From Kittens to Quilts via Way of the Underground Railroad

Our campus was excited---maybe not the WHOLE campus, but I sure was excited about the new visitor who spent a morning with us recently. His name is Mercury and he’d been lost for four days before his picture was snapped outside the window next of our concierge's desk. He found the right window to make his plight be known. The concierge was able to hook him up with some residents who have two cats of their own who provided food for the hungry little guy. Someone else found him a blanket and box where he warmed up after he was wandering around outside in our below freezing temperatures. But he was too sweet to be a stray so eventually he got taken to a vet to see if this guy had a micro chip implanted. He did. And his ‘dad’ came to pick up soon after we called. Mercury was nine months old and had traveled over a half mile from home where the thirty-something cat daddy’s girlfriend had “accidentally” let the inside kitten outdoors. I’ve joked many times that I wish a kitten or puppy would wander onto my deck so I’d have an excuse to keep one but I never really thought it could happen. I'm going to be more careful about my wishes from now on and hope a winning lotto ticket is in the mini pile of dried-up oak leaves blowing around on my deck.

To celebrate Black History Month our Life Enrichment Director booked a black college professor to talk about the Underground Railroad, concentrating mainly on the Railroad Stations here in Michigan. I’d pretty much heard it all before because a few years back I went on a day trip tour of some of the underground stations aka houses with secret rooms that housed run-away slaves. Some of them had tunnels connecting the houses with their barns so the human cargo in false bottomed wagons could be unloaded in the barn away from prying eyes. Then they'd walk the tunnel to the house where they’d be fed, get rested up and get medical attention if needed. Still, its always good to reminded of our collective history and I was happy there was standing room only for the lecture which isn’t often the case here in my Continuum Care Facility.

When it came time for the Q and A I asked if he could talk about the Quilts. If you don’t know about quilts in connection with the underground railroad you haven’t read the 1999 book by Jaqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard titled Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. This beautifully illustrated book claimed there were codes in the quilt designs that pointed the way to safe houses along the Underground Railroad. The professor said, “I was hoping someone would bring up the quilts. That’s been debunked as a myth." “That’s too bad,” I replied, “It’s a lovely myth.”

Having mostly believed in ‘the myth’ for over twenty years I did  some research after getting back to my apartment and I found a recent interview of Marsha Mac Dowell, the director of the Quilt Index which is a massive online catalog of more than 90,000 quilts who refreshed my memory of the controversy about the quilts but the book authors to this day stick by their claims. Mac Dowell says before 1999 no one---not even in the African American quilting communities---had ever heard of coding in quilts. She says this comes up every Black History Month because in 1999 all the book reviewers at places like The New York Times, The National Geographic's, The Smithsonian and NPR accepted the content of the book as true without questioning its validity. It took on a life of its own, she says, that today has African American women making coded quilts for their daughters and granddaughters.

The information in the above paragraph was found in an article in Folklife Magazine and it ends with the author, Marie Claire Bryant, saying: “Whether or not the codes are ‘real,’ Tobin and Dobard are responsible for a twenty-year tradition of craftsmanship that has cropped out of a confidence in what they wrote, in the codes. Now the lineage of artisans using quilt codes is robust. For them, the codes are poetry, healing, and, especially, a means of expressing history.” 

I like how she kept the door open to the power and possibility that the myth has a grain of truth to it. And whose to say that at least one conductor on the Underground Railroad didn’t have a few stops that used coded quilts the way hobos riding the rails during The Depression used piles of rocks and sticks along side the tracks to point to houses where they could get a sandwich. There were many Underground Railroad branches operating secretly and independently from one another fanning out across upper northeastern part of the United States. It’s not like there would have been period handbills to be left behind as proof that quilts were used to point the way to Canada. Anyway, it’s fun to learn new things but not so much fun to have to unlearn them.

Until Next Wednesday. © 

 ** I wrote about my day trip to visit some stops on the Underground Railroad and the quilts in a post tiled Day Trip to Secrets and Accomplishments. If you're interested in the topic that post is more detailed than this one.

Day Trip to Secrets and Accomplishments

Growing up, I knew about a house four or five blocks from where I lived that was rumored to be a stop on the 1800s Underground Railroad. As an adult I got to tour the inside of that house when I started using a tax service that worked out of that old, stately place. Like many houses on the Underground Railroad it had a tunnel between the house and a barn where runaway slaves would leave false bottomed wagons, make their way into the basement of the house via the tunnel where they’d be fed and get some rest before going on the next leg of their trip to Canada. 

I don’t remember when or where I learned about how quilts were supposedly used as signals for those helping the fugitive slaves along the ‘railway’---hung on clotheslines or slung over windowsills to point the way to safe houses or warn of danger. Although the use of ‘quilt codes’ is now controversial among historians, it seems like I’ve always known about them (or their rumor) and it never fails to surprise me when I find out that this kind of thing isn’t common knowledge. Tuesday was one of those times. I went on a day trip organized through the senior hall that was billed as a tour of the Underground Railroad and I couldn’t believe that one woman actually thought we’d be seeing real railroad tracks underground! How does a person get old enough to collect Social Security and not know the basics of American history? Our tour guide, by the way, said, “There’s no evidence that quilt codes were ever used in Michigan.” Bummer! 

The day trip took us to Battle Creek, Michigan, to the home of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and important historical figure by anyone’s standards, an activist in both the Abolitionist and Woman Suffrage Movements. From the time we left the senior center and got to her house, our tour guide gave us a crash course on the Underground Railroad, the Civil War and the Quakers. This started at seven o’clock on a coffee-deprived morning so my head wasn’t quite awake enough for such heavy topics. I didn’t know what I expected on a “history trip” like this but it was intense and I was glad we weren’t expected to pass a test when we stopped for lunch. A couple of facts stuck with me, though, one being that an estimated 50,000 slaves passed through Michigan via the Underground Railway. And I already knew that thousands of x-slaves were resettled overseas in what is now Liberia. But I didn’t know that what I was taught in high school---that x-slaves after the Civil War were all given 40 acres and a mule---is not entirely true. The Acts that made that happen were reversed in the courts and the land was returned to its pre-war owners. Very few slaves were able to hold on to that land.

Lunch was at a vintage railroad-station-turned-restaurant and the conversation with my three table mates was one that author Robert Fulghum of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame would be proud of---we shared in equal proportions with no one person dominating the talk. It was great. It was entertaining. It felt like we’d known each other for years.

After lunch was the highlight of the trip for me. We went to a funky little museum where a self-proclaimed hero worshipper of Sojourner Truth crowded all fifty of us together and gave us a robust and interesting talk about Ms. Truth, who had lived just down the street for the better part of two decades. I already knew quite a lot about Sojourner including her activism on the lecture circuit, her friendship with famed suffrages, and her meeting with President Lincoln. She was reported to be such a charismatic and popular speaker traveling nation-wide that when she died over 1,000 people came to Battle Creek to attend her funeral. After leaving the museum, the woman who gave the talk hopped on our bus and we went to see Sojourner’s simple grave site, a bigger-than-life monument of her in a small park near-by and to see another spectacular monument commemorating the Underground Railway.

Looking around our world today some people think it’s “going to hell in a hand-basket” as my mother used to say. But a day trip to past secrets and accomplishments tells us that’s always been the perception for those living through times of changing values. Depending on which side of the struggle you fight or root for determines if you see societal struggles as hopeful for the future or a threat to your whole way of life. It has always been that way and it probably always will. ©

Photo at the top is of the Underground Railway monument. Pictures can't do it justice. It's huge and has a lot of details on all sides. The photo at the bottom is of the top portion of Sojourner Truth's 12 foot high bronze monument. In 1993 the town raised $750,000 to have it made.