How to Make an American Quilt (2 page)

W
hat you need:

You need a large wooden frame and enough space to accommodate it. Put comfortable chairs around it, allowing for eight women of varying ages, weight, coloring, and cultural orientation. It is preferable that this large wood frame be located in a room in a house in Atwater or Los Banos or a small town outside Bakersfield called Grasse. It should be a place that gets a thick, moist blanket of tule fog in the winter and be hot as blazes in the summer. Fix plenty of lemonade. Cookies are a nice complement.

When you choose your colors, make them sympathetic to one another. Consider the color wheel of grammar school—primary colors, phenomena of light and dark; avoid antagonism of hues—it detracts from the pleasure of the work. Think of music as you orchestrate the shades and patterns; pretend that you are a conductor in a lush symphony hall, imagine the audience saying
Ooh
and
Ahh
as they applaud your work.

Patterns with tiny, precise designs always denote twentieth-century taste.

Your needles must be finely honed so you do not break the weave of your fabric. The ones from England are preferable. And plenty of good-quality thread, both to bind the pieces and adorn the quilt. Embroidery thread is required for the latter. You will need this to hold the work together for future generations. Unless you are interested in selling your quilt at an art fair or gallery, in which case
the quilt will still need to be held together for generations of people you will never meet.

The women who circle the frame should be compatible. Their names are: Sophia, Glady Joe, Hy, Constance, Em, Corrina, Anna, and Marianna. Hyacinth and Gladiola Josephine are sisters, two years apart, and always called Hy and Glady Joe. Anna and Marianna are mother and daughter, seventeen years apart. Em, Sophia, and Corrina are all natives to Grasse, while Constance is a relative newcomer. When you have assembled the group, once a week for better than thirty-five years, give or take some latecomers, you will be ready to begin the traditional, free-form
Crazy Quilt
.

The
Crazy Quilt
was a fad of the nineteenth century and as such is not truly considered Art, yet still it has its devotees. It is comprised of remnants of material in numerous textures, colors; actually, you could not call the squares of a
Crazy Quilt
squares, since the stitched-together pieces are of all sizes and shapes. This is the pattern with the least amount of discipline and the greatest measure of emotion. Considering the eight quilters surrounding the frame in the room of the house in the small town outside Bakersfield called Grasse, considering the more than thirty-five years it will reveal, perhaps some emerging images will be lambs or yellow roses or mermaids, entwined wedding rings or hearts in states of disrepair. You will find this work to be most revealing, not only in the material contributions to the quilt, but in who enjoys sewing them and who does not. This random piecing together.

MORE INSTRUCTIONS

W
HAT YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND
when undertaking the construction of a quilt is that it is comprised of spare time as well as excess material.
Something left over from a homemade dress or a man’s shirt or curtains for the kitchen window. It utilizes that which would normally be thrown out, “waste,” and eliminates the extra, the scraps. And out of that which is left comes a new, useful object.

Take material from clothing that belongs to some family member or friend or lover (if you find yourself to be that sort of a girl). Bind them together carefully. Wonder at the disparity of your life. Finger the patches representing “lover” and meditate on the meaning of illicit love in early American society. Failing that, consider the meaning of the affair in today’s time frame.

The Roanoke Island Company, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, completely disappeared—all 117 men, women, and children—by 1590 with no one knowing exactly what took place during that five-year period, and a single word carved into a tree the only viable clue:
CROATOAN
. No historian has figured out what that means. This you will find as the genesis and recurring theme in America as founded by the English: that we are a people fraught with mysteries and clues; there are things that cannot be fathomed.

Do not forget that the Norse, Spanish, French, Italians, and god knows who else arrived before the English, relative latecomers to this place, and that the Indians stood on the shores, awaiting them all. These same Indians were exploited by the English, who were lazy and preferred to spend their time smoking tobacco on the banks of the James River rather than till the soil, expecting “someone else” to do it for them. Killing themselves by the end of the first winter because, as they emphatically told the Indians,
We are not farmers. We are explorers
, then demanded their provisions. Some say this is where the seeds of slavery were sown. An institution the English were not devious enough to come up with on their own, instead adopting it from the Spanish, who had been dealing in African flesh for a number of years. But that is another story.

Consider that women came across the Atlantic from the beginning
and were not allowed to vote until 1920. A quick calculation leaves you wondering about those hundreds of years in between. You are curious about their power, their spheres of influence. Most historians agree that the first president voted in by the women was a washout, a different sort of man than Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and so on. Men can take credit for those presidents.

Recall that women who came to newly colonized America often outlived their husbands and that it was not uncommon, in those early Virginia days, for them to be widowed and inherit, remarry, be widowed and inherit, remarry, and so on. This, you would think, may have been a frightening cycle to a number of men in the area, never knowing when their number was up, so to speak. But with so few careers open to women at the time, they simply made the best with what they had to work with. Not unlike fashioning a quilt from scraps, if you think about it. And there weren’t that many of them, proportionally speaking. With that sort of social arrangement, you find yourself wondering if all these husband deaths were strictly due to natural causes; but to conjecture such a thought, without historical verification, would be to assume the worst about the early settlers. No reputable historian would suggest such a thing: duplicitous, untrustworthy, murderous women. Not just any women, but
wives
.

She used whatever material she had at hand and if she was too overburdened with work she could ask her husband, sweetly, with sugar in her voice, to please, please look into acquiring an indentured servant. England, experiencing a bit of an economic crisis, had a surplus of unemployed citizens it was not much interested in caring for, and Virginia, Tidewater, and Maryland took on the look of an acceptable repository. Ah, but that is to confuse convicts with indentures and, really, they are not the same. An indentured servant is more like a slave, whereas a convict is more like a caged man. Different. You see.

Later, a turn in England’s financial fortunes led to a drop-off of people interested in coming to America as servants, what with renewed opportunity at home (and that unholy Atlantic crossing), and an attempt to fill the resulting American employment gap paved the way for African-American slavery. But that is another story.

The nineteenth century brought an explosion of ideas to the concept of the quilt, of a woman’s political voice. Not to mention the domestic conflicts of the Revolutionary War, followed by the Civil War (with one or two small—by comparison—skirmishes in between). Ignore the fact that the Revolution still left some unequal and the Civil War had a rather specific definition of brother against brother, neglecting to include color or gender. That, too, is another story.

Your concern might be trying to reduce your chosen quilt topic to more manageable dimensions. For example, the Revolutionary War could be defined as a bloody betrayal. One can almost hear the voice of Mother England crying, “But you are mine. An extension of me. You promised to be faithful, to send back your riches and keep me in a style to which I have become accustomed.” America’s answer is something like: “I need my space. It isn’t that I am not fond of you. We can still maintain a friendly trading relationship.”

There is the Civil War, which is a conflict of the blood tie. No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows its own weakness, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still love with the force of hatred. Feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that is why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot, being only human, put asunder what God has joined together.

Women were witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Find some quality silk and cotton in red, white, and blue. Cut white
stars in the evening as you sit on your summer porch. Appliqué the letters that spell out your name, your country, your grief. Stitch across the quilt a flag held in the beak of a dove. Ponder the fact that you could not vote for the man but will defy any male citizen who will not allow you your measure of sorrow at the president’s sudden death. Say something in cloth about the Union lasting, preserved. Listen to the men expound their personal satisfaction in glory of the vote. Listen to them express surprise that you, too, would like to vote and be heard. They might say,
This is not your concern
, and conclude that perhaps you are too idle at home and should consider having another child.

Save your opinions for your quilt. Put your heart and voice into it. Cast your ballot; express your feelings regarding industrialization, emancipation, women’s suffrage, your love of family.

Send away for silk ribbon printed with black-lined photolithographs. Try your hand at doing these ink drawings yourself. Experiment with the colors newly available from nineteenth-century factories: peacock blue, scarlet, jade green, eggplant, and amber. Save a scrap of velvet. For texture.

As the nineteenth century draws to a close, be sure to express your gratitude for the “improvements” in your life; you can drive your own buggy, attend college, or work in a textile factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. And do not forget the popular magazines like
Peterson’s
or
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, which encourage the decorative quilt over the story quilt (the quilt with a voice), as it can safely be displayed outside the bedroom without offense. Place it in the parlor. Simply to work a pattern and color with no ulterior thought is the mark of a woman of leisure and reflects well on her husband.

You want to keep these things in mind: history and family. How they are often inseparable. In the twentieth century you may feel that all those things that went before have little to do with you, that you are made immune to the past by the present day: All those dead
people and conflicts and ideas—why, they are only stories we tell one another. History and politics and conflict and rebellion and family and betrayal.

Think about it.

M
any of their neighbors cannot recall a time when Glady Joe and Hy were not “old.” It seemed that the two sisters had always been languishing somewhere in their senior years, as if they had somehow executed the leap from girlhood to middle age to senior citizen, lacking any sort of transitional areas in between.

And it seemed that one was seldom seen without the other. Except for that brief time following the death of Hy’s husband, James Dodd, but that was a short period and soon all appeared to be back as it was. Even married, the two sisters never lived far apart.

These days they share the house where the quilting circle meets, where Glady Joe had lived with her husband, Arthur Cleary, also deceased. When Arthur was alive, before Hy moved in, the house held their twins, Francie and Kayo, as well as Anna Neale, their housekeeper, and her daughter, Marianna. Anna said, “This is a strange house; haunted, I think it could be said. But it is an odd haunting, not as if something extra were here as much as something missing; not a void, only the powerful absence of a thing lost.”

G
LADY
J
OE
C
LEARY
and Hy Dodd travel each summer in an enormous Chevy station wagon, visiting their children and grandchildren flung like stars across the United States. Hy takes photographs of the places they pass through and the relatives they see. A traveler, taking his own summer vacation, could look up from his roadside lunch or his video camera (weary from recording memories of
his vacation with the wife and kids), or simply finish pumping gas somewhere outside Four Corners, shaking his head at the puzzle of anyone
choosing
to live in this hot desert; he would see two elderly women, both with silver hair, faded blue eyes, and soft, lined faces. He would notice the inevitable signs of old age—the hollowing of the cheeks, the loose flesh along the jawline, the tortoiseshell glasses that make the blue eyes appear slightly larger than they truly are. He might admire Hy’s sunset-hued blouse and the Mexican lace of her skirt, as she sits facing Glady Joe. Glady Joe sits with her legs crossed, scribbling away in a spiral notebook, now and then looking at her pen accusingly, giving it one or two sharp jerks in an attempt to get the ink flowing again. He might like the smart look of Glady Joe’s white cotton men’s shirt and white skirt. Or the way Hy’s dangling onyx earrings move with the motion of her head.

Another tired tourist could look through the lens of his camera to see Hy directing Glady Joe into a pose, somewhere in the expanse of the green Virginia countryside. He might take a moment of his attention away from
his
tired wife (who is trying to placate their bored, cranky children with promises of ice cream after dinner) to notice an elderly woman, all in white, behaving as irritably as his youngsters, while the other woman, the one with dangling onyx earrings, places her hands on her hips as she lowers the hand holding the camera, her lips drawn into a thin, angry line.

And maybe a woman traveling with her grown daughter would see these same elderly women at a gas station just outside Colorado Springs, sharing soda from a bottle, planning their next stop. And marvel at how alike these women look—except that one is dressed a little more colorfully, more stylishly—so physically alike they must be related. As if their choice in clothing were the only distinguishing feature between them.

When Glady Joe passes by any of these fellow travelers, she
leaves an essence of floral scent in her wake, while Hy’s perfume is musky, oddly sexual for someone so clearly in her seventies. Hy, too, walks a little less briskly than Glady Joe, more deliberately. Just taking her time. Both women have some of the awkwardness of age in their step, as if moving with a certain amount of care.

Sometimes they pull over to a rest stop and have a smoke. Sharing the cigarette as they shared the soda pop. Once a day, sometimes twice.

T
HE SISTERS COMPILE
a notebook of their favorite restaurants, coffee shops, and roadside snack bars located on the numbered highways they travel. Glady Joe collects scraps of fabric and lace along the way, checking the remnant bins of fabric stores. She touches the cloth as her mind works its possibilities, her eyes large behind her glasses and far away. She likes to re-create various landmarks and landscapes, her favorite being Virginia with its lush green valleys
(Oh Shenandoah/I love your daughter/I’m bound away/You rolling river)
, farmlands—“God’s patchwork,” she says—blooming dogwood in pink and white. Hy has a marked preference for historical figures as well as the common man. She is encouraging Glady Joe to agree to do Monticello but Glady Joe will only agree if they leave out the remaining slave quarters in the design.

The west-side view of Jefferson’s home is called the Sea View because the extensive grasslands and rolling slopes resemble the ocean.

Hy would prefer to quilt a Native American surrounded by pueblos and mesas, but Glady Joe says that would be as bad as showing Jefferson’s slave cabins.

(There are only two ways to deal with tragedy and injustice: show it plainly or hide all traces; and the sisters are in disagreement on this matter.)

“I disagree,” says Hy. “I want to show the nobility in the Indian.”

“The only thing noble,” says Glady Joe, “is how those people managed to survive the theft of their sacred land and the poverty to which they have been reduced.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” says Hy.

Which makes Glady Joe furious. “Your heart should be more than broken, it should be shattered.”

“What about government reparation?” asks Hy.

“What about it?” retorts Glady Joe.

“We could call the quilt ‘God’s People,’ ” says Hy after a brief pause.

Glady Joe grips the wheel of the Chevy. “You mean ‘God’s Forgotten People.’ ” Glady Joe’s fury is directed at her sister, but not over what she is saying at this point; her anger over injustice is more generalized than that. She does not believe that Hy is responsible for the scenes she wants to depict, but Hy
is
responsible for something else, something that Glady Joe cannot entirely forgive. Glady Joe prefers stitching landscapes and monuments. People can hurt you, betray you. People are dangerous if you are not careful.

S
OMETIMES
in motel rooms between their children’s homes, Glady Joe and Hy drink whiskey and smoke a little reefer. It is their secret. They say it helps them sleep better in strange beds. They buy it from a grandchild in graduate school, a young woman named Finn Bennett-Dodd. Who has promised not to betray them to her parents or the other relatives. Finn understands that, more than the fact that pot is illegal, it upsets people when two elderly grandmothers indulge in this private ritual. “It’s just so unseemly at our age,” Hy says to Finn, tucking the grass-filled Baggy away in her makeup case. She kisses Finn’s cheek, lays her cool hand on her grand-daughter’s
arm for a moment, Hy’s musky smell tinging the atmosphere of the room. “It’s not safe for us,” she continues. “When you’re young” (she smiles at Finn) “what is exciting or rebellious or eccentric becomes senility or a lost grip in one’s old age.” Glady Joe and Hy choose not to risk it.

They drive the Chevy for two reasons. One, it is a reliable, roomy, well-made American car with plenty of space for luggage and the miscellaneous junk they pick up in the course of their travels. And, two, it is a “grandmother” car; it comforts their children to see their mothers in that old machine, just as it would disturb them to see their mothers passing a pipe (they converted one of James Dodd’s old Comoys for this purpose—removed the stem and kept the bowl).