Hidden code?
Quilt appraiser Alice McElwain had a standing-room-only crowd at the Bella Vista Historical Museum to listen to a story about quilts, codes and the underground railroad. The meeting took place on Sunday, Jan. 27.
It started when author Jacqueline Tobin was shopping for handmade baskets at an open-air market in South Carolina for her own collection, McElwain said. When she passed a quilt stall, an elderly, African-American woman named Ozella Williams motioned her inside.
The woman, Tobin wrote, showed off a few of the historic quilts she had for sale and explained how they had been used by slaves to communicate with each other. Williams said the story, like the quilts, had been handed down through her family. But she didn’t finish her story, telling Tobin she needed to wait until she was ready to hear the whole story.
Tobin, a college professor, went back to her everyday life and didn’t do anything with the information right away, but then she started to think about it. Later, she started contacting quilt scholars and black quilters, but no one could tell her more about a secret code quilted into Civil War era bed covers.
Eventually, Tobin went back to the market and found Williams again.
When Williams was finally convinced to share the rest of the story, she showed Tobin the quilts. It was common, both women knew, for housekeepers to hang quilts out on a clothesline or over railings to air. But what if the patterns included secret messages that slaves living in the vicinity or even traveling through the area could decipher to help them find their way to the next stop on the Underground Railroad?
McElwain shared a few of the possible messages during her presentation including the “Bear’s Paws” pattern which could mean “Follow the bear’s trail,” or the “Drunkard’s Path” — “Don’t go straight.”
If a tied quilt is hanging with its inside facing out, the ties form a grid which might be used like a map to show distances or turns McElwain said.
Tobin’s book, Hidden in Plain
View, was written with Raymond G. Dobard, Ph.D., and became popular. Two children’s books were written about slaves using the codes, McElwain said. Teachers often use the children’s books in class to introduce the Civil War to very young students, she said.
But the actual quilts didn’t survive and no one can prove that the quilt code existed at all. McElwain has her doubts.
Some of the patterns that Williams told Tobin were part of the code were actually developed long after the Civil War, McElwain said. Even the Bear’s Paws pattern was created in 1879. Also, she pointed out that slaves running away from plantations probably didn’t encounter many bear trails in the regions through which they traveled.
People were not likely to “tie” a quilt during the Civil War, she said. In fact, quilts were only beginning to replace a one-piece “coverlet” as a bed cover because the kind of fabric needed for a quilt had not been available for very long. It was later when people learned that “tying” a quilt was a quick way to complete a bed cover.
But if a tied quilt was hung on a fence or rail, “reading” the ties would not be easy since the grid would be small and probably on the inside of the quilt.
Finally, McElwain said, there’s no slave narrative to support the theory and that includes dozens of personal histories told to WPA workers who interviewed former slaves in the 1930s. Even William’s family didn’t know about the “oral history” of Civil War slave codes.
“Don’t let history get in the way of a good story,” McElwain joked. And she mentioned another historic story. It’s like Betsy Ross and the American flag, she said. Ross may have sewn flags, but she didn’t create the stars and stripes. Contemporary politicians came up with the plan.
But people love the story of the Civil War codes, McElwain said. In fact, when she recently tried to convince an elementary school teacher that it was probably not true, the teacher had an interesting response.
“It’s in the state cirriculum,” the teacher said, “so it has to be true.”