An American Quilt Read online




  For Ezra & Lily

  &

  For Minerva, Eliza, Juba Simons, Jane—and the dozens of people, names recorded & not, whose lives are connected to this story

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  1 Piecing the Quilt

  2 Eliza, Minerva, & Juba

  3 Warp & Weft: Agriculture & Industry

  4 Mosaic

  5 Medicine & Its Failures

  6 Hickory Root

  7 The Leonids: A Sermon in Patchwork

  8 Even There

  9 Canuto Matanew

  10 An Abomination

  11 Living History

  12 Portraits

  Sources

  Additional Image Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations Insert

  A Note from the Author

  This is a work of creative nonfiction. I’m a creative writer and scholar, and have researched the stories of the Crouch-Wiliams-Cushman family and the people they enslaved: Minerva and her children Cecilia and Samon, Eliza, Juba Simons and her son Sorenzo, Boston, Bishroom, Jimmy, William, George, Jenny, and Jane. These were not the only people the Crouch-Williamses enslaved in Charleston over the years, but these are the people whose lives I came to know, as much as I could, and whose traces I followed, as much as was possible, from the 1830s to the 1860s.

  The records that remain tell us more than usual about Eliza, Minerva, Juba Simons, and Jane, on whom I primarily focus. Nonetheless, because the records of enslaved people in the antebellum era are so scant, I have imagined their lives based on historical and contextual information. I make clear within the text what is known fact and where I’m imagining. I hope that you, the reader, will follow me in these moments, and that you come to fill in the story as you imagine the lives of all these people who lived almost two hundred years ago but seem to stand alongside us today.

  All errors in the quoted letters are as they were originally written. In places, I have added punctuation and/or capitalization within these family letters for purposes of readability and clarity.

  “Cloth as a metaphor for society, thread for social relations, express more than connectedness. . . . The softness and ultimate fragility of these materials capture the vulnerability of humans, whose every relationship is transient, subject to the degenerative processes of illness, death, and decay . . . Precisely because it wears thin and disintegrates, cloth becomes an apt medium for communicating a central problem of power; social and political relationships are necessarily fragile in an impermanent, ever-changing world.”

  —Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider,

  Cloth and Human Experience

  “These seemingly isolated episodes reaching back to the nineteenth century and carrying forward to the twenty-first, once fitted together like pieces in a mosaic, reveal a portrait of a nation: one that is the unspoken truth of our racial divide.”

  —Carol Anderson, White Rage

  1

  Piecing the Quilt

  There is the sound of a baby in the house, a delight. He is a fat baby, a happy baby, full of laughter and mischief, Susan writes. The light falls through the window of their house on Cumberland Street each morning, when the baby wakes her early, and she gazes at him and makes him smile. Touches his sweet, soft skin. Leans toward him to kiss him and linger at his cotton-soft tendrils of hair. He is always getting into things; she can’t turn away from him for a moment. He kicks his father in bed at night, and in the morning, they laugh about it together—his kicks are no joke! But he is so easy at bedtime, going off to sleep contented. Susan is a mother for the first time at twenty-three. Come for a visit, she tells her sisters in letter after letter. Come and see my baby. He’s such a good baby, she tells them, he’s so easy.

  She is proud. She has gone to housekeeping with her new young husband—now a doctor, no less. Their life is a delight.

  She is an expert sewer, and when the baby goes to bed each night, she bends over her hexagons, basting them one after the other with swift, quiet stitches—and her husband sits and thinks to the sound of thread running through cloth and paper. He thinks about the patients he saw that day, some of their cases simple—rheumatism, a cold—while others were intricate puzzles—chronic stomach pain, headaches, an inexplicable bulge in one’s side. Susan hands him a hexagon, and he sews. He’s designed the pattern, and together, they make the quilt that I’d come to know almost two hundred years later.

  In 1833, when Susan was twenty, there were pelerine collars on dresses—what we’d call “boat neck collar” today, straight across the breastline with the collarbones exposed. There were leg o’ mutton sleeves, poofed at the top, slender at the wrist. There were bonnets with bows and feathers. When the head was bare, a woman’s ’do was two puffs at each side of her face, and a single high twisted bun at the top. It reminds me of a primped samurai. Susan must have worn this look in her early twenties.

  But first. Imagine: In 1820, Susan is seven. Her mother will cut the vegetables brought in by Susan’s brothers from the kitchen garden, stoke the fire in the iron stove, dice the beef. Unlike her wealthier neighbors, she doesn’t have a girl to help. She has boarders to feed—a family staying the night between Boston and Newport and two Brown University students. Sometimes, she has more than twenty boarders. She’ll come to Susan to look at the sampler, examine her stitches to see if they’re fine enough. How is the arch of the lowercase a? How straight is the line of the y? Susan has made three alphabets this week, and then she’ll start the phrase her mother dictated to her this morning: “Behold the child of innocence how beautiful is the mildness of its countenance and the diffidence of its looks.” Maybe Sarah Rose, her mother, stitched the same when she was a child. It’s Sarah Rose’s job—as it will be Susan’s—to make the coverlets, the quilts, the dresses, the petticoats, the corsets, the pantaloons, the trousers, and the jackets. Sarah Rose’s family depends upon her skill to keep them clothed, warm, respectable, and in fashion. Their clothes, the stitched objects in their home, signify their class and status in this world, and influence every element of their lives, from love to business. Susan has been sewing since she was three.

  Next, she cross-stitches the phrase “Be good and be happy.” She makes the red stitches in x’s across the linen, carefully pressing the needle in and out, piercing the white cloth at the top and bottom of each x until she’s built a B out of what feels like a hundred small x’s. And then the e, and so on. Her mother is satisfied with her stitches. She does not ask Susan to tear them out. They remain.

  One hundred years later, Susan’s grandnephew Franklin would find this sampler, along with three quilt tops, in a trunk that traveled from Charleston back to Providence and remained sealed shut after Susan’s heartbreak. Franklin would be the first to examine its contents in almost a hundred years, and I would be the first to fall in love with the quilt and its story after he passed away, another near-century later.

  On the first day, before I even saw the quilt tops, I was captured by their mystery, my sense of the secrets they must hold and the knowledge that I’d get to touch the cloth and study hundreds of paper templates made from ephemera. As a quilter and writer seduced by the tactile and drawn to a good story, I approached them with wonder and delight. I was finishing a book on modern quilting and lived in a Rhode Island house built in 1738; it was rumored that George Washington stayed at this house in Little Rest on his way down to Delaware in the 1781. I’d walk across the original wide pine floorboards in my apartment, the sound of squirrels chuckling in the walls throughout the winter, trying to imagine who else had walked these floors, if I might be walking in Washington’s ghostly trace.

  When Prof W. mentioned these quilt tops I might study as part of a material cul
ture theory course, I was intrigued. We knew only that they were made by a newlywed couple in Charleston, South Carolina—he was a doctor who worked on the quilts with his wife when he had a “difficult case”—and donated in 1952 by a colonial revivalist from Providence. It was a snowy winter day when Prof W. led me down the overheated hall of the Textiles, Fashion Merchandising and Design department at the University of Rhode Island. With a jingling set of keys, she unlocked the old wooden door of the flat-storage room, and once inside, slid open the metal drawer of what looked like a map case. As it opened, I saw the first quilt top, its sky-blue, red plaid, white floral, green zigzag hexagons slowly revealed. My intrigue became entrancement. I couldn’t wait to touch it.

  Prof W. slid both arms underneath it, gently, as if it were a sickly lamb. The only sound was the crinkle of the tissue paper that had been set between its layers to keep it from pressing against itself in storage. She set it down on top of the case and slid her arms out from underneath.

  “The papers are fragile in the back,” she said. “Every time you move them, a few crumbs fall away.”

  We looked over the front of the quilt, unfolded it once and found a central star of colorful calico hexagons with a white center. And around the star, “‘flowers’ of hexagons . . . separated by rows of white hexagons,” some of which were yellow and brown with age. The “checks, stripes, indigos, chintzes, calicos, drabs, and rainbow prints” dazzled me. There were white parrots’ heads framed in repeating hexagons around a central patch of red, sweet red ginghams and plaids, a pink floral print on a white background.

  I imagined the makers’ hands on the quilt, sewing what today we quippily call “hexies,” in just the same way I’ve been taught: make the paper template, baste the scrap of fabric over each edge, then whip-stitch them together and, finally, remove the paper template. Since these tops had never been finished, the paper templates remained. Prof W. could tell that the fabrics were cottons from the 1830s or ’40s, machine-woven and printed with blocks, plates, and cylinders, “all three of the main printing techniques of the period.”

  As I held the quilt tops, in my mind’s eye I saw Susan and Hasell (pronounced “Hazel”), a young couple hunched near the light of an oil lamp and a fire, carefully cutting out each paper hexagon template, then the fabric scraps left over from dresses and men’s shirts and children’s clothes. I could hear the metallic slice of their shears’ edges meeting. Could see the fire beside them burning hot on a rainy southern night. Could hear its crackle and the pull of the thread through paper and fabric—one long shhhhhh. A pause. And then another. That soothing rhythm of hand-stitching that every sewer knows. Today, it’s a privilege to have time to sew and we romanticize the hand-stitched, making precious gifts for one another with stitches that illustrate for the recipient our care and love: I made this for you. With my own two hands. But in the days of this quilt, these hands (at least, the woman’s) would have known a lifetime of sewing, a skill that was necessary for survival. Sitting by the fire, or in a quiet few minutes while the baby slept, she would have stitched dress seams and hems, buttonholes, hat trimmings, cloth diapers, and undergarments. She’d have decorated her home with embroidered tablecloths and napkins, lace doilies. Together, the couple made hexagon after hexagon with long basting stitches—one stitch across each side—that they’d tear out later, once they’d whip-stitched the hexagons together.

  Why was a man sewing with his wife in the 1830s? What did they talk about? What were their lives like? How had the quilt tops come from Charleston to Providence? Why did they remain unfinished?

  As we stared down at the quilt top, Prof W. said, “It’s the back you’ll want to see.”

  We moved the quilt top to an empty classroom and pressed several tables together, threw a clean white sheet over them, and then unfolded the quilt facedown so that the papers in its backing showed. It was slow, the unfolding. I was cautious. We’d both washed our hands. I tried to remember not to touch my face, because the oils from our skin would damage the fabric and papers.

  Finally, the quilt was flat—a gasp—and there they were: a collage of hexagon papers that ranged in color from brown to cream to white, some in glossy full color with typed print, and some in loopy old-fashioned handwriting that no one without special training could replicate today. It was obvious before we even examined them that these browning, handwritten pieces were the oldest, crinkling and dry, corners disintegrating. A few paper flecks fell to the floor.

  Carefully, I leaned over the quilt top and saw the words on oldest paper (matte, beige): friendship, sloop, schooner, and on the newer papers (glossy, whiter): invest, see, fame. There were lists of numbers, handwritten and typed, snippets of glossy articles on investment opportunities, yellow mimeographed announcements about high-school faculty meetings in the 1930s. None of this made sense yet. It was a great, swirling collage of times and places and language and numbers, of the nineteenth century enjambed with the twentieth, of sweetnesses like dear sister next to business contracts: signed in the presence of. There were four languages, sheet music, repeating words lined up beneath one another as if a child had been assigned the task of perfecting each letter’s shape: Knowledge, knowledge; friendship, friendship; maintained, maintained, maintained; communicate, communicate, communicate.

  Older snippets, “maintained,” and “master for” (probably referring to master for a ship, an oft-repeated phrase in the quilt top papers), enjambed with typed text on yellow paper probably from the 1930s.

  Prof W. receded to the background, her voice faded out, and it was like that night in college down South when I was drunk, staring at the boy I loved; all the world was gone but him and me, and we spoke in a vacuum. It was like that once more. Just me and this quilt. I recognized the strangeness: I was falling in love with an object and the stories it promised. But here I was, touching a two-hundred-year-old object that would normally be kept behind the safety of museum glass, and its collage of papers looked like a puzzle to solve. I was allowed to trace the fabrics with my fingers, lift up one of the half-loose paper templates ever so slightly to read its reverse side, take pictures, read and reread the words in the hexagonal snippets of text.

  When sound reached me again, I heard Prof W.’s voice. “There are two notebooks that go with the quilt tops. You’ll want to look at those next.”

  Before I got to the notebooks, I spent weeks with the quilt tops, studying the fabrics and reading and recording the papers in the back. It became obvious that there was one—or more—expert sewing hands in the quilt; I could read in each tiny stitch a lifetime of training as a sewer. Other stitches were sloppier—crooked, longer, uneven. The variation in stitch quality meant that multiple people had worked on them. Who? I wondered. The young couple, or were there more people involved?

  As I recorded words from the papers, I noticed repetitions: shuger, casks, West Indies, West Indies, West Indies, over and over, along with Havana, Barbados, lists of numbers and calculations in a small nineteenth-century hand, juxtaposed with the bigger, loopy words friendship, kindness, government, incident. A child’s handwriting practice. The sweetness of that repetition and the concentration it must have taken to make each perfectly arched a and h and l. Cursive. Shapes our children don’t make anymore. And juxtaposed against that sweetness, the smaller, experienced hand of someone connected to the mercantile industry of the nineteenth century; the people who worked on this quilt had money at their disposal. They were calculating shipments on schooners and sloops, making manifests of the ship’s holdings—casks, shuger, barrels—and those who would sail it—seaman, master—to and from locations like Havana, Barbados, Carolyna, Newport.

  Returning to the department’s accession records, made when the quilt tops were donated, I learned that the quilt tops had been stowed away, first in a trunk that was closed in 1838 and left unopened until 1917, when Franklin, who donated them, was given them by his aunt; they were made by her mother, Susan, and her new husband, the doctor Hasell. Th
e accession note read: “Planned and sewn by Dr. and Mrs. Hasell Crouch. It is said that when he had a difficult case to prescribe for, he would work on his patchwork while trying to decide what to do for his patient . . .” After the tops were donated in 1952, just before Franklin died, they were left more or less undisturbed—studied here and there by a student whose research faded into now-defunct floppy disks and lost notes—until Prof W. and I removed them that winter afternoon in 2012.

  A watercolor portrait of Franklin.

  Alone each day on the third floor of that overheated old stone building, accompanied only by the disarrayed crowd of cloth-covered mannequins used by fashion design students, I’d open each paper-lined box and remove one of the quilt tops. The floor-to-ceiling windows in that corner room cast in honey-thick, three o’clock light in blocks along the floor, hitting one corner of the quilt. Each day, it was like finding a present that someone had left for me almost two hundred years ago, with dropped clues about their lives: There were the 1830s-era fabrics with small prints of red, blue, plaid green, and floral whites, the teakettle print in brown and red; the fragile papers in the back with the dates 1798, 1808, 1813, 1824. This was a treasure trove, an unfolding, ever-expanding story with hints buried like a crooked trail to follow: artifacts housed at the historical societies in Providence and Charleston, the family gravestones at St. Philip’s Church in Charleston and Swan Point in Providence, stacks of letters in file folders and notebooks that Franklin had transcribed.

  It’s 1833 in Charleston, South Carolina, and Susan and Hasell Crouch are young and in love. They were married in October 1832, in Providence, and then she moved to his hometown, Charleston, to “go to housekeeping,” as she said, with him. For years, Hasell had been friends with her brothers, since they met, most likely, when Hasell boarded at their family home while a student at Brown University. It’s possible their families had a long-standing connection. Just before Hasell graduated in 1830, he went to visit Susan’s brothers, Hilton and Winthrop, who worked as clerks in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. Their weekend entertainments included bird-hunting, and, perhaps, planning their futures; within two years, Hasell, Winthrop, and then Hilton moved south to Hasell’s hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, to make their fortunes. Somewhere along the way, amid family dinners and stays at Susan’s Providence home, Susan and Hasell began to court.