H-Slavery discussion: Theodore Ransaw request for "Quilt Code" sources
The original thread can be found here.
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU> List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 07:19:51 -0500
Date Posted: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 07:19:51 -0500
Cross-posted from H-Amstdy
I have a student working on a masters project about the communicational and political uses of quilts throughout the underground railroad. He's discovering an inherent problem with the project: the lack of primary research materials. The original quilts have by now disintegrated, and apparently there are very few first hand accounts of how quilts were used in practice. What I'm looking for, then, are references to quilt-use in popular literature. Do you know of any novels, short stories, poems, essays, etc, from the antebellum period that in some way mention quilts in association with the underground railroad or the abolition movement in general?
I appreciate any suggestions.
Donovan Conley.
Department of Communication Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
702-895-5137
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Dear Donovan,
Recently, I did some research on this issue myself for a project on African-American artist Faith Ringgold. Most of the resources I found indicated that this theory has been debunked, specifically because there are no primary sources (quilts) available and no first-hand accounts that indicate their use as "maps" or codes for the Underground Railroad. Additionally, none of the extant slave narratives mention quilts functioning in this way. The best quilt historians and material culture scholarship I found said that this theory is only a theory since quilts functioned for warmth or as documents of important events (weddings). If you or your student identifies any primary source material, it would be helpful if you could circulate it widely.
Anne Swartz, Ph.D.
Professor of Art History Savannah College of Art and Design
====================================
From: Dale Ducatte <dducatte@bellsouth.net>
I attended an exhibit sponsored by the Underground Railroad Quilt Code Museum in Atlanta back in August, and the exhibit included a good bit of documentary evidence about the use of quilts in the underground railroad. I don't recall popular literature specifically, thought it seems like there were several books on exhibit, dating back to the late 1800s, that had such references. I didn't spend a lot of time at the exhibit, so my information is a little sketchy. In any case, this organization:
http://www.ugrrsecretquiltcodemuseum.com/
may be a potential contact for some additional sources.
Regards,
Dale Ducatte <dducatte@bellsouth.net>
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:10:52 -0500
Date Posted: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:10:52 -0500
1. From: Paul Finkelman [mailto:paul-finkelman@utulsa.edu]
It is almost entirely nonsense made up in the last few years by people who *want* it to be true; how could uneducated illiterate fugitive slaves know about the "signs" on quilts but NO professional slave catchers, US Marshals, slave owners or northern anti-abolitionists ever figured it out.
I have read a fair number of slave narratives and NEVER ran into the notion of quilts as some sort of slave semiphore system of communication. I have also read, I believe, EVERY known reproted case involving a fugitive slave or an abolitionist that went to court and spent hours and hours in the archives reading primary documents on fugitive slave cases, abolitionists, etc. Again, I have never encountered anything to do with quilts. I think the interesting story for your student is to undercover the origin of this late 20th century myth and write about why people are so desperate to create it.
Just as interesting, of course, is the whole myth of hte railroad -- in that *everyone* in the North seesm to want to connect to it; go into any town in PA., Ohio, Ill., Indiana, even downstate NY, and tell people you work on fugitive slaves and they all start telling you about tunnels and safe houses and secret rooms. If just a quarter of all those people and houses had been involved in the UGRR, there would have been no slaves left in KY, Mo,, Md. Del, or Va. by 1860 -- the would have all been hidden away in the those attics and secret rooms.
There is a story here -- not a history of the UGRR -- but a history of myth creating that is surely worth telling.
-- Paul Finkelman
Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Tulsa College of Law
3120 East 4th Place Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
918-631-3706 (office) 918-631-2194 (fax)
paul-finkelman@utulsa.edu
============================================
2. From: Kcliflar@AOL.COM
It continues to amaze me that this quilt code theory keeps making the rounds. There is no documentary evidence for the quilt code -- based on thousands of first person interviews of slaves during the 1930s, biographies and autobiographies written in the 19th century, and letters, diaries and journals of Underground Railroad activists and freedom seekers, not one single account of a quilt code has been uncovered. The quilt code phenomenon has sprung from the oral testimony of one person, and whose story was featured in the best-selling but very poorly documented and researched book "Hidden in Plain View." Quilt historians have soundly debunked many of the statements made about the quilt designs supposedly used on the URR. Many of the designs were not even in use before the Civil War.
If that doesn't deter some believers, then paying close attention to the messages these quilt designs were supposed to convey make little sense. Also, the idea that treasured quilts would be hung outside, at night, for freedom seekers to read, in the dark, makes even less sense. Giles Wright, State Historian for the state of New Jersey has written an important critique of this code, and he strongly believes that the continuing use of the code myth to promote the stories of the URR is racist and demeaning to the thousands of freedom seekers who used their own intelligence, communication and transportation networks, and sheer determination to find their way to freedom. Other historians concur. Leigh Fellner, a quilt expert, has written a lengthy analysis and critique of the code, and the family who promotes the story. See her website at _http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/_ (http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/)
Perhaps your student might look at why this quilt code myth has caught on like wildfire, from k-12 curriculum, to college and graduate studies. Perhaps it tells us something about how we as a nation have a hard time talking about slavery, resistance to slavery, and the struggles of freedom seekers to find their way to liberty. The difficult stories of slavery and resistance somehow are softened by the images of pretty quilts, but by focusing on those pretty quilt designs we are once again obscuring the truth. Many people, both professionally trained historians and local researchers are now digging up the real stories of the Underground Railroad, and discovering the very real networks and systems freedom seekers and their allies used. These are the stories we should be telling our students, not fake stories about pretty quilts.
Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D.
www.harriettubmanbiography.com
(http://www.harriettubmanbiography.com/)
Dept. of History Simmons College
300 The Fenway Boston, MA 02115-5898
617-521-2183
============================================
3. From: susannah@XACTCOMMERCE.COM
At last! Something I actually know something about! As far as I have been able to ascertain, the first mention of quilts being used as safe house signals appeared in a 1928 quilting magazine. A good long time after the Underground Railroad was active. Quilts with Underground Railroad associated names, like "Underground Railroad" (which in different configurations is "Jacobs Ladder" or "Nine Patch") were apparently devised AFTER the Civil War. At least in the fugitive slave narratives that I have read, quilts as signals are NEVER mentioned. The same goes for the Federal Writers Project interviews with former slaves during the 1930s. The source for the Quilt Code comes from the book Hidden in Plain View. Whenever I've tried to research the Code, everything leads back to this book, and no other source. The book itself is rather scattered in its approach (though it is purportedly about the Quilt Code, the authors get sidetracked discussing codes in African American spirituals, to say nothing of spending a lot of time trying to trace the origins of European patchwork patterns to African textiles). Quilt historian Barbara Brackman has written about the use of quilts by abolitionists, not as signals, but as fundraising projects at "Abolitionists Fairs" which raised money for freedmen and freedom seekers.
As far as antebellum or postbellum novels in which quilting is mentioned, especially in the UGRR context, I don't know of any. There have been some published in this century and the 20th century, however. (The Runaway Quilt is one that I have read, a "fun read" but easy to "pick holes in." Also the picture books Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and Under the Quilt of Night.) But until somebody invents a time machine that will let us go back and find out for sure whether quilts were used as signals or as a code, we'll never actually be able to say for sure. Actually I've often thought that it would be interesting to write about how fascinated people have become by the idea of the quilt code, how it has captured the imagination; it's something that I'm asked about repeatedly, especially by quilters.
Many of them have made their own "Underground Railroad" quilts using the patterns mentioned in Hidden in Plain View, using reproduction antebellum fabric, no less. I hate to tell them that the Quilt Code is probably only a 20th century fantasy!
Susannah West
interpreter, John Rankin House
(home of abolitionist John Rankin, 1793-1886) Ripley, Ohio
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4. From: martha.katzhyman@GMAIL.COM
As Ann Swartz notes, the theory that quilts were used as codes for how to escape slavery has been pretty well debunked. Two on-line sources that your student could consult are http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/, which has many links to sources, and http://www.historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews11_doc_01a.shtml.
They may be useful as leads to possible antebellum sources.
Martha Katz-Hyman
Newport News, VA
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU> List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU> Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad Date Written: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:55:24 -0500 Date Posted: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:55:24 -0500
1. From: David Blight [mailto:david.blight@yale.edu]
The reason your student is not finding primary material on quilting in the Underground Railroad is because in all likelihood there isn't any. This is "myth" of the softest kind that serves the needs of the present for people who prefer their history as lore and little else. See the book I edited for the new museum in Cincinnati, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, 2004.
David Blight
============================================
2. From: KSmardz@AOL.COM
Dear List:
The story about quilts and the UGRR seems to come from the book "Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad" by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond Dobard, published by Doubleday in 1999. Personally, I think it took hold because the quilt story helps validate women's (often anonymous) work on the UGRR. But that's another hobbyhorse of mine . . .
Thank goodness this quilt stuff is finally being debunked! But how do we discredit this myth? I work a great deal with educators and community historians in Ontario and parts of the Upper South and Midwest, and I have to say that this Quilt Code nonsense is very widespread. It is absolutely everywhere - school curricula, monuments (one just having been erected using the Quilt Code at Owen Sound, Ontario), websites, and museums.
After years of reading slave and fugitive slave narratives, I quite agree with Paul Finkelman that there's not a single reference to quilts in anything I have ever come across. But every women's group, children's history club and museum friends association I come across is busily making quilts using the "Code".
Karolyn Smardz Frost
Collingwood, Ontario
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject:
Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 08:03:07 -0500
Date Posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 08:03:07 -0500
1. From: Leigh Fellner [mailto:hcquilts@cox.net]
I read with interest the recent, very informative discussion on this subject (I'm honored that some thought my site worth linking to). The "Underground Railroad Quilt Code Museum", it should be noted, is a private (and, as far as I know, for-profit) venue run by the same "quilt code" family with whom I have corresponded at length. See www.ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/rr8.html; emails at www.hartcottagequilts.com/kemp2002.htm and www.hartcottagequilts.com/kemp2004.htm.
I asked a colleague to visit the place when it opened this summer. He did not observe any artifacts from the antebellum period, and reported that the exhibit consists of about two dozen 20th century quilts, most dating to after WWII, a number of photocopies of e.g. "wanted" posters for fugitive slaves, and an assortment of modern craft items from various places in Africa. He was "absolutely denied" permission to take photographs, but from his description it seems to be the same collection of objects that the family has displayed at its many lectures.
While an early publicity blurb for Hidden in Plain View claimed that Ozella showed author Jacqueline Tobin a "quilt dating from slavery" with "markings that had guided runaway slaves along the routes to freedom," this quilt is entirely absent from both the book and the exhibit; as far as I know, neither the authors nor the "Code" family have ever even mentioned it. Additionally, Teresa Kemp, the family representative (and proprietor of the museum), told me the family possesses documents with which "we can tell if someone says their ancestor participated with mine in the development or spreading of the codes, " but they are apparently not on exhibit and have not been shared with historians - to whom, says Ms. Kemp, the family "does not owe anything".
Apparently the family is attempting to "document" the Quilt Code by inviting visitors to contribute their own "code" stories for posterity. My colleague could not ascertain what verification process, if any, existed.
Leigh Fellner
www.ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com
============================================
2. From: wellman@TWCNY.RR.COM
For more on quilt codes, see Leigh Fellner's work at http://www.ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/. For more on research on Underground Railroad sites in upstate New York, see results of cultural resources surveys sponsored by the Preservation League of New York State and local historic preservation groups in Oswego, Onondaga, and Cayuga Counties, and available on the web under Oswego County Underground Railroad (check Google), www.pacny.net/freedom_trail (for Preservation Assn. of Central New York), and Cayuga County Genweb site (forthcoming). I have worked on all of these projects, and the sites we have found are well-documented, incorporating sites relating to the UGRR, abolitionism, and African American life, since I don't think you can separate out these themes, one from the other, very well. We have started from the bottom up, with primary sources that include census records relating to the African Americans in each of these counties, as well as printed local history materials, newspapers, antislavery petitions, and manuscripts. We have a booklet describing this methodology that the National Park Service is about to publish. If people would like to see a draft of this, contact me privately.
Best, Judy Wellman
Judith Wellman, Ph.D.
Director, Historical New York Research Associates
Professor Emerita, State University of New York at Oswego
2 Harris Hill Road,
Fulton, New York 13069
315-598-4387/wellman@twcny.rr.com
Discovering extraordinary people and places in time. "Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color." Frederick Douglass. North Star, 1848
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:12:31 -0500
Date Posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:12:31 -0500
1. From: Pen Bogert [mailto:Bogert@filsonhistorical.org]
I have researched thousands of ads in Kentucky newspapers for escaped slaves, read dozens of narratives and interviews, researched hundreds of KY court cases involving slaves who were captured and brought back to KY, talked with over a dozen people in Louisville who claim to have UGRR tunnels leading from their house to the Ohio River and have yet to see any mention of a quilt. I sat through a presentation of "Hidden From Plain View" and was left wondering, well, what if the quilt was accidently hung the wrong way? I think Dr. Finkleman's idea of researching this as a late 20th c. myth creation is a good one. This myth does a disservice to those who attempted to escape - many of whom knew very well which roads to take and which areas to avoid. Read Benjamin Drew's interview with Henry Morehead - who escaped from Louisville, read his own wanted poster in Indiana, changed his route and made it to Canada!
This myth is topped only by an article that appeared in the February 22, 1998 issue of the Lexington, KY Herald-Leader: Yes, lawn jockeys were placed "throughout the South" to help the geographically-impaired slaves find their way to Canada.
Pen Bogert
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2. From: paul-finkelman@UTULSA.EDU
As I suggested earlier, the really interesting aspect of this is not the history of quilts and the UGRR, because that is nonsense. Rather, it is 1) the impressive desire of people to believe this fantasy and propagate it; 2) the shrewd ability of some people to figure out how to make a profit from it (or at least their attempt to do so) and 3) the declining standards of American publishers who are willing to put out books, like "Hidden in Plain View," that could not get a passing grade in a high school history course (but of course might in a creative writing course), and market such books as "history." Thanks to Leigh Fellner for her work on this problem!
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad Author's Subject:
Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:58:21 -0500
Date Posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:58:21 -0500
1. From: djackson23@NYC.RR.COM
I want to jump into this discussion of quilts,slavery, and politics to make a couple of observations. While I agree that quilts were probably not signs for the UGRR, I hope that we do not trash the possible visual language of quilts in the process of disposing of an urban legend. I have imagined quilt designs to be similar to the subversive language of the Spirituals, but even more obscure.
We know that large plantations had fabric houses where enslaved black women sewed, quilted, and embroidered for the "big house." We know--from scholar Maud Wahlman (sp?)--that color and design of fabric was an important social marker in West African society.
Maybe we should think of Hidden in Plain View as a pioneering but flawed hypothesis about the language of visual representation in slaves' and freedpeople's political, social, and cosmological existences.
Wahlman notes significantly that Harriet Powers, the gifted ex-slave quilter from Georgia, wears a ritual apron with a black sun embossed upon it in the only known photograph we have of her. Wahlman suggests that Powers was a ritual leader in a secret society (Household of Ruth, Eastern Star, Order of St. Luke, or hundreds of others) and that there may be a link between this status and her remarkable quilts.
Remember, we academics are as ignorant as children trying to navigate the streets of say the south Bronx, where every eight year old can read the grafitti which denotes which gang rules or who died on a particular corner. This grafitti, I suggest, is the modern heir of a visual language developed in the slave and post-slave South, the Caribbean, and Mexico.
The resilience of the black southern quilting tradition alone--not to disparage many other such quilting traditions in America--suggests there is important meaning in this art and its language(s).
Harold S. Forsythe
Visiting Fellow (2005-2006)
Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
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2. From: tanter@TARLETON.EDU
I'll tell you why I think many of us wanted the myth to be true: we wanted to believe that the intelligence of the enslaved outperformed the intelligence of the enslaver. Why do we love trickster tales? Because Ol' Massa is duped and John outsmarts him. The myth of the quilt feeds into that. If they could make up songs that included code words to get them through the URR, why couldn't there have been codes in the quilts too? Obviously, there's an answer to that question that makes sense but with all the horrors of slavery, this myth is one thing that seemed to give slaves an upper hand. I've never studied the issue and haven't thought a lot about it, but I do feel a bit sad knowing that there's no evidence of any quilt ever acting as a signal.
Dr. Marcy Tanter
Associate Professor of English
Director of Sophomore English
Department of English and Languages
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, TX 76402
(254) 968-9892
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3. From: bskelche@desu.edu [mailto:bskelche@desu.edu]
Having conducted research on the Underground Railroad in Delaware and within the surrounding region, I have heard the stories about quilts with hidden escape routes depicting the Underground Railroad embedded in them. Giles Wright, in New Jersey, has been very outspoken about the myth of the quilts and Underground Railroad maps to name a few. You may also want to consult with Kate Larson at Simmons College in Boston, who wrote a fine biography of Harriet Tubman. I vaguely remember seeing a reference to a meeting of Quaker women in Ohio during the Civil War and quilts. I cannot remember the source, but I do remember a reference to fund-raising to support their anti-slavery activities and quilts. This may have been the source of the quilt myth. I look forward to anyone who knows about this meeting.
Dr. Bradley Skelcher
Acting Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
EH Building, Room 268
Delaware State University
Dover, Delaware 19901
302.857.6628 Fax: 302.857.7605
bskelche@desu.edu skelcher@direcway.com
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:28:04 -0500
Date Posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:28:04 -0500
1. From hcquilts@COX.NET
>> I have imagined quilt designs to be similar to the subversive >>language of the Spirituals, but even more obscure....we academics are
>>as ignorant as children trying to navigate the streets of say the >>south Bronx, where every eight year old can read the grafitti which >>denotes which gang rules or who died on a particular corner.
Many today do indeed imagine that, barred from full participation in the political process, our foremothers of all races resorted to expressing various subversive motifs in their quilts. But quilt historians' research indicates that the names we now ascribe to such patterns were assigned long after the events whose names they bear. It's also worth pointing out that a number of the patterns said to be part of the "Code" date to well after the Civil War - some as late as the 1930s.
>>Wahlman notes significantly that Harriet Powers, the gifted ex-slave >>quilter from Georgia, wears a ritual apron with a black sun embossed >>upon it in the only known photograph we have of her. Wahlman suggests
>>that Powers was a ritual leader in a secret society (Household of >>Ruth, Eastern Star, Order of St. Luke, or hundreds of others) and that
>>there may be a link between this status and her remarkable quilts.
I'm hardly the first to observe that Wahlman (a folklorist) makes a number of "suggestions" in "Signs and Symbols" that are not only unsupported by data but actually contradicted by it, and that she goes off the rails a number of times regarding quilt and textile history. Among other things, she mistakenly presumes African textile technology is the same today as it was during the Diaspora; she virtually ignores the significant body (125+) of extant 19th century African-American quilts, instead forming generalizations based on 20th century examples (most after 1970); and she seems unaware that the "African" features of these quilts also apply to those made before 1930 by rural southern whites and rural Anglo-Australians, and by the British in the 18th and early 19th century.
http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/rr6.htm#wahlman
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2. From: ww22000@YAHOO.COM
I have been following the quilt discussion with great interest. I would like to contribute a few comments.
I think Finkleman is right to signal a research opportunity in the propogration of myths surrounding "UGRR quilts." The very fact that people respond so much to this may not simply be a question of slave intelligence or not, but also an expression of expecting African Americans to communicate in symbols, not very far fetched considering literacy levels for that population through the last century. That is in itself interesting.
I would also like to suggest that the fact that we don't have any record of such artifacts does not prove that they did not exist, or that some sort of coding didn't exist in quilting by African American women. In my work on slaves who arrived from Madagascar to Virginia, I have found very scanty evidence of their arrival. The volume of evidence in no way reflects the volume of people who claim an ancestor from among those slaves. However, there is evidence that the slaves arrived, though it is rarely if ever in the public view and only recently of scholarly interest. That people in power do not dispose of all the information of the people that they are opressing is not a new concept, and I do not believe that this is a strong argument against anything we are trying to understand about the slavery period. Underlying this would be an assumption that Africans were completely "knowable" and "accessible" to their European captors, which has already been proven to be a faulty assumption.
As an Africanist, I would also like to caution that there are all kinds of codes and even parables in color and design in African cloth that we can easily miss. I would even suggest that these kinds of codes, which could signal ethnicity or geography or a parable in African cultural terms, may have existed. Later generations may have confused these symbols with symbols for slave migration to the north. Certainly for a long time no one would have found it profitable to mention that the designs had African meanings (which could have been forgotten, and UGRR may have sounded far more prestigous and believable). I think it is useful to remember that such narratives (oral histories) can confuse or interweave seemingly unrelated events or meanings for more contemporary applications. Certain patterns can be associated with various regions of West Africa, for example...ie kente style versus Mandingue or other Sahelian patterns. I think it is not far fetched to at least consider that there may have been some important imaging in AFrican American quilts for which we do not have sufficient information; that this imaging became the basis of several narratives, and that one of these narratives regards the UGRR. I think we should be careful not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," as someone also alluded to in not discrediting family historical texts in general.
Wendy Wilson Fall, PhD KSU
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3. From: boston1775@EARTHLINK.NET
The Author's Note for HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW can be read at the book's Amazon webpage: <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385497679/> In my eyes, it offers interesting evidence about the appeal of the story to the book's prime author, and perhaps to the culture as a whole.
Coauthor Jacqueline Tobin writes of first hearing about a link between quilts and escapes as Ozella McDaniel Williams sells her a quilt to Tobin in Charleston's Old Market. Williams's economic interest in making her products more appealing doesn't seem to enter Tobin's thinking.
Tobin calls Williams's wares "her handmade works of art"; while recognizing that other vendors in the Old Market sell tourist trinkets and imports, she doesn't appear to consider that Williams might be selling other quilters' work.
Tobin becomes more interested in the quilt story, and the emotional drives beneath her interest also become clear. She returns to Charleston after three years of largely fruitless research, having had only two short conversations with Williams. Yet by that point in her narrative she's referring to Williams as "my quilter friend." (Williams, for her part, doesn't seem to recognize Tobin at their second meeting or care about any past conversations.) Tobin, a white American, admits to having been nervous about whether Williams, a black American, would take her into her confidence. "Worse yet," she writes, would be finding out that there's nothing to find out.
On their second meeting in the Old Market, the two women have a long conversation. (The extract on Amazon doesn't say whether this meeting ended with the purchase of more quilts.) During that talk, Tobin writes, she comes to think of herself as "one of only a few trusted people" to hear about the quilts' secret. Both Williams and her eventual coauthor Raymond Dobard have told her she would learn the secrets only when she was "ready." At last, this second conversation seems to confirm, Tobin is "ready" for such a secret. And, by implication, so are the book's readers and America as a whole.
J. L. Bell JnoLBell@earthlink.net
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4. From: hcquilts@COX.NET
>>There is a story here -- not a history of the UGRR -- but a history of myth creating that is surely worth telling.
Dr. Finkelman is not the only one who thinks so.
This month's annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (www.afsnet.org) included a number of presentations on the "Code" phenomenon, including a panel discussion and papers by folklorists Laurel Horton ("The Underground Railroad Quilt Code: Traditional Narrative Strategies in Promoting a Good Story"), Marsha MacDowell ("The 'Secret Code' in Quilts: Creating Authenticity") and Courtney Brooks ("Contravenes, Quilts and Codes"). Not sure when or if these will be published.
In 2003 Horton presented a paper entitled ""Revealed in Murky Research: The Underground Railroad Quilt Code" at the annual meeting of the California Folklore Society. And a short address on the subject was given by MacDowell (who I believe is also the the textile curator at the UMich Museum) at the 1999 American Quilt Study Group annual meeting; it's published in the AQSG annual publication, "Uncoverings 2000".
Pen Bogert noted that the "Code" myth ""...is topped only by an article that appeared in the February 22, 1998 issue of the Lexington, KY Herald-Leader: Yes, lawn jockeys were placed "throughout the South" to help the geographically-impaired slaves find their way to Canada."
You will be pleased to hear that the two actually converge in "Hidden in Plain View": the Lawn Jockey Code is approvingly cited in one of the several introductions to the book. Some years back a member of the Quilt History email list wrote me that her attempts to debunk the LJC in her own community (a prosperous, white Virginia suburb, if memory serves) were met with howls of righteous indignation.
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5. From: bskelche@desu.edu [mailto:bskelche@desu.edu]
I agree with Professor Forsythe on the following point he is making. This is an important perspective that should be noted in studying quilts produced by enslaved African Americans. Yet, we also need to seriously question the idea of maps embedded into quilts depicting the Underground Railroad. There are other areas of research associated with the Underground Railroad that need serious attention such as explaining why so many did not runaway.
Dr. Bradley Skelcher
Acting Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
EH Building, Room 268
Delaware State University
Dover, Delaware 19901
302.857.6628 Fax: 302.857.7605
bskelche@desu.edu skelcher@direcway.com
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Author's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad Date
Written: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 05:10:19 -0500
Date Posted: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 05:10:19 -0500
1. From: Kcliflar@aol.com [mailto:Kcliflar@aol.com]
I think that a discussion of African and African-American textile making and traditions are one thing, and the quilt code quite another. While Wendy Fall argues "it is not far fetched to at least consider that there may have been some important imaging in African American Quilts for which we do not have sufficient information; that this imaging became the basis of several narratives, and that one of these narratives regards the UGRR. I think we should be careful not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," I would suggest that we step back and talk about this in a basic and concrete manner first. When you think about the actual logistics of this theory, it doesn't seem to even make much sense. The actual process of making the quilt, having access to the variety of fabrics required to make the designs, the ability to have as many as 12 quilts and designs available to place outside, at night, in the dark, for people to come up to, read and interpret (in the dark), count the threads (in the dark), stretches credulity. How many enslaved families even had one quilt, never mind elaborately designed ones?
How many had spare quilts to hang outside? Doesn't that strike anyone as odd to begin with? Some of these supposed designs tell freedom seekers to "zig zag" (like a drunk) their way, other designs supposedly tell them to go to a church, get married, change their clothes, etc.etc. Do you think going to church and getting married helped a freedom seeker secure liberty? How insulting is this? Leigh Fellner's website highlights many such instances -- and the book, Hidden in Plain View has many more fantastical and impossible suggestions that not only stretch the limits of the imagination, but also show how poorly researched the book is regarding the known operations of the Underground Railroad. Wouldn't it have been just as effective, and a whole lot quicker, just to *tell* freedom seekers which way to go? This quilt code theory substitutes spoken language -- was everyone mute?
Anyway, I think Brad Skelcher has made the important point again. Teaching students about African and African American textile and craft traditions is worthy of its own curriculum. While teachers and others are instructing students in the stories of the URR quilts, they are not teaching their students about the horrors of slavery, why enslaved people wanted to run away, and the huge obstacles they encountered in their desperate attempts to flee. It also tells students nothing, absolutely nothing about those individuals who fled, and those who helped them on their way. Telling those stories will reveal just how demeaning it is to fill students' heads with pretty quilt designs as a substitute for that very real and very important history.
Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D.
Simmons College Dept. of History
www.harriettubmanbiography.com
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2. From: buyurun7@YAHOO.COM
I am very pleased to see these observations from Forsythe, especially in light of an earlier suggestion in this thread that enslaved Africans were illiterate and uneducated. They may have been illiterate in the Western sense of that term but never uneducated; unschooled perhaps, in the Western sense of schooling, but not uneducated. We now know from recent research conducted jointly at Rutgers and the University of New Orleans that prospective slave owners specifically requested and eventually got particular captured Africans because of the skills they would bring with them, skills inherent to their own tribes; skills such as iron mongering and rice planting. Enslaved Africans did not learn these artistries from their masters. These were indigenous abilities, skills, and capabilities that they learned in their own homelands, where they themselves were masters or appfrentices to mastgers of such enterprises.
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3. From: paul-finkelman@UTULSA.EDU
One more point on this. Let's keep in mind that the quilts made by slaves are not the issue. The issue, in the myth created by Tobin and others is that these quilts were hanging outside of houses in the North to welcome fugitives. Thus, the myth could not even satify Marcy Tanter's desire expressed in her early post that the quilts somehow show the slave outsmarting the master. This myth was about the abolitionists hanging up quilts to guide the slave with the slave catchers too dumb to figure it out. This, it is also not about African culture and codes or signs in slave made quilts. We know slaves had codes -- the drinking gourd for example -- on how to get North. But, the quilt myth is about slaves knowing what northerners are putting on quilts and northerners knowning what slaves know and everyone inthe UGRR knowning what no one outside the UGRR knew.
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad A
uthor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 08:38:51 -0500
Date Posted: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 08:38:51 -0500
1. From: David Blight [mailto:david.blight@yale.edu]
I strongly endorse Kate Larson's sweet reason here. Feeding this mythology in any way only supports lore and not any real learning, except about how such myths take hold and persist. As a little guidance I would once again suggest folks look at our recent book, Passages to Freedom. Pieces by John Vlach and Milton Sernett are pertinent as are my own two pieces in the volume. The quilt story is something none of us can truly conquer; it will survive and thrive as long as it serves real needs in the desires many people have from history - to convert tragedy into something triumphal, suffering into progress, complexity into curiosity, nitty gritty social and political history into material culture we can touch and see. There was no quilt code, but don't expect to convince the true believers. Memory is stronger than history, but history has to hold its ground nonetheless.
David Blight
Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale.
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2. From: tanter@TARLETON.EDU
What I'm finding really useful in all this discussion is it's making me think about how the URR is perceived by people who have a romantic notion of slavery. It's got me thinking about how I first heard about Harriett Tubman and the URR, as if it was some kind of grand adventure, sneaking around and saving slaves. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time but now I'm wondering if books like HiPS are still propagating the romantic notion of slavery...? In my children's schools, slavery is discussed very little and at my university it's not discussed much either (when an English professor teaches the only [occasional] course on slavery at the school that tells you something!), and when I ask students what they know about it, they don't talk about the horror and the fact that it impacted individuals.
When I'm teaching a slavery class, it's a literature class and while we go into the history, we're looking at individual slave narratives or pro-slavery documents. I talk about the URR but it's usually in the context of Douglass, the Crafts, Box Brown, etc. Is there a comprehensive text about the URR out there that satisfies the need Kate Clifford so rightly says our students have?
Dr. Marcy Tanter
Associate Professor of English
Director of Sophomore English
Department of English and Languages
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, TX 76402
(254) 968-9892
From: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
List Editor: "Mintz, Steven H" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad Author's Subject:
Re: Quilting and/or the Underground Railroad
Date Written: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:50:21 -0500
Date Posted: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:50:21 -0500
1. From: Susannah West [mailto:susannah@xactcommerce.com]
Leigh Fellner has corrected an erroneous statement I made in my previous post. I referred to a "1928 quilting magazine" that mentioned quilts being used as signals. Actually, I was thinking of a book by Ruth Finley, Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them, which was published in 1929.
This book contains the first mention of the "Underground Railroad" patchwork pattern.
Another thing I thought of --we really have TWO myths we're talking about here: the myth of the Quilt Code which gave slaves instructions about preparing to flee, and the myth of quilts being used as signals by abolitionists.
Susannah West interpreter, John Rankin House (home of abolitionist John Rankin, 1793-1886)
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2. From: paul-finkelman@UTULSA.EDU
I agree with David, in part, on why the quilt story will survive. But, the other reason is the absolute lack of intellectual standards by some publishers; they purport to publish history but instead will pander to anything they can sell in the market. I have nothing against selling books but we as scholars should at least be aware of the problem. In addition, I think many scholars are unwilling to confront nonsense when they hear it, fearing it will offend someone by telling them their theory is absurd. Memory may be "stronger" than history but it still our job to confront false memories.
As for Marcy's comment, the answer is probably "no" on a comprehensive text but yes on lots of good scholarship
Paul Finkelman
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3. From: deal@OSWEGO.EDU
I can't add anything to the well-informed postings on this topic by David Blight, Kate Larson, Judy Wellman, and many others. Nothing, that is, except a suggestion about a way to understand the controversy. It seems to me to be a perfect illustration of the perils of confusing two very different enterprises--history and heritage. David Lowenthal's Possessed by the Past is the book to read on the subject (a short summary may also be found in an essay of his, "Fabricating Heritage," History and Memory, 10:1 (Spring 1998), which is available online).
Both history and heritage have legitimate, but very different purposes. In a nutshell, history is written to recover the past, warts and all, via methods designed to maximize objectivity and minimize bias. Heritage, in contrast, is pursued to forge identity and group solidarity; it combines bits and peices of history with myths and feel-good tales. Every people and every nation around the globe engage, in various ways, in the fabrication of heritage (Ernst Renan, French nationalist in the 19th century, said something like "every nation must get its own history wrong"). We seem to need the myths, lore, and distortions of history it necessarily perpetuates, but we--as professional historians--need to keep reminding ourselves and others of the very different aims of history, a kind of truth-telling that cannot serve the same ends as those fed by heritage.
This discussion, in a way, has been just that sort of reminder.
Douglas Deal
Professor of History and Chair of History Department
State University of New York at Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
deal@oswego.edu (315)-312-5632
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4. From: hcquilts@COX.NET
Dr. Finkelman recounts *one* way "Code" quilts are claimed to have been used: by abolitionists in the North. However, I have counted at least fifteen conflicting versions of the "Quilt Code" presently in circulation, some of which maintain that it was developed and used by slaves in the South. In my mind, one of the first credibility hurdles "Code" proponents face is that they just can't seem to agree on the fundamentals - who developed the code, who used it and where, what patterns it included, what they meant, and how the quilts were used. And, of course (as Dr. Larson just pointed out), none explains why a code was necessary at all, let alone one that conveyed the strange assortment of messages claimed.
Moreover, among those individuals claiming the "Code" as family oral history, to my knowledge none has ever pointed to an ancestor who actually used it to escape. In fact, as far as I can tell none of these families even left the South until the present generation. One who says she learned the "Code" from her grandmother has written a book recounting the brutality her forebears endured not only during, but after slavery on the same Kentucky plantation to which they were first brought from Africa, near which she herself was born. It is just 75 miles from the UGRR "hub" of Ripley, Ohio.
An aside regarding African-American quilts: It is widely assumed that quilts such as those in the Gee's Bend exhibit are representative of "traditional" African-American quilts: brightly colored, irregularly pieced in strip fashion. This is not the case; such "African" attributes do not appear until the mid-20th century, even in the ostensible bell jar of Gee's Bend. Observations of conditions in a 1980s history of quilters there suggest the evolution in style was a creatige response to the technical limitations caused by poverty. When new in the first part of the century, the tools used by Gee's Bend quilters allowed the detailed, regular piecing and quilting shown in their early quilts; as the years wore on, so did their tools. By the 1960s, quilters were getting by with scissors with dulled blades, blunt needles, and thimbles worn through, and accommodated their methods and aesthetics to those limitations. In effect, faced with a 4" brush and a can of house paint, Brueghel becomes Rothko. (1970s interviews with white Ozark quilters note the same stylistic changes.) Interviews with African-American quilters outside Gee's Bend working in this style reveal that while some grew up in quilting households, their own quilts do not resemble those made by their mothers and grandmothers. Instead, at some point (generally the 1970s) they made a creative decision to leave the mainstream.
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5. From: david.blight@YALE.EDU
I strongly endorse Kate Larson's sweet reason here. Feeding this mythology in any way only supports lore and not any real learning, except about how such myths take hold and persist. As a little guidance I would once again suggest folks look at our recent book, Passages to Freedom. Pieces by John Vlach and Milton Sernett are pertinent as are my own two pieces in the volume. The quilt story is something none of us can truly conquer; it will survive and thrive as long as it serves real needs in the desires many people have from history - to convert tragedy into something triumphal, suffering into progress, complexity into curiosity, nitty gritty social and political history into material culture we can touch and see. There was no quilt code, but don't expect to convince the true believers. Memory is stronger than history, but history has to hold its ground nonetheless.
David Blight
Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale.