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.

Painting Class, the Art Show and Coming Back from Heaven

Painting class is going to be more challenging that I thought but not in the way you might be imagining. On one hand just hearing the instructor talk about what the different brushes are used for got me excited about painting again but on the other hand, when she started telling us precisely how she wanted us to fold pieces of paper towel to wipe our brushes on I started getting the idea she’s going to teach in micro-controlling steps. “When I tell you to clean your brushes,” before changing colors, “this is how I want you to do it,” she said while blotting a brush with the folded paper towel in her hand. Okay, brushes are expensive so I get her point here. I must not beat the crap out of my brushes anymore while trying to clean them. No hard surface should ever touch the bristles in my brushes.

She’s been teaching classes since the ‘70s and when I asked where she taught---because I thought maybe I’d taken one of her classes---it came out that I "painted some back then" and that I've been away from art for a long time. She asked what style I painted in and I replied that I want to develop a new style from what I used years ago similar to the Impressionists, using short dabbing strokes and with less detail than in my past. “You won’t learn that in my class. I will teach you the proper way to make a paint stroke.” Maybe my memory is faulty---it's been 35 years ago since I've taken a serious art course---but I don’t recall an instructor ever saying one type of brush stroke is better or more “proper” than any other. Georges Seurat with his pointillism style would have been sent to the principal’s office for not staying within the lines, so to speak, in this class. 

Okay, I do get it. Again. She wants us all working on the same thing at the same time and we’ll start with the sky during the next class and working our way down from top to bottom. In my college classes we were taught to kind of paint all over the canvas, balancing out the values before getting down to refining the details in any one area and this class is more like advanced paint-by-number. I'm totally okay with that. I need to start some place on the long road back into getting obsessed again with painting.

She had us trace a drawing of a barn on a canvas and mine was too dark, she said. “You’ll have to erase your lines because you won’t be able to cover them with paint.” I didn’t think they were dark at all but then I'd just had eye surgery the day before so what did I know. I figured if we were using watercolors she would have had a valid point but we’re using oils. “I’ll just use thicker paint,” I said without thinking that I was being a cantankerous student who I wouldn't want to be teaching. "That won’t work," she replied. Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock are lucky they were not students of this feisty, elf--- the top of her head lines up with my boobs. They may never have learned to use an impasto technique, laying on thick paint with a palette knife. I really can’t complain, though. The series of classes is only cost $15 with all supplies included and I’m learning (or relearning) useful things about our paints, brushes and canvases. The first three hour class was just an introduction to the supplies and her doing a demonstration. I needed that review.

But I will be challenged not only by her teaching method and my rusty skills but also by my classmates several who talked extensively about going to heaven and coming back and how everything will be revealed at death and there is nothing to fear. I once had an out-of-body experience when I was being rushed to the hospital with a high fever but all I saw while looking down on myself were snakes crawling everywhere. No white light for me to follow. Ohmygod, I really am going to hell, aren’t I! I did not share my experience with the class. I know when to keep my mouth shut.

We've had an art and crafts show on campus already---not from this class. It was organized by the girl in charge of the Enrichment Programs. She is one busy girl! I wasn't sure I wanted to put either one of the only two finished paintings I still have around in the show because I had no idea where I’d stand on the scale of talent on the campus. (I didn't want to be embarrassed, if I didn't measure up.) My dog Jason's portrait is artsy-fartsy better than an old house in other piece. The portrait was done in a true painter’s fashion while the old house was done more like a Bob Ross formula painting.

So instead of a painting I entered a quilt that I knew would wow anyone who sees it. (In the photo up above it wasn't married to a backing yet and I'm too lazy to take a new photo.) I ended helping the organizer set up the show because she had some easels that she didn't know how to work, and at the last minute I went back to my apartment, grabbed the house painting and put that in the show as well because it fit an easel still left.

We have a wide range of talented people living here---an accomplished metal sculptor, two wood workers, several knitters, a weaver, a tailor who made a to-die-for artsy-fartsy jacket, two photographers, five painters and four quilters. Even had an x-florist enter floral arrangements. The instructor of my class brought in a large and lovely winter landscape---nicely done, a real crowd pleaser. Oh and in case I might have left the impression that we get along like oil and water, that isn't true. She's got a sense of humor and we "get" each other. ©