Ocean Wave Quilters

First, an announcement we had hoped we wouldn’t have to make. The annual Fort Bragg Quilt Show — as an indoor show — has been canceled for this year. Our committee felt that vaccinations would not be sufficiently widespread in the community to make a gathering in an enclosed space safe for all.

We are planning to hold an outdoor quilt display like we did last year and are in process of applying to the City of Fort Bragg for the appropriate permits. Stay tuned to this space for more details in the coming months!

In last month’s column, we talked about how quilts can tell stories, and we mentioned the Underground Railroad quilts. Some say that slaves escaping from the south were aided by clues represented by quilt patterns on their journeys. This story began with the oral history of one woman, Ozella McDaniel Williams of Charleston, S.C., a quilter and retired educator, who told of a quilt code that had been handed down through generations of women in her family. This code purportedly aided fleeing slaves to find their way north to freedom.

Williams told her story to Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and teacher who happened to be walking through a marketplace in 1994 where Williams was selling her quilts. Tobin enlisted the help of Raymond Dobard, a quilter and art history professor affiliated with Howard University, and together they wrote a book titled “Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad” published by Random House in 1999.

Of course, relying on the oral history of one family is problematic — there is no corroboration from other sources. Some make the case that slaves were not permitted to learn to read, so, of course, nothing was written down. Those on the other side note that many of the quilt patterns supposedly used in this “code” were not found in quilts until the early 1900s — long after the Underground Railroad was in use. So they couldn’t have been part of any code. Moreover, notable members of the Underground Railroad — such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman — never mention the use of these codes in their accounts of the Railroad.

Barbara Brackman, who is a well-known quilt historian, wrote in her book, “Facts and Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery” published in 2006 by C&T Publishing, that “The tale of quilts and the Underground Railroad makes a good story, but not good quilt history.”

If you look at some of the patterns that were supposedly part of the code, they include:

• North Star (or Evening Star): This told slaves to follow the North Star to Canada — and to freedom.

• Shoofly: This pattern is said to have suggested that slaves scatter and meet together at some later place along the path.

• Drunkard’s Path: This design supposedly warned the slaves to move in a zigzagging way — as if drunk — rather than a straight line to elude any slave hunters.

While fun to imagine, there are problems with these stories. For example, following the North Star would be fairly obvious if one wanted to head North, making the quilt pattern redundant. And splitting up (rather than traveling in a larger group) only makes sense. One would assume that zig-zagging your path to make capture difficult would always be a good idea — you probably wouldn’t need a Drunkard’s Path quilt block to tell you that.

A person escaping from a plantation would probably be traveling at night. And since there were no streetlights back in those days., it would be very difficult to read quilt patterns in the