Misquotes, conflations, and semantic games 

...[T]here's a downside to debunking fraudulent people or claims. The people who make them up -- and most of those who agree with them -- simply don't care. Because the characters and claims are invented to support what they already believe fervently, debunking them does not 'count.' Lies presented in furtherance of a greater 'truth' are not really considered to be lies, at least not in the moral sense. The idea is to persuade people, and if fictional people or incidents have to be used, that's OK, as long as it's in the interest of the greater truth. The problem I have with this approach is that I don't like being lied to. Even when I agree with the cause the lie is intended to support. I don't find lies emotionally fulfilling because they pollute the process of thought.

-- Eric Scheie                       

Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt

Tobin and Dobard resort to yet another 20th century children's book as "proof"  when they point to Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, a children's book published in 1993 - coincidentally, the same year Ozella first approached Tobin with her "quilt code" story.  The authors devote nearly four pages to Sweet Clara and recount the story in detail as if it were history, noting that in it "we find all the elements that are referenced in the Underground Railroad Quilt Code".  Sweet Clara's origins appear shrouded in mystery.  Say the authors of Hidden in PlainView:  

Personal conversations and correspondence with Hopkinson and the books illustrator, James Ransom, revealed that neither has any idea where the story originated, though Ms. Hopkinson remembers hearing a true story about the Underground Railroad on the rado, on which she based the story....Is the illustrator...[a descendant of slaves]...betraying his knowledge or remembrance of special stitches [such as those in Elizabeth Scott's quilt]?  

The authors' careful choice of words leads the reader to infer that Hopkinson's book is not only based on "a true story about the Underground Railroad" she heard on the radio, but is the product of some vague, retrieved memory on the part of the illustrator.  (Apparently such memories did not also include accurate representations of antebellum textiles or slave clothing; his characters cheerfully pick cotton fully dressed in sparkling new clothes, carrying a sack about as big as a mailbag.)  

Yet when I wrote Hopkinson, she promptly stated exactly where "the story" came from - a news (i.e., "true") story and a book:

I wrote it after hearing Elizabeth Scott interviewed on NPR on June 15, 1989. There is no documented historical evidence for escape routes in quilts, however, and much controversy among quilt historians. I used books such as Gladys Marie Fry's Stitched From the Soul. Sweet Clara is fiction.

It seems all that Hopkinson "has no idea" about is where the "Code" story itself "originated". 

In fact, what Hopkinson heard was a news story about Stitching Memories : African-American Story Quilts, an exhibit of contemporary African-American art quilters. National Public Radio never made a transcript it, and reporter Phyllis Joffee died a few years later. But NPR does have a record of all the persons interviewed for the report:  exhibit curator Eva Ungar Grudin, art quilter Faith Ringgold, and "artist and singer" Joyce Scott, Elizabeth Scott's daughter.  Since the exhibit catalog quotes Joyce Scott as claiming her mother said quilts were used as maps, it seems to be Joyce whom Hopkinson actually heard.  NPR says Elizabeth Scott wasn't even interviewed for the segment. 

Hopkinson's book is discussed at length in a 1998 African American Review article called "The rhetoric of quilts: creating identity in African-American children's literature".  In it the author describes Ms. Hopkinson as an African-American writer who "employ[s] the quilt as a symbol of resistance to control and dominance" and in whose book "cultural identity is created by the symbolic tradition of the quilt and its representation of Afrocentric motherhood". Ms. Hopkinson described herself to me as "an Irish girl from Lowell [Massachusetts]".

What did Elizabeth Scott actually say? 

Having discussed Sweet Clara at length, Hidden in Plain View then points to the work of African-American art quilter Elizabeth Scott as one of its three sources confirming the existence of a "Code".  (The other two "sources" appear to be Sweet Clara and Ozella McDaniel.) Tobin writes that Scott

weav[es] her stories in textiles and encod[es] her memories on fabric in appliquéd symbols, enclosed objects, and stitching...The hand stitching on [her "Plantation Quilt"] forms a topographical map in patches...Reminiscent of Sweet Clara stitching a topographical map onto her quilt....We liken Mrs. Elizabeth Scott to a "fabric griot", one who preserves and passes on the stories of her family and her ancestors.

By calling the quilt "reminiscent of" Sweet Clara, Tobin suggests the connection between the two is a strange coincidence - rendering a certain independence and legitimacy to the book.  But Scott's quilt predates Sweet Clara by almost a decade, and despite Hidden in Plain View's obfuscation about the book's "origins," Hopkinson is clear about her inspiration. Is Tobin guilty of sloppy writing - or is she playing semantic games? 

Scott's biography also suggests that her quilts have only a tenuous relation to what her family taught her about that craft. She abandoned quilting in the 1940s:

[i]t wasn’t until the 1970’s, when her [artist] daughter Joyce headed off to grad school, that Elizabeth began quilting again in earnest. But this time it wasn’t the traditional craft she practiced. She expanded her designs, skills, and use of materials until she created a completely new direction and an extended vocabulary all her own. 

Thus, while (as her bio states) Scott's remarkable works "incorporate memories of her childhood and draw upon her religious and spiritual beliefs," her stitching patterns and designs would seem to be less a quilting tradition passed down from her forebears than a radical move in a new direction.  In fact, her use of mixed media caused Scott to "[join] the ranks of a very select group of pioneers who changed the face of quilting in this nation and in history."  This is not to say that Scott's quilts do not express her feelings about her heritage.  By virtue of the objects Scott incorporates in them - "stones, shells, pine cones, beads, buttons, men's ties and other scraps and objects that held special meaning to her family and friends" they are indeed historical records -  for and about the artist, just as any "memory box" or scrapbook would be.  That does not make them a reliable source of information about quilts made by slaves before the Civil War, or even about quilts Scott's own grandmothers may have made.   To find evidence of a "Code" in Scott's Plantation Quilt, Tobin has to set aside the artist's own detailed description of the quilt as personal expression, in favor of the secondhand interpretation of two other individuals whose language overflows with arty hyperbole and metaphor.

The catalog accompanying the exhibit which featured one of Scott's art quilts contains a lengthy quote by the artist - an explicit, detailed description of the meaning of and the motivation behind her 1980 mixed-media "Plantation Quilt". It is based, says Scott, on recollections of a childhood quilt lost half a century earlier, the hard life of her foremothers, and the stars seen from the family porch.  Once again Tobin engages in semantic tricks.  She repeatedly claims Scott's work "replicates...from memory" the one made by her ancestors.  To "replicate" is to  make an exact copy; the implication is that Scott's quilt faithfully reproduces some sort of "coding" learned from her ancestors. But Scott's own description of the quilt shows otherwise:  

This quilt calls up for me memories of the slave and farm women on the plantation who worked so hard. At six o'clock in the morning they'd be out in the fields. After they worked so hard all day, they'd work hard at night too. That's when they'd sew and make the quilts. By night they sat out on that porch and talked and pieced and sang. I recall that often the moon and stars would be so bright it would be like daylight out there.

The stars on the quilt look the way you'd see them on some of those clear nights. In the center of the quilt there's a special star. I call it a shootin' star. My parents used to call it a devil star. Every ten years this star would come through, but you couldn't see it with your naked eye. You had to look through wax cloth to see it.

These stars back home were very precious to me. They gave us so much light. They even seemed to give off heat and warm us.

Scott never mentions quilts in any way as escape maps; for her this quilt concerns sitting out on the porch at night, enjoying the stars while her overworked relatives quilted.  

Tobin reinforces the idea of "coding" by claiming Scott told her the stitching "represented the rows of crops on the plantation."  But in the catalog, those words belong to curator Eva Ungar Grudin (also apparently not a quilter): 

Around the stars the quilting stitches become very congested. These tightly packed rows simulate the contours of the farm fields.

Grudin has not said the lines  literally represent the rows in the same way a red line on a map indicates an interstate highway. She has drawn the sort of poetic analogy common to art critics (and similar to the way  "amber waves of grain" suggests the prairie resembles the sea).  Moreover, Scott's lines of stitching either echo the shape of the stars or weave, curl, and cross; if this is a "topographical map" of a South Carolina field, it belonged to an unusual farmer indeed.   If Scott's quilts "represent" anything, do they do so the way a map does? (If so, why would slaves have to make a map of fields with which they were intimately familiar?) Or is this Scott's artistic imagery - like "seeing" shapes in clouds?

When Scott recalls that different families would quilt in different ways, Tobin dramatically pronounces these are "distinctive stitching styles" "passed on" to the next generation.  But Tobin is neither a quilter nor familiar with quilt history, and she imbues the merely practical with deep meaning. (She also is unaware that this style of quilting seems to have originated no earlier than the 1890s.)  A little knowledge of quilt history might have curbed Tobin's frenzied literalism.  In the first half of the 20th century, quilting on everyday quilts was almost always done in parallel rows, either along the quilt, or in concentric arcs or a large L whose size was determined by the length of the quilter's forearm. This "fan" or "elbow" quilting is the fastest way for a group to finish a quilt. Each quilter works on an easy-to-reach area, the pattern does not need to be marked, and the desired overall consistency of workmanship can be achieved if all the quilters use the same style and technique. And because the rows of stitching are parallel, they look like "rows of crops" whether the quilter intends it or not.  

The only mention anywhere (including the NPR segment) of quilts-as-escape-maps comes from Scott's daughter Joyce - a flamboyant, university-trained "fiber artist, jeweler, sculptor, printmaker and performance and installation artist" who creates "controversial" art "based on statements about racism, sexuality, violence and stereotypes".  Says Joyce Scott in the catalog:

My mother was told...that slaves would work out a quilt piece by piece, field by field, until they had an actual map, an escape route. And they used that map to find out how to get off the plantation.

Why doesn't Scott ever say this herself, either in the catalog or Hidden in Plain View, or anyplace else? 

Tobin attempts to legitimize Joyce's statement by finding evidence of a "map" in Scott's childhood recollection:  sitting underneath the quilting frame 70 years earlier, she says she heard her relatives argue about where various landmarks were while pointing to different places on the quilt.   Presumably Tobin has never sat around the dinner table watching male family members arrange silverware, salt and pepper in formation to settle an argument about a football play.

In 2000 a fourth-grade teacher questioned Tobin's lengthy discussion of Elizabeth Scott in Hidden in Plain View.  Tobin reiterates her original assertion that the quilt was a "replica" and says she personally interviewed both Scotts in 1994. She states that Elizabeth Scott herself was "adamant that her relatives stitched so as to indicate the contours of the various fields." (Considering Hidden in Plain View's habitual and sometimes flagrant misinterpretation of its sources, the reader might be forgiven for questioning the accuracy of Tobin's recollection.)  Tobin added that an (unnamed) "museum planetarium astronomer" had since asserted the stars on the quilt "represented certain constellations" (which she declines to identify).   

Tobin has carefully chosen her words.   It is easy to miss that neither in the book nor in her reply does Tobin ever claim Elizabeth Scott herself has ever said anything about being taught slaves made map quilts to be used in escape.  

But presume that the quilts-as-escape-maps claim does originate with Scott rather than her daughter.  It seems remarkable that in (at that time of the interview) a quarter century of revealing her family's lives in art quilts, neither woman ever thought this fascinating subject was worth addressing in their work. This exhibit - which came on the heels of both Hearts and Hands and Stitched from the Soul - appears to be Joyce's only mention of it.  

Rewriting the history of the Coates Quilt

Would such a signal be visible? Would a silk quilt reasonably be displayed outside?  How do Tobin and Dobard know which way is "north"? And why would Deborah Coates merely "nod," when her husband was an outspoken abolitionist himself?  Historian Christopher Densmore notes that the Coateses lived 

...in the middle of a hotbed of documented Underground Railroad and anti-slavery activity. Even if we had clear evidence that the Coates quilt was intended to symbolize the U[G]RR and that the triangle was some sort of code, the idea that Lindley Coates was directing freedom seekers by quilt when he more easily could have shown or drawn them a map is highly unlikely.

In fact, none of the sources Tobin and Dobard cite even mentions this "group of triangles".  

What do Hidden in Plain View's sources actually say?

According to Hearts and Hands (p.71), the "oral history" concerns the quilt being cut in half after the maker's death. With that information, the present owner of the two halves could know they were parts of the same quilt.  When she removed the binding to rejoin the halves, the quilter's "message" was revealed:

In other words, the quilt's abolitionist "secret" was not a code hidden in oddly-positioned blocks along an outside edge. It was literally spelled out in words and pictures, right in the middle of the quilt. (Densmore notes that similar motifs were publicly displayed by abolitionists not only on quilts, but on medallions, as seals, in books and leaflets, and even on dinnerware sold at abolition fundraising "fairs".) It became a "secret" only by accident after the maker's death. 

The significant discrepancy between the two stories is best illustrated by the quilt itself. Click on the image to emlarge it.

Are Tobin and Dobard merely correcting an error in Hearts and Hands?  If so, why does Hidden in Plain View repeat that book's erroneous assertion that  the Coates house was "Station No.5" on the Underground Railroad? (The number is a post-WWII invention by historian Charles D. Spotts, who used it solely for purposes of enumeration.)  

Certainly Hearts and Hands is unreliable.  But here it has supporting evidence:  a closeup of the reassembled, formerly "fractured" image which would have indeed "la[in] within the seams" of a new binding.  That information is repeated by Patricia Herr in her discussion of Quaker quilts in Pieced by Mother (1987).  Dobard cites both Herr and Hearts and Hands when referring to the Coates quilt in his 1994 International Review of American Art article "Quilts as Communal Emblems and Personal Icons".  Even though some paragraphs later he speculates (without evidence) that oddly-positioned pieces in a quilt may be intentional, he never mentions the Coates is quilt as an example.  

Hearts and Hands, Herr, and Dobard's article are the only sources about the Coates quilt in Hidden in Plain View's bibliography.   What about the Lancaster Quilt Museum, which houses the quilt?

Wendell Zerker, the Museum's curator, confirmed the Hearts and Hands version, but pointed out that its reference to a "family story" regarding the Coates is something of an overstatement.  Apparently what existed was more like fragments of information: that the quilt had been cut in half, and possibly a vague notion about Coates's Underground Railroad activities.  Zerker says that the Museum has a "thick file" on the quilt, but that nothing known about the quilt lends credence to the claim it contains any kind of code.   And Densmore observes that considering what is known about how Coates and his colleagues operated, a "coded" quilt would not have been necessary. If anything, the Coates quilt is evidence that Underground Railroad participants did not use quilts as signals.   

Why does Hidden in Plain View recite a story about the quilt that supports its claims of a "Code" - but which differs materially from what every one of its own sources actually says, and from the museum's own research? When asked why her book included a picture of the 20th century Dresden Plate pattern, Tobin said it was an error made by "graphics editors" - even though it was Dobard who supplied the photograph.  Are "editors" at fault here as well?  What other such editorial "errors" does Hidden in Plain View contain?   

The Ransaw thesis

On October 18, 2005, University of Nevada/Las Vegas professor Donovan Conley posted to the H-Amstdy email list concerning his Masters candidate advisee, Theodore Ransaw. A Communications instructor at UNLV whose students gave him less than enthusiastic ratings (screenshot here), Ransaw is the author of The Sexual Secrets of Cleopatra, which asserts among other things that Viking culture came from Egypt, the Pope wears a pharaoh’s hat, and that yoga and tai chi spread to China from Africa. Conley explained that Ransaw’s Master’s thesis concerned "the communicational and political uses of quilts throughout the underground railroad," but since Ransaw had been unable to find any primary sources on the "Quilt Code," Conley wondered if anyone might help.  Conley’s query was cross-posted to H-Slavery, a scholarly email list focusing on the study of slavery, abolition, and the Underground Railroad whose regular participants include the nation’s leading historians. 

After an H-Amstdy listmember mentioned having "a sketchy memory" of visiting Kemp’s "Quilt Code" museum, Conley received more than two dozen H-Slavery responses  pointing out flaws in the "Code" story and suggesting Conley discourage Ransaw from treating it as fact. The comments of David Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder-Lerman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, sum up the H-Slavery consensus:

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. ....Feeding this mythology in any way only supports lore and not any real learning, except about how such myths take hold and persist.

(Transcript of H-Slavery posts here.) Several individuals recommended my website, and on October 30 Ransaw contacted me. We exchanged about a dozen emails discussing the reliability of Kemp’s claims, which he agreed "seemed speculative," and problems with the "Code" family’s genealogy.

According to Ransaw (thesis, p.3), Conley's query was the result of an early thesis committee meeting which caused Ransaw to revise the "purpose" of his project. Remarkably, less than six weeks after the H-Slavery exchange, Ransaw’s thesis was not only complete but had been accepted by the committee. In it Ransaw unquestioningly embraces the existence of a "Quilt Code", and while admitting he has never seen the "authenticated first hand account" Kemp claims to have, he simply takes her word it exists.