Belonging: A Culture of Place (22 page)

The work of black women quiltmakers needs special feminist critical commentary which considers the impact of race, sex, and class. Many black women quilted despite oppressive economic and social circumstances which often demanded exercising creative imagination in ways radically different from those of white female counterparts, especially women of privilege who had greater access to material and time. Often black slave women quilted as part of their labor in white households. The work of Mahulda Mize, a black woman slave, is discussed in
Kentucky Quilts 1800–1900.
Her elaborate quilt “Princess Feathers with Oak Leave,” made of silk and other fine fibers, was completed in 1850 when she was eighteen. Preserved by the white family who owned her labor, this work was passed down from generation to generation. Much contemporary writing on quiltmaking fails to discuss this art form from a standpoint which considers the impact of race and class. Challenging conventional assumptions in her essay “Quilting: Out of the Scrapbag of History,” Cynthia Redick suggests that the crazy quilt with its irregular design was not the initial and most common approach to quiltmaking, asserting, “An expert seamstress would not have wasted her time fitting together odd shapes.” Redick continues, “The fad for crazy quilts in the late nineteenth century was a time consuming pastime for ladies of leisure.” Feminist scholarly studies of black female experience as quiltmakers would require revision of Redick’s assertions. Given that black women slaves sewed quilts for white owners and were allowed now and then to keep scraps, or as we learn from slave narratives occasionally took them, they had access to creating only one type of work for themselves — a crazy quilt.

Writing about Mahulda Mize’s fancy quilt, white male art historian John Finley’s comments on her work made reference to limitations imposed by race and class: “No doubt the quilt was made for her owners, for a slave girl would not have had the money to buy such fabrics. It also is not likely that she would have been granted the leisure and the freedom to create such a thing for her own use.” Of course there are no recorded documents revealing whether or not she was allowed to keep the fancy scraps. Yet, were that the case, she could only have made from them a crazy quilt. It is possible that black slave women were among the first, if not the first group of females, to make crazy quilts, and that it later became a fad for privileged white women.

Baba spent a lifetime making quilts, and the vast majority of her early works were crazy quilts. When I was a young girl she did not work outside her home, even though she at one time worked for white people, cleaning their houses. For much of her life as a rural black woman she controlled her own time, and quilting was part of her daily work. Her quilts were made from reused scraps because she had access to such material from the items given her by white folks in place of wages, or from the worn clothes of her children. It was only when her children were adults faring better economically that she began to make quilts from patterns and from fabric that was not reused scraps. Before then she created patterns from her imagination. My mother, Rosa Bell, remembers writing away for the first quilt patterns. The place these quilts had in daily life was decorative. Utility quilts, crazy quilts were for constant everyday use. They served as bed coverings and as padding under the soft cotton mattresses filled with feathers. During times of financial hardship which were prolonged and ongoing, quilts were made from scraps left over from dressmaking and then again after the dresses had been worn. Baba would show a quilt and point to the same fabric lighter in color to show a “fresh” scrap (one left over from initial dressmaking) from one that was being reused after a dress was no longer wearable.

When her sons went away to fight in wars, they sent their mother money to add rooms to her house. It is a testament to the seriousness of Baba’s quiltmaking that one of the first rooms she added was a workplace, a space for sewing and quiltmaking. I have vivid memories of this room because it was so unusual. It was filled with baskets and sacks full of scraps, hatboxes, material pieced together that was lying on the backs of chairs. There was never really any place to sit in that room unless one first removed fabric. This workplace was constructed like any artist’s studio, yet it would not be until I was a young woman and Baba was dead that I would enter a “real” artist’s studio and see the connection. Before this workplace was built, quilting frames were set up in the spacious living room in front of the fire. In her workplace quilts were stored in chests and under mattresses. Quilts that were not for use, fancy quilts (which were placed at the foot of beds when company came), were stored in old-fashioned chests with beautiful twisted pieces of tobacco leaves that were used to keep insects away. Baba lived all her life in Kentucky — tobacco country. It was there and accessible. It had many uses.

Although she did not make story quilts, Baba believed that each quilt had its own narrative — a story that began from the moment she considered making a particular quilt. The story was rooted in the quilt’s history, why it was made, why a particular pattern was chosen. In her collection there were the few quilts made for bringing into marriage. Baba talked often of making quilts as preparation for married life. After marriage most of her quilts were utility quilts, necessary bed covering. It was later in life, and in the age of modernity, that she focused on making quilts for creative pleasure. Initially she made fancy quilts by memorizing patterns seen in the houses of the white people she worked for. Later she bought patterns. Working through generations, her quiltmaking reflected both changes in the economic circumstances of rural black people and changes in the textile industry.

As fabric became more accessible, as grown children began to tire of clothing before it was truly worn, she found herself with a wide variety of material to work with, making quilts with particular motifs. There were “britches quilts” made from bought woolen men’s pants, heavy quilts to be used in cold rooms without heat. There was a quilt made from silk neckties. Changes in clothing style also provided new material. Clothes which could not be made over into new styles would be used in the making of quilts. There was a quilt made from our grandfather’s suits, which spanned many years of this seventy-year marriage. Significantly, Baba would show her quilts and tell their stories, giving the history (the concept behind the quilt) and the relation of chosen fabrics to individual lives. Although she never completed it, she began to piece a quilt of little stars from scraps of cotton dresses worn by her daughters. Together we would examine this work and she would tell me about the particulars, about what my mother and her sisters were doing when they wore a particular dress. She would describe clothing styles and choice of particular colors. To her mind these quilts were maps charting the course of our lives. They were history as life lived.

To share the story of a given quilt was central to Baba’s creative self-expression, as family historian, storyteller, exhibiting the work of her hands. She was not particularly fond of crazy quilts because they were a reflection of work motivated by material necessity. She liked organized design and fancy quilts. They expressed a quiltmaker’s seriousness. Her patterned quilts, “The Star of David,” “The Tree of Life,” were made for decorative purposes, to be displayed at family reunions. They indicated that quiltmaking was an expression of skill and artistry. These quilts were not to be used; they were to be admired. My favorite quilts were those for everyday use. I was especially fond of the work associated with my mother’s girlhood. When given a choice of quilts, I selected one made of cotton dresses in cool deep pastels. Baba could not understand when I chose that pieced fabric of little stars made from my mother’s and sister’s cotton dresses over more fancy quilts. Yet those bits and pieces of mama’s life, held and contained there, remain precious to me.

In her comments on quiltmaking, Faith Ringgold has expressed fascination with that link between the creative artistry of quilts and their fundamental tie to daily life. The magic of quilts for her, as art and artifice, resides in that space where art and life come together. Emphasizing the usefulness of a quilt, she reminds us: “It covers people. It has the possibility of being a part of someone forever.” Reading her words, I thought about the quilt I covered myself with in childhood and then again as a young woman. I remembered mama did not understand my need to take that “nasty, ragged” quilt all the way to college. Yet it was symbolic of my connection to rural black folk life — to home. This quilt is made of scraps. Though originally handsewn, it has been “gone over” (as Baba called it) on the sewing machine so that it would better endure prolonged everyday use. Sharing this quilt, the story I tell focuses on the legacy of commitment to one’s “art” Baba gave me. Since my creative work is writing, I proudly point to ink stains on this quilt which mark my struggle to emerge as a disciplined writer. Growing up with five sisters, it was difficult to find private space; the bed was often my workplace. This quilt (which I intend to hold onto for the rest of my life) reminds me of who I am and where I have come from. Symbolically identifying a tradition of black female artistry, it challenges the notion that creative black women are rare exceptions. We are deeply, passionately connected to black women whose sense of aesthetics, whose commitment to ongoing creative work, inspires and sustains. We reclaim their history, call their names, state their particulars, to gather and remember, to share our inheritance.

15
Piecing It All Together

Watching quiltmakers do work by hand, I see in their labor an organic practice of mindfulness. Attention is concentrated, focused, repetitive. Sarah Oldham (Baba) mama’s mother saw in the process of quiltmaking a way for a female to learn patience, the stillness of mind and heart that she would need as a grown woman to tend to work, home, and family. Learning to quilt in girlhood and continuing on into death and beyond, Baba was devoted to the ongoing practice of patience, combining spirituality with creative imagination. In stillness, sitting, sewing, she found herself able to listen more fully to the divine voice speaking, making god visible in the work. Baba was patient but she was not quiet. Creating beauty she found a way to speak, a way that moved beyond words.

Creativity is not quiet. I often experience the urge to create as a rumbling within the depths of my being. Like the tremors before an earthquake to come, that rumbling within me lets me know my senses have been aroused, stirred, that I can move into the imagination as though it is a fierce wave that will sweep me away, carry me to another plane, a place of ecstasy. The root meaning of the word ecstasy is to stand outside — that’s what creativity does, it allows the creator to move beyond the self into a place of transcendent possibility — that place in the imagination where all it possible. And in that process one is both moved beyond measure and awed. In his insightful work The Happiness Hypothesis author Jonathan Haidt writes: “Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.” It is precisely because artists recognize the vision that precedes the creation of a work emerges from a place we cannot locate or name, a place of mystery, that we stand before creation in awe. And this awe is not the province of those we are schooled or learned, it is democratic. It is an experience available to anyone irrespective of race, gender, nationality, class; it can be present to any one who makes art.

Time and time again stories are told about the survival strategies folks use to maintain a sense of hope in desperate life threatening situations of oppression, dehumanization, and violence. We tell stories about the ways we maintain a sense of worth and dignity in intolerable situations. I first hard such stories listening to Baba talk about living in slavery and beyond. She talked about hearing about the hardships, experiencing them as a girl, and she talked about the role of quiltmaking as both a functional necessity of life (making the covers that will keep out the cold, that will keep the body warm) but also she tells stories about the life sustaining energy of the imagination, the artistry behind the creation of quilts.

In more recent times we can read the life stories of the black women quiltmakers of Gee’s s Bend, Alabama and be awed by their lives and work. From the location of newly acquired acclaim, they find a public voice to speak about the hardships they faced day to day, living as they say “a starvation life” where everybody was just struggling to get by, to make a way out of no way. And yet in a life that was more often than not filled with hardship, pain, and sorrow they found a pleasure of pleasure, of ecstasy, a place where they could transcend self, that place was artistic production — the making of quilts.

For years I held on to a pieced quilt top Baba had given me before I left home to go to college. The pattern was the Star of David and each point of the star was cut from cloth that was summer dresses mama and her sisters had loved and worn — worn so much they were worn out. But those soft cottons that in another culture might have become rags became a tapestry, a visual history of summer time pleasure. Sitting in a rocking chair upstairs at 1200 Broad Street, mama’s childhood home, I would pour over this quilt as though it was indeed a text to be read and Baba would tell me the story of each dress and the girl who wore it. I could imagine then mama and her sisters, beautiful young girls, delighting in summer, wearing the much wanted, much beloved favorite dress.

I took this pieced quilt top on every one of my life’s journeys, packing it in soft cotton pillowcase covers (cause a quilt should never be placed in plastic). There was no place I lived where I did not find those special moment to share this precious treasure with anyone with an eye for beautiful old things. But whenever I was asked to give the quilt top over to some helping hand that would be willing to quilt it for me, I could not trust enough to let it go. Afraid it might be lost, as my Baba was lost, gone to a place where she will sew no more. She did not imagine herself doing much in the afterlife that she had done in her life before. Heaven to her was one big porch where she was going to just sit and sit and enjoy the warmth and cool sunshine. I suppose the sunshine could not be hot because that might suggest she was in a hell somewhere. No, she was up there on the heavenly porch just sitting and looking at the angels go by. Just as she sat on her porch in Kentucky and watched the world. When we were young’uns she was never on that porch alone but as she grew old and as the preacher said when she passed away “her choicest friends were gone”; she would sit on the porch rocking all by her lonesome, just looking out at the world.