. This is especially evident in the way African American Story Quilt makers tend to emphasize relevant aspects of their culture, be it by highlighting historic hallmarks or by giving prominence to a politics of discrimination that persists in the present. Although the themes may not vary considerably from the larger category of contemporary African American quilts, the plasticity of the figures and icons employed here make of it an especially suitable outlet to transmit those ideas. Such plasticity offers the optimal means of expression to explore the complex issues frequently approached by black Story quilters: notably, a search for their original African roots, the recognition of the role of family and family ancestors, and a vindication of the African American experience from the first Middle Passage journeys to our days, with an especial emphasis on black political movements. This tendency to focus on certain common concerns derives from what Patricia Hill Collins has called ―a legacy of struggle‖ (Black Feminist Thought 22). The shared black female experience in America throughout time has led many of their artists and intellectuals to transcend specificities of ―historical era, age, social class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity‖ and come up with a legacy of struggle which acts as ―a common thread binding African American women‖ (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 22). This suggests that a collective unconsciousness underlies much of their theoretical and creative work, as if such binding needed to be reinforced and continued through generations, regardless of the particular circumstances of each individual‘s experience. Being one of their core thematic interests, Story Quilt makers tend to address an apparently limitless number of issues concerning the African heritage in black America. Culturally, such influences are so varied and multifaceted, and their representation in quiltmaking so heterogeneously portrayed, that their account would exceed the purposes of this dissertation. However, I find it especially relevant to identify at least two main aspects recurrently dealt with in Story Quilts.

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First, the necessity to look backwards and claim a dignified narrative of black life in America has had, as one of its consequences, the restitution of a rich African past as a crucial aspect of the African American identity. This recognition of an impressive cultural inheritance is reflected in black Story Quilts from diverse angles: some of them stress, as has already been presented, the African impact on art forms like music or dance, while others explore how ancient popular customs bear that mark. In this sense, the interest to unveil traditional practices among the early black communities has led many quilters to present in their works folk customs which date back to slavery times, like ancestral rites of passage. As a token of this, the African practice of jumping over a broomstick together (White and White 32), a ritual that used to officialize the marriage of a slave couple, is portrayed in Allyson Allen‘s Jump Da Broom (1995) (Allen 40-1).56 In fact, certain researchers suggest that the custom might have become so entrenched in the black community, that some slaveholders even hosted ―broomstick weddings‖ as a major event, thus continuing the ancient tradition by which the couple were to jump backwards over a broom to inaugurate their marriage (Genovese 475, 478). Reflecting on this ―African tradition that originated with the Asante tribe in Ghana, West Africa during the eighteenth century‖ (Ruffin 107), the quilt artist and narrator Sonie Ruffin pays tribute to this practice, initially incorporated into the African American culture, in her colorful Jumping the Broom quilt, included in her 2007 collection The Soulful Art of African-American Quilts. To provide a context and a specific setting for her story, Ruffin accompanies the quilt with a text recreating the invitation to a wedding in Philadelphia dating from 1895 as told by the bride and her grandmother, who reminisces of the day of her own marriage ceremony, and on the importance of preserving their own cultural traditions (107).

56 According to Shane White and Graham White in their anthropological study of the African American culture from its origins to the mid-twentieth century, the couples‘ tradition of jumping over the broom to officialize their union responded to an African heritage and was extensively maintained in America (White and White 32). An image of the quilt is included in Allen‘s photo- diary available at https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/12/1630453/-DK-Quilt-Guild-Black- History-Month-Quilts-by-Allyson-Allen-Photo-Diary

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The status of wedded couples in the slave community lacked all legal support, a fact which tended to stir opposition even from pro-slavery politicians and jurists, who feared that the perpetuation of unlawful unions would debilitate the traditional institution of the family (Genovese 52-3). Due to the undervalued nature of such unions, and in general to the degraded treatment of affective and family relations in the history of slavery, the two above-mentioned and other similar quilts are a tribute to those amputated family ties, which were usually at the mercy of the slaveholder‘s whimsical decisions. These works place the focus on how little power slaves retained over their own emotional lives, and how their family networks lacked all kinds of support or protection (to the point that a slave woman could be estranged from her children or partner without further notice, and for no reason other than the master‘s financial interests). A slave woman‘s complete lack of agency over her own emotional existence was, hence, partly due to the social irrelevance of her choice of a partner, at a time when marital status was pivotal in white women‘s lives. The criticism of this lack of autonomy regarding as elementary matters as one‘s personal bonding is reflected in Allen‘s quilt as both the reminder of a painful legacy and to honor the lives of those anonymous women. It is not casual, in fact, that so many black Story Quilts approach in a passionate way the advocacy of politics as the legitimate means to fight for equality and the end of discrimination. Common to a vast number of pieces of this type of quiltmaking is a reference to political moments in history when the African American role was decisive to change their fate —and, consequently, the fate of the whole country. From the early quilts created in support of the abolitionist and the suffragist causes (discussed in Chapter 1, section 3), to those currently employed at fundraising events for a huge variety of reasons, black women in America have never given up on the needle as an effective political instrument. Many modern and contemporary African American quilts draw on this militant spirit to explore the restitution of racial injustice past and present. An example of this is the emotional impact produced by the horrid practices that spread through the Jim Crow period (1865-1965), namely public lynching and

205 Black Stitches other forms of mob violence and extortion, including the murdering of black women and children (Terrell 207). The approach adopted by Story Quilts dealing with these issues is diverse, but they all attest to the emotional necessity to address some wounds which have remained unhealed for too long. In these quilts, references to the (mainly Southern, but not only) custom of public lynching adopt varying perspectives and forms of representation, from Yvonne Wells‘ Yesterday: Civil Rights in the South III or Rosa Parks I which portray a black body hanging from a tree, using a simple style, full of symbolism, to Gwendolyn Magee‘s Southern Heritage, Southern Shame, where the ghostly image of a man in a Ku Klux Klan hood overshadows several realistic portrayals of lynching and the emblem of the Confederate flag (MacDowell et al. 36, 107, 129).57 With respect to the latter, and according to Magee, the idea that sparked her design came up when the State of Mississippi voted to retain the Confederate battle flag in 2001, which to her view was an outrageous episode in the history of this state (106). Southern Heritage distills a profound sense of spirituality and pain, having an eerie effect on the eyes of the viewer. The impact produced by these quilts is, indeed, especially disturbing. While it is true that painting and photography have provided a crude vision of the savagery of lynching, the overall effect produced by anti-lynching quilts can be perceived as even more unsettling. From a conventional perspective, this may be due to the supposed unlikelihood of needlework, broadly associated with leisure or home-making activities, as the appropriate means to expose the barbarity of lynching. Such conservative assumptions make of quiltmaking an unexpected arm to contest any kind of oppression, let alone the brutality of this type of murder. However, as has been claimed concerning its role in abolitionism (see section 1.3 above), quiltmaking has been regarded by countless women through history as an

57 Wells herself has acknowledged that her art work tends to shock and startle more ―traditionalist‖ quiltmakers, due to the extreme simplicity of some of her designs, which call to mind a naïve aesthetic, together with the use of bold colors and symbolic shapes and figures. According to the artist, her preference to create this kind of quilts reflects her interest in expressing her personality, while also engaging the viewer into a dialogue with the quilt‘s meaning, so that spectators can ―imagine their own story‖ by looking at her work (Grudin 84). Rosa Parks I and Yesterday: Civil Rights in the South III are is reproduced at https://katyquilts.net/2016/03/19/yvonne-wells-quilts/. For her part, Gwendolyn Magee‘s Southern Heritage, Southern Shame quilt is available at https://southernspaces.org/2014/lift-every-voice-and-sing-quilts-gwendolyn-ann-magee/

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effective instrument for struggle, including their abomination of this inhumane practice. Although it is logical to presume that many cases of lynching in the history of the United States remain either incompletely documented or simply unregistered, there exists an estimated 66 cases of black women having been victims of this practice, only between 1889 and 1922 (Mungarro n.p.). The necessity to honor them and restitute some dignity to their forgotten history moved the artist April Shipp to create a mural-like quilt where she recorded the names, state by state, of all the black women, men and children who were lynched in the country between the end of slavery and the Civil Rights era; Strange Fruit: A Century of Lynching from 1865 to 1965, dedicated to the famous anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, lists all those proper names under the symbol of a noose on each side of the quilt, in an attempt to materialize some sort of tribute to those invisible victims.58 As the artist declared, it had never occurred to her that women might have also been the victims of lynching, until she happened to see a photograph of a woman and her son who had been hanged from a bridge in Oklahoma in 1911. Shocked, she felt it necessary to express remembrance of all the known and unknown victims not through the exposition of their dead bodies, but by vindicating their human dignity and their place in history (Shipp n.p.). Sharing a common feature with other forms of African American art expression, and to paraphrase bell hooks‘ aforementioned search for the ―blank spaces‖ in black history (Art on My Mind 28), the artist embroidered over a deep black background, in golden thread, the full names of all those human beings rendered invisible, bringing their testimony back to life.59 She also attached two large nooses on each side of the quilt to bluntly confront the viewer with the cruelty of this practice, and the process of sewing them onto her quilt was a devastating

58 A reproduction of Shipp‘s quilt can be seen at https://www.michiganradio.org/post/michigan- artist-s-strange-fruit-quilt-remembers-thousands-lost-lynching 59As Toni Morrison asserts, conventional historical and literary criticism had canonized a general concept of ―knowledge‖ that systematically ignored whatsoever African American contribution to it. In particular, pondering on the influence of African Americans (as a people and as individual literary characters) in the American literary imagination, Morrison concludes that the canon assumed that presence almost as non-existent: as if it had ―had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture‘s literature‖ (Playing in the Dark 5).

207 Black Stitches experience: as she expresses it, ―with every stitch that I sewed while I was putting the nooses on, I felt each one‘s pain‖ (Shipp n.p.). Another example of this is LaShawnda Crowe Storm‘s quilt Her Name Was Laura Nelson (2004), where a full-size, black and white photograph of a black woman‘s body hanging from a tree contrasts with a stark black and red background.60 Significantly, the artist insisted on claiming the name of this otherwise anonymous woman who conformed the silent (and invisible) statistics of the female victims of lynching. In that spirit, Storm established the Lynch Quilts Project, to bring light and attention onto the ―ramifications of racial violence, specifically lynching‖ (MacDowell et al. 41) by elaborating a monographic series of quilts on this theme in a collaborative manner; that is, through fabric donations and the transmission of techniques. The fact that the artist initiated this project bearing in mind the involvement of as many women contributors as possible, and her idea of mixing the harshness of the image with the beauty of art resonate with an African American sensibility to explore painful episodes of their common history from a creative impulse. A feature that many of these quilts have in common is precisely this disturbing contrast between the cruelty of what is being exposed and the softness and warmth of the textile material employed in the quilts. The same contrasting effect appears in the lyrics of ―Strange Fruit‖, where comforting notions such as ―the Southern breeze‖, ―scent of magnolia sweet and fresh‖ or ―pastoral scene of the gallant South‖ are mirrored with ―the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth‖ and ―the sudden smell of burning flesh […] for the crows to pluck, for the sun to rot‖ (Davis, Blues Legacies 181). This rhetorical use of sharply contrasting images to expose as crudely as possible the dehumanization of lynching (and in general, all sorts of racism or sexism) is often present in other forms of black art: from slave music to contemporary African American painting and sculpture, the beauty of aesthetics tend to convey a stern rejection of such oppression. In a similar way to the many quilts used to spread anti-slavery ideas in the nineteenth century analyzed in Chapter 1, section 3 —let us remember, for instance, how Susan B. Anthony used to organize quilting bees for that purpose

60 Image available at https://www.thelynchquiltsproject.com/the-quilts?lightbox=dataItem- itm394x91

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(MacDowell et al. 74)—, women continued to elaborate them to promote other reforms during the twentieth century.61 The common goal to fight the scourge of racial segregation led many black quilters to foreground that theme in their works, bringing long-held taboos to the center of social debate, and doing so from a female perspective. The quilts-activism dyad never ceased to exist in the country, and during the twentieth century they were employed for a vast range of purposes: to raise funds to support victims of AIDS and other diseases; to provide shelter in the aftermath of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005; to help homeless people; as a means of protection for poverty-stricken families, etc. The list of causes is extended, but what they all have in common is the creation of a supportive network for those subjected to discrimination, or those suffering social exclusion or oblivion. Quilts, whose purpose is to bring emotional as much as physical relief, continue to be used nowadays as a means of support for people who are discriminated against or who are going through grievous times.

61 Among the social conquests they targeted through fundraising events and quilting rallies, female suffrage and birth control were two of the most elusive ones, not being significantly achieved until the mid- to latter decades of the twentieth century (Calviño 136-7).

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Part 3: Stitching their own narratives: some connections between quilts and literature within the African American context

Chapter 4. Representations of quilts in African American literature

4.1. The quilting trope in African American women’s writing

Undoubtedly, creating a quilt is an ambivalent, complex and usually very demanding endeavor, be it physically and/or emotionally. Considering that the statement holds true for contemporary women living in free societies as autonomous citizens, is it possible to imagine the degree of complexity and sacrifice that the task must have entailed for black enslaved women living in pre- Civil War America, at a time when they were not even regarded as human beings and held no agency whatsoever over their lives? Any attempt at answering this question is, at the very least, rather unsettling. Contrasting that situation with our contemporary times, though, evidences a common fact in the two cases: that women have managed to find in the art of making quilts a channel for expressing their thoughts and emotions, even at a time when these were not fully noticed or credited by their surrounding society. It is evident, therefore, that the needle substituted the pen when transmitting those ideas in written form was unavailable for them; and in the cases where they could access literacy, some of these women quilters combined both writing and sewing to communicate their vision of the world. Contrary to Michael James‘s argument that ―[i]n the past, few quiltmakers thought their handiwork important or valuable enough to document its making and the conditions and motivations that inspired their range of artistic decisions‖ (qtd. in Berlo and Cox Crews ix), I contend that many quilters (and in particular, many African American quilters) regarded their work as important and worth of conservation. James‘ view stems probably from the assumption that it was within most women quilters‘ reach to choose whether or not to give written account of their art; however, that notion would exclude the ones who were illiterate or had to overcome unfathomable difficulties to leave such written legacy, even in the cases when they wished to. Besides, the consideration that most quilters eluded to record the meaning or symbolism of their work seems to overlook precisely one Black Stitches of the most crucial aspects about their activity: that their quilting amounted in fact to communicating themselves through their needles, if only using a different language. All in all, the tradition of registering on paper their daily work was kept alive by successive generations of women who, like Nora Ezell, kept a diary describing their artistic evolution; or like the painter Faith Ringgold, who has mixed both activities to the point that her texts are inserted on the surface of her quilts as a double narrative. Today, many other black American quilters, be it on a local, national or world-wide scale, continue to do the same thing via the publication of their entries in their specialized blogs, passing on their personal, social or aesthetic concerns to the new generations of women. The quilt trope, which has been hailed as a multi-encompassing metaphor for the writings of (in particular, black American) women, has proved to be an especially rich source of inspiration/creativity within that literary tradition. Considering its versatility as both the symbolic and the material element, the African American quilt becomes the meeting point where writers of very different concerns, styles, aesthetic interests and theme priorities have converged. It functions as a compelling symbol for its capacity to reconstruct the missing parts of literary and historically narration while it was partially silenced: the presence of gender and race is made visible in the novels that employ the quilt as an element to build structure and/or content to the plot. The already mentioned ―void spaces‖ left historically by the absence of black women in most representations of American life was contested by the quilt trope, which started to agglutinate some answers to the countless questions that were emerging by the late twentieth century, with the rise of a new sociopolitical and cultural awareness. ―By virtue of their race and gender,‖ Claudia Tate has stated, ―black women writers find themselves at two points of intersection: one where Western culture cuts across vestiges of African heritage, and one where male-female attitudes are either harmoniously parallel, subtly divergent, or in violent collision‖ (xvi). At the same time, and in conformity with the blossoming of a tradition by black female authors, the development of quiltmaking as an art that transcended the home walls and started to be publicly exhibited, fueled the use of this form of

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expression among many artists in search of their own voices amid a vertiginously changing context. The presence of the quilt in the work by the two groups of artists is not casual, as it operated as a powerful claim in the retrieval of the common heritage. As will be discussed later on, quilts are imbedded in the plots of narratives set in slavery and cover any other historical period from that time onwards, reaching the contemporary creation that deals with today‘s issues. Following my initial simile of quilts as the instrument used by women to express their concerns in a subliminal way –disguised as an activity that was socially approved of–, so does the quilt itself, as the material object and not just as a metaphor, occupy an emblematic place in the literature of African American women writers. Indeed, in a similar manner to the use by female activists of all times of this rather innocuous-looking artifact to reach their aims, many black female authors have found in the quilt a source to explore their concerns as creators of fictional (and non-fictional) literature. As has been argued by feminist literary criticism, most women writers needed in the past to conceal, at least on the surface, certain ―levels of meaning‖ that remained partially hidden in their time. As it turned out, the more skillfully ―disguised‖ the content, the less risk of undergoing social rejection as authors; consequently, part of those meanings were concealed at lower or deeper levels of the narration, as a subterfuge for such meanings. By doing so, these women writers managed to gain ―literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards‖ (Gilbert and Gubar 73). Particularly in the case of African American women writers, this need to disguise the true content of their texts became of greatest importance. Beginning with the first slave narratives written by women, the assumption that reality (even autobiographical events) could not be delivered openly but had to conform to a myriad of gender, race and class parameters, shaped black women‘s writing into a complex corpus of often hidden significance. Explaining how the literary canon had traditionally eschewed women‘s –and especially black women‘s– texts, accusing them of sentimentalism and self-centeredness, Mary Helen Washington points out that ―[o]ur ‗ritual journeys,‘ our ‗articulate voices,‘ our ‗symbolic spaces‘ are rarely the same as men‘s. Those differences and the assumptions that

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Black Stitches those differences make women inherently inferior plus the appropriation by men of the power to define tradition account for women‘s absence from our written records‖ (xviii). Narrowing the perspective to the relationship between literary works and needle art, I will try to argue that the figure of the quilt acts as a channeling device that has given voice to those silenced spaces, inside and outside of fictional literature. The pairing quiltmaking-writing from an African American cultural perspective has been the object of in-depth analysis, mainly because of the rich metaphorical connotations of one mirroring the other; but also, because it has been a powerful instrument to claim agency and individuality for the thousands of women whose creativity had historically been dampened. It is only fair to recognize at present that ―[t]he familiar process of piecing a quilt and the infinite malleability of bits of cloth meant that some [of those women] could transcend their voiceless state, inscribing with their needle what they could not write in words‖ (Lemire 118). Further, although the theme of quilts made by African American women has been present (from multiple perspectives, and to signify very different things) in American literature countless times, I have decided to analyze in this chapter a selection of works according to a double criterion. First, I have considered that the main literary corpus should consist of works written by African American women, since their creative production is the object of study of this thesis. Also, despite the significant contributions made, especially in recent years, by other agents directly involved in the analysis of black American women‘s quilts, like white women or African American men quilters/researchers, I have restricted my scope of study to the works of black women writers, as I consider them primarily involved and concerned with the cultural significance of these quilts. This is not to say, of course, that a gender or racial line should be drawn in one‘s approach to the field of this textile art and the literature surrounding it, since doing so would reproduce the biased divide that has historically imposed its gender and/or racial barriers. In this sense, I think it is pertinent to remember here Toni Morrison‘s notion of ―dishonest scholarship‖. She used this expression to complain to a white

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woman scholar who had devoted her whole literary compilation to white female writers, on the excuse that she feared stepping into misappropriation (Tate 121). Certainly, discarding the creative production of authors exclusively because they do not share the same racial or gender features seems to me another form of alienation, apart from a sad impoverishment of one‘s cultural vision. Scholars reflecting on this controversy (which would make some avoid drawing on the work of those belonging to an ―external‖ cultural community, lest they be misjudged) have argued that if we defend ―the right of a black American to study and enjoy Austen and Shakespeare on the grounds that any literature worth reading has something to say to us all about being human, then a conscious avoidance by whites of the work of black writers is indefensible‖ (Birch 1). Applied to the corpus selected for this chapter, it might be thought that consciously restricting the selection to the production of black women is equally questionable. Yet, I find it necessary to ponder a significant difference in the criterion adopted in this particular case. Since my research deals exclusively with the quilts elaborated by black women in America, tracing an overview of their historical and cultural significance for the same women (though not only) throughout time, I consider it crucial, in order to keep a logical coherence with the whole study, to focus solely on the literary creation of black women writers. Also, as the material of research in the first part of this study discusses in particular the symbolism and meaning of those quilts within the African American female community, it would be inconsistent to approach their representation in literature from a perspective other than that of their creators. Finally, I thought it of vital importance to look at those quilts exclusively from the gaze of black American women writers, and to eschew alteration or mediation from external elements.62 Consequently, my selection is based on the literary production of black women authors whose personal or cultural background is intimately connected with the tradition of quiltmaking, and who often understand the quilt as a metaphor for their individual or collective experiences.

62 That purpose is challenged by the difficulty of treating the testimony narratives as a fully autobiographical genre. This will be further discussed in section 5 of Chapter 4, in relation to the excerpts from interviews compiled under the title The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (2002).

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Formally, this third part of my dissertation follows the same chronological pattern employed for the historical analysis of quiltmaking; as a result, each period has been accorded one or several literary works set in the same historical context. The quilt as a meaningful theme, in some cases even as a character in its own right, within the plot of those works adopts, yet, very different forms and is applied by the authors for a variety of purposes. In some cases, the quilt appears as a threatening or destabilizing presence; other times, it functions as a channeling link between conflicting characters, thus playing a crucial part in the plot. On other occasions, still, it is consciously presented by the author as a cohesive element of cultural continuity within black female communities in America. In any case, it is my intention to present the multifaceted roles of these quilts from a broad spectrum, and to explore their symbolism and impact on the literature of black American women. With this aim in mind, I have envisioned to classify the works according to the chronological sequence of their settings, with the exception of the two tales relative to the Underground Railroad, which in spite of belonging to the slavery era are considered separately. The literary works, which include fictional stories and real-life accounts, cover a broad period of time, from the first generations of women of African descent living in America to our days. In any case, it is my intention to emphasize the heterogeneous nature of these quilts as powerful cultural symbols, also reflected in the variety of genres adopted for this matter (novel, short story, children‘s story, interview, etc.).

4.2. Claiming African American women’s past through their quilts: Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata

Phyllis Alesia Perry‘s Stigmata (1999) revolves around the theme of slavery, portraying a black Alabaman family whose ancestry dates back to the waves of people brought from Africa throughout the nineteenth century to be traded as slaves in the U.S.A. In the story, the spirit of the eldest known member of the family, named Bessie Ward upon arriving on American land, but originally called Ayo, wanders through several generations of women in her restless search for

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peace. Ayo, as she continued to call herself in spite of external mandate, never managed to overcome the emotional and physical pain she had suffered as a slave, and returns to life in her quest to find some relief for all her suffering. Real life events and a complex web of extra-sensorial experiences blend into each other while Ayo moves back and forth in time, until she encounters Lizzie, her great- great-granddaughter, who as a result starts to become insane. What begins as occasional blackouts and extremely vivid nightmares gradually pushes Lizzie to an unknown universe of memories from past lives that she is able to experience in her own body and mind, and which eventually confines her in a mental asylum. Essential for the development of the plot is an old diary recounting Ayo‘s life, written by one of her daughters, Joy –Lizzie‘s great-grandmother, whom she never met either– which unexpectedly falls into the hands of Lizzie just as she begins to suffer from the hallucinations.

However, her presumed collapse into madness is not what it seems, nor her strange ―dreams‖ are such. Lizzie‘s awareness of the process she is going through –her acknowledgment that she is reliving the experiences of her female forbears– becomes even more clear when she discovers the existence of an object that accompanies the diary: a ragged quilt that used to belong to her grandmother, Grace, when she was young –an object so deteriorated and strange that nobody seems to know what to make of it. Socially condemned to hide her real experiences under the more convenient term of ―dreams‖ produced by her imaginative young mind, Lizzie is aware that her visions reenact the real existences of the women who preceded her. Unable to explain that the marks on her body and the bleeding wounds on her wrists and back are not self-inflicted (the stigma of madness she is submitted to becomes now physically reflected on her bodily marks), she is committed by her parents to a mental hospital for two years. Thus, paralleling old social customs of secluding relatives –especially women– whose behavior or personal attitudes clashed with the expected standards in a blatant manner, Lizzie finds herself isolated in several asylums, adding the social burden of craziness to her own and unacknowledged pain.

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To exit the labyrinth of mental confusion in which she is trapped, Lizzie resorts to the legacy quilt as the only thing that can guide her way. In its extremely worn-out surface, she manages to read and decipher the painful story of Grace, who had abandoned her family, unable to cope with her own visions. Following the narrative displayed in the Story Quilt, Lizzie feels that the only way out from her mental collapse is through the reconstruction of the quilt‘s pieces. They depict, as Lizzie will gradually learn, all the crucial moments in both Grace‘s and her grandmother‘s tormented lives, and they hold the key to solve the family‘s current suffering. Hence, Lizzie undertakes the quilt‘s reconstruction process by trying to involve her reluctant mother, Sarah, in what seems the overwhelming task of bringing the quilt‘s narration –and Grace with it– back to life. This internal necessity she feels to reproduce the sorrowful lives of her ancestors echoes similar practices by other black female artists who have reflected on the healing value of quiltmaking. For example, the visual artist Deborah Willis acknowledges that her impulse to create Story Quilts from childhood memories stems from an intimate need to explore her own family history and trace back the experiences of its older members, in particular with respect to the female ones. Thus, Willis‘s tendency to re-create those experiences in a quilt, often incorporating old photographs, is her attempt to document in a visual form the historical trajectory of her family, ―filling up‖ the blank spaces where hardly any information remains about the deceased ones. To use the artist‘s words, ―[i]n constructing a photo story through memory, I situate my own family and the lives of other African American families. By telling my story, I make it possible for others to visually consider the shared experiences of many black women‖ (Willis, ―Searching for Memories‖ 228). This interest in relocating lost or forgotten patches of the whole family landscape could derive from the absence of documented material on original kinship and roots among many African American families. Obviously, if taken from a short distance, there exist no larger gaps in that landscape among African Americans than among other ethnic groups; however, if considered from a larger perspective, the lack of genealogical records from the earlier times is in many

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cases evident. Furthermore, rather than searching for the particular episodes of one‘s kinship ancestors, the emphasis is placed on the quest for a collective memory, as a necessity to reaffirm a cultural identity through the relocation of the missing pieces of the broader picture. Such impulse to transcend the peculiarities of an individual‘s history and extend them to conform a collective memory has been explored in fiction as much as in the research of historians and ethnographers. The West African-rooted tradition of orally transmitting the accounts of a community or genealogy has its origins in the figure of the ―griot‖, a musician and narrator who acts as a chronicler of the events happened in the foregoing generations (Konte 21). The parallel with the griot is pertinent here in that it underscores the role of the oral narrator as transmitter of a people‘s past, and can be associated with the strong African American tradition of maintaining history alive through intergenerational storytelling. This query to trace back a cultural lineage, or to express it in Alex Haley‘s words, ―the background of us as a people‖ (―Black History‖ 24) is a particularly relevant aspect of Perry‘s novel. It is so much so that the spirit of Ayo, the woman captured in Africa and the eldest relative of whom the family has kept record, haunts the following generations in retaliation for their oblivion of the past. Her refusal to conform to an existence as a slave and her desperate nostalgia for her native land turns Ayo‘s life into a tortuous cycle of punishment and psychological degradation. Despite her pleads to God to end her suffering, Ayo lives to reach old age, but the wounds in her soul are so deep and so bitter, that she reincarnates into the body of her own descendants, in a febrile quest for justice and the re- establishment of memory. In Stigmata, quilting is employed as the bond that unites past and present, and as the channel to access the world of forgotten lives. The process whereby the protagonist duplicates the family quilt into a new version of the original design functions as a metaphor for this query towards personal and communal identity. Lizzie brings the old quilt from the darkness of the trunk –where it had been kept for decades– out into the light, and in the process the ―snapshots‖ represented by each patch acquire more clarity and meaning.

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Interestingly, as the plot revolves around the theme of reincarnation, Lizzie actually re-lives the experiences of her deceased female relatives, traveling back and forth in time and becoming her own mother‘s mother. The construction of the new quilt helps all the women in Lizzie‘s family elucidate what really happened in each one‘s tragedies, and is especially clarifying about Grace‘s sudden disappearance. Lizzie‘s effort to join the pieces back together finally lets her mother, Sarah, reconcile with the woman who had almost become a ghost, an invisible presence haunted by unresolved questions. Hence, the powerful symbolism of Lizzie‘s re-embodiment is used by the narrator to present the character as both the mother and the daughter of Sarah, who is at last capable of making amends with the tortured spirit of Grace. Besides, another curious effect of Lizzie and Sarah‘s mutual assistance in the construction of the quilt –apart from helping Lizzie heal, recovering from her psychological wounds– is the role-swapping process that the two experience: the young woman, Lizzie, teaches her mother how to sew a quilt, observing her learning process full of joy and pride (Perry 194). Because of the plot‘s backward and forward movements, the fact that it is Lizzie the one teaching her mother how to quilt (unlike the common tradition of passing the skills from one generation to the next), the internal coherence to the story is continuously kept. As a child, Sarah often asked her mother, Grace, to train her at quiltmaking, and they had sewn some pieces together; but now, through her visions of the past, Lizzie re-lives the whole episode and is able to understand the quilt from a deeper insight. Like a painter who could know in advance what the white canvas will look like once the painting is finished, so does Lizzie foresee the future appearance of the quilt, acknowledging how valuable it will become for her family‘s destiny. Being able to observe the quilt from that perspective, thus moving backwards from the finished work to its inception, Lizzie feels overwhelmed by the sudden weight of so much wisdom: ―I run my fingers over the still-bright colors and notice the places on the background waiting to be filled‖ (Perry 54). By looking at those ―still-bright colors‖ of the then emerging quilt, which over time will become faded and even invisible for the rest of the family, Lizzie metaphorically binds past and present in zigzag stitches, as in a spiral rather than a

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chronologically ordered sequence of episodes. Contrary to the common western conception of time as a linear succession of events, many women in Lizzie‘s family regard it as a fluid continuum, thereby acknowledging that past and present may rub each other‘s edges as part of the real cycle of life, which in any case is always recurrent. Although Lizzie agrees with her great-aunt‘s outlook that the nature of time is circular, fluid and everchanging –―[t]he past […] is a circle. If you walk long enough, you catch up with yourself‖ (117)–, not all her closest relatives share the same view. Some seem to be utterly uncomfortable with this idea. It is the case of her mother, who feels disturbed by the apparent lack of order of the quilt, as it displays the events in a circular, instead of linear and supposedly more logical, manner. She dislikes –in fact, feels threatened by– this seemingly chaotic time conception, complaining to her daughter that ―[y]ou could tell better what was going on if the pictures were in a row […]. This is hopelessly jumbled‖ (93). Sarah‘s need to hold on to a more conventional sequence of the patterns may respond to her own unstable past, as she was abandoned by her mother, Grace, whose life is represented in the quilt in an apparently anarchic manner. Yet, it is precisely the turbulent layout of the events represented in the quilt that is supposed to bring Sarah back to her lost childhood and to lead her towards a posthumous reconciliation with her mother. Lizzie is so bewildered by Sarah‘s failure to acknowledge the meaning of the quilt they are, in fact, (re)constructing together, that at some point she even suspects her mother is deliberately refusing to make the internal connection. But Lizzie does more than accepting the cyclical and unstable nature of life: she is forced to live the traumatic episodes in her own flesh, going through her ancestors‘ experiences again and again as the only way to finally reconcile present and past. Ultimately, what heals Lizzie will be her strong spiritual connection with that past and the female forbearers that inhabited it. In the novel, Grace‘s and Lizzie‘s quilts function almost as characters in themselves, as living beings whose biographies are displayed or hidden along the story; in fact, the very process of their elaboration acts as an engraining device that binds together the lives of dead and living women in the family. Upon realizing that she has been chosen by her ancestors to honor their forgotten

223 Black Stitches testimonies, Lizzie acknowledges that she is ―telling Grace‘s story with this quilt –just as she had told Ayo‘s story with hers– and the fabric has to hold up at least until the next storyteller comes along‖ (63). Significantly, in viewing herself as the current ―storyteller‖ of her family‘s memories while she is, in fact, using thread and needle but not a pen and paper, Lizzie implicitly claims the narrative nature of her quilt, perceiving it more as a readable text than as some heirloom artifact. This is so much the case that, although Ayo‘s words are initially transcribed by her daughter Joy in the written form, it will be the following generations of women (Grace and, especially, Lizzie) who will truly give meaning to the content of those old memories. A connection between the concepts of madness and female creativity is drawn in the story not simply through the central development of the protagonist‘s psychological troubles, but also through other less explicit references. Interestingly, the threatening effects of her creativity, perceived as an uncontrollable force of nature that needs to be tamed, has been often reflected in literature in the confinement of those women in isolation, usually removed from the common living spaces inside the house. In fact, this association of female genius with psychological unbalance has been frequently present in the works of key female writers throughout history, and it has been profusely studied by feminist literary research, from Gilbert and Gubar‘s groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) onwards (Goodman, Literature and Gender 114). In regards to this link between female writing and forced isolation, researchers have also claimed that

[t]he reality of confinement is fundamental in nineteenth- and twentieth- century women‘s writings, in the sense that cultural boundaries have denied women equal access to opportunity […] Simply stated, in the literature and life of a patriarchal society confinement symbolizes female existence, particularly that of the black female. (Wilson, ――Everyday Use‖ and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 169)

Particularly with respect to black American women‘s representation in literary fiction, confinement is presented as especially necessary, since the allegedly insane black woman appears to be even more subversive, adding the

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racial challenge to the issue of gender. If, according to Elaine Showalter, ―madness is the price women artists have had to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a male-dominated culture‖ (The Female Malady 4), what price must black women have paid, when they were not even considered as peers with the white females? What price could have been paid by the black woman who was, from a social and legal perspective, regarded not as a citizen but as the objectified property of others? In some cases, though, the literary character embodying the insane black woman manages to reverse the oppressive mechanisms of her physical and/or mental confinement, using them to her ow benefit. For example, Harriet Jacobs‘ autobiographical account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) narrates in the first person how she decided to hide in a small and dark garret during seven years to escape the tyranny and sexual assaults of her master. The fact that she ―deliberately confined herself to a cramped attic space for many years in order to achieve freedom‖ (Washington 12) reveals that this kind of physical imprisonment was less unbearable for her than submitting to the ordeal of slavery; so much so, that in her memoirs she even acknowledges she would choose death over being re-enslaved (Jacobs 120). By the same token, and in closer connection with the aforementioned theme of insanity and female escape from bondage is the character of the mulatto woman Cassy, from Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom‟s Cabin (originally published in 1852). Cassy, devastated after losing her three children to her greedy master Simon Legree, decides to exploit her supposed craziness to free herself and another young woman. Learning about a previous female slave who had died in the attic of the master‘s house, Cassy concocts a plan to ―reincarnate‖ in the spirit of the deceased slave, terrorizing Legree. After pretending to have run away, the two women return to their hideout in the supposedly haunted attic, knowing it to be the one place where Legree would never dare search. Hence, by manipulating the conventional assumptions that link female subversion, madness and confinement, Cassy turns her predecessor‘s seclusion in the attic into her key to freedom (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 533-4). This revealing episode in Stowe‘s novel offers a reflection on the disturbing image of a woman

225 Black Stitches whose race and intelligence seem to inevitably condemn her to isolation and self- destruction –although, in this case, she manages to use that fate to gain her liberation. Certainly, and as Lizbeth Goodman suggests, it seems that female creative genius is ―at odds with their expected roles as women‖ (115). It is out of the question nowadays that women‘s disobedience to the established order was considered, in the past, as a sign of mental instability, especially when they reclaimed full independence in their use of oral and written expression (Birch 20). In Stigmata, however, the concept of literary creation must be considered in a broader sense, since it is the act of writing with the needle, not with the pen (that is, creating a quilt instead of a novel) which becomes entangled with the protagonist‘s breakdown. This might apparently be contradictory with the above statement, since sewing is a chore intimately related to the female sphere and, as such, seen as a task ―expected from women‖. Yet, in Stigmata the only conventional aspect about quiltmaking is the claim of a common material culture and the necessity to preserve the matrilineal heritage of a family whose memory has been disrupted. The act of sewing is not presented here as female submission to culturally conservative rules: on the contrary, it is portrayed almost as a revolutionary instrument used by a woman in search of her own roots. Turning the conventional act of stitching fabric into the unexpected (even unwelcomed) act of writing her story through that quilt, Lizzie‘s decision becomes a challenge to the normative status quo and the assumed laws of silence –and, as such, the quilt must be taken to a less harmful place in the house: the attic. Lizzie‘s mother‘s reluctance to accept the uncontrolled and free-spirited quilting process into her impeccably neat living room reinforces the permanent tension between reason and madness underlying the novel‘s plot. Two approaches about how to deal with painful family secrets permeate the story: on the one hand, characters like Lizzie‘s parents and her psychiatrists (that is, those representing stability and reason) opt for denial of that traumatic past, as if suggesting that collective oblivion could somehow erase the wounds. On the other hand, Lizzie and most of her female ancestors embody the inverse idea: only a conscious knowledge of the extent of that trauma, and the understanding of the

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significance of the pain, can lead to reparation and healing. While the former characters embody logical thinking and a rejection of creativity (which is feared as unsettling), the characters in defense of artistic quiltmaking see it as a catalyst to overcome all that suffering. There is, indeed, a lot of uncertainty about the very act of elaborating a quilt, from its inception to the final, and sometimes unpredictable, outcome. This uncertainty may apply both to the quilt‘s physical nature (it involves the use of many different scraps of fabric, often very small, that tend to be scattered or accumulate around the place), and to the quilt‘s content (as the quilter‘s state of mind might vary through the process, leading to unplanned alterations in its design). This apparent ―deviation‖ from the traditional concept of strictly organized needlework is emphasized in Stigmata in the sense that the quilt Lizzie creates is perceived as a narrative rather than simply a decorative work for domestic use. The fact that, in the middle of her psychological breakdown, she decides to trace back and re-write her forbears‘ lives, adding elements from diary and epistolary narratives, echoes the aforementioned literary tradition that equated female talent to social subversion –and was therefore perceived as threatening. In addition to this, some literary critics have perceived the identification with ancestry as a cohesive force within the black American communities. For example, Eva Lennox Birch has observed the strategic importance, for contemporary female writers, to ―reclaim the past in order to define the female self in terms of inherited culture,‖ as it is simultaneously ―a feminist and a racial urge‖ (150). Both Lizzie and her grandmother Grace resent the social and emotional rejection they endure because of their artistic spirit and their involuntary involvement in paranormal events. The latter, in fact, ends up abandoning her family, unable to face the perspective of being locked up by her husband on account of her ―madness‖. Yet, although Lizzie initially tries to fight off her heavy burden for fear of being isolated from society, with time she accepts it as a necessary, if tortuous, process, realizing that the creation of the quilt can help her exorcize all the accumulated suffering.

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The figure of the quilt is permanently used as a channeling device to explain all the hidden lives of Lizzie‘s foremothers, giving voice to the women whose experiences and stories of horror and hope had been silenced. In a sense, the quilt itself acts as a real character in its own right: it personifies not just the two women who created the original and the secondary version, but also the other family members who tried to leave testimony of their lives through oral transmission or written records. At some point, Lizzie becomes aware of the human-like nature of the work she is bringing (back) to life. For instance, during one of her out-of-body experiences, she observes that ―the colorful pictures on the quilt‘s surface rise up to greet me‖ (Perry 143). Further, despite her initial rejection of the transformation process she is undergoing, deep down she perceives the quilt as a physical link with the preceding women: ―I‘m tangled in the quilt, but it feels good to be in that cloth womb, because I am cold‖ (39). In fact, the quilt plays the role of a double-edged sword in Lizzie‘s hands, as it becomes both the trigger of her mental distress and, simultaneously, the only way out of all that pain and confusion. Her psychological duplicity and eerie sensation of inadequacy in both her present and past lives clash with the normalcy expectations from family and doctors, forcing her to feign that nothing is happening. This interlinks with the previous considerations that explained the exploitation of the crazed female character, claiming that ―maddened doubles functioned [in literature] as asocial surrogates for docile selves‖ (Gilbert and Gubar xi). Further examples of the treatment of the quilt as if it were endowed with human life can be perceived in the way many characters relate to it. For instance, the appliquéd figures that Lizzie adds to the fabric –some of which had been taken from her grandmother‘s old clothes– gain life in her eyes: she describes them as ―shapes and colors [that] dance‖ (Perry 22). At a certain point, they become so vivid and menacing to Lizzie‘s mother that on one occasion that she picks up a dropped block she immediately ―drops it as if the fabric is on fire‖ (171). Another highly symbolic element in this narrative where time and place coordinates overlap, is the reference to the family‘s ancestral roots in Africa. In reality, the quilt manifests itself as the material connection among generations

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who did not even know each other while alive: thus, Grace decides to leave the diary and the quilt to her future granddaughter, Lizzie, long before the latter even existed. Similarly, Lizzie‘s great-aunt Eva describes that legacy as ―the keys that unlock the door to what you call the past‖ (118), in reference to how the lives of preceding and current generations within a family permeate each other. In particular, allusions to the African origins that became lost over time play a vital role in the story, and are ultimately at the core of the protagonist‘s mental breakdown. The women in Lizzie‘s family express the necessity to reclaim their place in history and to exorcize the trauma of having been cut off from their original land, and they choose to do it through the needle as much as through the pen. Thus, the resort of some of them to narrating their experience represents an effort to find relief within themselves, and as a consequence it is an act of survival. ―For the black woman in American autobiography,‖ writes Joanne M. Braxton, ―the literary act has been, more often than not, an attempt to regain that sense of place in the New World‖ (2). Within that context of traumatic disruption from their cultural roots, African women abducted to America had to find ways to make sense of an unbearable reality, which included a new environment, a new language and their condition of enslaved beings. With respect to the women in Stigmata, hard as they try to preserve their African roots by many different means, only through the collective elaboration of the quilt –a material and artistic object that can be kept and transmitted to further generations– will they really manage to do it. The continuous references to the original homeland are present in the story in an explicit manner –for example, through the diary narratives and the oral transmission of Ayo‘s life in Africa, where she was captured as a child– but also in a more subtle or implicit way, for instance in the references to the type of cloth and colors used in the quilt, or even the head attires worn by the older family women. With respect to the type of fabric employed in the quilt, two main colors, blue and red, are repeatedly emphasized as being especially meaningful. In the story, there are several references to the use of one of the most widespread dyes in

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Africa, indigo blue, which immediately connects Lizzie with her West African foremothers for a number of reasons. First, it is narrated how Ayo, then a child, had been abducted and forced, together with many others, onto a cargo ship. When her clothes were torn off, she firmly held onto a small piece of indigo fabric that she would keep with herself from then on, and which many generations later would be used in her appliqué figure for the quilt. When Lizzie observes the small and tattered piece of cloth, as she reflects on how her great-great-grandmother had been brutally taken from her family and homeland, the immaterial nature of that link is emphasized: ―[t]he scrap of indigo-dyed cotton feels like a cloud in my palm, insubstantial and hardly graspable‖ (Perry 47). This episode resonates with a scene in Jacqueline Woodson‘s Show Way (which will be analyzed in the following section), where a young girl clings to her mother‘s piece of cloth, managing to preserve it and transmit it to the following generations. The continuity of the emotional link is evident in the passage where Grace finds the blue scrap and decides to sew it on her quilt, as if the inclusion of the relic could transmit something of the spirit of its original owners:

A closer look […] tells her it is that beautiful blue piece that her mother, Joy, had given her. It came from Grandmama, from Ayo. Joy had always kept it. There isn‘t enough of it to do nothing with, she said, though Grace had known her mother to do much more with much less. Grace pins it to the quilt, just to the right of the swaying woman. (58)

Ayo‘s emotional bond with that piece of cloth is so strong that later in her life she reminisces about how she had grasped it firmly in her hand while going through the humiliation and despair of the auction block, and carried it for the rest of her life as the only physical attachment to her estranged mother and land. Second, the color blue serves as a channel to Lizzie‘s past in the sense that it is all along associated with water and, in particular, with the ocean that Ayo had been forced to cross when she was captured. As a consequence, the shades of blue included in the quilt become a metaphor for the trauma of the Middle Passage voyage that Grace‘s grandmother went through, and act as a simile for her own personal ordeal when she had to leave her family and home. Besides, blue, and

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particularly indigo, is considered ―the most extensively used non-industrial dye in Africa‖ (Picton and Mack 35), as its age-old prominence in African textiles proves. Consequently, the presence of blue in the quilt bears witness to the family‘s cultural roots as much as to their history on American land. Likewise, the symbolic meaning of the color red, and its connotations within most African cultures (Fry 44), is highlighted in the story not only through the relevance of the red fabric in the quilt, but also through the many allusions to the strength of blood ties and even to the physical presence of blood. Although some researchers have suggested that ―red by its association with anger, blood, war and fire is regarded as threatening‖ (Picton and Mack 11), in Stigmata it covers some other equally powerful, only more positive, meanings. For instance, and apart from the abovementioned references to the profundity of family bonding (particularly through female common experiences of menstruation and childbirth), red appears associated here with the creative force and with a passion for life that belies the suicidal attempt allegedly made by Lizzie. There is, in fact, a correlation between the positive notions attributed to this color in the novel and the similar concept in some West African countries; in Nigeria, for example, red is not likened to bellicosity or aggressiveness but to personal improvement (Picton and Mack 13), and its widespread connections with spiritual and religious beliefs have been thoroughly documented (Genovese 558). In addition to this, the metaphoric use of the colors in a quilt‘s top as evidence of a determined cultural ancestry resonates with the strategy used by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved (1987). At the beginning of this novel, the character of the elderly woman Baby Suggs, who had been a slave and lost most of her children, is trapped in a kind of existence that does not fully belong to the world of the living, nor to the realm of the dead. Baby Suggs, agonizing in some indefinite place similar to a limbo, is in fact starving for color: the drabness that reigns in her house is only altered by the colorful presence of two bright orange squares in a dark quilt, representing the joy of life in opposition to the bleak atmosphere of a colorless existence (Beloved 38). In the end, exhausted after a life of abuse and extortion, Baby Suggs decides to stop fighting and just find some

231 Black Stitches peace in the startling beauty of each and every tone of the palette: ―she lay down and thought about color for the rest of her life‖ (Beloved 176). Finally, and also in connection with the use of color as symptomatic for the characters‘ association with life or death (or the space in between), in Perry‘s novel it is noteworthy to see how Ayo perceived her first encounters with slaveholders as an otherworldly presence, describing the new land as the ―land of ghosts‖ (Perry 98). Her association of the white captors with afterlife specters also finds an echo in some African rituals which employ white as the color for mourning at funerals (Picton and Mack 13), in contrast with western traditional use of black for the same purpose. Ayo‘s perception of the white Americans as ghosts accurately describes her feeling that life as she knew it –and not just mere subsistence– has ended, and she sets out to retain her memories and pass them onto her descendants. Precisely because of this, she feels compelled to leave written proof of her story, and is adamant about making her daughter write it down for herself and for the generations to come. To conclude, it is relevant to observe how the novel moves beyond the idea of an individual‘s healing through art and expands it to the curative power of quilting for a whole family –which could be interpreted as the healing of a whole culture. The notion of art as a most effective instrument to empower marginalized black Americans has been expounded, among others, by Maya Angelou, who argues that ―we survived [extreme poverty and racial submission] particularly because of the inheritance left to us by our forebears as sure as steel managers left massive fortunes to their heirs‖ (Even the Stars Look Lonesome 123). As Angelou points out, a solid artistic tradition was probably the only type of (im)material wealth that could be inherited among generations, hence the simile with the financial gains made by some privileged white American families. Besides, and as the same author claims, the deliberate transmission of a rich artistic legacy not only helped the African American people to give shape to their cultural identity, but even to survive in terms of emotional and psychological health. As she claims, it was ―the healing, the sustaining and the supporting roles of art‖ (126) that allowed many generations to stay alive with the purpose of bequeathing that collective wealth.

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4.3. Quilts as a metalanguage: Faith Ringgold’s Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky and Jacqueline Woodson’s Show Way

Faith Ringgold‘s Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and Jacqueline Woodson‘s Show Way (2005) are two examples of how African American literature approaches the subject of slavery and the related phenomenon of the Underground Railroad network for children and young adult readers. Using their own particular aesthetic styles and choosing different perspectives, both illustrated books present a fictionalized adaptation of the significance of that network within slave narratives. In the first case, the painter and quilter Faith Ringgold is at the same time illustrator and narrator of the story, while in Woodson‘s book the pictures are the work of the illustrator Hudson Talbott. The choice of these two works for my study responds to the fact that they present the theme of African American quiltmaking from a different genre, that of children‘s and young readers‘ literature, and also because the connection established with those quilts is twofold: first, from the theme itself, and second, from the physical format of the story, which imitates the appearance and aesthetics of a real African American quilt. In Ringgold‘s story, two siblings, Cassie and her little brother Bee Bee, follow the spirit of the famous slave liberator Harriet Tubman, who guides them on a journey reminiscent of those undertaken by runaways in the pre-Civil War years. Tubman, portrayed in the story as the conductor of the Underground Railroad that moves around in the sky, announces to the two youngsters what the stages on board the train will be, until they reach freedom in Canada. Throughout the way, the plot line is used by Ringgold as visually and metaphorically descriptive of the Underground Railroad phenomenon, turning Tubman into the real conductor of the train which is about to set off with the two children on board. In fact, Ringgold‘s work paraphrases, by means of its narrative discourse as much as through its captivating illustrations, made by the author herself, many aspects of Tubman‘s real life.

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In the first place, the description of the train‘s conductor as a small and self- confident woman matches existing depictions of Tubman (Lowry 118), whose leadership skills and shrewdness are highlighted all along the story. Also, it is worth remembering certain events in the protagonist‘s biography which are present in Ringgold‘s work to different degrees of explicitness. As it turns out, one of Tubman‘s most remarkable skills was her capacity to move around stealthily, which helped enormously in her fugitive trips. This ability proved vital in the sense that she needed complete silence not just to travel unnoticed, but to obtain guiding signals from the natural elements around her. Further parallels between the real and the fictional characters can be seen in the fact that Harriet Tubman‘s childhood was marked by the loss of several family members, including her older sister, and her necessity to take care of her baby brother, Benjamin (Lowry 52). Although her sister was sold away when Harriet was too young to understand, this event must have left an indelible mark on her consciousness, as she would grow up to become almost obsessed with the necessity to return to her homeland in Maryland and liberate as many slaves as she possibly could:

To understand the ferocity of her determination, we must remember [how her sister seemed to simply have faded away] and how it must have affected the little girl to lie awake wondering what happened and to watch helplessly as her mother and her older brothers and sisters give themselves over to inconsolable despair, calling the name of the vanished sister. (Lowry 52)

This pattern recurrently appears throughout Tubman‘s life in her impulse to secure the lives of others and consider herself fully responsible for the fate of those she was guiding north, making sure that nobody was ever left behind. Interestingly, in Ringgold‘s story it is the young girl, Cassie, the one who adopts this protective attitude with respect to her brother, probably in an attempt to set the historical figure closer to the young readers‘ imagination, thus facilitating their identification with the character. The fact that, at the beginning of the story, Cassie loses sight of her brother (he turned a deaf ear to the girl‘s warning to step off the train, which she considers

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too dangerous) works as a simile for Tubman‘s permanent quest for security and family unity, an endeavor she would devote her whole life to.63 On the other hand, it is very revealing that Ringgold‘s tale shows a close connection between nature and the true meaning of freedom. The continuous reference to elements from the natural world –with which Tubman had become extremely familiar since a very young age– are used in the story as reliable guidance: from the birds whose songs alert Cassie to change direction, to the deep woods that shelter her along the dangerous journey. For instance, Ringgold points to the ―sea of clouds‖ inviting Bee Bee to join the carriage and follow the Underground Railroad; the flowers covering a hearse where runaways were hiding; the thick woods that awaited Cassie on her long and painful pilgrimage; the ―weather-beaten house‖ in the middle of the forest; the big rock facing north which acts as a signpost for the protagonist, etc. Frequently along the story, the half-hidden presence of the Conductor is accompanied by this conceptual association, for example through the description of Aunt Harriet‘s reactions, whose voice came at first ―like a gust of wind‖ and upon celebrating victory and emancipation ―yelled in a voice that shot through the air like a joyous bolt of lightning‖ (n.p.). In special, repeated references to water describe a sense of freedom: as if completing a cycle, Ringgold starts her narration by remembering the first slave cargos that arrived on American shores establishing black slavery in the country, until the liberation reached by Cassie at the Niagara Falls. Between the starting point and the culmination of Cassie‘s odyssey, water is several times mentioned as a natural accomplice in her quest: she is initially told by the Conductor Tubman to follow the rivers, and she frequently finds herself amidst streams and swamps, where she finds personal objects that her brother has left on the way.

63 In any case, it is important to observe that the concept of ―family unit‖, as seen from the African American experience, has frequently diverged with the European American traditional concept of the same term, which tends to assimilate it to a physical household. In contrast, the African American consideration of such family units relate more to what the anthropologist Carol B. Stack calls ―a kinship network‖ that would allude to a larger sense of community and that tends to provide mutual support in times of difficulty (Stack, ―The Kindred of Viola Jackson‖ 542-3). The same concept of ―kinship network‖ applies perfectly to Harriet Tubman‘s continuous quest for re- uniting the African American family, in a literal but also metaphorical sense.

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Since all of Ringgold‘s story is imbued with a highly sensorial description of the journey, this identification of wildlife with the deepest value of freedom appeals to the reader‘s emotions –and even to their subconscious mind. In special, the author seems interested in exploring this through certain strategies, based on visual and narrative symbology. In Ringgold‘s particular rendition of Tubman‘s feats, there exists a permanent tension between two opposing forces: the perils of defying status quo and disobeying legally established racism, and the powerful presence of the Underground Railroad network. Presenting both forces as mutually exclusive but intimately dependent on one another, an exhausting atmosphere of danger and fear underlie the whole plot, chasing the protagonist as an ever-present shadow. Ringgold masterfully hints at this menacing sensation by creating an atmosphere where white, sinister faces stand out from the background all through Cassie‘s journey. This is reinforced by Tubman‘s repeatedly warning Cassie that, regardless of how far north she manages to go, she will not be completely safe until she crosses the national frontier. This matches accurately with Tubman‘s real-life obsession to reach Canada, since a threatening feel never abandoned her –in fact, she made it her motto to trust no strangers along the way, and to rely only on her own intuitions. As a result, the white scary faces that continuously haunt Cassie symbolize Tubman‘s own anxieties not just of being caught by bounty hunters, but because she especially dreaded the idea of losing a single human life in her care. This threatening setting echoes the fact that, as an effect of her head injury produced years before by the attack of an overseer, Tubman experienced throughout her life numerous episodes of narcolepsy, a sudden loss of consciousness (Lowry 92), which could strike at any moment –even in the midst of her guiding a group of runaways, as happened on one occasion. This is perfectly recreated in the story book through a dream-like atmosphere that blends history and proven facts from Tubman‘s biography with oneiric scenes and imaginary situations, as abound in children and young readers‘ literature. In connection with these half-fictionalized scenarios, Ringgold intelligently introduces one of the most controversial aspects of the Underground Railroad phenomenon: the adoption of quilts as iconic guides in the escape. Here, the

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importance of quiltmaking for the success of the clandestine network is highlighted, apart from the use of a quilt that actively participates in Cassie‘s escape, by a metaphoric use of the narration, which simulates the completion of a quilt pattern. As it turns out, the Conductor gives Cassie a series of instructions on how, by following her own steps, emancipation can be obtained. The explanation of those instructions seems to give Cassie a clear pattern she must follow in order to complete her own quilt –her freedom and reunion with her stranded brother, whose handwritten notes and personal belongings are scattered all along the way. Re-constructing the path means, for Cassie, to be able to match all the ―scraps‖ together, since only by completing the complex pattern will they be free again. This simile with the elaborate process of planning and designing a quilt emphasizes the necessity, for the protagonist, to rely on Tubman‘s wisdom and to reflect on the importance of keeping one‘s courage and persistence. Although she is more than once tempted to surrender, she realizes that persevering is crucial to accomplishing the journey, and that turning back is not an option in her struggle to be free. In the process, the role of a guiding quilt flung on top of a wooden house in the middle of the forest becomes of key importance for the development of the plot. Presented as the antithesis of uncertainty and abandonment, the quilt appears as a symbol of refuge, purpose and hope. When the character representing Tubman indicates Cassie that she must pursue her journey through the woods until she glimpses ―a weather-beaten frame house with a star quilt‖ on its roof, both narrative and the matching illustrations place the quilt in a prominent position. The house displaying the star-quilt design represents a beacon in the middle of the darkness, and marks a turning point in the story. It is surely not coincidental that the design chosen by Ringgold as the quilt‘s central motif is a North Star, a pattern which has become iconic within the African American quilting tradition of abolitionism and runaways‘ resistance. Besides, the sudden apparition of this bold, colorful quilt matches Tubman‘s –and also Ringgold‘s, for that matter– daring personality, underscoring the idea that audacity and high doses of courage were needed in the escape from bondage.

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Also, the connections between quilts and the historical character of Harriet Tubman are supported by our knowledge that she regarded them in high esteem. Proof of this is the fact that she gave one of her hand-made quilts to the woman who initially hid her; on one occasion, she asserted that piecing quilt blocks was her ―favorite way to pass the time while hiding in the woods, waiting for sundown when she could guide her ‗passengers‘ to freedom‖ (Fellner 20). As has been previously discussed in section 3 of Chapter 1, the connotations of the theory that suggests a historical use of quilts in the pilgrimage of runaways moving northward are not exempt from controversy. In her four-year research on the matter, entitled ―Betsy Ross Redux: The Underground Railroad ‗Quilt Code‘‖ (2006), Leigh Fellner compiles a variety of reasons why such theories lack sufficient plausibility, and points to economic or cultural interests behind the promotion of that link.64 As she claims, the absence of archival documents corroborating the connection between slave-made quilts and the clandestine network that helped fugitives to escape proves by itself the fragility of the theory, of which she also pities its wrongful use as indoctrinating young readers into a false belief. For Fellner, blurring the borders between fiction and history may only lead to deception and a lack of awareness of the real historical facts, while creating a mythical past that contributes nothing to a truthful account of the black American culture. Likewise, the historian Kate Larson has objected to this idea of a Quilt Code (see section 1.3), complaining that

by dressing the story up all cute and pretty with quilt patterns and kindly folks who used them to guide runaways to freedom –then we don‘t have to talk about the realities of slavery […] By creating mythical stories the truth is eventually lost. No one needs myths as a substitute for history, nor as a way to explain the complications of history. (qtd. in Fellner 19)

However, even if it is easy to agree with Larson‘s claim that extensive and serious scholarship is always necessary to trace back the history of slavery with

64Betsy Ross is credited with being the first person to design and elaborate the embryonic model of the American flag. Since there exists no factual evidence or archival data documenting this but the episode is popularly accepted, Fellner uses the reference to Ross for its similarities with mythical rather than historically accurate events (Fellner 95).

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accuracy and dignity, a contradiction between such claim and the use of myth, especially if limited to the artistic arena, is not so evident to me. Certainly, I can only share the objection of these and other researchers with respect to the application of the Code as a means of distorting the brutality of slavery and the hardships suffered by those who dared escape, even when assisted by members of the Underground Railroad network. However, I am also able to appreciate a valuable contribution on the part of the Code as a semi-mythical concept and undoubtedly as a cultural manifestation, which in my opinion does not (or rather, should not) aim to replace history in its desirable role of analyzing contrasted data. In this sense, the Quilt Code controversy engages us in the interesting debate of legitimacy versus partiality regarding the rendition of historical events. Considering that official historiography is usually rendered by those in power, and that the canon admits nothing else than ―historian-as-authority and informant-as-subject‖ (Blee 322), it may not be far-fetched to at least consider the voice of the ―informant‖ as holding part of the truth as well. Although Kathleen Blee refers to the dichotomy between written (official) history and oral (unofficial, and usually silenced) description of events by their witnesses in the concrete case of Ku Klux Klan, a similar reasoning could apply to the Quilt Code phenomenon, since the unbalance of power between ―historians‖ and ―informants‖ is similarly heavy in both cases. On the other hand, historiography has very often resorted to literary or half- fictionalized accounts of factual episodes in the form of legends, mythical narratives and oral tales as a powerful instrument to reinforce the transmission of such knowledge, not as a substitute for it. More particularly within the context of African American lore, the lack or insufficiency of a written corpus has driven researchers (ethnographers, historians but also literary critics) to investigate the oral tradition of that culture, including mythic aspects, in earnest. This must be regarded as an effort to shed light on the unknown elements of a community that was forced to illiteracy for centuries, not to suggest a delusional version of its past. For all these reasons, I am prone to think that contributions such as those offered by the Quilt Code can be considered as complementary sources of knowledge, not as a means of distortion.

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On the other hand, and leaving the above considerations apart, it is undeniable that most human cultures have used fabric (relying on its patterns as much as its color) to transmit certain messages whose codification is usually understood only by members of such community. Thus, for instance, there is evidence that it is a common African practice to accord specific symbolic meanings to certain textiles: the quilt historian Schnuppe von Gwinner reminds us that West African tribes frequenltly relied on specific patterns and hues as indicative of hierarchical status: ―[e]ven at some distance, their strong colors gave the correct signal to those who approached them‖ (155). This practice could be in connection with the emergence of the Quilt Code myth, since in both cases the chosen textiles are carriers of a shared konwledge within a given human group. In the particular case of the Quilt Code phenomenon, there exists an additional element that should be considered: the fact that it empowers black women as active agents in the anti-slavery resistance and as being crucially involved in the Underground Railroad. Consequently, I partially disagree with Larson‘s statement. From my point of view, myths are necessary too: as long as they are not wrongfully presented or employed as a means to soften the cruelty of real events, they can play a determinant role in our perception of a cultural community, and even compensate for the lack of agency that standard (patriarchal and Eurocentric) historiography has usually accorded to the members of these communities. Besides, another interesting aspect lies at the core of the Quilt Code. Theories refusing its existence mostly support their arguments on the idea that no written records remain about it, as a conclusive matter of fact. Yet, is it possible that the causes for that lack of documentation reside somewhere else? Could it be that, just as the tradition of quiltmaking has gone unnoticed for the male public until well into the past century, so did black-made quilts remain totally unperceived by the white gaze during the time when the Underground Railroad operated? As Judith Fetterley contends in ―Reading about Reading,‖ very often the observer‘s prejudice renders them/us unable to appropriately ‗read‘ and culturally understand an object whose significance, however, may be clear to the insiders of that culture (147). Using the example of Susan Glaspell‘s short story

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―A Jury of her Peers‖ (1917) –in which two men fail to identify a woman as the author of a crime because they ignore certain clues that were traditionally alien to the male scope—, Fetterley explores how the readers‘ previous set of concepts renders certain aspects of the surrounding reality simply invisible to their eyes, thus making a text unintelligible for them. Applying a similar argument to the Quilt Code system, it could be argued that the rigid perspective from the white cultural paradigm would have blatantly ignored the meaning –or even, the presence altogether– of those African American quilts containing a specific language in their designs, which would explain the absence of attention to it, and the corresponding written references on the matter. Truthfully, the lack of solid documentation makes it difficult to blindly believe in the existence of the Code either, but this does not, in my opinion, automatically erase all plausibility to the contrary: some alternative reasons, mostly ethnographical, could have been overlooked. In any case, it seems undeniable that black American women have historically resorted to the fabrication of quilts as vehicles for transmitting subliminal information, or to tell a story that only those belonging to their same community could grasp. For example, in the novel How to Make an American Quilt (1991), by Whitney Otto, it is described how a female descendant of slaves, called Pauline, fights to preserve an inherited and very visual Story Quilt in which her ancestor had narrated the crucial events in their family. Coveted by the woman Pauline is working for as a servant, the quilt is temporarily acquired by the former, who nevertheless fails to understand (or care for) the meaning included in the scenes of the quilt (135). In the cinematographic version of the novel, Pauline‘s great-niece gently caresses the quilt‘s surface, while explaining the story behind each of its scenes: ―My aunt Pauline passed this quilt down to me. It was made by my great-great-grandmother. She called it The Life Before. It‘s a Story Quilt. It‘s meant to be read‖ (1:07‘09‘‘). The fact that the creator of the quilt had not only given it a title, but striven to keep it within her own family against all pressures, gives an idea of its value as a narrative piece. Besides, the story behind each picture can only be understood by those who know their meaning, therefore remaining undecipherable, illegible, to anybody else. This, in

241 Black Stitches turn, echoes in a certain way a characteristic feature of African American culture, the custom of ―signifying,‖ which consists in communicating with each other via connotative and subliminal hints that are solely comprehended by members of that community (Nordquist n.p.). Hence, to a certain extent it can be argued that the metalanguage of some Story Quilts conveys a meaning that only those familiar with a shared experience can access and value in its entirety. With respect to the Quilt Code trope and Ringgold‘s children‘s story (as happens with other similar narratives based on the same theme), it can be said that its most valuable aspect does not lie in the historical existence or inexistence of the Freedom Code. Being, in any case, a fictionalization of a historical character and events, the fact that a specific part of the narrative lacks ―scientific‖ basis is not at all relevant to measure the artistic and literary value of the work. In it, the dramatization of events, the craftily designed characters and the powerful visual language of the illustrations are used by the author to recreate the atmosphere of solitude and fear that slaves seeking freedom must have experienced. Even if adamantly rejecting the existence of such Codes, none of these qualities should be denied, in fairness, to Ringgold‘s work. In a similar vein to Ringgold‘s story, Jacqueline Woodson‘s picture book Show Way (2005) also tackles the topic of the Quilt Code, although in this case the tone is quite different from the one in Ringgold‘s.65 Show Way presents a multi-generational perspective, within Woodson‘s family, as she traces back her own ancestors‘ roots in the slavery era. Interestingly, the writer concentrates all her attention on the female members of her genealogy who, according to her story, struggled to retain as much as they could of their cultural legacy. In this partly autobiographical story, the simple but powerful plot revolves around a central idea: the transmission of a common memory from one generation to the next, at a time when practically no material objects were kept in their possession. The metaphor of the quilt as the vehicle used for transmitting that wisdom reveals the high emotional value they have historically had for African American women. On the other hand, the choice of the first-person narration testifies to the writer‘s interest in putting the female voice in the spotlight, expressing the

65A video of Woodson‘s reading of her book is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r8Rtu2PLJ0

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emotional intricacies and the devastating effects of slavery from the perspective of the women who lived under it. As the story begins, we are presented with Woodson‘s ancestor, whose name is not revealed, who lived six generations before her. Referred to as ―Soonie‘s great-grandma‖, this anonymous woman –then just a little girl being sold from Virginia to a South Carolina plantation– initiates the long journey back into the past traced by the writer. Forced to part from her family, she is only allowed to carry one thing with her: some muslin that belonged to her mother, who pinned onto the fabric two needles and a thread ―dyed bright red with berries from the chokecherry tree‖ (Woodson 7). The tradition among slaves to use natural resources (mostly plants and herbs) to dye cloth in a great variety of hues is supported by numerous accounts in slave narratives and other historical records. Thus, for instance, hickory and walnut bark produced the color brown; yellow was obtained through cedar moss, pine straw dyes gave purple and ―cherry, elm, and red oak imparted red (a favorite color)‖ (Fry 44). Among the many theories attempting to explain the preference within slave communities for the color red and other hues related to it, there seems to be a certain quorum for those which show a link between that tone and the slaves‘ original cultures. For instance, Gladys-Marie Fry has hypothesized on the various reasons that may account for this color choice, ranging from climatological considerations to certain African- and Caribbean-originated cults (Fry 44-5). This color, frequently associated with strong emotions and human survival, could also symbolize, within the slavery context, a connection with intergenerational transmission through bloodline and even a reference to women‘s biological processes, as commented above in reference to Perry‘s Stigmata.66 Besides, this red thread seems to reflect both the suffering and pain of African American women at that time, on the one hand, and their common hope of deliverance on

66 Apart from this, some researchers have also attributed the preference for red to the blood shed at warfare (Genovese 558). From a broader perspective, the color red in all its nuances could also be linked to the physical toil to which black slaves (women and men) were submitted and, by extension, also to their psychological suffering.

243 Black Stitches the other –in the story, it is exclusively women who hand down the cloth and the thread amongst generations. The quilt as a powerful, almost sacred object, is present on every spread of the book, from the original cut-out opening page to the back cover. Often, it appears as the physical coverlet made from colorful patches and displaying a bold arrangement of designs, while other times the visual imagery of the pages refer to quilts through the background layouts, which may look like a set of fabric patches (even framing words and sentences inside) stitched together. Besides, the choice of certain expressions –such as ―large patch of land‖ (Woodson 6), ―colored thread‖ (10), ―[she] stitched […] songs into art‖ (36), etc– matches the book‘s visual design, in some cases by resorting to mixed-media techniques that include snippets from newspapers and photographs of Woodson‘s relatives inserted in the illustrated patchwork of the pages. In this way, the artistic work of both writer and illustrator are blended in the book to create a quilting metalanguage of its own, through the interdependence of text and image, where quilts and the women who made (and transmitted) them shape all African American history. Furthermore, following Roland Barthes‘ famous remark that any given text is endowed with a ―weave of signifiers‖ (159), it can be argued that the multilayered works of Ringgold and Woodson give greater sense to that expression, due to their simultaneous use of languages to convey a message.67 The text is here woven into the linguistic and the semiotic code, combined together by the authors to provide a twofold meaning. Considering that ―Show Way deals mostly with African American ancestry and with the impact of black culture in America from the nineteenth century to the present, it is revealing to observe how quilts are represented as hallmarks along that trajectory. First, Woodson presents them as symbol of collectivity and a certain solace and joy during the quilting bees held in slavery times, or framing other African American rituals like the ―jumping the broom‖ ceremony that signified the marriage of two slaves. Then, they are portrayed as ―show ways‖ into freedom during the Underground Railroad period. Later on, quilts appear

67 Barthes also pointed out that ―etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric‖ (Image, Music, Text 159), linking the etymological origins of the term with its connotations as a cloth of many layers and threads.

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associated with the Civil Rights marches and nation-wide protests that took place in the United States halfway through the past century. The writer‘s aim to give continuity to her ancestors‘ life stories is also observed in the poetical repetition of some events that seem to adopt a cyclical nature. For example, Woodson‘s forebear Mathis May being sold away at seven and parting only with a piece of her mother‘s blanket to remember home, mirrors a similar episode that had happened to her mother when she was exactly the same age. Reproducing this sequence of events, by the use of quilt patterns overlapping each other and the repetition of some images and tropes, Woodson wants to echo the tragedies lived by the women in her family; looking at it from a larger perspective, Woodson is making the same claim about the fate of thousands of other African American women in history. This idea is emphasized as well by the fact that the story begins exactly as it ends: with the narrator uttering the same words, mimicking Woodson‘s habit of telling the tale to her own daughter as a bedtime ritual, while also opening space to give further continuation to the transmission of these memories in the future. This circular pattern can be ―read‖ as a quilt in itself: in fact, the all-pervasive presence of quilting imagery along the story should not be taken as simply illustrative for the plot, or as merely aesthetic embellishment to it. Rather, it plays the important role of exemplifying how quilts were used, indeed, to be ―understood‖ or ―translated‖ within the community. As the writer explains about her grandmother Soonie, already in the context of the early twentieth century, ―[she] sewed those quilts to live. Sewed those quilts to remember. And though some could book read, most could not. Stars and moons and roads. Picture reading was what they‘d always known‖ (Woodson 29). This passage of the story shows how illiteracy still affected black Americans many years after having obtained their freedom, and how unequal access to education meant that, for many, being able to preserve a common culture through non-verbal language was vital. Deprived of other biographical means such as photography (albums, portraits…) or written texts (letters, diaries, wills…), the condensation of those rich family heirlooms in textile format became of capital importance.

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Finally, with respect to the thematic aspects of the two works, it is noteworthy to say that there exist some striking similitudes between them. Even if the theme of the Underground Railroad is presented in Woodson‘s narrative very differently from Ringgold‘s romanticized vision of Harriet Tubman, both stories share certain features. Firstly, what the two have in common is the use of real events and characters as point of departure: Ringgold‘s dealing with Tubman and her rescuing journeys are as factual as Woodson‘s predecessors living in bondage and using quilts as an arm of resistance. Secondly, both highlight the trials lived by the women who preceded them and who managed, despite the odds, to survive and open the path for the following generations. Yet, one of the most relevant aspects that the two works have in common is the unquestioned existence of a Quilt Code being employed to lead refugees to the free territories of North America and Canada, and the visual metaphor of those quilts as the guiding light in the middle of the darkest times. Similarly, and paralleling the already-mentioned scene in Ringgold‘s Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky, the author of Show Way reminds her audience (who in the first stance is her daughter, although she is obviously addressing all subsequent readers) of the old tradition of pinning inside the children‘s clothes little scraps of fabric for their identification, presented in the book as a reassuring ―show way‖ for the little black girls wearing them (Woodson 34-5).68 The combination of the selection of the color red and the custom of carrying those protective pieces of fabric inside one‘s garment has been explored by researchers who claim that ―black quiltmakers may have formerly associated the red squares [present at the core of patterns like the Log Cabin] with widely- used self-protective or healing charms, called ―mojos,‖ covered with folded or sewn red cloth, which were worn inside the clothing‖ (Arnett and Arnett 108). In conclusion, the two picture books analyzed in this section bespeak their authors‘ will to pay tribute to a tragic but memorable past, and to continue spreading a deeper understanding of the role of their female predecessors, helping

68 Though Woodson dedicates her seven-generation story to her daughter in the hope that she will continue the transmission of her family‘s legacy, the author has suggested an implicit appeal to other readers, and especially to those of African American descent, to regard their own family history in a similar way (Woodson, ―Books I‘ve Written‖ n.p.).

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to keep their cultural memory alive. Instrumental for this purpose, quilts are presented along the process as the material artifact that binds generations together, acting in their pedagogical function as an antidote against forgetfulness.

4.4. Bed comforts to alleviate the harsh times: Phyllis Lawson’s Quilt of Souls

Quilt of Souls (2015), by the novelist, autobiographer and quilter Phyllis Lawson, gathers many of the narrative themes heretofore analyzed concerning the African American female experience throughout the twentieth century as seen from the perspective of the quilters and their peers. It brings together some recursive topics such as the strong matrilineal bonds within black communities, the perception of family (and cultural) history through women‘s eyes or the profound necessity to exact beauty out of ordinary acts and prosaic objects. In addition to all this, Quilt of Souls engages the reader into other equally important aspects underlying the universe of black women‘s quiltmaking, by broadening the scope to less common elements such as the effects of cultural and racial collaboration in the creation of such quilts, or the effects of family dismemberment on the production and conservation of heirloom quilts.69

Lawson‘s narrative is in the form of memoir, told from a very personal perspective through the author‘s musings on her own childhood, but it is also a story that could reflect the common destiny of many other African American families during the early to mid- twentieth-century decades. The decision of Lawson‘s parents to send her southward to be taken care of by the child‘s grandmother was frequent among African American families who went through dire times in the industrial North. Researchers estimate that, especially between 1910 and 1930, the Great Migration attracted tens of thousands of black people from the Jim Crow South to the ―promised land‖ of the Northern states, which during slavery had symbolized the hope of freedom and now had become a place

69 Such a cultural and racial fusion is patent in the novel, among other things, through Grandma Lula‘s Native American ancestry.

247 Black Stitches of refuge for the black population (Hine and Thompson 212, 214).70 Sharing a similar fate meant that countless black communities became once again disintegrated due to the family dislocations that were forced on them. In addition to this, only a few decades following the end of slavery, many of those who had migrated to the North during the rural exodus of the Great Migration were now forced to take their children back to their families still living in the South, thereby undertaking a curious sort of ―reverse migration‖ that enabled them to continue working in the industrialized areas of Northern cities.71 In some cases, even whole family units moved back South when the expected betterments of what Carol B. Stack called ―migratory wage labor‖ failed to happen (546). Most usually, due to the rigors of economic downturn and a variety of other social reasons (for example, a lack of access to planned parenthood and endemic employment discrimination), the situation translated into generations of children temporarily ―orphaned‖ and raised by other family members, frequently the grandmothers they had never met. Maya Angelou describes the unsettling experience, for a young child, of being abandoned by their parents in the opening lines of her famous memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): ―Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone […] back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises‖ (10). The vacuum left by such abandonments produced a bitter imprint in the minds of those children who, like Lawson, could not remember the faces of their own mothers as they were growing up. On an unconscious level, it is probable that certain kinship customs (such as singing specific songs, cooking according to old family recipes or the continuation of traditional quilting) helped those children mend the broken pieces inside their souls, since those activities functioned as

70 According to Hine and Thompson, the prospect of economic advancement was not the only reason that ignited the massive exodus: while black men tried to escape from the constant fear of beatings and lynching acts, black women found in the journey North a safer workplace scenario from the point of view of sexual assault and rape. Even if the North offered no substantial betterment in the kind of opportunities they had access to (many remained confined to domestic labor), the higher wages and the lower risks of suffering sexual violence may have been crucial for their decision to migrate (214-5). 71 To make things worse, these waves of returned migration would soon encounter an added difficulty: the consequences of the Great Depression, which aggravated the already meager living conditions of many black families around the country.

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connectors with the missing relatives –and most especially, with their mothers. Sewing in all its forms, and in particular quilting, provided those children with a much-needed sense of continuity, and helped give answers for the many empty spaces in their young lives. If, as Hazel V. Carby has argued, ―[t]he search for and establishment of kinship is a recurrent Afro-American literary metaphor‖ (136), that longing is certainly present in Lawson‘s story through what could be called a ―diaspora within the diaspora‖: the emotional grief from kinship rupture had to be added to the already existing cultural breakdown of their ancestral roots, in a doubly painful process of alienation. Apart from the family dismemberment produced by this phenomenon, other types of involuntary separations were also common within black communities many decades after the official ending of bondage –in fact, it can be argued that their repercussions lasted well into the 1960s and 1970s, when some of the atrocious effects of racial and gender-based discrimination started to be politically and culturally contested. These scenarios included different forms of family division, but probably the most usual one consisted in the alienation of black women from their offspring as they were massively hired as full-time caretakers in white homes. Although in most cases these workers insisted on ―distanc[ing] themselves physically from erstwhile masters‖ and establishing more autonomous ways of life, many were not able to do so and had to accept live-in jobs as cooks, maids or washerwomen (Hunter 58). Especially in these cases, the paradox lay in the fact that many black women‘s access to the upbringing of their offspring was severely thwarted by their necessity to earn a salary through rearing the children of white families instead. Black women‘s bodies, argues Carole Boyce Davies, ―were appropriated to raise healthy white upper-class children,‖ with the subsequent effect that ―in and out of slavery, [these women] often did not have the luxury of caring for their own children (144). Lawson‘s account of similar experiences in her family‘s preceding generations points at this bitter dilemma that affected thousands of other black women. Addressing the conflict with a mixture of grief and nostalgia for the broken bonds, the author reflects upon the consequences that such

249 Black Stitches disruptions had on the psyche of countless mothers (and their children) during several decades. In Quilt of Souls, Lawson recalls how at age 4 it was decided by her family that she would be separated from hometown Detroit, where she lived with her parents and eight siblings, to the small village of Livingston, Alabama, to be brought up by her maternal grandmother Lula Young Horn (1883-1986). The author describes the process whereby that particular grandmother-granddaughter bond is established through her nearly decade-long stay in Livingston, while she gradually forgets the facial features of her parents and siblings and becomes deeply attached to life in the countryside. The commonality of similar experiences for so many other black families tended to produce, according to some researchers, a kind of ―surrogate motherhood‖ where children were raised by a collective body of relatives (usually female, and very usually grandmothers, aunts or even older sisters) who over time ―acquired parenthood [that] often lasts throughout the child‘s lifetime‖ (Stack 47). In consequence, the bonds that developed between them transcended the circumstances of non-biological motherhood, to the point that the child eventually considered the woman who had raised them up as their true mother (Stack 47). The necessity to offer long-overdue reparation to all ―[t]hose heroic grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s [who] have been passed over by history‖ (Lawson xiv) traverses the novel from the author‘s preface to the end. Lawson states that it is only fair to at last give those women the appropriate recognition, since ―[n]o notice has been taken of how they toiled to raise grandchildren who were left on their doorsteps: the endless hours […] drying the tears of those young children who were considered a surplus‖ (xiv). Indeed, Lawson‘s work is thoroughly permeated by the presence of the elder women that have accompanied her since childhood, leaving an indelible impression in her mind. Being a recollection of those memories, Quilt of Souls presents the reader with a vast number of real-life characters that walk by the novel‘s pages as the writer reminisces about her early years in the South. Except for three of these characters (Grandma Lula‘s current husband, named Edgar, the mysterious Moses, a Civil Rights fighter she had been married to in her youth, and

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Jeremiah, the young man engaged to her sister Ella), the novel recreates an all- female universe inhabited by strong-willed women who share the common traits of determination, self-respect and a love for recreating themselves while watching and listening to Grandma Lula as she sews and narrates her compelling stories (Lawson 55). This bittersweet loss and (re)discovery of home draws on the traumatic experiences of mobility and forced migration experienced throughout the past century within innumerable black communities in America. In this sense, Lawson‘s work takes over and gives continuation to one of the most painful themes of African American women‘s literature, ―[t]he questions of movement and migratory subjectivity‖ that so deeply affected the writers‘ memories (Davies 150). Simultaneously, the novel explores the devastating effects that family severance held on its members, describing the chain of tragic events that took place when Lawson‘s grandmother, then a young woman, was working as the caretaker for the Rogers‘s, a white Mississippi family. As a bitter paradox, during several years the Rogers‘s household demanded more and more of Lula‘s assistance due to its increasing volume, while Lula managed to see her equally growing family only a few hours a day, if any. The fact that Lula lived far from her employers‘ home and that she already had seven children made her ―grow mighty weary‖, with a heartache ―for my po‘ children. But I have to earn money, and I tellin‘ myself that all my hard work goin‘ to give them a better life‖ (Lawson 79). The resentment of Lula‘s older daughter, Sarah, who adopted the role of caregiver for all the remaining siblings, was aggravated by her mother‘s increasingly longer stays at the white family‘s.72 Mrs. Rogers‘s last pregnancy with a girl, Victoria, will unfurl a series of dramatic events. After Mrs. Rogers dies in labor, Lula‘s mixed feelings of responsibility and desolation make her stay even longer with her employers‘ family, further aggravating the gap between her

72 Although Phyllis never came to meet her, the presence of her long-deceased aunt Sarah haunts the author‘s memories like a ghostly figure. In a way, Sarah‘s estrangement from her mother represents all the disfunctions and unbalance derived from the forced family separations that have been described.

251 Black Stitches daughter Sarah and herself. In the end, Lula finally returns home, only to find out that Sarah has escaped, probably overwhelmed by the demands of being left in charge of the whole family and resentful against her mother, who now regrets that ―[a]ll her sacrifice had been in vain; all her trudging back and forth and spending long, soul-numbing days in someone else‘s house had come to naught‖ (80). It is relevant to observe how many black American women during approximately a century-long period (in rough, from the 1870s to the 1970s), lacked not only the possibility of becoming fully independent beings from a socio- economic point of view (in that sense, a fate shared with most white women of the era), but even the mere capacity of raising their own offspring on a full-time basis in case they would have wanted to do so –a fact that nevertheless did not save them from the drudgery of domestic work. The tragedy of Grandma‘s double loss (first missing the early years of her own children, then literally losing her first-born daughter forever) makes itself vivid on the quilt she is now making for her granddaughter, Phyllis. The arrival of this child into the life of the elderly Grandma Lula seems to rekindle the hurtful memories of the daughter who had abandoned her so many years ago. At the same time, looking back into that part of her past makes her remember how Mrs. Rogers‘s daughter had to grow up as an orphan too. The red and white plaid cloth Lula chooses for the section of the quilt that reflects that episode was the fabric that Mrs. Rogers had originally bought with the idea of making a dress for Victoria, her expected baby. As if coming full circle, that cloth reunites symbolically both the mothers who lost their children and the children who grew up without a mother. While she watches Grandma Lula hesitate with the cloth between her hands, the young Phyllis meditates on the healing power of that quilting work: ―I wanted her to sew this piece of fabric into the body of the quilt to create a sense of closure, help heal her wound‖ (81). Undoubtedly, quilts considered both as a process and as a product acted as a therapeutic instrument for all those ―lost generations‖ during the long years of psychological and physical disconnection. While the slave women in Lawson‘s family had had ―the spirit to make something of [their] own creation‖ (47), and their descendants elaborated the coverings ―as a way for people to refocus their

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gaze from the ugliness‖ (xiv) that often reigned in their lives, others simply engaged in the act of quilting as a way to produce a lasting artifact whose elaboration process eluded the monotony of sheer repetitiveness and, more importantly, offered an outcome that could be preserved and enjoyed through the senses for decades to come.73 Elaine Showalter has pointed at the artist‘s personal criteria, while making a quilt, as one of the differentiating factors that set apart this particular type of needlework: ―piecing is not a repetitious recycling of design elements, but a series of aesthetic decisions that involve the transformation of conventions‖ (Sister‟s Choice 150). Still, other quilters devoted their efforts to recuperating their own or their beloved ones‘ emotional balance, in times of great hardship and distress. As the young Phyllis admits, watching her grandmother quilt always had a soothing effect on her, especially since the moment the two got involved in the task of mending (practically creating from zero, as it was almost in shreds) an old quilt that was intended to be her legacy. Despite her short age, the girl was aware of the uniqueness and symbolic force of that action, acknowledging that it had the power not only to make her feel special and relevant for the first time in her life, but even to fulfill the empty spaces left by her traumatic separation from her mother. If, as Joanne M. Braxton suggests, the act of writing one‘s autobiography responds to the inner necessity to give continuity and meaning to childhood‘s creativity and to provide some logical articulation for the most painful losses in one‘s life (145-6), Lawson‘s autobiography truthfully conforms to both criteria, with the peculiarity in this case that the inner journey is guided by the writer‘s memories deployed in her grandmother‘s quilts. Also according to Braxton, there exists a powerful tradition of black American female writers who have resorted to autobiography as a literary search for the self and for the collective, since ―the quest is not only for survival but also for an authentic, self-defining black female

73 The search for beauty and creativity to oppose surrounding ugliness and a suffocating atmosphere is a core theme in the works of other African American women writers. In In Search of Our Mothers‟ Gardens (1983), Alice Walker remembers how that quest for finding relief through beauty had a profound impact in her childhood, and she attributes this healing power to her mother‘s vibrant talent for gardening: ―because of my [mother‘s] creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms‖ (241). Even if it was not in their power to fight the bleakness of poverty in their lives by any other means, finding shelter in their own creativity was in itself an act of contestation, a therapeutic measure, and a quiet form of triumph.

253 Black Stitches identity‖ (187) and, significantly, the acquisition of such positive self-image is often transmitted via surrounding female figures, present and past (188). Lawson‘s narrative provides continuation to that literary tradition, evidencing the psychologically and culturally nurturing role of her female relatives, friends and teachers. The physical common link among most of them seems to revolve around the activity of quilting, employed by the author as a metaphor for the thread that stitches many lives together but also, and at the same time, as the physical objects that trigger off the terribly hurtful memories from their past. In the memoir, the quilt that is intended to be Phyllis‘s bequest represents a life journey in itself, insomuch as it can be considered the central theme of her narrative: from the time the little girl arrives in Livingston feeling completely torn to her adult years as a writer, the quilt becomes the symbol of the narrator‘s personal odyssey, and it is also the object that witnesses all the crucial phases of that voyage. Indeed, the narrator remembers how her first nights living with her grandparents were full of melancholy, fear and a sense of abandonment that prevented her from sleeping. The little girl‘s situation echoes Angelou‘s remembrance of her own traumatic experience as a migrant child, when she states that ―[i]f growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is unnecessary insult‖ (Caged Bird 9). In Phyllis‘s case, emotional distress was accompanied by physical discomfort, as she had to get used to sleeping in a hostile surrounding of rodents lurking around her bed and very low temperatures. The freezing cold she experienced on her first weeks in the old country house would not be mitigated by the pile of quilts stacked one on top of the other on her bed. One night, when Grandma placed a different quilt upon the others, the little girl‘s sense of cold and grief suddenly evaporated. ―I couldn‘t move‖, recounts Phyllis. ―I felt a sense of unimaginable comfort […] Swaddled like an infant in a receiving blanket. It didn‘t make sense, but that quilt engulfed me in a feeling of bliss […]. That old quilt had personality and from the moment Grandma laid it on my bed, I claimed it as my own (13).

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The evolution of that life journey will be accompanied by the reconstruction of this particular quilt that missed so many parts that already was ―barely hanging on its backing‖ (13). From that first moment, the young girl takes refuge (on a physical and emotional level) in that special domestic object, clinging to it as a lost traveler would to their only map. Further, as the story unfolds, the quilt will function as one of the few continuums of stability in her life, and as the instrument that will help place all the scattered pieces of her life in their right position, making sense of each one of them. Mirroring this process of self-reconstruction from rags to wholeness are the life stories of other women that Grandma reveals, little by little, during her long quilting sessions. The young girl‘s initial reluctance to having a quilt made entirely from scraps of discarded clothes that used to belong to now defunct people gives way to a growing understanding of the value of such an object. As a matter of fact, when Phyllis realizes that the soils that marred the cloth (from blood, tears or sweat) were so deeply ―embedded into the fibers of the quilt‖ (34) that soap could not remove them, she develops a more profound comprehension of the emotional and cultural value of those scraps. The transformation of Phyllis‘s quilt finds a parallel with her life‘s evolution in a similar manner to the way other women‘s stories had changed thanks to or as the same time as their quilts were being made. In one of her sessions, Grandma reminisces about the tragic life of a woman named Miss Daisy, whose hopeless circumstances had forced her into prostitution. Vilified and scorned by the whole village, one day she approaches the only person in Livingston who did not repudiated her, Phyllis‘s grandmother, asking for help in the restoration of a badly damaged quilt she owns. Grandma‘s decision to recompose it and make it ―live again‖ (94) instills in the little girl the idea that quilts effectively hold the power to redeem a person‘s battered existence, even when (or especially if) nothing or nobody else will. In addition, Miss Daisy‘s quilt story reflects a sense of solidarity between women that is often present in the text, symbolized in this case by Grandma‘s generosity to use her own fabric ―to replace the sections that were tattered or burnt‖ (97) until it ―looked almost brand new‖ (98). Her custom of relieving some

255 Black Stitches of the burden of those who are in emotional pain by offering them a quilt, be it new or a mended version of an old one, echoes Bets Ramsey‘s opinion that ―a gift of a quilt is a gift of oneself‖ (190). The human bond derived from an act like this is perfectly summarized in the words of the contemporary quilt researcher Katherine Bell, when she identifies quilting, and particularly quilting to alleviate somebody else‘s suffering, as ―reclaiming, saving, mending, and unifying. The result, the quilt itself, solves a basic problem –the need for warmth– but it represents much more: [it is] an attempt to make something beautiful out of what otherwise might have been wasted, and a desire to make some kind of peace‖ (4). The profound emotional connection that can be established with this type of patchwork coverings, and the psychological support that can be derived from them are also evident in the way the narrator describes Miss Daisy‘s awestricken reaction when she receives her restored quilt, holding it ―like it was the newborn child she never got to have‖ (Lawson 98) after having suffered several miscarriages in her life. In a time and place where other forms of psychological assistance were totally unavailable for certain social groups, elaborating or receiving a hand-made quilt from a beloved person unquestionably functioned as therapeutic support, supplying the help and comfort that official medicine could not (or would not) provide (Birch 188).74 Another example of the healing effects derived from quilting can be observed in Phyllis‘s ambivalent relationship with her mother, whom she intensely misses on the first stages of her Alabaman life but gradually starts to regard in a different light, remembering her cruel treatment from early childhood. During her stay in the South, Phyllis manages to develop a bond with her quilt that will act as a surviving tool not only in times of loneliness and sadness, but also as a protective armor when, many years later, her mother returns to bring Phyllis back to the North without prior notice. Already accustomed to living with her aging grandparents in a small-town setting, the idea of moving back to a Northern urban city, and to a life surrounded by strangers, paralyzes the young girl, whose decision-making capacity is once again annulled. Unable to, at least,

74 Once again, the importance of quilts as purveyors of emotional support in times of hardship is made evident in African American women‘s literature. See section 2 of Chapter 4, regarding Morrison‘s treatment of color in hand-made quilts as a strategy to alleviate suffering.

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keep her most treasured object (her mother insisted the quilt was too big for the journey, forbidding its transportation), Phyllis seems doomed to relive the traumatic experience of separation, this time from her beloved grandmother and from the quilt they had been sewing together. The separation of the young girl from her bequeathed quilt represents, in sum, her detachment from all the things that she had learned to care about in life, since it embodied all the family memories transmitted through Grandma Lula‘s wisdom. Years after having been uprooted from her quiet existence in the country and relocated to a hostile environment in Detroit, when Phyllis finds out that her grandparents‘ old house has burned down, her hopes of ever retrieving the quilt shrink to practically none: ―My cherished past had gone up in smoke‖, since ―I‘d never hear the rest of the stories inside the cloths of that old cotton sack [where Grandma kept all her fabric patches]‖ (165). To her amazement, however, the chest containing this and other family keepsakes had survived the fire; in spite of this, Phyllis‘s eager search from that day on never seems to shed light on the whereabouts of the quilt. In the end, however, Phyllis‘s mother returns it to her, admitting that she had kept it in secret after the fire and that she had always perceived the influence of this object on Phyllis. Truthfully, the recovery of the lost quilt is metaphoric for the girl‘s final reconciliation with the woman who first deserted her and then pushed her back to a belligerent world, even submitting her to severe beatings. So many years after this painful episode, it seemed evident that the only way for Phyllis to reconcile with her traumatic relationship with the past (and with her mother) would necessarily involve the restitution of her quilt, which represented all she had come to love in life. The narrator‘s mother eventually admits that her long concealment of the quilt had been motivated by jealousy, since Phyllis had been lucky enough to receive all the attention, care and transmission of family memories from Grandma Lula that Phyllis‘s mother had never enjoyed herself. On the other hand, beyond the therapeutic effect that quilts undoubtedly had, their connection with an even more intimate or personal sphere can be observed as well. From a broader perspective, literary aspects regarding black women‘s psychotherapy, in particular as they relate to the sphere of spirituality,

257 Black Stitches have been gaining increased attention from critics and writers alike (Beaulieu, Writing African American Women 814). More precisely, the nexus between the spiritual world of a woman quilter and the procedure of sewing is frequently emphasized in both formal studies on quilting and the fictional (and non-fictional) literature that revolves around the activity. In Lawson‘s work, although the protagonist obviously develops an emotional bond with her quilt for everything it stands for, even greater importance is given to the spiritual side of the process rather than to the final product itself. Hence, Grandma Lula‘s all-natural relationship with the world of non-visible presences and the spirits of the dead appears very frequently associated with her sewing sessions. The acceptance of a supernatural dimension and its embedding in the development of their characters‘ destiny permeates the work of some of the most remarkable black women writers since the late twentieth century, as is the case with Julie Dash‘s Daughters of the Dust (1997), Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple (1983) or Toni Morrison‘s Beloved (1997). In the novels by the latter, for instance, otherworldly spirits and a universe of West African-derived imagery are incarnated in many of her living and dead characters, usually playing a crucial role in the development of the plots (qtd. in Gupta and Mahal 247). In Quilt of Souls, one of Phyllis‘s first encounters with these otherworldly forces takes place during one of her first weeks in Alabama. As she looks back in time, one of her earliest memories there relates to the cultural treatment of the experience of death within black Southern communities. When she came across a man apparently sleeping on his bed, in a house where all his bedding (including the quilts made by Grandma Lula, his sheets and even his mattress) were hanging outside, she certainly ignored this was part on an old Southern custom: the man, who had died that day, was now resting on his cooling board, and his family was complying with the traditional belief that the dead person‘s bedding items must all remain on the outside until sunset, to help the departed one‘s spirit find its way toward peace. Truth be told, the relation of clothing with some religious beliefs is not a feature exclusively found among the African American cultures, but it could be argued that, within the context of Lawson‘s story, a particular connection is

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made between those beliefs and the complex universe of quilts (considered, again, as the product and as the process). Even more, the link is established not only with a so-called set of religious customs, but more broadly, with the spiritual world at large, which from a Southern perspective could be named a mystique of supernatural events. The same perception is shared by other quilt historians and collectors who have noticed the multifaceted powers of African Americans quilts, especially in regard with the spiritual significance they transmit: some are made for ―memorializing great pain, and other times, great triumphs. Other[s] are created with specific powers: to heal, protect, woo, resolve, or acquire. Still others are made as gifts, usually across generations, and honor significant rites of passage‖ (Freeman xviii). The idea that the spirit of a deceased one may or may not be able to rest in peace depending on the treatment given by their relatives to that person‘s sleeping utensils, in particular to their bedcovers, finds its echo in some other passages of the memoir, where the protective or guiding role of these handmade quilts appears repeatedly. One instance of this lies in Grandma Lula‘s own cultural heritage, since her mother Emma was the mixed-race daughter of an ―Injun‖ (Native American) woman and an African man that had been turned into a slave in America. Emma had learned to quilt from her ―Injun‖ mother but, as she acknowledged, some of her father‘s cultural roots were also present in her quilting style; according to Grandma, the rich mixture of all those influences was the ingredient that made her mother‘s quilts so unique (Lawson 102). In her study of Native American quiltmaking, in this case pertaining to a community in Northern California, Sandra J. Metzler-Smith noticed certain features that are also found within the African American tradition –for instance, the consideration of quilting as a soothing and relaxing task, in comparison with other manual activities that were perceived as tedious (Metzler-Smith 46). The same author observed as well that Native American women quilters from this region placed high value on both the ―[p]racticality and beauty‖ of their works, stressing that free creativity was prioritized among the quilters, on the grounds that the imaginative mind could not be replaced by the printed pattern (Metzler-

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Smith 45). Furthermore, as described in section 7 of Chapter 4, sometimes a quilter mentally recorded a particularly appealing design as seen on another woman‘s quilt, to make her version of it by her own means: ―Eyes were so sharp, memories so good, they just remembered‖ (qtd. in Metzler-Smith 45). Likewise, other scholars have pointed at examples of Native American quilting practices that resonate with those found among the African American culture, such as the involvement of quilts in crucial life events –namely rites of passage– and the emphasis on transmitting the quilts from one generation to another (Shaw, American Quilts 189).75 Closely related to that aesthetic blend was the fusion of religious beliefs around death. For both cultures, life does not end on the physical level of consciousness; instead, it reaches a non-visible dimension that often can be perceived by and holds a strong influence upon the defunct person‘s descendants. Phyllis pondered on how her grandmother had inherited certain beliefs from both cultures, wondering whether the peculiarity of her ―superstitious quiltmaking‖ (Lawson 102) was in fact the result of such blending. The fear and respect for the afterlife are also evident in the episode when the young girl inadvertently trespasses into the local Native American cemetery near the village, wrapped around in the home-made quilt that she had just received from an aunt. When she realizes the mistake she has made by entering on the premises and displacing the sacred objects that lay on the tombs –even though she had been warned to avoid the cemetery–, the girl‘s panic will not recede until she finally confesses to Grandmother, who takes matters into her hands by restoring the sacredness of the place. Furthermore, certain Native American tribes attribute a protective capacity to quilts, and traditionally include them at the burials of relatives, to the point that some of these tribes ―draped [Morning Star quilts] over caskets at funerals, as a symbol of rebirth and immortality‖ (Shaw, American Quilts 189). Once again, the amalgamation of the spiritual and the quilting

75 Among other characteristics that coexist in the Native American and the African American traditions is the relevance given to the Lone Star (also called Morning Star) pattern, imbued with rich symbolism in both cultures. Besides, another interesting element presented by Robert Shaw is the documentation of a Pictorial Quilt (c. 1900-1910) by Rebecca Blackhorse, a South Dakota Sioux quilter, which resembles in a way the two extant works by Harriet Powers (1886, 1897) in their ―readability‖ as a graphic depiction of historical events through hand-appliquéd figures of humans and animals (Shaw, American Quilts 188-9).

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tradition is fundamental to explain Phyllis‘s journey into maturity according to the peculiarities of her heritage. As described in other parts of this dissertation (for example, in Chapters 2 and 3), the perception of quilts as sheltering elements or as shields against evil appears as a powerful concept. In Quilt of Souls, and considering it from a physical point of view, Lawson highlights the healing skills of the quilters who, like Grandma Lula and her ancestors, learned how to cure different ailments from African ―root doctors‖ (123) who had transmitted their knowledge as a crucial strategy for group survival. Their capacity to treat sickness and assist in the process of childbirth during and after slavery times garnered them recognition within their communities, since in many cases they were able to provide relief to a large number of physical problems that otherwise would remain uncared for. But the link that unites the narrative‘s quilters with the concept of healing goes beyond the purely physical perspective, delving into a more intimate plane of existence that revolves around the sphere of the unknown. From such standpoint, the memoir describes the inclusion in Lula‘s quilt of clothing remnants from deceased relatives and friends, in keeping with the Native American belief that ―placing cloths of the dead into the quilt acted as a talisman‖ (102), a ritual equally present within the African American quiltmaking tradition. In fact, the use of fabric for protection purposes is repeatedly portrayed in Lawson‘s narration as an extended custom: the act of embedding into quilts old scraps of cloth that used to belong to significant people from one‘s past is presented as common practice among black Southern quiltmakers. This highly symbolic tradition may be considered to be a spiritual rite per se. The impulse to preserve the soul of one‘s kith and kin beyond death through the conservation of their material objects may be rooted in a larger human instinct of preservation; however, the integration of a person‘s cloth into a whole new artifact gives a different dimension to the process. It entails the purpose of bringing back to life the essence of the quilter‘s loved ones after their physical life has ended and, by including their clothing into a re-constructed (and re-usable) item, continuity and preservation through time are somehow attained.

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In this case, the integration of the old pieces of fabric into the new unit is not only described as a conscious decision by the quilter, but equally important, as a valuable action that must teach something (if only about the lives led by those ancestors) to the younger generations. Thus, the elaboration process of Phyllis‘s quilt becomes a kaleidoscope of images in a patchwork manner, apparently random but carefully planned in its design. As a token of this, Grandma‘s usage of cloth from her first and young husband, Moses, is intertwined in the story with the episodes where she describes their life together and Moses‘s personality, revived into the quilt through the patches of his old shirts. Moses, who became a revolt leader and chose freedom at all costs, disappeared early from Lula‘s life, but left an indelible mark in her. According to the narrator, the quilt in progress transmitted the perception that Moses‘s cloth still ―was protecting those around him‖ (85). Likewise, the incorporation of scraps of cloth from other dead relatives brings back their memory to Lula, who transmits it to her granddaughter. Hence, the integration of those bits of fabric into the quilt is used by Lula to explain such past to Phyllis. For example, Grandma resorts to cloth to describe the tragic fate of her sister Ella, who died days before her marriage when she rebelled against her violent master. After Ella‘s unexpected demise, the boy she was engaged to commits suicide, and Grandma Lula decides to keep one of his shirts for remembrance. Now, Lula‘s inclusion of pieces of Ella‘s wedding dress together with bits from the boy‘s shirt acts as a symbolic completion of the union that never materialized. By joining the scraps from Ella and Jeremiah, Grandma Lula is paying tribute to the unfulfilled lives of those who paid too high a price for their choice of freedom. In addition, the protective function of quilts appears in other episodes of the text, such as Grandma Lula‘s use of one of her quilts to cover the body of her elderly husband, Edgar, while shoving him out of their burning home. In a similar manner, it can apply to the above-mentioned Miss Daisy‘s ragged quilt that, after being recomposed, would become ―a sight for sore eyes‖ (97) and which, according to its maker, ―needed balance‖ so that ―those old spirits would watch over Daisy and help her get through the trials she was facing and had endured her whole life‖ (97).

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The marked spiritual dimension reached by sewers who immersed themselves in a hypnotic-like rhythm clearly affects some of the characters who participate in –or simply witness– the creation of the quilts: ―[a]fter carefully measuring each piece, Grandmother gently wiped the cloths with her hand, ironing out their wrinkles. Her eyes closed like she‘d gone into a deep trance‖ (82). This kind of experience, assimilated to a trance process that, according to Lawson, ―folks down South called a ‗stitchin‘ rhythm‘‖ (34), has its echo in other artistic activities, from producing instrumental or vocal music to dancing. The highly repetitive (not to be confused with monotonous) and increasingly rhythmic nature of these art practices favors a state of mind that shares similarities with processes of meditation or self-introspection. There seems to be no accidental connection among these art types, including the regular pace of sewing, which allows for the artist‘s dialogue with the self in a manner that cannot be mediated or explained from the outside spectator. Religion and mystic experiences within the Southern black circles were a vital aspect for the cohesion and cultural belonging in the community. Some researchers have observed the influence of extrasensory episodes such as visions, premonitions, religious conversion and other rites of passage as key elements of spiritual life within black Alabamian communities (Beardsley 29-30). In her study on the diverse manifestations of African American folklore entitled The Sanctified Church, the writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston declares that ―[t]he vision is a very definite part of the Negro religion‖ (85). Similarly, other studies reveal that the decades following the end of bondage were marked by the tensions between continuation of Christian rituals (based in fact on the European American influence, more prone to physical containment) and a type of religious practice more openly connected with its African roots, in which case the emphasis was put on bodily expression, boisterous sounds and physical movements (Hunter 177). From this perspective, the interrelations between religious and artistic expressions for post-slavery African Americans were deemed as indivisible as the link itself between music and dance –including, to a certain extent, the fusion of their pagan and sacred representations. For Tera W. Hunter, the transition into the

263 Black Stitches twentieth century was a conflicting era also from the point of view of spiritual beliefs and their manifestations in collective worship, notably in the tensions between a more static or restrained Christian tradition on the one hand, and the overt physical expressions inherited from a West African culture on the other. As she states, ―[t]he similarities in the ritual, cathartic, communal, and expressive purposes of secular and sacred music and dance threatened the province once occupied primarily by [Christian] religion in African-American life‖ (177). In Quilt of Souls, most female characters seem to be perfectly at ease with that way of expressing their faiths, to the point that they personify the natural blending of all those cultural and religious inputs. Grandma Lula, through her gospel songs while she engages in daily work, and through her strong Christian faith but equally firm belief in supernatural forces and ghostly spirits, clearly embodies the amalgamation of the successive influences that have modeled the African American experience from its beginnings. The complex blending of all these beliefs is exposed by the quilter Jeannetta Chase in an oral interview with quilt documenter Roland Freeman:

as a people we‘ve always had a strong spirituality […] deeply rooted in a complex religious system that had sustained us for centuries. But in the New World, the Church […] viewed Africans as pagans with no belief systems. […] However, the old African faiths never died; they simply went underground. […] The Africans‘ understanding of spirits and of the role of ancestors in everyday life did not change. (Qtd. in Freeman 16-7)

If initially the African slaves‘ identity was further disrupted by the imposition of alien religions (the loss of their original beliefs contributed to their disempowerment as a group), some generations later it held the opposite effect: paradoxically, the cohesion under a common faith united the black communities in such a strong manner that many slaveowners feared the sense of unity could lead to revolts (Birch 18). A shared faith strengthened their cohesion as a group, providing them with a greater sense of autonomy ―beyond the reach of their masters‖ (McGillen 97). In truth, the quilters in Lawson‘s work are inheritors of that fusion of beliefs and of the complexity of such historical evolution. They are capable of integrating all the traditions in a fluid manner, a theme that is

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frequently present in the black female literary universe, as ―[q]uestions of spiritual identity and faith identity are embedded deep within the African American literature‖ (Beaulieu, Writing African American Women 812) and have been most extensively explored in the works by its female writers (815). This interest in the development of a current of African American women‘s spirituality has not ceased to increase, especially since the late twentieth century and up to our days, thanks to the reflections of authors such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison, among many others (Beaulieu, Writing African American Women 814-5). In Walker‘s case, for instance, the emphasis is put on the womanist power that comes from cultivating that spirituality, while Angelou presents ―an African American women‘s spirituality of growth, wholeness, and depth of experience‖ that is not subjugated to restrictive religious dogma (Beaulieu, Writing African American Women 812-3). In her intimate exploration of this theme, Walker views the legions of anonymous women whose spirituality was systematically stifled as hurting beings

trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era […] that did not acknowledge them, except as ―the mule of the world.‖ They dreamed dreams that no one knew –not even themselves, in any coherent fashion– and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts. (Qtd. in Christian 40)

For her part, Morrison‘s literary universe is full of ghostly spirits that haunt or redeem the troubled existence of her characters, blurring the frontiers between life and death or, to put it in other words, between material and immaterial forms of existence. Equally through her use of biblical references and other religious metaphors, Morrison includes those powerful forces as crucial elements of her narrative, in which open acceptance of the supernatural is frequently ingrained in the plot (Gupta and Mahal 247). Likewise, her fine ear to detect the nature of black American folklore is felt in her treatment of two of its most significant expressions: the oral transmission of this culture and the African-derived musical language. In relation to this, Eva Lennox Birch has pointed out that ―[i]n [Morrison‘s] listening to the language and stories of her people she also hears the music into

265 Black Stitches which her enforcedly illiterate ancestors had poured their souls‖ (188). This ―unwritten literature,‖ to use Joanne M. Braxton‘s term, has always been crucial in the affirmation and continuity of the black American female experience, acting in juxtaposition (not in subordination) with the literary form since both kinds of expression started to coexist (Braxton 5). In other words, both written and oral textualities have traditionally accompanied each other, even if established cultural canons have tended to dismiss the importance of the latter. In effect, giving full prominence to these forms of non-written transmission of knowledge help compensate, in a way, the overwhelming unbalance of power experienced by the black community in historical terms. As such, Morrison‘s aforementioned ―enforcedly illiterate ancestors‖ resort to unconventional ways of expression that succeed, probably against all odds, in conveying (and retaining for future generations) their culture in all its richness. In Lawson‘s work, Lula‘s approach to quilting as though it were a sacred ritual, the use of work chants to accomplish field and domestic labor and her revered attitude towards ancestry reveal how all those influences naturally merged in the lives of many generations of women like her. By the same token, the resort to art expression, especially music, as a collective outlet to convey those beliefs does function as a cathartic element that helps release the accumulated tensions of loss and tragedy through the family‘s history line. What is even more remarkable about Lawson‘s work is the fact that the procedure of quiltmaking seems to respond to a particularly African American musical strand, the already mentioned call-and-response tradition. The methodology used by Grandma Lula to make Phyllis‘s quilt echoes that call-and- response pattern that was at the core of black American music via its African origins, characterized by a leading voice playing the main role that prompts a reaction or ―response‖ among its surrounding audience. This musical style, firmly rooted in the enslaved work songs tradition, requires active participation among the ―choir‖ of voices that follow the initiator, and as a consequence, their intervention is crucial for the development, and even completion, of the song. The dialogical nature of this music, which initiated as a communicative device and included work chants but also spirituals, gospel and field hollers –and which is

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considered as the genesis of blues (Hunter 169)– has its parallel in the novel in the way that Grandma Lula directs the quilting labor and cues for her granddaughter to join in the task at the precise right moments. Lula‘s custom to adopt the role of a lead singer or storyteller every time she grasps the needle is part of the ritualisation she wishes to imprint to the quilting sessions: it belongs to a broader scheme of transmitting the legacy to the little girl by involving her on a physical and emotional plane. The resulting work is a piece of synchronized efforts that reflects the individual talents and sensibilities of its makers, who co-create a unique work of art. Thus, as happens with the communal nature of most representations of black American music (Hunter 175), so does family quilting demand active engagement from the ―observer‖ for the result to be mutually satisfactory. This idea of collaborative art-making is emphasized by Lula‘s attitude at the outset of every quilting session: the sewing is obviously important, but not more than her apprentice‘s involvement: as long as little Phyllis understands the significance of the act and gives it her full attention, the quilting rite is being appropriately fulfilled and transmitted. Grandma‘s eager interest in integrating the child wholeheartedly in the task reflects the importance of passing on the tradition according to the respect that it deserves. Likewise, Phyllis‘s grandparents try to pay homage to the family memory through the many photographs of deceased relatives that preside over the walls in their house, as testimony of the life stories that must be conserved and exposed. The aim behind Lula‘s transmission of that past responds to the necessity to prevent the significance of those lives from falling into oblivion once again, remaining invisible for posterity. Grandma‘s mesmerizing storytelling, a talent she displays most intensely while quilting, is another form of family‘s inner- history preservation that can be assimilated to the afore-mentioned photographs, as they attempt to fulfill the same role. Probably unusual for a child her age, Phyllis asserts to be fully aware of the importance of receiving all that wisdom, and feels honored that her grandmother has chosen to pass the stories down to her. In fact, she considers herself luckier than other children who are taught popular (usually fictional) tales, for learning

267 Black Stitches about the past from real life stories is, in her view, a much more valuable system of transmission. According to Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, ―particularly valuable hand-stitched quilts‖ are still today transmitted from one generation to the next in keeping with a secular tradition that originated in great part from the necessity to document family events since slavery days, a time when no other form of keeping record was accessible (Beaulieu, Writing African American Women 737-8). From this outlook, quilts helped stitch back together the invisible wounds of family dislocation, thence the emotional attachment developed to them by both makers and inheritors. In like manner, Grandma Lula‘s role as a storyteller reflects this legacy of material and immaterial testimony; her initiation of each quilting session is not casually connected to the oral narration of a new story, since the two actions are permanently interlinked in the novel. Here, the metaphoric sense of textile creativity as text production proves more truthful than ever, to the point that one action seems to spark off the other. As evidence that both processes are intimately entwined, Phyllis perceived that Lula ―didn‘t start her story until she was sewing. It seemed like she had to be in the right state of mind before she could do justice to the family stories she told‖ (Lawson 71), something which only occurred with the needle in hand. The textual nature of quilts is approached in the narrative simultaneously from a formal and thematic level. With respect to its formal structure, there is a metaphoric use of the quilt as an all-encompassing text that permeates the story; in fact, the elaboration process of the quilt intended as Phyllis‘s bequest advances simultaneously with the plot development and reflects the twists and turns of her stay in the South, at times suffering abrupt interruptions while others it gains momentum and steers up the narration rhythm. The episodes describing past events in the characters‘ lives are almost always preceded by the rituals of the quilting gathering, to the extreme that each patch-sewing session is matched with a particular narration, in such a way that the adding of every new scrap to the quilt resembles the distribution of different chapters in a novel. In other words, the deployment of events moves along the composition of the quilt as it gradually takes shape: it is first initiated when Phyllis sets foot in the village and will

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accompany her to the end, occupying central stage throughout the story. Her quilt, in fact, not only traverses the whole narrative, but it can equally be argued that it becomes a cornerstone in Phyllis‘s evolution into maturity, especially in terms of cultural awakening, as will be explained in more detail later. From a thematic perspective, the simile of quiltmaking as a narrative process in itself is equally present in the memoir. There abound semantic references to the labor of quiltmaking as a textual composition: first of all, through the careful planning of design as a well-thought plot. Even if on certain occasions Lawson‘s quilters let themselves go by spontaneous inspiration and surrender to a certain improvisation, the task of quilting is more often presented as a meticulous work of creativity that must be planned in advance. As a consequence, quilting does not only require mental concentration and spiritual calm, but also an intellectual effort to visualize the internal structure of the work before the sewing begins. As if paralleling the designing strategy of a writer, the quilter must be able to pre-arrange in her mind the distribution of all the pieces of the story, ensuring that each patch will fit in harmony with the others, in order for the final outcome to form a coherent whole. This is especially interesting because the construction process of the quilt does not appear to be strictly organized beforehand: the narrator continuously mixes episodes from her family past with the gradual making of her quilt, and those episodes may seem disconnected if considered in isolation. Besides, the interspersed references to the quilts made by other characters increases that sense of fragmentation and heterogeneity. However, the overall effect is one of cohesion, as if all the ―scattered‖ pieces finally contributed to a meaningful unit and, as Lawson reflects in hindsight, to give a sense of wholeness to her life. In relation with this, upon finishing her memoir the author acknowledges to what extent her family‘s quiltmaking tradition affected her childhood and adolescent years, but also her future as a mature woman. Her rearing by a quilter woman would have a profound impact, not only from an emotional point of view but also in terms of acquiring her own cultural awareness. As she concludes, understanding this legacy opened a new path into the significance of her cultural origins, a process she closely identifies with her quilting grandmother and thanks

269 Black Stitches her for. In other words, Lawson perceives that her ancestors used quilts as vehicles to transmit knowledge about her family past, but also about the impact of African American culture at large. Furthermore, similes reflecting the connection of everyday life with textiles, cloth and sewing appear in the narrative profusely, as can be observed in the following excerpts: ―[t]he words came off her tongue as crisp as the sheets I took off the clothesline‖ (64); ―[f]inding her [missing] brothers would be like finding a needle in a haystack‖ (112); ―[i]t tore a piece out of me that was just beginning to mend‖ (139). More particularly, metaphors assimilating the act of quilting to the process of storytelling are continuous, and needlework-related vocabulary is used by the author to explain such process. For example, at the beginning of her memoir Lawson acknowledges how, being a newcomer in Livingston, she intuitively understood the power of Grandmother‘s narrations and felt that she ―connected with those people whose stories and souls were transformed into a patchwork of healing with every pull of the thread‖ (Lawson xiv). In time, she admitted to have established ―a regular pattern of spending long country days sewing quilts while Grandma told stories‖ (32) that disclosed the unknown past of their ancestors, catching the girl‘s undivided attention and feeding her expectations for a continuation in the sequence of daily narratives. By the same token, the tragic story of Grandma‘s sister Ella would act as ―an interlude to the tales spun about the quilt‖ (33), while the memories of their predecessors would be ―kept alive in a hand stitched mosaic […] that would live on forever in a piecing together of what I used to call rags‖ (126). The biographic episodes that Lula unfolds for her granddaughter become so closely attached to the two women‘s sewing sessions that the author recalls how, at some point, one action almost turns into synonymous with the other: ―Grandma said it was time to finish the story about Ella. I rushed out into the front yard to help her set up the quilting horse, eager to hear the rest of the story‖ (47). On another occasion, while Phyllis was expectant to know about the presumably tragic ending of Moses‘s (Lula‘s first husband) story, the discourse was interrupted and its closing was never unveiled, because the pain of remembrance made that impossible: ―As quickly as the story appeared on Grandma‘s lips the

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day before, it disappeared just as fast. It was like Moses never existed. Grandma pulled out a different piece of cloth. […] She just moved on to another story. I was left hanging there like a forgotten sheet on a clothesline, flapping in the wind‖ (85). Before concluding, I consider a last aspect to be worth of attention. The main quilter in the story, Grandma Lula, shares with other female characters an independent creative voice which they do not hesitate to claim as art and to do it on their own terms, which might not (and usually, did not) coincide with the mainstream canon. For instance, one of Grandma‘s friends, a mixed-race woman called Honey Bee, was credited in the village as the artistic mind behind the most outstanding and innovative aprons that one could imagine.76 These ―had Aunt Honey Bee‘s signature all over them. […] Every [apron] had a thick, crooked stitch in the shape of a bee in all four corners of the bib. Just like Grandma‘s quilts, you could always tell her brand by their style and pattern‖ (Lawson 62). It can be argued that both Honey Bee and Grandma Lula regarded their creations as art rather than exclusively utilitarian objects –although they certainly fulfilled a practical aim too. Even if Lula‘s quilts did not bear her signature on the surface, they were acknowledged as unique pieces of art and identified as her own brand, a true indicator that they were simply unlike any others. The fact that both women brandished their textile work as art and exhibited it proudly is evident not only because of the great value they placed on the quality and usability of the final outcome, but also in terms of the sophistication and detail to which their labor was subjected from the moment it was conceived in their minds. It is therefore interesting to observe how the sewers in this story regard themselves as art- makers, at a time when needlework, however elaborate or complex, was simply considered menial labor and consequently lacking the category of art. A token of their self-perception as artists can be noticed in their conscientious design phase,

76 Lawson makes it explicit that Honey Bee‘s aprons were aesthetically remarkable as much as they were practical: ―These weren‘t just little aprons you‘d throw around your waist. […] Above all, they had two big pockets to put your wares in [while at the same time, they] came in all types of colors and designs‖ (60). The description suggests how naturally the two concepts, art and functionality, merged in the mind of the needlewoman, who certainly saw no conflict in unifying both qualities. This is revealing of a feature that is traditionally present in African American needle art: the usability of the piece as a very practical tool is not detrimental to its aesthetic or artistic value; on the contrary, it is in the artist‘s genius to reach a successful combination of the two.

271 Black Stitches which preceded the actual sewing and, especially in the case of quiltmaking, required a thorough selection and distribution of the pieces to create a clear image of the quilt‘s (or apron‘s) future layout. In Lula‘s case, for instance, this led the artist to be ―meticulous as she stitched each individual piece together. Like finding the exact piece to a puzzle. She‘d measure each one with the length of her hand to ensure a perfect fit‖ (Lawson 34). The patches, in fact, had to match their neighboring pieces from a multitude of parameters; as a result, the author described how ―the intricate weave of connections‖ (101) worked, in such a manner that ―the pieces were laid out so they related to all the pieces around them, historically‖ as well as aesthetically (101). These features reveal a finely-tuned eye for color and pattern composition, precise interweaving of the patches and a clear interest in creating a final work that would bear the stamp of uniqueness. In sum, Lawson‘s work truthfully confirms Carolyn Mazloomi‘s statement that black women‘s quilts can fulfil the role of ―culture documents used as resources in reconstructing the experiences of African Americans‖ (Quilting the Jazz Tradition 12), and are especially revealing in their reconstruction of that past from a female perspective. If, as Toni Morrison argued in her essay Playing in the Dark (1993) about the perception of African Americans in white American literature, ―in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse‖ (9), adding the elements of female gender and lower social class only contribute to increasing that process of silencing. The narrative and perspective in Quilt of Souls doubly challenge this negligence: first, because agency rests completely on the female protagonists of that untold past, and second, because its author chooses to do so through the making of African American quilts, one of the most genuine expressions of this culture. All in all, Lawson‘s work proves that black American women saw in quilts a powerful tool for self-expression in times of special hardship/great suffering, and an effective way to perpetuate the cultural tradition onto the following generations.

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4.5. Telling their story in their own words: quilts in the Civil Rights era

The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (2002), edited by William and Paul Arnett –and published in conjunction with the homonymous exhibition, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the same year–, is a compilatory volume that gathers a collection of artistic quilts made in the small peninsula of Gee‘s Bend during the Civil Rights movement. Although not written by an African American female artist (or at least, not so in the traditional sense of the term), the inclusion of this volume in the corpus responds to a broader consideration of the concept of authorship.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this compilation is its innovative treatment of the famous art produced in that Alabaman area, which for many decades remained so isolated and self-enclosed that it became known as an ―inland island‖, or an ―African Alabama‖, as it was almost exclusively populated by black families. Departing from the more common approach that tended to present these quilts as quaint compositions and study them from the outsider‘s perspective, this work places the spotlight on the artists themselves, providing them with all the instruments necessary to rise as the real protagonists of this major art movement. Indeed, The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend opens up a platform for these local artists to freely speak up about their lives, their memories and the creation process of this ancestral quiltmaking. Remarkably, although the preliminary sections are introduced by several art critics and museum curators involved in the preservation of African American art, the core part of the volume is righteously occupied by the quiltmakers‘ works and words. The profile of each quilter, which includes a one-page autobiographical record followed by one or several quilts of her creation, gives shape to their reflections on how the Freedom Quilting Bee phenomenon evolved and, beyond that particular highlight, on the role that quilts have always played in their personal and collective experiences. Thus, the stories are here presented through the eyes and voice of the art makers, instead of simply being reinterpreted by the observers –however experts on the

273 Black Stitches matter and well-meant these might be, the adaptation would probably entail some alterations of the original words. Of the more than 150 documented local artists to have been making quilts during the twentieth century, the book compiles 87 pieces by 37 of them, the majority dating from the mid-century years. Of them, 70 quilts were presented at the 2002 national exhibition that started at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and toured around New York, Boston or Atlanta, among other major cities. The quilters‘ first-person explanations host a peculiar category within the conventions of the autobiographic genre: briefly introduced by the volume‘s compilers, each quilter expresses her own thoughts and emotions, except in the few cases where the voice of a deceased artist is replaced by one of her descendants (herself a quilter, too). In this manner, even if the accounts are not directly written by the artists but only orally transmitted, it is presumed that no significant changes were made to them. As a result, the auto/biographical genre contained in The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend relates more to the testimony narrative subtype, since the protagonists‘ statements are not personally handwritten by each one of them; instead, their words are recorded and transcribed by the compilation‘s editors. The testimony narratives are an extremely interesting category situated halfway between the interview and the autobiography, but also between oral history and the purely literary description. Here, the subject ―I‖ that tells her story does not fully coincide with the subject that is ultimately writing and presenting it; thus, the original teller is somehow mediated by the interviewer and compiler, creating a patchwork of complex identities (Thomas 7-8). In any case, the ―authors‖ only partially dominate the final form in which their message is presented. Although no substantial formal alterations seem to have been made to their original statements –the language maintains its colloquial nature and many traits of the oral expression–, it is impossible to deny that a certain homogeneity of style runs through the book‘s narrative. The reader can easily imagine that, despite all the respectful editing, some distance still remains between the testimonies presented here and the genuine voice of an individual artist reminiscing, in written form, about her life. In a similar manner, and though

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no further information is given, it is likely that the quilts accompanying the texts, previously cast for the corresponding exhibition, underwent a selection process unaffected by the criteria or preference of the quilters. As a result of it all, the present volume can be considered as a semi-autobiographical work, created by multiple authors who aim their messages to both the hearer (that is, the interviewer, sometimes even addressed directly by the quilters) and ultimately to the reader. As some researchers have insisted to point out, the emergence of an interest in analyzing and documenting African American quilts since the latter quarter of the twentieth century was somehow tainted, at least in the beginning, with preconceptions and misguided stereotypes about the true nature of African American quilts. The photographer and folk-life documentalist Roland Freeman, who has devoted several decades to the analysis of such quilts on a national scale, reflected in the introduction to the compilation A Communion of the Spirits (1996) that only by giving voice to the quilters themselves could one gain real understanding of this art (xvii).77 In keeping with that statement, The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend focuses its attention on a particular type of such quilts, those marked by the Civil Rights period in the Alabamian context, and according as much importance to the pieces showcased in the compilation as to their authors. Beyond the style particularities of their works, the composition techniques used, or their sources of inspiration, one of the reasons why I have considered it appropriate to include the first-person stories of these Southern quilters in the literary section of this thesis is the poetic nature they transmit. Their recollections of childhood and youth years, which for some are too painful to even mention (Arnett and Arnett 164) and their rich expression while reminiscing about the past resonate with the story-telling tradition, placing their narratives in a position much more aligned with the literary genre than with the merely historiographic approach. Also, being one of the extremely rare volumes ever published to narrate the Freedom Quilting Bee‘s experience from the standpoint of its artists, The

77 Freeman‘s landmark work, published in 1996, is considered the first thorough study of African American quilts, covering the majority of states and relating the quilts portrayed on the lives and memories of their makers.

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Quilts of Gee‟s Bend clearly sets itself apart from other works of conventional research on the topic. This compilation reminds us of the necessity claimed by African American women critics in the late twentieth century to set up a specific corpus and terminology that could give account from inside of the particularities of black women artists‘ experiences. According to scholar Jacqueline Bobo, from that time onwards black women have ―written themselves back into history‖ (36), using a very appropriate metaphor that combines their efforts to lay claim to their place in history and, at the same time, their recourse to the written word as an effective way to perpetuate that testimony. Arnett and Arnett‘s work, in spite of its somehow ―hybrid‖ nature with respect to final authorship, is a good example of the emergence and consolidation of such specific scholarship on black feminist art. As the insightful remark by Gloria Wade-Gayles explains, it is crucial for black women and for their artistic production to move from simply being analyzed to become the analysis-makers, thus ―moving the uniqueness of black womanhood from ‗theme‘ to ‗theory‘ and creating a space in which only they could/would speak for themselves‖ (xv). With respect to its thematic structure, the 37 quilters included in this work narrate aspects of their past and present lives, revealing many traits shared by mostly all: an extremely harsh upbringing, farming and laboring the fields since childhood, an early marriage and numerous progeny –especially for those born in the first half of the century, reaching or surpassing a dozen of children–, or a lack of formal education and basic resources such as electricity or communications. Precisely the lack of heating devices was at the core of their original necessity to make quilts, although this alone does not, obviously, account for their necessity to make art through those quilts. One of the artists, Loretta Pettway, reflected on how she initially disliked needle works, though she ended up becoming an accomplished quilter:

I didn‘t like to sew. Didn‘t want to do it […] I had a lot of work to do. Feed hogs, work in the fields, take care of my handicapped brother […] Had to walk about fifty miles in the field every day. Get home too tired to do no sewing. My grandma […] told me, ―You better make quilts. You

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going to need them.‖ I said, ―I ain‘t going to need no quilts.‖ But when I got me a house, a raggly old house, then I needed them to keep warm. […] Them quilts done keep you warm. (In Arnett and Arnett 72)

Luckily for the women who, like Loretta, did not fancy the needle, collaboration and mutual assistance from other women were usually at their avail. Most of their stories reveal that cooperative work was not only encouraged but also expected from one another, and taking into account that they inhabited a small portion of land where ―no more than a few hundred women lived at any one time‖ (Arnett and Arnett 48), the bonding created between them must have been really close. This sense of sorority is felt throughout the book, mirroring a kind of solidarity that spread beyond the female circle and involved the whole community, from the act of sharing food to helping each other build their houses (Arnett and Arnett 94, 118). Like Amelia Bennett, whose testimony is quoted below, most of the quilters from Gee‘s Bend became acquainted with the mechanics of this ―necessity- turned-into-art‖ from a very early age, often before reaching puberty, trained by their female elders –usually their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts:

I was eleven years old and I used to watch my mother when she piece quilts, and I would pick up all the little pieces and watch her sew them together. And I kept doing that until I got a big part. And she said, ―Honey, you doing good.‖ So then she give me more pieces. She said, ―You understand how to cut them?‖ I say, ―I‘m going to try.‖ She say, ―Well, if you try you can make it.‖ I kept a-doing that till I pieced up the whole top. (In Arnett and Arnett 82)

Less commonly, a few preferred (or needed) to learn how to cut the fabric and stitch the patches together by themselves, even if the quilting technique was almost indefectibly transmitted to them. Once the process was mastered, the act of making quilts acquired an individualistic as well as collective nature. While the designing scheme was shaped in the mind of each artist –and the piecing together of the patches following that design was also one person‘s work– the last step of the process, the

277 Black Stitches quilting of the three layers, was often completed in a communal way, probably because it was considered the most monotonous chore. As one of the quilters, Estelle Pope, recalled: ―[my mother] had three sisters and they all helped each other […]. When they finish a quilt […], they would go to another sister‘s house and do the same kind of thing‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 122). Likewise, another quilter, Sue Willie Seltzer, remembers how this communal quilting simultaneously involved many families in the neighborhood, as they moved about ―[f]rom house to house, quilting quilts. If they got the quilts ready, us used to do it that way for them‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 124). The fact that the original designing and piecing was an individual task, and only the subsequent quilting was collective, reinforces the notion that Southern black quiltmaking in general, and the Benders‘ type in particular, did not accommodate to a specific ―art school‖ or to a rigid common fashion. On the contrary, the quilters emphasize their interest in detaching themselves from pre- conceived styles or from any kind of aesthetic dictates, including those which resonated with the taste of traditional quiltmaking in the area. Of course, the rejection of imposed styles included also those proposed in pattern books, which only limited their imagination. In the words of another artist, called Nettie Young, ―I started using patterns, but I shouldn‘t have did it. It broke the ideas I had in my head. I should have stayed with my own ideas‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 156). Concerning the attitude of the artists towards their top‘s designs, certain concepts abound in their narratives. Be it that they acquired skills from their forebears, or as the solitary process of self-taught artists, an element is shared by many: a dislike for following strict patterns and reproducing perfectly regular designs. This tendency to distance themselves from ―by-the-book quilting‖ is apparent in the fact that even the most symmetrical and presumably orthodox quilts present a certain ―disparity‖ or dissonance in their design, producing a disturbing effect that nonetheless contributes to the quilt‘s overall harmony. For instance, in Annie Bendolph‘s One Patch quilt (made around 1960), although consisting of an apparently orderly disposition of 7x7 rows of patches, a closer look reveals the irregular dispositions of some of the blocks, which added

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to the flaring edge of the binding produced a sense of unexpected movement.78 This taste for surprise and for a sudden breach of the presumed flow of the pattern (in case any pattern at all is easily identifiable) so astonished art scholars that the critic Jane Livingston, commenting on the rebellious nature of one these works, concluded that its ―effervescent energy and eccentricity of shape make this quilt unique. [Its] flaring shape is so irregular that it has to be intentional, and its designs, on both sides, make it virtually indescribable in the language of quilt patterns‖ (58). Curiously, the critic‘s remark that the quilt‘s irregularities ―had to be intentional‖ proves the observer‘s instinctive necessity to find a minimum degree of homogeneity or systematic pattern (taken in the broader sense of the word) to these works of art that prove so evasive to classify. Livingston‘s remark replicates many other critics‘ difficulties at making sense of an unorthodox kind of art creation that manages to retain balance and order despite the many and evident style ―incongruities‖. This need to rationalize quilts according to one‘s preconceived idea of a system or paradigm is clearly elusive in these works, where conventional style strictures do not frequently apply and where, in many cases, a free disposition of the design reigns over the piece. It is not that the quilter simply succumbs to improvisation; rather, the choice of her personal design is planned and decided before the piecing process begins: in the words of Paul Arnett, ―[m]any Gee‘s Bend quilts feature a single dramatically magnified block whose switch of scale highlights improvisation as a conceptual quality: ‗improvising,‘ as design blueprint, precedes the construction of the quilt‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 146). Further evidence that belies that supposed ever-present improvisation in their quilts (which seems to hint at a certain nonchalance) is the artists‘ insistence that the resulting work should conform to their expectations and satisfy their personal taste; thus, whenever the outcome did not align with it, they did not hesitate to pull it all off and start anew (Arnett and Arnett 170; Ferris 102). Arguably, if they had not initially held a mental image of the desired aspect of the

78 Image available at https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/annie-bendolph/work/one-patch

279 Black Stitches quilt, it would be out of the question to take back part of the previous work, and to do this as many times as necessary until it matched that ideal. The artistic variety presented in the collection resembles a kaleidoscope of the women‘s multi-form creativity, belying those theories that support the existence of a quintessential African American quilt type. Although some of these pieces share a certain similar taste or flare, it is impossible to claim that there exists a predetermined style or a set of aesthetic traits that would make them predictable, which gives more relevance to each artist‘s personality. Most of the women interviewed reflected about their preferences for avoiding printed templates and their inclination to follow their own personal tastes. Some acknowledge to rely only on their artistic instinct, such as in the case of Lorraine Pettway, who affirms: ―It come to put, just putting stuff together […] How I start to make a quilt, all I do is start sewing, and it just come to me. My daughter ask me the other day what I was making, and I said, ―I don‘t know yet; I‘m just sewing pieces together,‖ and the quilt looked pretty good. No pattern. I usually don‘t use a pattern, only my mind‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 70). What this artist explains as ―putting stuff together‖ finds correlation with what other colleague quilters literally denominate ―get-togethers,‖ (in Arnett 80) or ―make-ups‖ (in Ferris 106). Present in many descriptions of their creative process is the skill to ―record‖ a mental image of a physical object or shape and transfer it onto paper so as to obtain patterns of one‘s own. For instance, one Mississippi quilter interviewed by William Ferris in his extensive research on the origins of African American arts, Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts (1983), explained how every object surrounding her could be easily registered on her mind and drawn on paper to serve as the template for her quilt. Anything, from a piece of fruit to the tape recorder being used by the interviewer, served as a source of inspiration for this artist, able to translate ordinary objects into the shapes and proportions of textile blocks simply ―by looking at something and imitating it. You draw it off in your mind‖ (in Ferris 106). In like manner, Gee‘s Bend‘s quilters acknowledge that the surrounding life provides them with the necessary inspiration to create their works; sometimes, it could be the shape of a building, a dress worn by another woman, or even a quilt drying off in the neighborhood, as

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observed by one of the quilters, Lucy T. Pettway: ―I get my ideas different kind of ways. I used to pass by quilts out on a line, get me a piece of paper and draw a pattern from it, make me my quilt‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 150). Following a similar process, the variations made to long-established patterns like ―Log Cabin‖ or ―Courthouse Steps‖ reflect this reduction of real-life images into simpler forms, keeping the essence of the original object but interpreting it in their own manner. This is evident in many of the Benders‘ recreations of the ―Housetop‖ pattern, which simply serves as the point of departure from where the artists freely move into their imaginative interpretations of the motif –so much so, that often the quilter seems to have used it as an excuse to explore as many unpredictable versions as possible, producing effects that may seem unrelated to the original pattern.79 Be it in the form of traditional concentric squares, or distorting it into more abstract variations, the ―Housetop‖ design is useful here as illustrative of how the personal visions of these quilters rule over received conventions, and how their artistic instincts supersede generalized ideas on what beauty and balance in a quilt means, or even on what a given quilt pattern should look like. Echoing similar experiences from many of her peers, the quilter Linda Pettway summarizes the process of starting in the middle and then ―strip[ping] the sides, top, bottom; keep going ‗round the sides. I be knowing where I‘m going‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 160). Very similarly, the abovementioned quilter from Mississippi Pecolia Warner explained the elaboration process of a so-called Pigpen quilt from a non-existent pattern: ―you take a strip, that‘ll be your first rail, and you go all around that square. Then you get another strip of a different color, and keep going all the way around until you get the pen built. You don‘t strip it nowhere, you just keep coming all the way around‖ (in Ferris 99).80 Finally, I find it appropriate to note that, although the collection is obviously non-fictional, the women‘s stories are impregnated with different emotions each, as no (auto)biographical record is ever exempt from the subjectivity of the teller(s). In rapport with the aforementioned lyricism of the work, some voices

79 See for instance Lucy T. Pettway‘s rendition of this pattern in her Housetop and Bricklayer with Bars quilt at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/654096 80 Image available at http://collection.folkartmuseum.org/view/objects/asitem/items@:839

281 Black Stitches carry along a profound sense of nostalgia, others of sadness; many, of gratefulness for having overcome the harshness of past times, considerably improved their living conditions, and having survived to old age (Arnett and Arnett 73-4, 90, 152). A remarkable sense of perseverance and a strong emotional attachment to their quilts are also transmitted in their words, as can be perceived in their pleasure at deciding the top‘s design and, for many, at the act of sewing itself, described as appeasing for the mind and as a moment of solace from the hectic rhythm of day work. Even further, their stories reveal a deep sense of spirituality, at times linked to religious faith but, more often, simply attached to a profound connection with the soul. Their comments transmit the need to trust what future holds and their own creative instinct, as though all a quilter had to do were to ―piece [the fabric scraps] up till they look like I want them to look‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 116), so that she can satisfy her own taste and not anybody else‘s (Arnett and Arnett 170). This spirituality is present as well in some of their memories in the form of dreams. While Mary Lee Bendolph (in Arnett and Arnett 130) describes her premonition of big changes about to happen in the Bend (which turned out to be true, with Martin Luther King‘s visit and the massive protests that ensued), other quilters simply acknowledge that there is a connection between their making of quilts and the fluid nature of memory and inspiration. For instance, Bendolph‘s mother, Aolar Mosely, is described as a woman ―who would sit under a tree, pensively and meditatively awaiting spiritual guidance that often arrived in dreams‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 39). Likewise, accounts from other Southern women quilters insist on the influence of dreaming as a resource for the creative process of envisioning a new quilt (in Ferris 99-100). Indeed, the connections between this type of dreams or visions and a profound spiritual dimension have been explored by ethnologists studying the impact of religion in the Gee‘s Bend area (Stone 229). Certainly, the oneiric atmosphere is recurrently present in fiction and non- fiction works concerning the art of quiltmaking.81 Sometimes, memories reside so

81 In Stigmata, as has been argued above, Lizzie‘s dreams play a pivotal role in the story; likewise, in other works dealing with female quiltmaking, as in Whitney Otto‘s How to Make an American

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far back in the protagonists‘ minds, that over time they have acquired a dreamlike nature, as if the borders between past life and imaginary events had blurred. In sum, the testimonies transmitted by these women are living proof of the enormous significance that their quilts held for their communities and, from a broader scope, for the black Southern culture as a whole. Their accounts reveal the necessity to continue the legacy and preserve it as the rich artistic corpus that it really is, and the same claim appears more or less explicitly in other literature on the matter. The quilters‘ love for their work permeates those testimonies, and this passion accompanies them throughout their lives, stopping only when ill health prevents them from continuing to quilt. As an example, the words of Lucy T. Pettway, summarize this genuine passion: ―I been piecing quilt tops right up to about last year. I can‘t quilt them no more […] I love to quilt. I love to piece on them. I love to wash them. I love to look at pretty quilts. I got to make me another one‖ (in Arnett and Arnett 150). Unquestionably, quilts succeeded at acting as a form of redemption from the ugliness of poverty and the hopelessness of racism, at a time and place that embodied the worst version of both things.

4.6. Reconstructing the self: the symbolism of quilts in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and “Everyday Use”

Alice Walker‘s novel The Color Purple (1983) and short story ―Everyday Use‖ (1973) exemplify the subject matter of quilts as instruments for self-validation and reconstruction of one‘s dignity within the context of African American women in the twentieth-century American South. Both of Walker‘s works illustrate the redemptive capacity of quiltmaking in the lives of women who, like Celie in The Color Purple and Maggie in ―Everyday Use‖, not only occupied the lowest possible echelon in American social hierarchy, but also initially lacked the self- esteem necessary to stand up against the devastating effects of that status.

The epistolary novel, which presents its protagonist character, Celie, as the embodiment of powerlessness and invisibility in an exceedingly racist and sexist

Quilt (1991), a great part of the symbolic meaning of the patches chosen by each quilter lies in their connection with dreams.

283 Black Stitches society (the rural South during the early decades of the past century), simultaneously explores the role of the needle as a form of introspection and as a way of escape from such an oppressive context. Celie‘s story is one of self-discovery and self-construction, beginning from a very poor consideration of her own value to becoming wholly aware of her value as a human being and as a black woman. Crucial in the process are several elements, namely the network of positive relationships that she learns to develop with other women and, in connection with this skill, the building of a new, empowered self through the use of the needle. As her diary entries progress along the story, the reader witnesses how Celie‘s use of her sewing abilities open up spaces in her life that had remained locked theretofore. Her growing self- confidence is visible also in the way she approaches her diary under the form of letters to God: at first, subsumed under the opinions and judgements of others, and gradually acquiring her own voice and asserting her own vision of the world. At an early stage in the narrative, Celie –who is also the first-person narrator– feels remorseful after having set her young stepson against his wife, strong-willed Sofia, inciting him to beat her. When Sofia finds out, she confronts Celie with the excuse of returning her some old curtains and thread, and eventually the two open up about their very different rapports to men. Sofia, who feels sorry for Celie‘s servile behavior and submission to others, decides to make amends with her friend by suggesting to elaborate together a patchwork cover from the ―messed up curtains‖ (Walker, The Color Purple 39) that she had used as a pretext. The two women act out their reconciliation by committing themselves to make the quilt in a cooperative way, as a peace-making ritual that finally allows Celie to go to sleep with a clear conscience. The scene reflects one of Walker‘s conceptions of the quilt within the African American female world: it stands as a symbol of women‘s collaborative work and the bonds that derive from it, especially when that work is aimed at counterbalancing the hostility of living in a suffocating environment. The resulting effect of endeavoring to make that quilt together means, for the two women, their ability to reverse (self)destruction and conflict and to use their creativity for remodeling the torn fabric (of their relationship, but also the

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material cloth itself) into something brand new. The true starting point of their friendship is thus marked by the co-elaboration of that quilt from discarded patches of cloth, metaphoric for Celie‘s lack of self-esteem and the invisible roles they both play in the larger society. In other words, the quilt translates their skill to produce something truly beautiful, valuable and useful –despite being seen by others as lacking any value themselves. In fact, it can be argued that the revolutionary aspect about their relationship lies in their decision to turn a deaf ear to the discouraging or demeaning voices around them, and in persisting to join forces together for their quilting project. Remarkably, the art of quilting, and from a broader perspective the act of sewing, will play further roles in Celie‘s long process of self-reconstruction. As the novel progresses and Celie slowly undergoes her personal transformation from a fearful and submissive girl to a self-reliant and independent woman, the needle becomes her most trusted weapon, and the instrument that radically changes her destiny. Probably the most evident example of this is the way she uses her sewing skills to set up a small business manufacturing pants that are initially aimed only for women –an audacious move for the mentality of early twentieth-century America. Celie develops her talent at designing and making the pants, originally from sturdy uniform material (as had been the case during the previous century, where worn textile was put to use as many times as possible), and later from more sophisticated fabric, in order to earn her own living independently from anybody else. One of the most significant aspects of this process is that it runs parallel to her personal evolution towards becoming an emotionally and physically free woman. In fact, this venture will over time save her from ending up in prison: after finding out that her husband, Mr _, had been hiding all her sister‘s letters for years, Celie feels unable to control her rage, fantasizing with the idea of killing him in revenge. As she takes up to sewing in collaboration with her female lover Shug, and to secretly reading the letters together, Celie chooses to build the foundations for the construction of her new life, which slowly emerges as a result of her own creativity. In waging ―a needle and not a razor in my hand‖ (125), she

285 Black Stitches acknowledges its potentially transformative power in a woman‘s life, as opposed to the disastrous effects of opting for a violent vengeance. Ironically enough, despite Mr _‘s long-standing opposition to Celie‘s producing women‘s pants —―[m]en spose to wear the pants‖ (230)—, with the passing of years he will develop a genuine interest in the creative process and will be taught to sew those garments by Celie herself, by then autonomous in every aspect of her life. In fact, it is revealing to observe how the evolution of one character runs in the opposite direction to the other‘s: while Celie manages to find her own voice and develop a purpose-driven life thanks, in part, to a love for sewing, Mr_ gradually destroys himself through his contempt for other people‘s (especially women‘s) creativity and independence. Only years later, when Celie has long freed herself from his control, will Mr_ become aware of the restorative power of sewing, and in the process he will learn to honor the creative impulse as a profoundly healing mechanism. In this sense, it is interesting to notice how the author questions concepts of ―feminine‖ and ―masculine‖ activities, placing Mr_ in a position where the socially constructed ―feminine‖ task of quilting becomes for him not only a pleasurable one, but even helps him develop a more compassionate personality. As a result of this, and to his own surprise, Mr_‘s destructive character adopts a more balanced attitude to himself and to others through the process of learning how to sew. On the other hand, although by that time Celie has gained economic independence from running her own business and has increased her self-esteem as a result of her personal transformation, Celie‘s emotional needs are not fully covered by her pants-making venture. The spiritual and psychological relief she is in search of can only be found in her quilting, an activity she feels intimately identified with, and which marks several turning points in her life story. Having always been an outcast in her social surroundings, Celie‘s shyness and isolation are partially alleviated by the creation of her free-spirited quilts, and this solace becomes greater when shared with Sofia initially, and later with Shug, an unruly blues female singer she falls in love with. With respect to the former, their alliance as closest friends, almost as sisters, grows much more solid after overcoming the already mentioned incident, and the bond developed between the

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two during their quilting sessions becomes so honest and intimate that it lets them confide their deepest worries as if they were thinking out loud. Their combined making of a piece following the Sister‘s Choice pattern leads Celie to muse that ―[i]f the quilt turn out perfect, maybe I give it to her, if it not perfect, maybe I keep‖ (53).82 Although Celie initially conceives it as a sort of reward for Shug, who has donated her dress to make the scraps for the quilt –and, most importantly, has provided her with instruments for self-appreciation– in the end she changes her mind and offers it to Sofia, when the latter leaves her husband and is sheltered by one of her sisters: ―At the last minute I decide to give Sofia the quilt. I don‘t know what her sister place be like, but we been having right smart cold weather long in now. For all I know, she and the children have to sleep on the floor‖ (60). The episode reflects Celie‘s sensitivity to her suffering friend and, as a farewell gift, it summarizes the hard lessons they have learned together and the strength of their sister-like union. Besides, this act of generosity —she would have liked to keep it to herself, or to give it to her adored Shug— symbolizes also the nature of patchwork quilts, in the sense that they offer the possibility of comforting those in straits from the reconstruction of overused or thrown-out scraps. Thus, these ―public acts of female creativity‖ are presented as a constructive energy that enables women to ―transcend pain […] and turn the negative into the positive‖ (Wallace, Invisibility Blues 71). Furthermore, the selection of the quilt‘s motif, known as ―Sister‘s Choice‖, is revealing in itself for several reasons. First, the fact that Walker indicates Celie‘s pattern‘s name suggests that it is going to be significant in the life of the protagonist, who is developing through the needle the ability to decide for herself. This has been perceived by Judy Elsley as Celie‘s revolutionary act of ―asserting her right to choose as well as affirming her community with other women‖ (75), both things representing, in Celie‘s case, a powerful act of defiance and of self- transformation.

82 Probably out of Celie‘s idealized admiration for Shug, whom she associates with the highest expression of beauty and style, her initial intention had been to bestowe the quilt on Shug, especially if it turned out perfect. However, Celie‘s strengthened bond with Sofia after the latter had decided to abandon her abusive husband, leads Celie to finally give her cherished quilt to Sofia, with whom she empathizes due to their common experience as victims of mistreatment.

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Besides, her decision to create a quilt following the traditional ―Sister‘s Choice‖ pattern is far from accommodating her into traditional schemes, since it is one of the starting points that will introduce radical innovations in her way of thinking. It reflects her intention of relating to other important women in her life (mainly her birth sister, Nettie, but also her friends Shug Avery and Sofia) through a kind of sisterhood that transcends the biological links and rather appeals to a deep emotional connection. These new bonds prove Celie‘s transformative process, whereby she starts to acknowledge her sisters (and herself) not as puppets playing the roles imposed by society, but as valuable human beings she can trust and, equally important, ―as individual women‖ in their own right (Elsley 74). In addition, quilts play a vital role in the life of Celie and her sister Nettie in ways that remain unknown to both until the end of the story, when they are reunited again after decades of forced separation. In a complex twist of events, Nettie‘s African sojourn provides an unexpected reconnection with her sister through the type of quilts that her travel companion had made from worn-out fabric. Many years before, Celie had had a daughter that had been given away to another family. One day, while the adoptive mother was purchasing cloth to make some garments for the child, Celie accidentally ran into her and recognized her child. Now, by unraveling the chain of hidden episodes that linked the lives of the four women, Nettie is able to identify the connection thanks to the quilts made from that cloth by the adoptive mother, who is temporarily living in Africa with Nettie and with Celie‘s children. In sum, Celie‘s recovery of her lost kin is, in part, made possible through the maker of those quilts, but equally important, through the observer, whose attentive gaze finally reunites them. It is also thought-provoking to observe that, on the two occasions, cloth functions as the unifying thread that binds Celie‘s stranded family together, and in both scenes the act of female sewing is represented by the author as charged with significant emotional force. In addition to this, the notion of female friendship as a life-saving device is made evident in Walker‘s writing either through the trope of the collaborative creation of a quilt, or through the cultural treatment given to it once it is finished. In any case, the notion that the profound bonds established

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between black women amidst a very hostile environment can save them from destruction and abuse is a persistent theme in her literature. As refers to the short story by the same author, entitled ―Everyday Use‖, the setting is also a rural Southern town, but unlike The Color Purple, which spans several decades and is, to a certain degree, a choral novel with a complex plot, in this case the narrative covers a one-time, one-place setting, focusing on a special episode occurred between the three members of a family. Mrs. Johnson, who lives with her introverted daughter Maggie, prepares for the arrival of her eldest daughter, the successful and sophisticated Dee. The plot hinges upon the emotional changes that happen in the relationship between the three, depending on how differently they relate to their common cultural heritage. First of all, it is worthwhile to observe that Walker initiates her story with a peculiar dedication: ―for your grandmama‖ (23, emphasis added), which reveals the author‘s call to stir the reader‘s awareness on their own origins, and the wisdom traditionally transmitted by grandmothers to the subsequent women in the family. It stands as a poignant symbol for the saliency of that knowledge, particularly as preserver and transmitter of the African American culture; this implies at the same time that the said knowledge must be continually (re)discovered by the new generations in order to survive. The author‘s dedication functions, therefore, as a preamble to the whole text, anticipating the notion of matrilineal heritage as the fundamental cultural source that must be carefully listened to and preserved. Walker‘s short story is narrated in the first person by Mama, whose internal monologue reflects her changing perception about her two daughters, in special with respect to their shared past as a family and as inheritors of the same culture. Presented as antagonistic characters, Dee and Maggie show opposite reactions to their mother‘s vision and treatment of the family legacy, be it immaterial, like the names that run traditional in the family, or the material objects that still remain in the home and that are witnesses to the lives of preceding generations. Maggie, the extremely shy and apparently fragile youngest daughter, is described as a fearful and insecure girl that became traumatized by a fire that had happened in their previous house. As a result of it, her limbs got burned, leaving

289 Black Stitches physical scars that shamed her and a permanent frailty that made her walk like ―a lame animal, […] a dog run over by some careless person‖ (25). The simile is very effective in that it presents Maggie as a powerless being that remains invisible for the larger society (temporarily, even for her mother), and exists on its margins. As the story progresses, Mrs. Johnson starts to look at her daughter in a different light, rediscovering under her meek appearance the common values they share. On the opposite extreme, her sister Dee represents the new generation of black women who have achieved college education and show an interest in ―sophisticated‖ matters like fashion, traveling and cultural trends. Claiming the roots of an ancestral African American lore in the wake of the Civil Rights movement is presented through Dee‘s character as one of those deceptive ―trends‖, obviously not because that would be a superficial purpose in life, but because in this case the claimer, in spite of her personal background, lacks genuine knowledge and appreciation of its significance. A revealing aspect of Dee‘s posing attitude is her exigence, once she arrives to visit her family wearing a very stylish dress and afro hairdo, to be called Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, refusing to be ―named after the people who oppress me‖ (29) to the stupefaction of her mother, who reminds her that Dee has remained a traditional name in their family for countless generations. The tension risen between the two on account of the name shift is symptomatic of Dee‘s (or Wangero‘s) efforts to live in accordance with her own construct of Africanness or African roots, even if in the process she seems to forget that her immediate family history is equally part of those roots. The claim of a new name is especially problematic in the relationship between Dee and her mother, and it is at the same time symptomatic of the upheavals of mid-century times, when the black nationalist movement advocated a return to the African essences. Inadvertently, by attempting to sacrifice her more recent black American history for the sake of an earlier, all-African past, Dee ignores ―the combative nature of naming practices among African-Americans‖ (Calviño 320). In other words, she is unaware of the choice and transmission of family names as a resistance strategy against white domination, since this practice

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represented, especially during the years of bondage, one of their few opportunities to oppose and counteract such domination, if only on a symbolic or sentimental level. Although some authors, like Alex Haley, have reflected upon the damaging effects of the original process of ―Anglicization‖ of the newly arrived Africans, accusing it of being ―the first step in the psychic dehumanization of an individual or collectively of a people‖ (16), what Walker‘s narrative suggests is, in a way, the vindication of the same independence through the opposite means. From a historic perspective, naming one‘s children acted as ―one of the strategies used to confront the threat of family segregation‖ (Calviño 320), hence its powerful emotional value and the importance given to the continuation of names within a same bloodline. Therefore, being able to consolidate a family name, or simply being able to choose it, were acts that reinforced severely threatened kinship bonds, and in a certain sense it helped to drive away the ghosts of family dismemberment. Dee‘s refusal to keep her name puts Mrs. Johnson in a conflicting situation, as she debates between the love for her daughter, whom she rarely sees anymore, and the loyalty due to their shared past. In any case, the tension reflects the dilemma experienced by a generation of black Americans who in the 1960s and 1970s found in the black nationalist outcry a way to dive directly back into the source of their original roots (Turner, Crafted Lives 134). This translated in a preoccupation with a kind of aesthetics that projected the Pan-African ideal, including afro hairdos, very colorful clothing and the retrieval of a genuinely African anthroponymy, among other things. However, as Walker‘s story illustrates, the complexity of undertaking that journey backwards in search of one‘s primal ancestry may not be exempt from contradictions or misconceptions. In this case, it can be argued that Dee‘s intention not to betray part of her lineage results in a betrayal of another part of it that also needs acknowledgement and preservation, as her mother disappointedly complains. Interestingly, Dee‘s vindication of her ethnicity also through the choice of gaudy and exotic attire is perceived by her mother as a painful misconstruction of their common roots, not as a recognition of them. The inevitable consequence of

291 Black Stitches this cultural clash is that Mrs. Johnson and Maggie regard Dee as an outsider, a flashy impostor who threatens to seize their family treasures (most notably, the quilts), ―clutching them closely to her bosom‖ (33) as if demanding ownership. Dee‘s outlandish arrival wearing ―[a] dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes‖ (28), as described by her mother, evidences the paradox of a stranger in their own home or, to put it in other words, a feeling of cultural misplacement. This sense of being out of place accompanies her character (or rather, the external perception of the character) all along the narrative, presenting her visit as that of a snobbish tourist who delights in the ―exoticism‖ of the local customs and extols them as a rarity that must be analyzed. The incongruity between Wangero‘s and her family‘s different perceptions of the same reality also finds a parallel in the narrative structure, which interrupts Mama‘s fluid soliloquies with abrupt references to the newcomer. Thus, on several occasions Mrs. Johnson breaks her own stream of thought with brusque allusions to her daughter‘s coming, as in ―She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks‘ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant under her voice […] Dee wanted nice things‖ (26). Or, when describing Dee‘s male (and equally exotic-looking) companion: Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. ‗Uhnnnh,‘ is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. ‗Uhnnnh.‘ Dee next. (28) With this rhetoric resource, Walker accentuates the destabilizing effects of Dee‘s arrival for Mama and especially for Maggie, who ―will be nervous until after her sister goes‖ (23) and feels immensely relieved at that moment. This formal technique, used repeatedly throughout the text, highlights the breakup in the quiet routines of Mrs. Johnson and above all of Maggie, who perceives her sister‘s visit with hostility. Yet, Dee‘s disruption in the tranquil lives of Mama and Maggie will be countered by the unexpected (even to herself) reaction of the mother, which will have a backfire effect on the newcomer: ―I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room,

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snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero‘s hands and dumped them into Maggie‘s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open‖ (34). Remarkably, at that turning point in the plot, the scene chosen by the narrator is not a neutral place in the house (as could be the living room, the kitchen or even the porch), but the intimacy of Mama‘s own bedroom. Walker situates the mother in her own room exactly at the moment when the latter makes her decision, and the roles are suddenly swapped. Furthermore, the story‘s ending, with its implicit reference to the quilts that Mama and Maggie have managed to save, reestablishes the temporarily broken balance: ―After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed‖ (35). Once again, this last reference transmits the idea of traditional quilts as symbols of leading a calm existence, in harmony with one‘s physical and cultural milieu. Besides, in an attempt to accommodate her new life to what she has mentally idealized as her true heritage, Dee moves around the house staking claim to some of the older and quainter objects, suggesting that her mother and sister are not capable of understanding the cultural value of those utensils. Mrs. Johnson and Maggie look askance at her demands, growing increasingly irritated by Dee‘s snobbish attitude. Walker‘s alignment with Maggie, the character that best embodies vulnerability and the absence of opportunities in life, is visible in her representation as the unlucky daughter who in the end is rewarded by destiny, as a sort of compensation for all the suffering she has had to endure. In addition, Maggie‘s scars from the fire incident echo a true event in the author‘s early life, when she was awfully wounded in one eye at the age of eight, remaining partially blind thereafter and suffering from long-term physical and psychological damages (White 38-9). In sum, Maggie‘s character occupies one of the most vulnerable positions in American society: the rural, poor, uneducated and socially neglected black woman who, on top of all those circumstances, has suffered a body- disfiguring accident produced by a domestic fire. Yet, though she feels menaced by Dee‘s intelligence and physical attractiveness, it is precisely a strong faith in

293 Black Stitches her own roots that gives her stability and a sense of belonging, which paradoxically Dee keeps searching for without success. Maggie‘s ability to cope with physical and emotional pain seems in direct proportion with her natural capacity to live in harmony with her family‘s cultural background, which she not only understands and cherishes, but is also contributing to continue. Her quiltmaking skills, inherited by the other women in her family, prove that her mother‘s beautiful quilts, which so suddenly are coveted by the newly-arrived Dee, do not look like simple gallery pieces to her, even if she acknowledges their enormous artistic value. In this sense, Maggie represents also the black female conception of a preoccupation for aesthetics in combination with and not in opposition to functional use, a notion that has usually been problematic from the conventional western perception of art as an almost ―sacred‖ activity, clearly detached from more prosaic aims. In essence, Dee personifies the latter vision, as she centers all her interest in the purely ornamental aspect of the quilts as objects that should be hanged on a visible location and praised as a painting is praised in a museum room; according to her criterion, the visual beauty of a quilt makes it incompatible with its mundane use as a humble bedcover. Hence her alarm at the thought that Maggie, in the case she inherited the precious quilts from their mother, would put them to ordinary use, inevitably wearing them away with time. In a manner, Mrs. Johnson‘s final decision to bequeath them to Maggie reveals how the two share the belief that homemade quilts should be considered art not in spite of being used for routine purposes, but rather in addition to that fact. The quilt is, in their eyes, a fruit of the creative mind that blends the memories from older times with the upcoming generations, but it does not do so in an isolated or ―aseptic‖ medium (as would, for instance, a sculpture or a mosaic): it incorporates the emotional aspect of family intimacy, as it is used for warming up oneself or another family member at bedtime. The idea behind Mrs. Johnson‘s zealous keeping of the family quilts also has a parallel in Walker‘s own childhood memories. According to Evelyn C. White‘s thorough biography of the writer, Alice Walker: A Life (2004), her writing was highly ―infused with her mother‘s quilt-making skills‖ (57), a feature shared

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as well with other African American women authors such as bell hooks, who recollect a similar experience. Unquestionably, Walker recognizes the connection between the act of making those quilts and a profound sense of spirituality and gratitude derived from the tradition: ―I feel just really good and protected and blessed … when I am under quilts made by my mother … The power is partly about grounding yourself in something that is humble … something that you can actually see take form through your own effort‖ (qtd. in White, Alice Walker 57, ellipsis in the original). The emphasis placed on the idea of being physically able to transform some material resources into pieces of art that simultaneously provide comfort for body and soul, for the eye and for one‘s memory, is not a minor one. Of all the productive efforts made by African American women during slavery, quilts were perhaps the only material objects they could retain some degree of agency upon, and were among the very few items created for purposes other than practical use alone. The capability to elaborate with their own hands –often directed exclusively by their free will– these artifacts with an aim of heritage in mind reveals a spirit of cultural resistance that goes beyond the mere creative instinct. Truthfully, it can be argued too that slave women produced many other daily objects or goods and were able to witness the fruits of their effort, but the inherent significance of quilts transcends any of them, since their elaboration was intended to persist in time and leave a simultaneously tangible and intangible imprint in their communities. All these notions clash with Dee‘s considerations of art and how it must be dealt with. Her shocked reaction at the thought of wearing out the quilts from common use originates in the idea that art must be ritualized and treated with a certain reverence and, what is more interesting, always outside of the domestic context, thereby implying that domesticity automatically excludes the possibility of dignified appreciation. This is evident as she moves about the house showing her intentions to appropriate certain utensils, like a churner and a dasher, to exhibit them as picturesque tokens of her rural birthplace. Such insistence on uprooting the material objects from her past and on displaying them outside of their real context as fashionable items indebted to some Southern charm finds a

295 Black Stitches turning point when Dee claims ownership of the old quilts in the trunk that her mother had been saving for years. Dee‘s perception of the family quilts as ―momentarily fashionable elements‖ (Ramsey 189) paradoxically makes her lose them, since she fails to appreciate their true value. As Dee contends that she should have them, since Maggie would ―probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use‖ (33), Mrs. Johnson‘s immediate response –―I reckon she would […] I hope she will!‖ (33)– certifies her irritation at her pretentious daughter, who years before had turned down the offer to take some of the quilts to college for considering them too old-fashioned. Besides, Dee‘s disgust at the thought of ―trivializing‖ those extraordinary quilts also evidences a consideration of art in a decontextualized manner: she wishes to present them as an exotic trophy, proof of her humble origins and her upward mobility in society. Such aim is self-contradictory, in that it attempts to praise an artefact for its cultural significance while implicitly (or unconsciously) denying it. Although Dee instinctively perceives the importance of the long hours of manual work devoted to the making of those quilts, she does not grasp their real dimension as cultural legacies. When Mrs. Johnson offers her instead some more modern quilts, Dee refuses, complaining that

―I don‘t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.‖ ―That‘ll make them last better,‖ I said. ―That‘s not the point,‖ said Wangero.

―These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!‖ She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them. ―Some of the pieces […] come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,‖ I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn‘t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her. (32-3)

Dee‘s utmost interest in possessing the physical objects that bear witness to her heritage, even if appreciating their value as art, discredits her claim to raise the status of such heritage. In fact, it could be argued that her use of an imitative

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African style (reflected in her name, clothing or hairdo) shows to what extent Dee and the family she left back home speak now two different languages: her mother and Maggie do not feel the need to publicly ―upgrade‖ their roots, because they truthfully honor them already. Because of Dee‘s insistence in coopting the supposedly best quilts, her sister gives in and accepts to let them go. Maggie‘s resigned reply reveals her poor chances at succeeding in open confrontations, but more significantly, it suggests that she truly understands the ephemeral nature of art, and that to a great extent the quilts‘ value lies in their emotional meaning as representative of the women who made them, and the relatives whose old clothes were pieced and stitched: ―‗She can have them, Mama,‘ she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. ‗I can ‗member Grandma Dee without the quilts.‘‖ (34) As it turns out, she chooses not to fight to keep the quilts although (or precisely because) she knows that their real worth is not being grasped by her sister. Maggie, who knows how to quilt for she has spent her life learning the art from the older women, can become a more effective ambassador of the family‘s precious quilts even if she does not struggle to retain them. In sum, both of Walker‘s works reflect on the transformative role of quilts in the lives of African American women, claiming that many were able to survive extremely dire times thanks to the bonds created with other women while making those quilts or, at the very least, by striving to keep the memory of their loved ones alive through the sometimes collaborative, sometimes solitary –and usually introspective– process of quilting.

4.7. Handstitched words: the quilting journal of Nora Ezell

Although it is considered that the fully developed autobiographical writings by African American women started to blossom in the mid-twentieth century (Braxton 184), the tradition in fact dates back to the earliest first-person accounts, often orally narrated rather than hand-written; these originated in the eighteenth century and are ascribed to the slave narrative corpus, which is composed of approximately six thousand extant stories (Beaulieu, Black Women Writers and

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Black Stitches the American Neo-Slave Narrative 7). For its part, Belinda, or the Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon, dated 1787, is considered the first narrative of this type, and it reflects the orally dictated experiences of a slave woman named Belinda Sutton (Braxton 211). The story, intended not so much as a literary work as it was conceived to be politically used –Belinda wielded her first-person account to plea for the abolitionist cause in front of the New York legislature (Braxton 2)–, reveals in any case a gender and race consciousness among African American women since the days of bondage that has been ever-present even if scarcely noticed by mainstream society, until recent times at least.

The relevance of the slave narrative as a genre has to be acknowledged simultaneously from the consideration of its political as well as literary impact. On the one hand, it is thought to have contributed to propel the arguments of the antislavery movement and, on the other, it had a remarkable influence on the trajectory of American literature in general (for example, in the development of the novel as a genre) and of the African American literature in particular (Gibert 107). The repercussions of the analyses of the first-person writings produced by former slaves have been profound and fruitful, and their multilayered readings are a key part of the American literary corpora today. More precisely, some scholars have pointed that ―[a]t present the slave narrative is recognized as the foundation upon which most of modern African-American literature is based‖ (Gibert 107-8). Furthermore, the specialized study of autobiographical writings has undergone different stages, fluctuating between critical disinterest to the modern considerations of autobiography as an independent literary genre. In-depth critical treatment of autobiography as a genre did not emerge until the 1960s, and it was not until a decade later that a solid body of criticism started to form around black literary creation in general (Braxton 4). It would take a further decade, verging on the 1980s, for the black American female autobiography to be considered and analyzed as a literary genre deserving critical attention in its own right (5).83 As a

 83 The decade of the 1980s is regarded by some scholars as the period when the protests and claims that rose in the wave of the Civil Rights movements of the foregoing decades began to bear their fruits, and it is also the time when African American artists started to focus on their own cultural sources on a large scale (Collins, The Art of History 7).

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result, it is no wonder that the study of this particular type of literature has been plagued with insufficient attention until much later than it should. The unexpected effect of such a long delay has been the rise of a particular genre, the neo-slave narrative, which started to bloom in the late 1960s, especially thanks to Margaret Walker‘s Jubilee (1966), and was vigorously explored by authors such as Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper or Sherley Anne Williams during the 1980s and 1990s. As Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu contends in Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative (1999), the point of departure for these authors is a revision of the slave narrative from the perspective of their own maternal ancestors, which results in partly factual/ partly fictional works: hence, ―the narrative now is fiction, but the testimony of their foremothers […] is [its] inspiration‖ (2). Some of the most remarkable black female autobiographers of all times have acknowledged the existence of a connection between the slave narrative corpus and their own work. For instance, in the 2016 documentary And Still I Rise, while recalling how she developed her famous autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou states: ―I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass, which is the slave narrative: Speaking in the first person singular, talking about the third person plural. Always saying ‗I,‘ meaning ‗we‘‖ (1:11‘24‘‘). The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) epitomizes nowadays the best known example of this tradition, to which the writings of former female slaves have contributed greatly too. Although usually less known to the non-specialized reader, the memoirs by ex-slaves such as Harriet Jacobs, who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) or Lucy A. Delaney, author of From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891), exemplify a tradition that was maintained by a number of African American women who had experienced bondage and either were literate or dictated their memories to another person. In any case, as Beaulieu has noticed, usually these narratives gathered little interest in their day: ―The unique plight of the enslaved woman continued to receive scant attention, and she remained an all but invisible figure‖ (Black Women Writers 1).

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Black Stitches

As regards Angelou‘s abovementioned remark about the collective impact of an individual autobiographer on the African American consciousness, it might seem problematic to support such contention with respect to Nora Ezell‘s work, entitled My Quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter (1999). The diary covers in total a time span from May 4, 1981 to December 24, 1993, during which the author calculates to have elaborated between two hundred and three hundred quilts (Ezell 31). Initiated when the author was 64 but published almost two decades afterwards, the journal looks back onto some of the memorable parts of Ezell‘s life, crisscrossed by a number of the social and political episodes that shattered the country during the second half of the twentieth century. Even if it can be considered as culturally heir to the earlier black American women‘s autobiographies, Ezell‘s journal clearly detaches itself from a thematic point of view: it deals mostly with a specific topic, the daily efforts, worries and hopes of an elderly quilt maker living by herself. Besides, her insistence on maintaining an individual voice as an artist seems to counteract Angelou‘s statement whereby the ―I‖ becomes the ―we.‖ In spite of all this, however, it is possible to value Ezell‘s influence within the larger frame of the black American cultural tradition. Her achievement as an artist who struggles to spread her work and reflect it in the pages of a diary is in itself a continuator and a precursor of such tradition: her journal echoes the contributions of her forerunners, and at the same time it exerts its influence on present and future women writers striving to communicate their personal stories. Particularly, Nora Ezell‘s work combines aspects of self-representation by fusing two art forms that act here as mutually complementary: the needle and the pen. Following simultaneously two traditions that have been crucial for the survival of African American women‘s culture, quiltmaking and the transmission of memories (in this case, in written form), Ezell blends the outcomes of both into a unique kind of art expression. Ezell‘s narrative showcases autobiographical elements of her life in much the same way that her quilts (through the materials used, the time spent on each block, the motivations behind each one of them, etc) reflect autobiographical aspects in textile language: as she declares, ―[m]y quilts are a good and true expression of my inner self‖ (Ezell 136). It can easily be

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noticed that one modality of her life‘s depiction acts as a complement, or even as an extension, to the other. Taking into account the myriad of channels for an artist, aside from the literary format, to mirror themselves in any art form –i.e., ranging from a painter‘s self-portrait to a musician‘s introspective composition–, this Story Quilt maker exposes much of her artistic and personal self through her needlework, to the point that the corresponding written logs that she keeps about each quilt simply act as explanatory details for her creative process, not as the main core of it. In other words, Ezell‘s inner world is exposed by her written entries but even more so by her actual quiltmaking, which in fact retains all prominence as testimony of her life. With respect to the debated existence of a specific set of traits and interests that presumably characterize the writings by African American women, authors and critics have suggested a variety of reasons both backing and opposing this idea. While some claim that it is possible to detect certain thematic aspects in much of the corpus (namely, the role of family, the influence of maternal figures and the claim of a common cultural heritage), others object to the idea that literature crafted by male or female writers must be inherently different. For example, when asked in an interview if she perceived any distinctions in the way that black male and female writers selected and developed their themes, Angelou insisted on the fact that both deal with the particular but equally represent the general human condition. In her view, it is misleading to consider female concerns as attached to the smaller sphere of family relationships and male writers‘ interests more linked to representational issues such as the political protest, when in reality the two groups use the particular to generate universal statements (in Tate 6-7). Certainly, an author reflects the world from the standpoint of their life experiences, and it is reasonable to expect that a black woman‘s vision of the world significantly differs from the experiences of a white male. The most interesting aspect about this debate is not, in my opinion, whether there exists or not an inherently different literature according to gender, but what are the stimuli and contributions of the literature by African American women in particular. In that sense, Angelou‘s interviewer, Claudia Tate, positions black women writers in a stance that turns out to be unexpectedly favorable: the crossfire of gender and

301 Black Stitches race lends to these authors the capacity to observe and represent reality from perspectives that lie out of reach for other groups of writers.84 As such, they ―write from a unique vantage point‖ that allows for an amplified ―angle of vision,‖ shedding light on corners of existence that traditionally had remained obscured (Tate xvi). I find this argument to be very useful for the abovementioned dichotomy, since it dismantles the idea that black women writers usually tend to focus on familiar or domestic topics (especially, if this implies a prejudice of simplification) and claims the opposed argument: that their outlook, based on the complexity of their experience, can act on their advantage, endowing them with a richer and ampler perspective. Nora Ezell‘s journal does exactly so. Her pages bring light on a kind of existence, that of the Southern rural black woman, which had been usually overlooked in literature, especially in the form of the first-person, non-fictional account. Moreover, she transcends the intimate narration by describing the daily ups and downs of her work as an artist, connecting at the same time her memories to the groundbreaking events of the nation‘s history. To begin with, the compilation‘s title, My Quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter, is quite revealing in itself. It exhibits the author‘s pride in the product of her own talent, be it in the shape of her diary or, more importantly, in the material object of her quilts. The double self-reference in the title reveals, quite unquestionably, the artist‘s identification with her own works and, as such, they receive the utmost of her creative potentiality and attention. Secondly, Ezell‘s self-denomination as ―American quilter‖ summarizes her own perception of her needlework as belonging to the larger American quilting tradition, and it proves the author‘s reluctancy to falling into the categorization of any strict or

84 The feminist standpoint theory, propounded among others by Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding, considers that non-privileged social groups paradoxically perceive knowledge from a vantage position, and that it should be the aim of specialized researchers to base their theoretical approaches on that particular knowledge (Bowell n.p.). Furthermore, this concept may be linked with bell hooks‘ contribution to the Double Consciousness theory, which contends that African American women add to the duality of being black and American, the fact of their female gender. Drawing on Du Bois‘ conceptualization of the unreconciled experiences of being an American person of black race, hooks incorporates into the theory the aspect of gender, suggesting that it is determinant in black women‘s perception of the world, and particularly in their integration in American society (Lento n.p.).

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stereotyped vision of African American quilting. In agreement with other black quilters and quilt researchers (namely, the African American quilt scholar Cuesta Benberry) who wish to avoid any reductionist categorizations, Ezell is claiming, above anything else, the right to belong to ―her own school‖, as she insists on the importance of crafting genuinely innovative quilts –hence, quilts that would fail to fit into any rigid or standardized classification. In sum, she tries to forbear what could be called a predetermined African American sense of aesthetics in her work. In fact, and though the act of identifying with the term ―American‖ is in any case another form of categorization, Ezell appears so much to be in search of conforming a personal style that her rejection of any reductionist concept seems only logical. Truth be told, her quilts are living proof that no clear classification can be made of a talented quilter –or of any talented artist, for that matter–, as it is impossible to place them in a too constrained denomination. In this sense, her work can be considered another form of innovative contribution to the long-held tradition of African American quilting, as in their own way have done her predecessors throughout history, and continue to do today. Nora Ezell‘s life as an artist certainly deserves to be extoled. Born in 1917 in a small Mississippi town, she was brought up in the Alabama village of Birmingham, the place where she spent her childhood and adolescent years watching her mother and aunts creating very different kinds of quilts. However, as unbelievable as it seems to the eye of critics and peers, none of them transmitted the knowledge to her in an explicit manner –in fact, as she recounts, nobody ever taught her how to make a quilt. Ezell explains about her early interest in the craft that ―[m]y aunt had all kinds of quilt patterns. […] I guess it never came to her to do her own, but […] I wanted my quilts to be different. Eventually I wanted to do something no one else had done. Thus, even at that time [being only a child] I wanted to make a quilt that no one else had made‖ (Ezell 24). This precocious interest in finding her own voice as a quilter would become a permanent trait of her artistic personality throughout her career, as reflects her rejection to use patterns for the making of her Story Quilts (using instead only pictures, photographs or mental images) and, remarkably, her refusal to ever create a repetition of the same quilt, even if it were not a widely-spread design but

303 Black Stitches the product of her own inventiveness. For example, although her much-celebrated Story Quilts garnered her numerous requests for duplication (usually from a collector, an art institution or simply an individual interested in her work), Ezell always refused to do it, arguing that none of her quilts should be too much like any other –including those already created by herself (Ezell 134). As such, this impulse to elaborate thoroughly original pieces can be observed throughout her work, and it reveals a necessity, as she would admit, not only to contribute to the tradition with quilts that reflect her personal taste, but to do it in a continuous search for excellence: as she claims, ―I‘m always striving for perfection‖ (Ezell 88) since ―I am my own worst critic‖ (48). These two traits, the impulse for genuine innovation and the search for excellence, are also found among other African American quilters, such as the already approached artists Faith Ringgold or Mary Lee Bendolph. In rearview, these two features are held in common by these and other black American quilters who, like the members of the Gee‘s Bend group, strove to create pieces unparalleled to all the rest, which resonated with their personalities and often aimed to convey long-transmitted messages, honoring a proud heritage. In the case of Nora Ezell, the emphasis on maintaining that message alive and communicating it to subsequent generations takes place on a twofold level: from the point of view of content and of the quilts‘ aesthetics. As far as content is concerned, many of her Story Quilts are centered on racial episodes of African American life from a thematic point of view, in some cases even involving herself in the episodes she narrates. On the other hand, and as has been explored in this dissertation, many African American women quilters have devoted much of their effort to create quilts which bore testimony to their African roots not only from a thematic perspective but also through the visual nature of their work: for example, by resorting to certain colors and patterns, or by trying to reproduce purely African American cultural expressions, such as jazz, blues or hip hop, in the aesthetics of their quilts. In my view, a parallel may be drawn between those music styles and both the methodology and aesthetics of Ezell‘s work. It is possible to support Heather D. Russell‘s argument that a triple connection exists between black American

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music, quilting and literary narratives (―Quilted Discourse‖ n.p.) by observing in detail Ezell‘s needlework and her journal reflections. On the one hand, the unusual mixing of motifs and techniques, together with the unexpected outcomes of many of her quilts provide them with a clash effect that could respond to her interest in creating ―off the trodden path‖ needlework. On the other hand, the intermittent breaches in her creative flow, both with respect to continuity in the elaboration of the quilts and especially to her journal writings, contribute to back Russell‘s parallel among the three forms of art expression. In sum, although Ezell‘s most representative work is not as a writer but as a quilter, she impersonates the link between varying manifestations of African American art. Like Russell, other critics have pointed out that the processes of quilting and writing, as seen from a female perspective, are similar not only in the gradual composition of a whole from fragmented pieces, but also regarding the actual elaboration conditions, usually plagued with external interruptions and discontinuities. ―Piecing,‖ according to Elaine Showalter, is ―an art of making do and eking out, an art of […] conservation. It reflects the fragmentation of women‘s time, the scrappiness and uncertainty of women‘s creative or solitary moments. […] [It] represents a triumph over time and scarcity‖ (―Common Threads‖ 149-50). Frequently, the disruptions derive from the load of heterogeneous work to which the authors are submitted. In this sense, Ezell‘s multi-task lifestyle reflects a tradition heir to most women artists from previous generations that were either economically dependent or low-paid workers, who as a consequence could not release themselves from many of their domestic burdens. As was the case for many of her peers, day after day and without vacationing periods, Ezell had to juggle all kinds of household work, including the most strenuous chores, with her artistic calling, as she records in the pages of her diary. In fact, the very nature of such diary answers many questions concerning the significance of her work, not only in relation to aesthetic choices or motivations. The way she writes her entries, at times following a steady pattern, while others leaving long silence gaps, reflects the everyday-life process of quiltmaking, even for a professional fiber artist as she is. The periods when no entries are added

305 Black Stitches normally respond either to health issues or to the abovementioned interruptions. The breaches in her creative continuum also affect her quilting but, interestingly, to a different degree: she strives so that the disruptions do not have such a direct bearing on it. She may spend several days, even weeks, leaving the pen untouched, but the needle seems to never fall from her hand, as she makes a steady effort to carry the quilting along in spite of ill health (mostly, arthritis and failing sight) or family problems. The following excerpt, relative to the making process of one of her quilts in celebration of the city of Birmingham, Alabama, exemplifies her preoccupation, on the one hand, with the effects of ageing on her work, and on the other with the ever-growing sensation that her skills as an artist might not last for much longer (and how she relies on her faith to carry on):

I love this [block]. I think maybe I‘m doing my best work. Sometimes I get the feeling that I may not do this type of work again. My fingers just simply refuse to hold the needle and my eyes don‘t see the needle‘s eye! Are they trying to tell me something? I don‘t know, but I shall pray God will give me the strength, as I have the want to do a good job. (Ezell 94)

The unwavering effort to continue the needlework despite the difficulties seems to suggest that Ezell‘s role as a diarist functions to a certain extent in surrogate manner for her truly transcendent work: that of a Story Quilt artist. Devoting most of her energy to her passion for textile art, and frequently leading a solitary life, the way Ezell chooses to communicate with others, even with her readers, is not as much through the written language as it is through her quilt language. Using a simile to account for this situation, it could be said that the written pages contribute to shed light on the sewing process she embarks on for each block of the quilt, in the same way that a ship captain keeps a log: to account for the particularities found during navigation. Following this metaphor, Ezell focuses her attention on the creative stage she is involved in at that moment and on her personal feelings on every step of the process, with the log acting as a descriptive device of her changing states of mind. Curiously enough, she only keeps that detailed record about her Story Quilts, not about her other projects: ―I don‘t keep a log on traditional quilts, but on the story quilts I like to see how long it takes me, how I feel as I work on it, if the work suited me‖ (101). The fact that

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she wishes to leave written record of the elaboration process of those quilts from an intimate perspective reinforces the twofold narration she develops. Taking into account the narrative nature of those quilts, the connection between her written word and her quilted work is made all the more evident at the beginning of her diary: ―I thought that I, too, would […] do things with a needle and thread that I have seen done with pen‖ (41-2). Moreover, in the Introduction to her journal, the author reflects about her expectations to maintain her legacy within her family: she hopes her descendants will keep the original manuscript of the diary, including the photographs she took of many of her quilts (Ezell 23). On the other hand, as refers to the nexus between writing and quilting from a formal perspective, Elaine Showalter has also pointed out that ―the quilt process corresponds to the writing process, on the level of the word, the sentence, the structure of a story or novel, and the images, motifs, or symbols that unify a fictional work‖ (―Common Threads‖ 151). In Ezell‘s case, her day-by-day composition of a diary reflects even more accurately that simile, since her writing is not fictional but descriptive of the evolution of her (other) creative action, in the same way that, for instance, photographs taken during the construction of a building would show evidence of its different stages as it is being made. Other elements, like the author‘s direct address to the recipients of her art, who at the same time are her readers, contribute to create the sensation that the acts of narrating and quilting continuously overlap each other. This perception is shared by the public attending her quilt exhibitions, who agree about Ezell‘s talent as a storyteller and her ability to transmit a sequence of events through her quilts (107).85 Moreover, the inclusion of written epigraphs acting as clarifying support for her quilted scenes or ―vignettes‖ also contributes to the literary nature of many of her Story Quilts. Even more graphic is the inclusion of a cloth-made book on one of her designs, the Kentucky Derby Quilt (1991), to celebrate the achievements of Annie Miller, the woman for whom that quilt was intended. This fabric book, composed of six pages and highlighting the relevant episodes of

85 Ezell‘s quilts entitled Civil Rights and A Tribute to the Civil Righters of Alabama, 1954-1989 can be seen at https://www.artsbma.org/collection/quilt-civil-rights/ and https://www.pinterest.es/pin/474144667017847294/ respectively. Other works by the same author are available at http://mastersoftraditionalarts.org/artists/97?selected_facets=

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Miller‘s life, is in itself an example of metanarrative quiltmaking, as it blends the actual language of inscriptions and images with the physical inclusion of stitched book pages within the quilt. This ―story within a story‖ also evidences Ezell‘s blending of the arts of narrating and quilting, whose boundaries are usually blurred in her work. In fact, even the quilts apparently unrelated to any particular sequence of narration tend to ―hide‖ a story within, be it from the point of view of the fabric employed, or because they were created to convey a certain message by the author. For example, the materials used in some of her supposedly non- narrative quilts, such as those displaying a variety of ties arranged in different shapes, refer to specific elements of Ezell‘s culture (e.g., the inclusion of beads from the New Orleans Mardi Gras parades) or to biographical aspects of the person for whom the quilt is being made. In other cases, she uses traditional patterns but provides them with her own symbolic meaning: for instance, the Sheehy Family Wall Hanging (1993) showcases popular designs, such as the Star of Hope, the Nine Patch, the Wild Goose Chase, the Drunkard‘s Path or the End of the Earth, each being used by the quilter with the intention to convey her personal views.86 Again, the metanarrative nature of her quilts requires that the receiver (be it the person reading her journal, or the public watching her quilts) have some knowledge of the story behind each patch or ―vignette‖ to gain full understanding of the narration being told. Equally from a formal point of view, Ezell‘s journal is in itself a curious mixture of genres. It is not fully an autobiographical record, in the sense that it does not cover a large span of time in the author‘s life. In this case, her writing is centered on certain aspects of her daily life instead of globally considered in hindsight, as autobiographical reminiscing tends to do. As a result, it does not conform completely to the journal-writing tradition, where the author usually approaches a large and heterogeneous range of issues. Apart from the occasional mention to a number of political worries, past and present (e.g., the Middle East conflicts during the late twentieth century, or the Civil Rights riots of the 1960s (Ezell 16, 93)), the narration almost exclusively focuses on Ezell‘s sewing

86 For example, the same wall hanging includes a patch with the popular pattern of the Underground Railroad, which Ezell associates with a figure she is interested in: Harriet Tubman and her legendary incursions into slavery states to conduct fugitives to the free North.

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sessions. These embody the center of the universe for her, and those concerns related to family, emotional and physical health, attendance to quilt fairs and some sporadic memories from the past appear to be the satellites revolving around that axis. Ezell‘s admiration for the inherent value of quilts lies in their versatility and significance: the possibility to create an object that is equally a pleasure for the senses and a thoroughly usable utensil. She emphasizes that the ultimate greatness of a quiltmaker derives from their capacity to elaborate such a cohesive work out of practically nothing: usually from the discards of cloth or from its least significant remnants. In fact, her needle provides testimony that it is possible to create veritable works of art from the humblest materials or, put in her own words, it gives the quilter the opportunity of ―[t]aking nothing and doing something out of it‖ (Ezell 41). This capacity to stretch one‘s resources and skills to the limit is heir to a more traditional (and environmentally friendly) custom of giving further and further life to already-used fabric, in opposition to present day‘s consumerist tendency to simply replace it by new store-bought clothing. According to Ezell‘s testimony, supplies for the composition of quilts used to come, for countless other black women in her generation, from the discards of field harvesting: ―We got our cotton for batting by scrapping up the [leftover] cotton after [the owners] finished [picking] the field‖ (27). In Ezell‘s case, she avers she was able to start quilting from a young age by selling homemade candy to the village peddlers, who either offered her money or scrap bundles (usually muslin) in exchange (24-6). For the acquisition of the first fabric scraps, she remembers the girlhood years, when helping the overseer‘s wife would provide her with a meal and some remnants of cloth (26). Ezell‘s harsh living conditions had accompanied her from childhood –a time she associates with field and domestic labor– to the later years as a grown-up woman, working and ―chopp[ing] cotton all day with my oldest grandchild on my shoulders‖ (35). However, it can be argued that her most profound wounds do not originate from the harshness of the continued physical work –though it did exact a toll on her health– but from a painful emotional life, especially regarding the lack

309 Black Stitches of support received from much of her family since childhood. Possibly stemming from that absence of recognition among her kinship, Ezell does not hesitate to claim the relevance of her work, as she is always trying ―very hard to live up to the name – ‗an artist with needle and thread‘‖ (83). This aspect of her biography, together with the loss of her only daughter to cancer, contributes to building her solid character and necessary self-reliance, which often translates itself into a preference for solitude and a strong faith in her own criteria. The fact that her daughter did not live to see their collaborative work on the Martin Luther King quilt finished –even though she had provided the idea for its design– left a profound mark on Ezell, whose references to the deceased daughter abound in her diary.87 Ezell‘s firm statement as an art maker is undoubtedly aligned with her strong personality. As regards her self-assurance as a quilter and her lack of feigned modesty, which takes her to salute her work as that of an artist of merit, it is interesting to notice how the simple distaste for doing ―tedious things‖, sometimes required as part of the sewing process, reveals the very creative nature of her mind.88 She not only discards making patterns out of her own designs but even dislikes the involvement in certain repetitive tasks that her routine as a quilter at times demands. Her position is adamant in that her work must satisfy her criteria and also those of the person or collective it is intended for; and, as the pages of her journal suggest, preferably in that order. From a sociocultural point of view, Ezell‘s determination to lead an individualistic, even solitary, existence, seems to clash with popular constructions whereby Southern rural black women used to be stereotyped. According to this historically spread concept, they were frequently associated with the already- explored Mammy figure: a cheerful and nurturing elder woman always surrounded by a considerable amount of people she was permanently expected to cater for. On the contrary, Ezell‘s open recognition to feel a sense of overwhelm,

87 Image of the quilt available at https://images.lib.ncsu.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?search=SUBMIT&q=Nora+Ezell&dateRange Start=&dateRangeEnd=&QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA 88 Ezell‘s self-validation attitude can be read as a statement on race, gender and social class, since she adopts that stance from a non-privileged position with respect to the three variables. Proud to defend her self-worth as an artist in a difficult environment, she is implicitly trying to redress the existing unbalance in her work context.

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when not outright stress, derived from the burden of such family demands certainly challenges a stereotype that has held for too long –to the point that it outlived post-slavery decades and remained firmly established until the eruption of the anti-racist movements in the 1960s. Her frank position provides the diary‘s reader with interesting elements for debate. The artist, through her complaints about the interferences that grandchildren and greatgrandchildren impose on her work as a quilter, reminds the reader (or the quilt critic) of the necessity, for any artist at any period of time, to find their own time and space to be able to develop their creative work without external disturbances. Traditionally, and as famously expressed by Virginia Woolf, ―for women […] these difficulties [of having impediments to create] were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a soundproof room, was out of the question‖ (A Room of One‟s Own 595). Obviously, these difficulties (which have accompanied women for centuries in every corner of the world) apply to the material as much as to the cultural obstacles they have encountered, and increase exponentially when referring to the case of black women artists. From this perspective, Ezell‘s self-vindication as a full-time artist and her determination to live life in her own terms is doubly challenging to conventional social norms: first, due to the combative nature of her quilts, and secondly, through her rupture of social and artistic stereotypes. This notwithstanding, enjoying that kind of freedom may also come at a high price, especially if considering that the person who dares challenge the traditional status quo mentality belongs to the less-privileged group in terms of social class, gender, race and age. Living the life of an independent and self- sufficient black woman artist meant also that she had to carry about all the housework, including gardening, domestic chores, field labor, home reparations, etc., single-handedly. Her needlework (which encompassed, apart from quilts, the elaboration of a variety of utensils, such as rugs, pillows and pillowcases, tablecloths, handkerchiefs and even umbrellas) reach periods of hyperactivity when Ezell becomes involved in many different projects at the same time –on one occasion, for instance, she realizes to be simultaneously working on six different quilts. Undoubtedly, for a self-supported artist in her sixties and seventies who

311 Black Stitches works at such a vertiginous pace, the repeated interruptions from relatives only add to her lack of concentration, together with an increasing feeling of exhaustion and personal frustration: as she admits in one of her entries, ―[I l]ost most of my ideas worrying about family problems‖ (78). On repeated occasions, Ezell laments that so much of her energy and time is taken up by the never-ending demands of family members, a fact she resents bitterly because there seems to be no connection between her personal values and those of the younger generations in her family (Ezell 165). Although much of the literature specialized on African American quilting highlights the idea that intergenerational continuity is a key aspect of the tradition, Ezell‘s diary reflects a certain disappointment at the set of values apparently dominating her descendants‘ lifestyles. This does not imply, per se, that there exists a total disconnection between her work and the way it is perceived by those new generations in her family; in fact, at some point Ezell recounts how one of her original and most popular designs, the Little Donkey quilt, had sparked as a petition made by one of her great-grandsons (Ezell 68-70).89 Yet, the way the author refers to the reception of her work among her family, which in general terms seems quite detached or uninterested, probably stems from her opinion that newer generations are less inclined to value concepts such as ―politeness, respect, love, and honor‖ as much as Ezell‘s generation used to do (Ezell 165).90 Besides, her independent character as an artist has, as she admits, the backfire effect that most other quilters do not feel prone to embark in collaborative projects with her, or to cooperate with her in terms of apprenticeship. Reflecting on the easiness to teach herself, in contrast to the difficulty of transmitting ―what it means to do art with a needle and thread‖ (Ezell 38), she comes to the conclusion that having such clear ideas in her mind of what she wants from a quilt may be too taxing on others. Probably, another reason

89 Image available at https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/20000040028 90 While the tradition of making quilts was usually transmitted from the elder to the younger female members of the community, this does not seem to be the case in Ezell‘s experience, as she remarks that her early interest in the craft was not supported by her mother (Ezell 23). Curiously, though, Ezell developed a close connection with her daughter throughout their quilting work together, to the point that the daughter is the one guiding and advising the mother in the learning process (Ezell 70). However, apart from the above-mentioned ―Little Donkey‖ episode and a brief allusion to one of her granddaughters (42), Ezell makes no explicit references to any other younger relatives of hers interested in giving her art some sort of continuation.

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would be her extremely persevering nature and full dedication to her art, which usually translates in never-ending sewing sessions (with several hundreds of work hours devoted to each block) and a genuine passion for the craft that is difficult to match. By all accounts, Ezell‘s tenacious nature, which she owes to her parents‘ upbringing (83), is crucial during periods of self-doubt, when temporary incapacity to quilt due to a variety of physical or emotional ailments challenge her seriously. Here, the practice of self-introspection through writing and sewing prove to be a healing instrument for her, very much as in the case of Phyllis Lawson (and other women in Lawson‘s life), previously analyzed in 4.4. The whole process of quilting, from the original designing phase to the final completion of the project, acts in a profoundly therapeutic way for Ezell, who admits it helps her fight periods of lack of faith, frustration and unhappiness (105- 6). Using her talent in a self-fulfilling manner responds to the artist‘s capacity to find resources within her own creative mind, in much the same way that she had been able to save materials from tiny scraps, thus ―[t]aking nothing and making something out of it‖ (Ezell 41).The product of that talent takes, at times, the form of pieced tops, while in other cases she uses complex appliquéd, lacing or crocheting techniques with which she gives more accuracy and detail to her work, in particular to the Story or ―Picture‖ Quilts, which in her hands acquire three-dimensional volume through visual trample l‘oeil resources or the superposition of fabric on the quilt‘s surface. The surprising realism of these designs derives in part from her capacity to reproduce, in textile, the images that she visualizes in her mind. Occasionally, the use of a camera serves to capture anything that attracts her eye, especially during the quilt fairs and gatherings she attends from time to time. Even if the image taken serves later as the motif for her top, she tries not to reproduce it in the exact same terms, since it is not in her nature to ―imitate‖ but to create always something new. In other cases, Ezell uses a photograph for the design of a particular scene, but more often, the mental image simply comes to her at any time of day or night, usually in a very vivid manner or resembling a vision

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―fixed so good in my mind‖ (120). In any case, and following her own advice, Ezell suggests her reader to always ―be able to do your own thing‖ (82) in terms of artistic creation. ―I work hard‖, she writes, ―to tell a story with needle and thread‖ (46, emphasis added). Similarly to the many quilters from the Gee‘s Bend group who claimed to visualize the image(s) for their quilts as clear visions in their minds, so does Ezell claim that the spark originating her work usually starts off from a particular thing she either sees in the physical world or stems from her imagination. Ezell, like the already mentioned Mississippi quilter Pecolia Warner, states her capacity to ―absorb‖ in her mind whatever catches her eye, and reproduce that sight on her quilts quite faithfully (Ezell 134). Although this may simply reflect a coincidental feature of both artists, it is evident that most Southern black quilters, at least until the late twentieth century, traditionally lacked access to samplers of printed patterns, which might have resulted, for those interested in quilting, in a more developed skill for observation and retention of surrounding images. In any case, both Warner and Ezell‘s ability to transfer into cloth what they have seen or imagined reflects a special sensibility to preserve the ephemerous nature of everyday life, in a similar way to what other plastic arts, like photography or painting, tend to do. Though Ezell highlights the importance for the quilter to guide their work by their own aesthetic taste, this is not to suggest that the quilter ought to succumb to whimsical impulses or to act randomly: quite on the contrary, it is her experience that a certain amount of planning is always necessary in order to create quality needlework. The effort to elaborate a clear design before starting the actual act of sewing becomes a crucial part of the whole creative process, and though the artist may employ some improvised solutions for the challenges that often appear along the way, following that mental image with a certain fidelity is vital for the consecution of her original vision (Ezell 134). The techniques and materials used for the composition of her Story Quilts are as varied as the themes chosen: from historical events to political protest, biblical passages or the commemorative celebration of a Southern city, among many others. Since collectors or individuals often commission her the elaboration

314 Chapter 4. Representations of quilts in African American literature

of a specific quilt, it is not rare for Ezell to be crafting different versions of a Story Quilt based on a theme that had attracted wide attention at a previous quilt fair. For instance, the Second Bible Story Quilt (1993) was requested from a fiber artist that had not been able to acquire Ezell‘s first rendition of the same theme (Ezell 114-6). Although the top‘s distribution (nine blocks depicting biblical passages, laid out in a ―readable‖ disposition and supported by written subtitles for each passage) and the overall size of the two works are similar, the specific content and materials employed in each vary considerably, as she always bears in mind an avoidance of self-replication. With respect to the central theme of some of her other Story Quilts, the approach to well-known historical episodes such as the Civil Rights protests usually places the focus on a particular venue or public figure that stands as symbolic for that event. With the purpose to highlight milestones of the anti-racist struggle in American history, her political quilt A Tribute to the Civil Righters of Alabama, 1954-1989 (1989) reads as a banner composed of 9 blocks, each commemorating a significant episode of that movement, including scenes she witnessed in person, like the street riots in the 1960s where demonstrators, including children, were ―drenched with water hoses‖ by police officers (76). Likewise, prior to the elaboration of her University of Alabama Quilt (1984), Ezell recalls considering different angles as its central point.91 She questioned the preeminence, from a historical point of view, of a figure such as that of the sports coach Bear Bryant (who became a celebrity after leading the university team to great national victories in the 1960s and 1970s), if compared with the name of Autherine Lucy, the first black woman enrolled in the University of Alabama and, yet, much less famous. ―I thought about the schoolhouse doors, and Autherine Lucy and George Wallace –that made history,‖ (Ezell 15) writes Ezell in reference to the blockage of the university entrance by Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama during the 1960s. Ezell‘s remark and choice of perspective prove her awareness on political matters and her interest, as an artist, in re-interpreting social and political history through the eyes of its true

91 Also available at http://mastersoftraditionalarts.org/artists/97

315 Black Stitches protagonists. Her University of Alabama Quilt condensates the tribute she wished to pay to the sacrifices made by Lucy and many others in order to tear down the barriers of segregation in the quest for access to higher education. Finally, I consider it noteworthy to observe how, in spite of Ezell‘s free spirit and fiercely independent personality, her writings show a clear interest in transmitting her knowledge to present and future quilters. The pedagogical introductory pages of her diary, where she gives advice to the reader with respect to some practical aspects of the craft, and the explanations about the methodological problems she encounters along the way, reflect this intention to give continuity to an art tradition in which she stands out. Certainly, Ezell‘s subjective vision of art-making and her abhorrence of any imitative work (even if this meant an imitation of hers) prove that she is not interested in establishing a particular ―school‖ of quiltmaking; rather, she seems to suggest that every artist/quilter should find their own personal style and develop it to its fullest potential, unencumbered by external pressures. If, as has been argued here, surrounding conditions have traditionally affected female writing with respect to its methodology and form, especially due to a scarcity of uninterrupted dedication, it is reasonable to observe how many women writers have tended, through the course of history, to turn to self- introspective genres such as diaries and journals. Very long periods of sustained dedication to their writing, which in the past were almost unavailable for a majority of women writers, are also today a requirement difficult to meet, even if the socio-economic conditions from the point of view of gender inequality have undoubtedly improved. This been said, it is my perception that female diary writers do not choose to resort to this literary genre specifically for its presumed formal advantages, but for a variety of different and less evident reasons. Above anything else, using the privacy of one‘s personal journal historically lent women a space where issues of identity, introspection and creativity could be explored freely, or at least unaffected by external expectations and the conventional literary canon. Paradoxically, though, these expectations placed the restriction of such privacy on the said authors: frequently, their pages were not published because that act would entail a transgression of the established domestic

316 Chapter 4. Representations of quilts in African American literature

roles of women. The passage from the intimate to the public arena was frowned upon, when not downright prohibited, for those journal or autobiography women authors who envisioned to publish their works. While society has evidently changed and those restrictions no longer hold, there may exist a number of reasons why so many female writers in recent and contemporary times decide to choose these literary genres as their form of expression.92 I am inclined to think that these first-person accounts, be it in the shape of a diary or a memoir, provide a perfect outlet for an in-depth exploration of individual and collective conflicts without the limitations imposed by other literary formats. In addition, the writing routines involved in those accounts seem more compatible, considered from the perspective of time management, with the usually frantic pace and women‘s multi-tasking lifestyles, past and present. Moreover, recent studies suggest that women belonging to ethnic minorities in current American society, such as black or Latina, tend to create blogs in larger proportion than their white counterparts, in part because of the possibilities for racial identity that such social networks can offer (Charmaraman, Chan, et al. 9). Patricia Hill Collins, in her article ―The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought‖ (2000), argues that the compendium of black women‘s ―everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge‖ (186) must be used by scholars to nourish the development of a black feminist thought, and vice versa: the latter must have an impact on the life experiences of black women, by ―encourag[ing] a collective identity‖ that boosts improved self-conceptions (186). Nora Ezell is a case in point in support of this argument. Her first-person descriptions of an ordinary life devoted to creating non-ordinary needlework exemplifies the self- empowering nature of quiltmaking. Ezell‘s vision of life and art undoubtedly contributes to the articulation of the aforementioned thought in the terms suggested by Collins, who also claims that ―[b]y taking elements and themes of black women‘s culture and traditions and infusing them with new meaning, black feminist thought rearticulates a consciousness that already exists‖ (―The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought‖ 186). Through her quilts and diary,

92 The statement refers, obviously, to the context of contemporary American society.

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Ezell extends that consciousness and brings it to life, potentially opening new paths for self-expression to many other black women artists.

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Conclusions

This study of African American quilts from a historical and literary perspective is centered around certain aspects that did not use to be the object of profuse academic attention for a long time. The fact that this dissertation examines a specific textile art created by African American women encompasses a series of elements that have traditionally been excluded, or at least undervalued, by the established canons of historiography and art criticism. The consideration of quilts and other textile activities as pertaining to the category of high art has been a long and exhausting demand from the artists themselves and from those involved in advancing the scope of African American studies at large but, as has been pointed out in section 2.3, this requirement took a long time to be acknowledged by the academia (and, considering it from the perspective of non-specialized critics, textiles would probably be excluded from the mainstream conception of ―art‖ even today).

Besides, the study of such quilts is undertaken here by focusing on the African American female context, which adds very specific elements to the paradigm. Given that official records tended to overlook the contributions made by women, and most notably by African American women, to the shaping of culture, it was only logical for researchers to be faced with a scantiness of academic investigation on these women‘s achievements and preoccupations (though this has changed in relatively recent times, especially since black feminists started to highlight this art form). Given, also, that homemade utensils, in this case those derived from needle-art labor, did not conform to the culturally accepted version of artistic creation, the categorization of quilting as art in its own right encountered innumerable obstacles until its recognition as an artistic discipline. Because historiographic accounts unremittingly overlooked the cultural impact of any domestic artifacts, the apparent ―inexistence‖ of these women quilters as art makers prevailed for a long time. However, between the decades of the 1970s and the 1990s, several events marked a turning point in that process: the first of them, the 1971 landmark exhibition at the Whitney Museum, in New York, where quilts (not yet African Black Stitches

American ones specifically, but American quilts in general) were for the first time heralded by art criticism and broad artistic circles as deserving their own place in the world of visual arts. Almost a decade later, in 1980, the foundation of the American Quilt Study Group, with its annual edition of specialized articles, and the publishing by Cuesta Benberry of her groundbreaking essay ―Afro-American Women and Quilts‖, opened up new paths for research and divulgation on the topic, evidencing the swiftly-increasing interest within the academic field. Still a further decade later, in 1990, the publication (following a corresponding national-scale exhibition) about slave quilts entitled Stitched from the Soul, by Gladys-Marie Fry, marks another milestone in the rapidly succeeding chain of events that were triggered by this blooming interest in the topic (Hicks, Black Threads 217-8, 221). In sum, the latter quarter of the century was an effervescent period for the discovering by larger audiences, black and non-black alike, of a cultural legacy whose significance on many levels had remained unacknowledged for centuries. ―The artistry required for making the extraordinary quilts African American women have constructed for hundreds of years has only recently been acknowledged‖, as Beverly Guy-Sheftall has poignantly remarked (62). In 2003, the activist and writer Marvin Arnett published her memoir, entitled Pieces from Life‟s Crazy Quilts. In it, she establishes a vivid identification of her growing up years with the ubiquitous presence of quilt scraps in her household:

Whenever I dream of my mother, she is always at the dining room table, sorting through an endless array of quilt scraps. My mother had many gifts, [but] she saved her true artistic gifts for making quilts. She designed quilts in every design, color, size and pattern: practical quilts designed to provide warmth; elaborately patterned quilts designed to show off her quiltmaking skills […]. I cannot remember a time when my mother‘s quilts were not a major part of our lives. (3)

This excerpt summarizes with accuracy some of the tenets that I have tried to prove throughout this Ph.D. thesis: first of all, the idea that elaborating quilts and transmitting them (as material objects, but also as conveyors of all the

322 Conclusions

wisdom inherently attached) has been a crucial activity for countless African American generations up to the present. In her memoir, Arnett transmits this conceptualization of quilts as an element of stability and transcendence in the ever-changing African American experience, particularly from a female angle. Without a doubt, quilts have influenced that experience in a significant manner, especially when one takes into account that most outlets for self-expression were simply refused to African American women during centuries, and the resort to the (often) solitary act of sewing was one of the very few opportunities they had to leave an indelible mark of their existence. In hindsight, it is not far-fetched to claim that the mere act of devising the elaboration of a meaningful quilt, and being able not only to accomplish it, but even to transmit it to a member of the following generation, was in itself an act of disobedience and victory amidst asphyxiating living conditions. On the blank space of the canvas that is the surface of the quilt, these women imagined ways to paint episodes from their lives through the needle and thread and, in many cases, they managed to leave testimony of the ―unspeakable things unspoken‖ (applying to quilting the famous adage of Toni Morrison with respect to African American invisibility in American literature) (―Unspeakable Things Unspoken‖ 11). Furthermore, the abovementioned excerpt alludes to other aspects related to African American quilts that have been exposed in this research. Arnett‘s remark about her mother‘s multiple abilities, of which quiltmaking was her greatest talent, hints at the high cultural consideration that the craft had within the black American community: it is not just that Arnett‘s mother excelled at different skills, it is rather that she voluntarily chose to ―save her true artistic gifts‖ for the creation of quilts. This revealing statement suggests that women quilters were aware of the importance of their activity, and honored the tradition by devoting much of their attention and purpose to it. Contrarily to what was the spread belief during decades, there has usually existed among quilters a consciousness of the significance of quilts as cultural and artistic items, a point I have tried to demonstrate throughout my examination of the literary works analyzed. All the narrative texts included in this selection, from the earliest published one, Walker‘s

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short story ―Everyday Use‖ (1973) to the most recent one, Lawson‘s memoir Quilt of Souls (2015), describe in some way or another how quilters acknowledged the transcendence of their work and revered the tradition by trying to add their personal contributions to it. On the other hand, Arnett‘s recount of her childhood memories highlights an aspect that has been frequently overlooked by mainstream considerations on quiltmaking: her emphasis on the word ―design‖, acting as a noun and a verb, indicates the necessary thought given in advance to the whole process of creating a quilt, and it evidences the time and effort invested in the craft before the needle is threaded. This means that the artist –except when she fully engages in free improvisation, and even then a certain planning is needed– may devote a considerable amount of hours organizing the patterns or, at least, setting in her mind the overall configuration of the quilt‘s top, and this process includes the necessary selection of fabrics and the outlay of all the patches in a manner that satisfies her intention. This may be one of the reasons why insufficient consideration was accorded to this art for centuries: compared with other activities such as painting or music, where it is believed that creation requires thoughtful planning, it might seem that the arrangement of small scraps of leftover cloth would be randomly or carelessly made. In reality, that is another misconception about patchwork quilting, because the necessity to make do from such remainders of fabric does not imply a sloppy or unkempt treatment of the task by its maker, as the many examples in this dissertation evidence. In addition, the above fragment from Arnett‘s memoir summarizes another aspect that has been explored in this thesis: the variety of purposes for which African American women‘s quilts were made, ranging from purely practical reasons to the most sophisticated aims, without forgetting those quilts destined to commemorative uses or to become part of the family‘s heirloom. In sum, quilts were omnipresent in the everyday life of many African American communities, to the point that countless generations remember growing up surrounded by a swarm of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters always busying themselves at the needle.

324 Conclusions

Through this thesis, I have tried to provide an answer for the initial inquiry that acted as its point of departure: what prompted the earlier African women living in slave-holding American society to envision, design and accomplish quilts of such spectacular beauty. Obviously, the scope of my research was not limited to these particular coordinates of time (the nineteenth century) and place (the Southern states). Instead, I intended to expand a similar question into a broader context of African American women‘s lives, forbearing to restrict it to the antebellum years in the American Southern territory. I was genuinely interested in discovering the motivations guiding the hands of African American women quilters of yore and of today, and to do so I contrived to do it first from a social outlook and then from the literary field. As far as the latter is concerned, I approached it from the point of view of other African American women writers who, in some cases, are not only authors but also quilters themselves. In the first chapter, I have attempted to explain the impact that African American quilts have had during the main historical episodes that contributed to the nation‘s evolution from the eighteenth century to the present, approaching this study from a race- and gender-related point of view. After analyzing the influence that these quilts had during the pre-Civil War years (especially concerning the collective experience of quilting in bees, and their roles in the abolitionist movement), I have examined how black women used quilts to face the difficult decades that followed the end of slavery, as a means of survival on the physical and emotional level.93 For instance, among the first generations of free African Americans, many women resorted to quilts to strengthen family bonds, using them as symbolic transmitters of their African roots blended into the American background. The power of heirloom quilts as continuators of that knowledge was (and still is) especially relevant for several reasons. In the first place, quilts bore testimony to the episodes lived during bondage, and the capacity to keep them within kinship ties at their free will symbolized the emergence of a new era where black

93 In fact, the communal experience of quilting is perceived as having had an extremely positive impact on the lives of the women involved, insomuch as the tradition was maintained long after the end of bondage, as the numerous accounts from the early twentieth century evidence (Banks, ―Quilting Parties‖ 233-4).

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American citizens started to access, even if only partially and in a very slow manner, some of their fundamental rights. For the first time, therefore, it was possible for this generation of women not only to create art on their own terms and according to their personal taste, but perhaps just as importantly, they were able to preserve the fruit of that work and pass it onto their descendants if and whenever they wished to. Secondly, one of the outcomes of this cultural awakening made it possible for artists such as Harriet Powers to be more autonomous in their creative impulse, which enabled them to envision and elaborate works that had no parallel in the European American quilting tradition. Hence, Powers‘ two extant quilts (examined in section 4 of Chapter 1), dating from the last years of the nineteenth century and re-discovered by quilt critics only some decades ago, reveal the artist‘s personality and her free spirit as a quilt maker, and show clear links between Powers‘ African roots and her cultural background as an African American woman living in the after-emancipation South. In sum, during a time when certain freedom was being conquered, the contributions made by Powers as well as by a legion of other unknown quilters can be deemed of great importance for the foundation of a new cultural identity. In Chapter 2, centered on the transformations of African American quilting throughout the twentieth century, I have examined the influence exerted by the surrounding sociopolitical scenario. During the Depression and post-Depression years, it has been argued that the economic context affected all types of American quilting due to the shortage of materials and the sudden difficulty to access published patterns and designs (Waldvogel 62). However, it is quite probable that African American quilters, traditionally following their own heritage in a relatively independent style, remained less affected in their labor by that lack of printed patterns. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that their centuries- old habit of making do with all kinds of remaining fabric, small or ragged as they could be, reduced some of the impact that the Great Depression had on their work. In fact, it can be argued that such specific context acted as a two-way road in the evolution process of African American quilts. Unquestionably, the turbulent movements of the 1960s and 1970s had an impact on, but at the same time were also impacted by, the effervescent quilt creativity of that period. To put it in other

326 Conclusions

words, the artistic field, and in this case the textile arts, collaborated in the shaping of a new race and gender identity while also benefitting from the flourishing of that identity. In support of this theory, in Chapter 2 I analyze the implications that the cooperative Alabaman venture called The Freedom Quilting Bee (from the small and isolated village of Gee‘s Bend) had on the Civil Rights movement that swayed the American society during those decades. Taking this successful collective as representative of an emerging cultural consciousness among black American communities during the Civil Rights movement, I examine the cultural impact of this quilting project on an aesthetic, social and even political level. As I contend in that section of Chapter 2, the works created by the Gee‘s Benders not only helped raise the artistic consideration of quilting as art: they contributed at the same time to lay the foundations for a new cultural pride in the art produced by African American women artists, whose work was hailed by larger audiences as extremely valuable and deserving all critical attention. At the end of Chapter 2 I also explore how this new cultural context sowed the seeds for the beginning of a revival in African American needle arts, especially visible in the discipline of quiltmaking. This revival, which could well be claimed to have continued uninterruptedly until the present, blossomed in the last decades of the twentieth century and is explained in part by the attraction of a new sensibility to Black Aesthetics which destabilized the European American artistic and cultural standards. Interestingly, this period also witnessed a new approach to the needle by waves of African American women who claimed it as an instrument for their own creativity by choosing freely their materials and designs and, not less importantly, by vindicating their textile work as representative of their own political vision of the world. At a time when feminist movements were gaining strength, wielding the needle as a symbol of emerging female power not only did not seem anachronic for those generations of African American women: to the contrary, many of them saw in the field of textile arts, and especially in the art of quiltmaking, an excellent way to voice their opinions, flouting the established aesthetic norms whenever they wished to. This use of quilts as tools of cultural protest can be considered as a self-empowering and

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revolutionary act from several stances. Firstly, it gave greater autonomy to its makers, who probably for the first time in history were free to express themselves without being constantly patronized by external agents, and they could do it in a social context of increasing –if still far away– equality. Secondly, it allowed those women to operate as relatively independent artists who could denounce injustice according to their own views and without being radically stigmatized or totally subjugated to a dominating class. Furthermore, quilt makers became crucial to preserving the richness of the black American legacy within the community members‘ own hands, therefore acting as avant-garde promotors of new aesthetic sensibilities but also as conservationists of a proud heritage that had been repeatedly plundered or neglected until then. In addition to all this, the support of reproduction devices such as photography, traveling exhibits in galleries around the country, the establishing of new all-black quilting associations and other means of communication that were becoming widely spread in those decades, cooperated in the perception of such works as instruments for black women‘s self- reliance. A short comparative analysis between these quilts and other art forms, including material culture artifacts, painting and music (as seen in Chapter 3) evidences certain similarities in their aesthetics, especially as quilts evolved into very ―plastic‖ exhibitions of visual art. With respect to elements from material culture, a reference is made to African American quilts which either include some of those items in their compositions, or allude to certain architectural or sculptural designs. Regarding painting, I outline a brief comparative analysis between the plasticity of African American quilts and the contributions of certain American and European painting schools, pointing at their mutual influences. With respect to music, I establish a very succinct comparison between traditional African American music styles, namely jazz and blues, and the reflection of such styles in African American quilts, observing the flexibility of textile elaborations as a merging art. The parallel between traditional plastic arts and quilts becomes even more remarkable with the development of Story Quilts, which depict an event or a sequence in a very graphic manner. The incorporation of written texts into some

328 Conclusions

of these Story Quilts, notably by the hand of mixed-media artists, culminates the evolution of quilts into fully narrative works. The treatment of quilts made by African American women in the literature of their peers is analyzed in the fourth and last chapter of this dissertation, showing outcomes that are at the same time heterogeneous and complex. The rich and old tradition of quiltmaking in communities of black American women is approached from a variety of angles in this corpus, starting from the perspective of cultural alienation and madness presented in Perry‘s Stigmata and finishing with the intimate reflections from a quilter‘s diary in Nora Ezell‘s homonymous work. In Perry‘s case (examined in section 4.2), the symbolic force of these quilts is exploited in the context of trauma and lack of communication inside a family environment but, considered more broadly, also from the perspective of the African American painful past. The impossibility to come to terms with those traumatic episodes results in the physical and mental agony of the novel‘s protagonist, a young woman whose inherited quilt seems to chain her to an unresolved conflict lived by her ancestors. In the novel, the author reflects about the necessity to use the quilt as the key to solve the intergenerational blockage and overcome taboos about the wounds suffered, as the only way to heal from that paralyzing past. Although, in fact, all quilts considered in the plots of this literary corpus function as carriers of messages with multiple readings, the two children‘s tales analyzed in section 4.3 are probably the most explicit examples of this trait. The analogy between quiltmaking and writing is clearly reinforced here, because both works present the double nature of quilts as communicative devices from a visual as well as a linguistic standpoint. These children‘s stories offer a narrative that can be read through the literal description of events as much as through the outlay of the pages themselves, which are presented in patchwork-like manner. For example, Woodson‘s semi-autobiographical tale Show Way depicts the trajectory of her own family, following the sequence from her earlier generations to the present (and projecting it into the future, with the final inclusion of her own baby daughter) in a similar way to the construction of a patchwork quilt. In fact, the

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author invites her audience to read her story as if reading a quilt, imitating its circular nature as metaphoric for the cyclical patterns of life and death. Despite the fact that both works deal with a phenomenon that happened during the enslavement period, the Underground Railroad network, I decided to consider the two children‘s narratives in an independent section due to the importance of that phenomenon and its salience on African American quilting. The impact that the Quilt Code has had is so relevant that it has become one of the iconic elements of this textile tradition, with implications and ramifications in other fields. The Quilt Code provides room for the amalgamation of fact and legend, blurring the limits between one and the other in the re-construction of an episode of the African American past that can be considered part history and part myth, and which has been exploited not only through quiltmaking but from other disciplines too, such as literature or painting. The importance of this Code, therefore, lies not in the exact degree of its verisimilitude but in the symbolic force that it can exert as an element of cohesion for a community that had been deprived of its own historical memory from the outset. The restorative power of quilts is also explored at length in Lawson‘s memoirs Quilt of Souls (analyzed in section 4.4). The creation process of a beloved quilt in unison with the author‘s grandmother, who due to family reasons fulfils the maternal role in the protagonist‘s life, acts as a catalyst to release all the bitter memories from the past and to overcome the grief of separation. The prominence of that quilt in Lawson‘s autobiographical narration indicates that it is almost endowed with human force (i.e., it acts nearly as a real character in the story), accompanying her in every significant episode of her life. Consequently, the four-handed composition of the quilt helps Lawson not only to make amends in her disrupted family relations, but more interestingly, it is determinant in the author‘s building of her personality as an African American woman that learns to be proud of her cultural background. Lawson‘s first-person story, as well as many other narratives included in this dissertation, presents the autonomy of a protagonist/narrator who shows the liberating force of her quiltmaking activity. However, the capacity of black women quilters to express themselves in their own words could not always be

330 Conclusions

taken for granted, even from the mid-twentieth century onwards. In the case of the compilation The Quilts of Gee‟s Bend (which I have examined in section 4.5), this lack of autonomy is evidenced by the fact that the quilters are not the real writers and supervisors of their accounts. Rather, they provide the original testimonies as members of the famous Freedom Quilting Bee, through the form of excerpts taken from oral interviews. For obvious reasons, this is not equivalent with the independence that a writer may have while crafting her own story: in that case, she holds (or attempts to hold, to the extent possible) a greater command over her writing from the moment they are conceived in her mind to their publication. Still, this breach in the quilters‘ agency as story-tellers should not downplay the importance of their valuable testimonies, especially when considered in unity with their corresponding quilts. Even if it may seem paradoxical that this section is introduced under the heading ―Telling their story in their own words‖, when in fact the quilters‘ memories are somehow ―interpreted‖ by external editors, I wanted to emphasize the importance of transmitting their original statements just as they are recorded in the interviews. For me, this process exemplifies the difficulties encountered by many other women quilters when trying to express their views and sensibilities to the rest of the world, especially when they had no public platform from which to talk. Precisely because of this, most of them chose to translate into quilts those feelings and thoughts, once again satisfying that communicative need by means of their textile work. Many of the transformative effects that can derive from making a quilt have been contemplated by the writer Alice Walker in her novels, short stories and essays. The examination of two of her works, The Color Purple and ―Everyday Use‖, in section 6 of Chapter 4, suggests that Walker perceives the quilt as a compelling instrument for the self-vindication of black women, from a standpoint that is at the same time personal (the reconstruction of their dignity as independent human beings) and collective (the consolidation of a shared cultural identity). Interestingly, Walker (like other women writers dealing with the same subject) treats those quilts almost as living members of her characters‘ families, considering the creative act of making the quilt as something as important as

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bringing new life into their communities. Likewise, the efforts made by these women in order to conserve the quilts, in part due to their great importance as cultural markers, embody the debate proposed by Walker concerning how the roots of a people should be preserved and transmitted. In that sense, her controversial short story ―Everyday Use‖, about the need to embrace the rich complexity of cultural blending that the concept ―African American culture‖ implies, is an example of how quilts can give answers (and also raise new questions) in matters of gender, race, class and identity. The story‘s plot, which revolves around the claiming of a traditional African American quilt by an archetypal character that embodies the new black nationalism of the 1960s, brings to the fore some queries about the true meaning of the art of quiltmaking, and about its role in the construction of an African American identity. Given that the abovementioned character represents the vision of a black Americanness as attached only to its African roots, part of the controversy that stems from Walker‘s work has to do with the consideration of those quilts as the exclusive expression of an African art, therefore disconnected from whatsoever aspects of the American culture. In addition to this, ―Everyday Use‖ highlights issues of social and psychological empowerment, from the perspective of rural black women, via the activity of creating and preserving quilts that are treasured within their communities. In other words, Walker shows how the literary use of quilts can trigger much-needed debates that are frequently not contemplated in the political agenda (and, it could be added, that continue to be ignored in our contemporary society). The dialogue between writing and quilting is taken a step further by Nora Ezell, the author of a personal dairy (analyzed in the last section of Chapter 4), where she blends both activities to better communicate with her public/readership. Through the description of the quilts‘ composition, and of the personal process that accompanies them, she establishes a solid link between one act of self- expression and the other. Conversely, by including small snippets of texts in some of her quilts, she fuses both creative acts together, turning them into new semiotic units possessed of more complex meanings. Besides, Ezell‘s writing supports the previous consideration of quilts as living organisms, heirs to their past and

332 Conclusions

permanently evolving. Drawing on relevant episodes of the African American history, she reflects on the achievements of foregoing generations of black Americans, while using as her means of expression a truly innovative language. In fact, her quilts are a remarkable fusion of tradition and modernity, derived from her continuous experimentation in quilting (particularly, within the complex field of Story Quilts) and the corresponding written records about her artistic evolution. As a result, Ezell‘s work serves indeed to provide a sense of continuity in the long history of African American quiltmaking, but it also gives continuity to the tradition of reflecting the quilting process on the written page. The transmission and preservation process, however, should not be considered ―accomplished‖, since the practice obviously has not stagnated: on the contrary, the art of making quilts within the African American community is thriving in our times, with an estimated figure of at least one in every twenty U.S. quilters being of African American descent (Hicks, Black Threads 10). As proof of the great health that this art enjoys nowadays, black women quilters are doing on the computer screen what some of their preceding counterparts did on paper: they are reflecting in written language the experience of creating quilts within their contemporary contexts, in blogs and websites, while using these instruments as a means to express their private and public concerns. It is clear that the differences between traditional logs and modern blogs mirror the technological evolution that our society has experienced since the outburst of the digital revolution. The transitions from the traditional diary to the virtual diary or ―blog‖ (and, afterwards, the latter‘s denomination as vlogs through the massive incorporation of video and other audiovisual material) reflect how these narratives have undergone the same transformations of all other forms of written communication as a consequence of the Internet era. Yet, the differences between paper diaries and digital blogs do not respond simply to formal aspects. The characteristics of conventional diaries included a very static nature and scarce flexibility, especially regarding modifications on the already existing entries. This translated into narrower chances for revision and correction and, in general, a much lower versatility than their contemporary equivalents. Furthermore, the physical medium was dramatically smaller, since the confines for expression were

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constrained to the page size itself, while today‘s blogs allow for almost unlimited means of communication, if one considers the richness of audiovisual insertions on their pages. On the other hand, among the elements that have been radically altered are those regarding issues of authorship, audience and social or political influence. While a traditional journal was usually authored by a single person, and often aimed at a relatively small number of readers, audiences of present day‘s blogs may reach figures that were unconceivable only a few decades ago, with the enormous repercussions that it entails. More interestingly still, the construction stages of a blog are in themselves a pertinent metaphor for the overlapping and self-recurring nature of the quiltmaking process. The elaboration of a quilt, especially of a patchwork or appliquéd piece, frequently entails a superposition of layers and the revision of already sewn patches, in order to ensure a coherence within the whole work (or, at least, to satisfy the author‘s personal taste). Besides, the process of matching the different parts of the top and the final quilted labor involve permanent adjustments that more often than not require ripping off certain seams and redoing parts of the work. This backward-forward movement in quiltmaking is comparable to the ever-changing process of a b(v)log construction, where the ―final work‖ may in fact never be achieved and the entries added by its author (or other contributors) reflect its very ephemerous nature. These elements, as well as many others, could be extremely interesting points of departure for further enquiry. I consider that a natural continuation to my research might be the analysis of the blog-writing activity produced by African American women quilters today. The privileged position of African American women‘s quilts at the intersection of studies regarding gender, race and textile art undoubtedly opens up new paths for investigation that approach the three fields together. I hope to have contributed to gain further insight into this fascinating field, and that my study will encourage other researchers to continue the labor.

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Primary Sources Arnett, William, and Paul Arnett, eds. The Quilts of Gee's Bend. Tinwood Books, 2002. Ezell, Nora. My Quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter. Black Belt Press, 1999. Lawson, Phyllis. Quilt of Souls. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Perry, Phyllis A. Stigmata: A Novel. Anchor Books, 1999. Ringgold, Faith. Aunt Harriet‟s Underground Railroad in the Sky. Crown Publishers, 1992. Walker, Alice. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. ―Everyday Use.‖ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. ---. The Color Purple. The Women‘s Press, 1983. Woodson, Jacqueline. Show Way. Illustrated by Hudson Talbott. Penguin, 2005.

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