BOOK NOTES by Joan Ruddiman
Last week we looked at the story behind the book "Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad" and its authors Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Ph.D.
The New York Times called the book "mesmerizing." In a word, it is.
In the last throes of the 20th century, a black woman revealed for the first time the secrets she carried all her life, passed from mother to daughter over generations. The secrets within Ozella McDaniel Williams’ quilt code have raised awareness of a missing link in the history of our nation and have increased an appreciation of black culture and the long hidden history of defiance against oppression.
"Hidden in Plain View" explores the meaning of the 10 symbols in the code Mrs. Williams a modern-day griot or keeper of the stories shared with Tobin. Chapter by chapter, Tobin, with Dobard, expands the understanding of the code as early American history and African cultures are examined.
"The African American quilt is a cultural hybrid that enjoys encoding meaning through geometric patterns, abstract improvised designs, strip piecing, bold, singing colors, and distinctive stitches," writes Dobard, an art historian and noted quilter. "It is a fabric griot."
What makes no sense at first reading becomes amazingly clear as the authors decode the 10 quilting symbols in the code. What follows is what the author’s term "Ozella’s Underground Railroad Quilt Code." Embedded codes are in italics and the quilt patterns are in bold type:
These are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada.
The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear’s paw trail to the crossroads. Once they got to the crossroads they dug a log cabin on the ground. Shoofly told them to dress up in cotton and satin bow ties and go to the cathedral church, get married and exchange double wedding rings. Flying geese stay on the drunkard’s path and follow the stars.
Quilters will readily recognize the common quilt patterns wagon wheel, bear’s paw, log cabin, bow ties and stars. Dobard, himself an avid and accomplished quilter and expert on African icons and art, had no idea that these familiar geometric shapes were anything more than just quilt patterns.
The book must be read to fully appreciate the patterns, which can not be reproduced here. Color photos of Ozella’s quilts, as well as Dobard’s, illustrate the use of patterns in contemporary quilts. Unfortunately, only pieces of a few actual slave quilts still exist. Those working quilts, made from scraps and often with batting that included everything from old clothes to other coarse materials, were used hard and washed in caustic lye. It is miraculous that the few examples survived.
Dobard and Tobin theorize the quilt patterns served as mnemonic devices to help slaves memorize directives before leaving the plantation: "The names of quilt patterns function as metaphors in the code; in other words, the patterns represent certain meanings."
To whet your curiosity, here are a few interpretations. The bear’s paw is a familiar quilt pattern, called "duck’s feet" in Rhode Island. Literally, the slaves were to follow the bear’s tracks through the wilderness for two reasons. One, the path was cleared in what was often very dense, often impenetrable undergrowth. Two, bears tracked in an erratic path, not a straight line. Later in the code, the directive is to follow the "drunkard’s path," again indicating the importance to weave to confuse the trackers that too often followed runaways with dogs, guns and vicious intent.
"Crossroads" most certainly, think Tobin and Dobard, is Cleveland, Ohio, where slaves made the journey to Canada in ships crossing Lake Erie.
"Shoofly told them to dress up in cotton and satin bow ties…" is more perplexing. The authors speculate "shoofly" was an agent at an endpoint on the Underground Railroad (Cleveland). After the Fugitive Slave Acts were passed, the end of the journey was even more dangerous than the initial flight from the plantation. We know the stories of Harriet Tubman who got her people to New York City on a train for Canada. The slave catchers watched these trains carefully. The men literally had to "put on bow ties" and the women sun bonnets to dress like free blacks. Moreover, they had to "dress up" their images stand tall, return eye contact so they would appear to be free, not oppressed, people as they boarded the train or ship to freedom in Canada.
The interpretations Tobin and Dobard work out for Ozella’s code are plausible and elaborate other history of the Underground Railroad. However, they realize the quilt patterns are only one part of a more extensive code. The stitches, the knots in the ties also impart meaning.
The 2000 edition of the Anchor Books/Random House publication has a new afterword that speculates on a secondary code Ozella shared with them before her death in 1998.
Ladies tied their heads up in sunbonnets and bandanas and went out gardening in nine different patches by the moonlight. Men put on coveralls and went fishing on sailboats and came back and ate fish on the Dresden plates.
Anyone died on the way they would weave baskets and leave at the cemetery. And they would take muscadine vines and they would pick wild flowers and make wreaths and also leave at the cemetery.
Was the first code one way to Canada and this secondary code an alternate route? Though the authors offer speculation on what it means, they conclude "This last portion of Ozella’s Code is enigmatic at best."
What Tobin and Dobard humbly present throughout this outstanding work is an attempt to honor Ozella’s narrative as they suggest an interpretation based on a cross-check of other slave narratives and primary source information. Much more must be revealed by the African American society before the full story is known of how Africans enslaved in America not only survived but forged their own identity.
The following is a note to those who know Deborah Hopkinson’s children’s picture book "Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt," illustrated by James Ransom. Tobin and Dobard contacted Hopkinson and Ransom with the hope they had knowledge of the quilt code history. Tobin writes, "Personal conversations and correspondence with Hopkinson and the book’s illustrator, James Ransom, revealed that neither has any idea of where the story originated, though Ms. Hopkinson remembers hearing a true story about the Underground Railroad on the radio, on which she based the story. Ransom, himself a descendant of slaves, modeled his illustrations on his ancestral home, the Verona Plantation on the Virginia/North Carolina border, a plantation that was owned by Captain James Ransom."
Tobin notes that within the context of "Sweet Clara," the children’s book, "we find all the elements that are referenced in the Underground Railroad Quilt Code," which also comes from the Carolina area.
The intrigue continues.
Joan Ruddiman is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.