Family history

The stories of those now teaching the "Code" based on family oral history share one surprising feature.  Logically, they should claim the "Code" was passed down from an ancestor who escaped north - someone who might plausibly have personal experience using the "Code". But none of the "Quilt Code" families ever left the South.

• Ozella was a South Carolina native. 

• Wilson, Ozella's niece, says she was born in the same South Carolina town where her grandfather was sired by a white plantation owner.  

• Boswell was born 40 miles south of the Kentucky plantation where she says her family was enslaved from the time they were brought from Africa until Emancipation.  

• Elizabeth Scott, whose 1980 quilt was Deborah Hopkinson's inspiration for Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, was born on the same South Carolina plantation her grandparents had worked as slaves. 

In other words, none of those who might claim the remotest connection to a "Quilt Code" ever personally used it to escape.  

Hopkinson makes clear that she uses artistic license to create the connection between Scott's quilts and a "Code". But Boswell says her ancestors suffered cruelly under slavery for generations.  The plantation where they lived was just 75 miles from the free state of Ohio and the town of Ripley, one of the most famous hubs on the Underground Railroad.  Just south of the plantation was one of the Union's largest recruiting stations for the US Colored Troops, and a huge refugee camp for fugitives; it even included a freedmen's school with more than 100 pupils. Eli, her great-great-grandfather, knew the way to Ripley:  he had transported a fugitive to the border, and had regular access to a wagon and mules.  Boswell explains that the couple never tried to escape, with or without a quilt code, because they were afraid that if they were caught, the family would be broken up. But despite their good behavior, just six months before the end of the Civil War Eli and his wife Leah learned that was exactly what was going to happen.  Even so, they meekly packed their belongings into their new owner's wagon, and left with him for Tennessee, leaving their devastated young daughter Delcy behind.  Equally strange is that at the time Boswell says this took place, Tennessee had been under Union occupation for two years; although the Emancipation Proclamation did not cover Tennessee, Union officers were forcibly emancipating slaves, and according to many historians the slave system had completely fallen apart.  What slaveowner in his right mind would invest in more slaves at that point - just a few months before the end of the Civil War?

Wilson attempts to explain her ancestors remaining in South Carolina by claiming they were freedmen who chose to stay there with their children to teach the "Code" to slaves.  In fact, the family history Wilson details is mathematically impossible. Hidden in Plain View is circumspect about the origin of the "Code"; it says simply that Ozella  learned it from her mother, who learned it from her own (unnamed) mother.  But Wilson gives specific names and details about her family tree and even names the ancestor she says used and taught the "Code" to slaves planning to escape.  

The line of descent Ms. Wilson recounts looks like this:

In her magazine article, Wilson says that her mother "lived in Edgefield, South Carolina, with my father Milton Strother and their three children - Benjamin, Viola, and me".  She has also reportedly claimed in at least one lecture that she was born in Williamson, West Virginia (a press release calls her a "West Virginia native") and that her father or grandfather was named David, the white son of an Edgefield plantation owner whose property was adjacent to that of the Strom Thurmond family. (A review of another lecture describes Ms. Wilson showing photographs of what she says is the family plantation.)  

In July 2004, Kemp wrote to complain that her mother's statements at the West Virginia lecture were "misquoted" and asserted that Wilson said neither that her father's name is David nor that she was born in West Virginia.  Kemp did not dispute any of the other statements her mother was described as having made at that lecture, nor did she discuss the "Quilt Code" except to say that "There are people who do not believe in Jesus, or that people have been to the moon. I do not publicly debate their views".  

Just two days later, Kemp wrote me that her mother, now 70, "was born in WV".   Eventually I learned from Kemp that although Wilson, now 70, was born in South Carolina and has spent the past 36 years in Ohio, she is to be considered a "West Virginia native" because she lived there at one time.    

While Wilson's birthplace is immaterial, it is notable that she seems permanently to have left South Carolina sometime after her  father's death in 1943. That would suggest that if she learned the "code" from her grandmother Nora, whatever she recalls is from childhood memories at least half a century old. 

Wilson writes in her 2002 magazine article that she, her sister, and her aunt Ozella learned the "Code" from her maternal grandmother Nora Farrow McDaniel (although the 2004-2005 versions of the family website describe Nora as Wilson's great-grandmother). Nora learned it directly from her mother, Eliza Farrow, the slave who Wilson says brought the "Code" from Africa.  Wilson provides considerable detail about Eliza, who according to Wilson and Kemp's now-defunct Geocities website was brought over from Benin, Africa "as a young girl" in the "early 1800s" with "knowledge of textiles, cotton,  herbs and basket weaving". (The 2004-2005 version of the family's www.plantationquilts.com website described Eliza as both "a child" and "a teen" .) From the old Geocities site (screenshot here):

She was brought across the Atlantic Ocean on a slave ship. The ship stopped in South America to provide goods and slaves for the banana plantations and in the Caribbean to provide goods and slaves for the sugar cane plantations. The ship also needed to get provisions to continue to America.  Finally, with other captives she was quarantined for two weeks at Sullivan Island off the Coast of South Carolina. Next, they were auctioned in Charleston, SC  to the highest bidder at a slave market, along with other goods the ships brought.

Wilson says that Peter Farrow, a free black man who was an itinerant blacksmith and preacher, saved for seven years to buy Eliza's freedom, and the couple married. But, Wilson says, "[r]ather than fleeing to the North, they chose to stay behind and continue to work, raise their family, and help more slaves."  (Yet one review describes a slide show in which Wilson traveled from South Carolina to Canada to "retrace her ancestors' escape route".)   So Eliza, a "seamstress, midwife, and medicine maker," traveled with her husband from plantation to plantation, where she would show slaves a sampler quilt and teach them the "English translation of Quilt Code patterns" which, says Wilson, had been developed by mathematicians in Africa. While he preached to the slaves, Peter would teach them the "code" in an African language which, according to Wilson, the slaveowners would presume was religious "speaking in tongues" - as she said in a January 3, 2002 article in the Columbia, S.C. State newspaper:

Slaves always wanted to be free, my grandmama told me...So they'd get together whenever they could in the woods and share information. Sometimes the preacher would tell them if the Holy Ghost hits them, they could speak in unknown tongues. That allowed the slaves to communicate in their African tongues....

This is a moving story with obviously Biblical overtones (Jacob, the future leader of Israel, has to labor for 7 years before he can marry Rachel and be free of her father (Gen.29:14-20)). It suggests a very short line of transmission that leaves little room for the error. But on close examination it contains many incongruities with recorded history, including antebellum South Carolina law, and simple genealogy. 

Peter Farrow is described as a free black man, a blacksmith and preacher who traveled from plantation to plantation, in a November 2005 email, Kemp also said he was brought from Africa. South Carolina kept careful records of freedmen between the ages of 16 and 60, requiring them to pay a special tax each year; failure to pay, or failure to provide documentary proof of manumission before 1820, would result in enslavement - and in Eliza's case, enslavement of her children as well, since children inherited their mother's status.  Absence from the list of freedmen allowed an individual's status to be challenged; in fact, the census was considered prima facie evidence of a black person's free or slave status. After the Denmark Vesey uprising in 1822, freedmen who left South Carolina were barred from returning; those who did would be enslaved.  Vesey had not only been a freedman but a minister, so black preachers were monitored with particular care.  Several times the state legislature even debated re-enslaving all freedmen.  The law also required every free black male to have a white guardian who had to appear before the court clerk and, in writing, attest to the freedman's character and accept the guardianship.  Similar laws were enacted in Georgia.

I have been unable to find either Peter or Eliza Farrow among the free blacks in any antebellum South Carolina or Georgia records. 

While it is commonly believed that worshipping, praying, and speaking in tongues was the usual practice in the slave quarters, WPA slave narratives (see also here) and more than 200 slave autobiographies tell quite a different story. On many plantations slaves were forbidden to practice any faith - most particularly Christianity, with its egalitarian notions, stories of deliverance, and promise of at least spiritual freedom. 

Former slaves recount stories of being barred from even saying "God" or "Lord" when they were whipped - all they could say was "Pray, Master!" (reinforcing the idea of their owner and no one else as God). Slaves who crept away at night to pray in makeshift chapels called "brush arbors" did so in fear of their lives. More than one former slave described his mother fearfully praying in the cabin at night, whispering into a cooking pot to muffle the sound. Burials were often hasty, sudden, in a shallow grave, with no prayer, marker or mourners permitted; a funeral might suggest the dead slave was something other than property. In this atmosphere, the slave that dared to sing a spiritual was truly brave - not because of any message of escape on the Underground Railroad, but simply by voicing the Bible message it contained. 

On plantations where religion was permitted, slaves could not join a church, or even be baptized, without their owners' permission, and worship was usually strictly supervised. Nondenominational preachers of either race were rare; a black itinerant preacher would have been looked at with suspicion. And while being filled with the Holy Spirit, jumping and shouting were not unusual in certain denominations in the border states in the very early part of the 19th century (including among whites, although most churches soon abandoned the practice), the modern practice of "speaking in tongues" (glossolalia) dates from the Pentecostal movement, which is commonly understood to have begun in 1906 in (of all places) Los Angeles. Such an unusual outburst would have drawn much attention in the antebellum South.  Wilson does not explain how Peter, who by her account (like the slaves he would have come in contact with), was at least second- or third-generation American, could communicate in a single "African language" to the descendants of the many tribes of West Africa. (For example, more than 50 languages are spoken today in Benin alone; most also have dialects.) By 1860, 99% of the 4.4 million African-Americans in the United States had been born here, not in Africa.  But if according to Wilson's article "[e]nslaved Africans were prohibited from...speaking in their native languages," using an "African language" in the manner she describes would seem to be only slightly more prudent than using Yiddish to pass messages at a Nazi rally.   

In fact, in South Carolina where Peter Farrow is supposed to have preached, both free and enslaved blacks were legally barred in 1800 from congregating (including for worship) from sundown to sunup - their only free time.  Punishment was 25 lashes. The situation was so bad that in 1833 South Carolina and Georgia Presbyterians officially stated

The negroes are destitute of the gospel, and ever WILL BE under the present state of things. In the vast field extending from an entire State beyond the Potomac [i. e., Maryland] to the Sabine River, [at that time our South-western boundary,] and from the Atlantic to the Ohio, there are, to the best of our knowledge, not twelve men exclusively devoted to the religious instruction of the negroes. In the present state of feeling in the South, a ministry of their own color could neither be obtained NOR TOLERATED. But do not the negroes have access to the gospel through the stated ministry of the whites? We answer, No.  We know of but five churches in the slaveholding States, built expressly for their use. These are all in the State of Georgia. We may now inquire whether they enjoy the privileges of the gospel in their own houses, and on our plantations? Again we return a negative answer....If the master is pious, the house servants alone attend family worship, and frequently few or none of them.

Methodists responded by appointing one (white) missionary to all the blacks in South Carolina.  He was quickly forced to desist because even

[v]erbal instruction...will increase the desire of the black population to learn.... We consider the common adage that ‘Knowledge is power,’ and as the colored man is enlightened, his condition will be rendered more unhappy and intolerable. Intelligence and slavery have no affinity with each other..

If even a white, ordained minister was barred from preaching to not only slaves, but free blacks, how likely is it that slaveowners would permit an unordained, free black temporarily employed on their plantations to hold spontaneous services for their slaves?

Wilson claims alternately that Eliza was from Benin and a member of the Igbo tribe.  Setting aside the fact that Igbo land is far southeast of both the country of Benin and Benin City in Nigeria, most Igbo were brought to the US  before 1800, and  after 1790, most were male. After 1800 South Carolina banned slave importation (the ban was imposed nationwide in 1808). Between 1804-1807 the state lifted the ban, but between 1803-1808, only six documented slave ships from the Bight of Biafra (which would carry Igbo slaves) arrived in any US port, and among those Igbo only nine are described as "children".

While slaves were smuggled in after the importation ban, it was rare, and almost nonexistent along the Atlantic coast.  South Carolina also limited to 10 the number of slaves an owner could bring from another state.  Slaveowners did not appreciate a market flooded with "imports" bringing down the value of their property, and quite naturally feared adding to an already considerable black population (58% of the total by 1860). If the "young girl" Eliza were one of these few smuggled slaves, in order to participate for a significant time in the Underground Railroad (which ran from about 1835-1861), she could not have been born any later than 1825; but few historians would characterize a c.1830 arrival as "the early 1800s". Moreover, if she were born that late and we believe Peter saved for seven years to "buy her freedom," we face the disconcerting idea that he must have chosen her for a wife when she was less than 10 years old.

In 1820 the South Carolina Legislature barred the manumission (freeing) of slaves except by direct petition to, and proclamation by, the Legislature. Over the next 40 years, less than two dozen such petitions were granted. Unless Eliza and Peter are listed among these few, while nominally free, by law Eliza and all her descendants would have remained slaves.  If Peter died or went into debt, his family could be seized and sold.  So for Peter to have purchased and freed Eliza, this manumission would have had to occurred before 1820, and she would be listed among the free blacks in the census.  And if Eliza was brought to South Carolina legally, when she was old enough to know not only about "textiles" but a complex code developed by African mathematicians, she could not have been born any later than 1792.  In either case her childbearing years would have been well over by 1845.    

Whether Eliza was a freedwoman or remained a slave, a problem remains: When was Eliza's daughter Nora Bell born?  Nora Bell is, after all, supposed to have taught the "Code" to both her daughter Ozella (born 1922) and her granddaughter Wilson (whose mother Mary was born in 1907). Wilson's article includes what appears to be a 1930s photo of Nora as a relatively young woman (adding more doubt Nora is Wilson's great-grandmother), and a picture of a quilt made by Nora Bell "in the early 1950s".  

In 2002 Kemp ignored my questions on the subject (rather than blaming the editors, as Tobin has about inconsistencies in Hidden in Plain View). But in July 2004 Kemp wrote me that it was not her mother's great-grandmother, but her "maternal grandmother's great-grandmother" who used the "Quilt Code."  That certainly seems more reasonable. But it also contradicts Wilson's Traditional Quiltworks article, every report of her lectures, her own brochure, , and the family website; and it means that she inexplicably omitted an entire generation (probably Eliza's daughter) from her  story of how the "quilt code" was passed down in her family. 

Repeated attempts to obtain clarification from Kemp were unsuccessful.

Tracking down Peter and Eliza Farrow

Does all this mean that Peter and Eliza Farrow are figments of Wilson's imagination?  Not at all. In fact, records show that a married couple by that name really did exist - and in exactly the same South Carolina communities along the Georgia border where both Ozella and Serena Wilson say they grew up.

A handful of free blacks appear in those counties' antebellum censuses (including three in Edgefield who are themselves slaveowners) but none are named Farrow.  The only Peter Farrow (or any variation of that name) in Georgia or South Carolina records first appears in the 1880 Lincoln, Georgia census.  Peter is described as a single black "farm laborer," age 21, boarding with Lucius Jennings; he says he and his parents were born in Georgia. So does the woman who appears to be his mother, Aggie Cartledge (all the other Farrows in Lincoln live with her and are described as her children, and in the 1900 census she lives with grandson Fred Farrow). 

It is unlikely the census taker merely assumed Peter and Aggie's birthplace, since their neighbors are described as having been born in Maryland, South Carolina and Africa.  The next county over, Columbia, is where Peter and Liza "Pharrow" are renting a farm in 1900, along with their children Thom, James, "Jency," and Nora. 

Who might Eliza have been?  We can surmise that since Peter is single in 1880 and Thom was born in 1883, Peter and Eliza probably married between those years.  Only three single, black "Elizas" or "Lizas" are in Peter's vicinity in 1880:  Liza Williams (age 25, born about 1855); Liza Gullat (age 16, born about 1864), of Columbia, and  [E]liza Gola (age 22, born about 1858), from Washington County.  All were born in Georgia to Georgia natives.  The first two live with or near members of the Cullars family; in 1900 Aggie lives with her grandson, Robert Cullars. 

Peter and Eliza are still in Columbia in 1910; Peter reports he is 55, Eliza says she is 50.  They share their home with three adult children:  Thomas, James, and Jessie (or Jennie) and her husband and son.   Kemp also seems to have traced Peter and Eliza Farrow to post-bellum Georgia.  Yet in a July 2004 email to me she insisted the couple in these census records is "not my family".   

By 1920, Peter and "Lizza" Farrow, their son Tom and his wife, and their daughter Nora and her husband (William McDaniel, probably born 1869 in Edgefield, South Carolina) have all rented farms in Edgefield, 35 miles northeast of Columbia.  Among the McDaniels' five children are Eva and "Sfan" (Stan?); all but the youngest were born in Georgia.  Also in the 1920 Edgefield census are Milton Strother and family.  (Eva, a/k/a Eva Mary, became Milton's second wife; Serena Strother Wilson is their daughter.) 

The two Farrow families are still in Edgefield in 1930, and Peter and Eliza's age is stated as 72.  The McDaniels have moved to adjacent McCormick County, possibly to join some of his relatives two doors down the road.  Among the children are Eva, "Sfan," and Ozella.  (Ozella is misidentified as a "son", but her age corresponds exactly to the birth date given in her Social Security death records, and Tobin reports Ozella says she lived in McCormick County.)    Vital records show Peter died in 1946; his age was estimated to be 89. 

Thus the only Peter and Eliza Farrow in Georgia and South Carolina records are just the right age to be Wilson's great-grandparents, precisely as she has stated. (Kemp even stated in a November 2005 email that her "great grandmother" [sic]  was born in 1859.)  In fact, it would be remarkable indeed if this couple - whose daughter Nora married to a McDaniel and had children named Eva and Ozella, the latter born in 1922, and lived in the county where Wilson says she grew up - were somehow not the Peter and Eliza Farrow whom Wilson claims as hers.  Based on census and other vital records, the "Quilt Code" family tree Wilson originally described should look like this:

But this presents another problem for the "Code" and its proponents:  Multiple, independent, primary- source documents spanning five decades indicate that contrary to Wilson and Kemp's claims, Eliza Farrow was not born in Africa in the "early 1800s", but in Georgia, to Georgia natives, in about 1859.  Eliza Farrow could not possibly have passed down a "quilt code" she personally used or witnessed being used  - for the simple reason that during the entire time the Underground Railroad was in operation, she was either a toddler or not even born yet.  When the Civil War started, Peter and Eliza Farrow would have been only two years old.

Thus even if a "Code" manuscript surfaces which can be shown to have been written by Eliza, at best it would be a secondhand account of somebody else's claims of what is supposed to have occurred in the decades before Eliza was even born.

I emailed this information to Kemp in November 2005. She never addressed the issue.

Claims, but no evidence

When we consider the conflicts both Hidden in Plain View, Wilson's article, and the claims of every other "Quilt Code" proponent have not only with firsthand data regarding slavery, the Underground Railroad, and quilting, but even with each other, and the lack of evidence of such a code from any other reliable source, we must wonder how accurate these stories can possibly be. This is particularly the case when those who make a point of promoting them as historical fact either cannot or will not provide reliable supporting evidence.  

In November 2005 Kemp claimed to have "seen two textiles that were used in conjunction with the McDaniel-Farrow quilt code" - but she has never produced any evidence these textiles exist, let alone that they were used in the way she claims. 

Kemp told me in 2002 the family has "extensive collections of artifacts and books" supporting their claims, but although she said she gives about 10 "quilt code" lectures a year, she was unable to provide any titles, authors, or other source information.

In May 2002 she also said her family has additional "documents and other written information" which they have not made public so that "we can tell if someone says their ancestor participated with mine in the development or spreading of the codes.  In July 2004 she stated that the documents in her collection are "birth and death certificates, family bibles, military records and church records and Masonic records and much much more", including 

copies of originals received from Historical sites between SC and Canada. Others are books that were written and published in Africa. Historians gave me copies of books that would refute the Daughters of Confederacy claims that the patterns were Civil War patterns.  They were African patterns and just because American historians did not bother to check or get other information does not make it true.  

However, just as in 2002 when she was "waiting for photographs and other documents to prove the oral history," three and a half years later in November 2005 she was was still "looking for information before we felt our work is complete enough to release to the public".    (She has not provided a source for her accusation about the DoC.)

In several emails she offered to fax copies of her documents to me.  In hopes of getting some idea of their authenticity, I asked for scans instead, and offered to publish them here so that she could set the record straight.  She then replied that she would not provide this information until "after we go to print".  I have emailed her several times since, but after promising once more to send them, Kemp has ceased responding.   Could it be possible that the "documents and other written information" was in fact the story of the Quilt Code that Wilson copyrighted in early 2000?  If so, they are modern, and written by her; an individual's writings cannot be copyrighted by her descendants.

In May 2002 I asked why she has never presented such valuable data to any historians, even privately; such information, if authentic, would not only silence critics but would be an important resource for those studying the Underground Railroad. She replied that she does "not need someone to validate what was passed down in my family" and does "not owe historians anything," later stating that nobody with "good intentions" had asked for the documentation.   

Yet for the past several years in lectures at schools, in television appearances and in magazine articles, and now at the family "museum", she and her family present the "Quilt Code" story as historical fact. 

Since April 2004 this article has received over 50,000 unique visits (and nearly three quarters of a million "hits").  No one has ever contacted me with evidence of a "Code".  I have also contacted many "Code" proponents myself to ask where their "firsthand evidence" can be located.  The only source ever cited is Hidden in Plain View.