An American Quilt Read online

  The house on George Street in Providence in which Susan grew up.

  In 1830, while she was finishing the education her brothers encouraged her to complete—since she never knew, they said, when she may need it—Hasell sent her a letter from Charleston; he’d gone home in December, just after graduating a month earlier. He’d have sailed to Charleston on one of the schooners or brigs that ran up and down the coast, trading goods in each of the port cities. Susan was eager to know if her father would rent a piano so she could learn the instrument from an instructor in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, where she was staying. Back in Charleston, Hasell must have been setting his affairs in order, preparing to marry. In 1832, Susan and Hasell had a small Providence wedding, witnessed by her younger brother Winthrop. From Charleston, in 1833, Susan writes home that she’d like Winthrop to have something made for her to commemorate the occasion.

  Winthrop ought to give me something seeing as how he stood up with me [at my wedding]. It is customary here for the bridesmaids each to give a suit that is a cap and frock. Now I should think Winthrop must buy the materials and let Sarah Hamlin make it. Such things here are talked more about than they are with you. They are made such secrets of

  While Susan strives to learn the ways of Charleston women and waits to deliver her first baby in August, she hopes her brother and friend Sarah will help her make her way in this new town.

  She feels like an outsider with the women in town, but she and Hasell are young and seem blissfully in love; they make cordial and preserves that they drink with friends and send to Susan’s family in Providence via the brigs that run the coast. They dye a bonnet together. Soon, they’ll start this quilt.

  Susan misses home and wishes she lived as close as her older married sister, Abby, does, but she’s happy making a new home with Hasell, and likes having her brothers and brother-in-law nearby.

  The weather is delightful now, just warm enough. Blackberries have been ripe about three weeks. All kinds of vegetables are in market. Peaches are quite large. I suppose they will be ripe in about a month. I think we shall have a great deal of fruit. Blackberries are very plenty indeed. Charles [Hasell’s brother] and Hasell bought near a bushel for 37 ½ cents. I made some jelly and Hasell’s making some cordial. I intend to send you some jelly as soon as I get an opportunity. I made it rather too sweet. I think I boiled it away too much. I never made any or saw any made before so I did not know. I put the same quantity as you do for currant jelly.

  Susan’s letters are full of stories of their young, domestic bliss. She thanks her mother for sending “sheets and spreads,” a quilted coat, and table spoons. The family constantly sends goods and food back and forth on the brigs. Apples from the North, peaches and figs from the South, pickled vegetables and wine. Susan sends north “barberries, gingerbread, jelly and dried apples” by the brig Mary and particular types of pots and pans, “Ma knows the size,” that she needs for her “housekeeping.” Susan’s brother Hilton, also in Charleston, asks for “a ½ barrel pig pork and a small keg of good butter, both scarce articles here.” Hasell and Susan send home the rose brandy they made together: “We have a great quantity of roses in the garden.” At one point, Susan requests a stove to be sent down. But most often, she asks for fabric.

  I wrote in the letter that was sent by The Eagle for some flannel 3 yards of nice and three yards for some coats for little Hasell. I have not bought any coats since those first ones and they are worn thin.

  At other times, she asks for calico, merino, “linnen,” “cambricks,” and white muslin. Some of these fabrics make up the quilt tops that Susan and Hasell made together.

  One November day in 1834, maybe the weather is cooling, and Susan is soothing the baby, Little Hasell, as a rainstorm passes over the city. Maybe her husband, Hasell, is off at the medical college, learning his trade. On November 8, her brother Winthrop, working as a clerk in Columbia, writes home to send news to his father. In the course of the letter, he asks for cotton batting and calicos to be sent south for his sister, sister-in-law, and aunt.

  Susan wants you to send her six pounds of cotton batting to make a comforter. Mrs. Thorne and Eliza would like to have enough to make them each one—you may as well send 20 pounds in all and Father can charge it to Hilton so they will settle with him for it here. You can buy it much cheaper with you than here. Susan likes the quilt you sent her very much. She has made it up and wears it. She is very thankful for it. I don’t think it would be a bad plan to send some cheap calicos to make the comforter for it will cost her a great deal more here than at the North, perhaps you have some old stuff in the house that will answer.

  And so this was the start of the quilt. Susan’s sisters and parents up in Providence would send down twenty pounds of batting and “some cheap calicos” to make the quilt, maybe “old stuff” they have left over from their sewing projects, or new materials they could buy cheaply near the textile mills and with their father’s connections as a dry-goods store owner and former shipper. (The “quilt” that Winthrop says Susan has made up and wears was quilted fabric she’d probably made into a petticoat to wear under her dresses, for warmth and to help billow out the skirts.)

  Susan and Hasell began work on the quilt together, that much we know, but the details are unclear. There is the problem of memory: While one note indicates that Hasell stitched the quilt, another states that Hasell designed the quilt top and Susan stitched it. While men sometimes quilted—injured Civil War soldiers, for example, took it up when they were bedridden and needed to occupy their hands—it’s unique that Hasell and Susan worked on this quilt top together. There’s something so hopeful in this. The quilt was intended to be for their great four-poster bed; they must have imagined they’d spend winter nights under this quilt for many years to come.

  Susan and Hasell could have had no idea that their quilt would remain unfinished, that tragedy would befall them, that the hexagons would be taken up by their descendants in Rhode Island a century after they’d started it in South Carolina, that because they’d made so many hexagons and modern beds were smaller, it would be transformed into three quilt tops of slightly different designs—that I, a stranger to their family, would come upon the quilt and this story almost two hundred years after they started it.

  Weeks passed before I came back to the notebooks Prof W. mentioned. They were donated with the quilt tops by Franklin in 1952, along with hundreds of other objects, including clothes and paintings. These two small binders included fabric connected to the quilt tops. I removed them from an acid-free cardboard box and carried them carefully, as ever. I imagined they were one of the empty, paper-thin robin’s eggs I used to find in the grass under ocean-side hedges; I’d tote them home in cupped palms to show my sister, steadying my steps, eager but careful not to crush the blue shells. This was the first notebook: a delicate surprise.

  I walked through the high-ceilinged halls, to the classroom, set the notebooks down, and opened them page by page. In the center of each page, there were squares of fabric, sometimes two or three layered on top of one another, and underneath, in neat cursive, a note that I realized was made by Franklin: from the pocket of Sarah Rose Williams. And, in the lower right-hand corner, the year, 1917.

  I didn’t yet know what this meant—a pocket? I didn’t know who Sarah Rose Williams was or how she was connected to this story. The classroom was quiet. I sat on faded green metal chairs that reminded me of my elementary-school days, and took notes in pencil—everything around the archives must be done in pencil, because it does less harm than pen if its marks should go astray on precious objects. I turned the pages, noting fabrics that were in the quilt. Most were listed as being “ante 1840.”

  And then I saw, in Franklin’s neat penciled cursive, the note that added still more questions, which superseded all those that came before: Probably for slave gowns.

  At first, I sympathized with Susan as a northern transplant in the South, as I grew up outside Boston and went to school in North Caro
lina. It was the mid-nineties. When I visited the college campus my junior year of high school, I remember having arrived tired from all the previous tours, on which students told me the merits of the college union or the cafeteria or the dorms. When I arrived here, I found myself enamored of its quiet beauty—the empty, wide green lawns and pillared brick buildings, the ringing bells that marked the hours, the water dripping from the greenery around the dorms. There were few students on campus that weekend; they were on spring break. I remember sidewalks crisscrossing an empty green, and I filled that green with my imagination of my life to come—long days talking literature with the other students, sprawled on the lawn with our books open, or playing Frisbee in the afternoons—the movie version of college. No one I knew from my high-school class was planning to go afar; they were all staying in New England. Families in Concord seemed to have been there forever, and they seemed to stay forever. My family had moved to town when I was older, and I never felt I fit in there; I imagined that if I went to a new land, I’d find my people. I wanted something different, an adventure, casting myself as far away as possible. The short of it: I didn’t know what I was getting into.

  A year and a half later, I found myself struggling with the differences between Concord, Massachusetts, the suburb where I grew up, and the small, conservative liberal arts college I’d chosen to attend. I didn’t know, when I applied, that the school’s student body was 98 percent white, 2 percent people of color, nor that the majority of the students were from old southern families, nor even that the school had such close ties with the Presbyterian church. At Easter, great wooden crosses were placed on the lawn at the entrance to one of the academic buildings, slurs were made against the few Jews enrolled, and when an African American speaker was scheduled to come to campus, swastikas were scrawled across his face on the posters advertising the visit. Two of my good friends, one who was from Turkey and the other who was Indian American, transferred out by the end of that first year. The town was divided between black and white by the railroad tracks—the African American side poor, the white side prosperous. I remember finding it strange that I never saw people of color from town on the main street we often visited to get shakes at the old soda shop, where the college’s sports paraphernalia from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—old football sneakers, a helmet, black-and-white photos of men—white men—smiling in their uniforms after a game—hung on the walls.

  But what was most alarming to me was the way that my classmates spoke. In the early weeks of my freshman fall, I sat outside with my hallmates and their friends. We were in the midst of the O. J. Simpson trial, waiting for the decision, and one of the students said, “I hope O.J. loses so that we can snipe black people from the tops of buildings.” I remember his face in this moment. The snarl and delight. And the woman who laughed loudly and said, “Cal! That was so southern of you,” and slapped him five. I was stunned, sickened. There were many other moments like that one to follow. Later that year, I’d hear someone call her puckering lips while smoking a cigarette “nigger lips.” I had never heard a white person use that word before. She was drinking, when she said it, and after, she and a friend giggled. Sometime that year, I visited a friend’s Charleston home, and when I said about the cottage out back, “What a cute little house,” she replied that it was the slave quarters. I didn’t know how to understand this at the time. She had a black nanny, whom she called “nanny” or “mammy,” I don’t remember which, but I remember the moment when I heard this, stunned, when she and I were introduced in the kitchen. At an event I attended in the city, all of the guests were white and all of the servers were black. It was simply regarded as the way things were. We could not talk about this history, nor even the fact of racism in the South. When I tried to talk about it, my classmates would laugh at me: “Go home, Yankee!” they’d say, laughing, or, “Carpetbagger!” or, “The South will rise again!” I was told that, as a northerner, I had no history, no roots that ran deep like theirs did. Many students hung Confederate flags in their dorm rooms. I’d ask why? Why would they hang that flag? They’d say it was about their heritage, not about racism or slavery. I kept talking, pushing, questioning, believing that these conversations might change things, even ever so slightly. I was too overwhelmed to transfer as my friends had; the thought of tackling applications again was daunting. So, I decided, brimming with hubris, I’d stay and try to change things. I was naïve. I wasn’t good at negotiating those conversations; I was too strident, pushed too hard. Meanwhile, I learned how slow the world is to change.

  It wasn’t just this school. I’d come to see that the problem was that I believed in the myths I’d been taught. During those four years in North Carolina, I had to confront my own experiences in Concord, Massachusetts, which I’d told people was a liberal bastion compared to the college. I grew up believing the stories about the houses with the black-striped chimneys, which were said to be part of the Underground Railroad, and the legends of Thoreau and Emerson and the transcendentalists. I’d never heard that people in town owned enslaved people—that would have been unfathomable to me, and to many New Englanders it still is, though the story is now being told more publicly: A house once inhabited by enslaved and then free African Americans in Concord has been moved next to the Old North Bridge and converted into a small museum, the Robbins House, named for the family who lived there. I’d never heard of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, half an hour from Concord, where the only known extant northern slave quarters still stand today and that history, of colonial northern enslavement, is told fully by its historians and docents.

  These quilt tops led me to a history of the North to which I had been blind. Now, when I tell people that Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island, were the largest slave-trading ports in the country in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they’re most often shocked. New Englanders continue to believe that the North was abolitionist, was always abolitionist, free from the damning history of slavery that plagues the South. People in the North don’t talk about that history, would not acknowledge it in their backyards the way my classmate had noted her home’s former slave quarters. That history and its markers and legacies, though, are just as fully present in and around Boston.

  If you walk through the acres of woods in South County, Rhode Island, where I lived when I began researching the quilt tops, you’ll see miles of moss-grown stone walls that cross and zigzag over the hills—many of them built by enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The walls were built in grids so that overseers could mark the progress of those who planted and picked in each section while also keeping each enslaved person contained. Stop and look at those stone walls when you see them in a colonial town, or out in the woods, almost forgotten: The way the walls are built is masterful—stones that fit together as if cut like puzzle pieces, they’ve stood for three hundred years, a testament to the skill and artistry of the people whose hands touched them, lifted them, and set them here.

  Havana, Barbados, shuger, casks, Carolyna, West Indies.

  I knew when I read these snippets in the quilt’s backing that someone in the family was likely implicated in the triangle trade. But exactly who was connected, and how closely, was a mystery. Probably for slave gowns was more definitive. It meant that a woman who had grown up in what I once believed to be the abolitionist nineteenth-century North had moved south and owned enslaved people. How did a woman from the 1830s North come to terms with owning people? And, the question I wanted to answer most of all—who were these enslaved people?

  I went back a generation to learn more about Susan, sinking into the reams of letters and account books held in Rhode Island archives. I found myself in the mercantile Atlantic world, a world I’d known about in vague terms, growing up around Boston and my mother’s hometown, Salem, and living now near Newport and Bristol. This is a world where it was faster to travel by boat than by land; there was as yet no railroad, no car. Horse and wagon were slow, and the rides were r
ough over potholed and rocky dirt roads. Wooden sailboats traveled smoothly across the sea, skimming up and down the east coast of what we now call the United States, and down to what we now call the Caribbean, buying and trading goods.

  Out on a schooner for an afternoon, I heard the creak of a thick rope as the wind pressed at the sail, felt the ship heeling as it gained speed. I’d been seasick all morning in the muggy, still air, the sail luffing, and now I delighted in the wind, bracing my feet against the rail of the boat. This was a wooden schooner with two masts, the sails attached by metal hoops and raised by hand. Heave, ho! Heave, ho! You know those words. Hauling down on the line, and then shifting the hands up to grab higher, and hauling down again.

  We sailed across Gloucester Harbor, and I saw in the distance another wooden schooner, and beyond, the rise of the land. An old warehouse painted red, a brick building, and the patchwork blur of colonial houses that scaled the hill in the center of town. The wind carried us out toward the sea, that great, open, windy expanse that awaited us, with all its ancient myths of mariners and monsters and pirates and wrecks. But just before we reached the open water, the crew called to jibe, and we ducked our heads to avoid the swinging boom; the ship turned back toward the safety, the quiet—the disappointment—of the docks.