Every day in my newsfeed I see something that makes me want to shout or scream or cry, but instead I turn my head away and go back to my work feeling helpless. This story, though, stopped me in my tracks: "Canceled federal grant may mean 1,500 historic quilts won't be preserved," by Chloe Veltman on NPR. Of all the horrors filling the airwaves, why cry over quilts?
Quilts are utilitarian: Scraps of fabric are recycled, pieced together, and sandwiched into layers to keep a family warm at night.
Quilts are history: Fragments of worn-out clothes get preserved in the pieced-together quilt top. In Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," treasured family quilts contain "scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty or more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell's paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War."
Quilts are art: Over the centuries thousands of quilters--mostly women--devoted precious time and skill to bringing a measure of beauty and color into their households. A well-pieced an intricately stitched Lone Star pattern doesn't warm the body any better than would a mishmash of scraps, but its beauty warms the heart.
Quilting is democratic: Anyone with access to fabric scraps, needle, thread, and patience can put a quilt together, although having a quilt frame and a group of friends to help with the hard parts can be a boon. Quilting thrives within a community where the elders pass their acquired knowledge down to the rising generation.
In "Everyday Use" Walker introduces a mother of two daughters with very different attitudes toward the family's quilts. The educated, sophisticated daughter, Dee, wants to nab the family's quilts and hang them on her walls to bolster her authenticity and impress her friends, but her damaged and backward sister, Maggie, wants the quilts to keep her and her future husband warm at night. However, Maggie is willing to surrender the quilts because, as she says, "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts"--and besides, she knows how to quilt. She can always make more.
Walker allows Maggie to win the argument, keeping the quilts for everyday use. This may feel like a travesty, because, as Dee reminds us, using the quilts will only destroy them, and they would be far more valuable hanging on a museum's wall. But throughout the story Walker distinguishes between the outsiders, who plunder a community's items of worth and beauty, and the insiders who keep folk-art practices alive by passing their skills down to the next generation. Walker's sympathies lie with the quilters more than the quilts.
But those quilts! What happens to old quilts when the quilters have died off?
"Because quilts are for everyday use and stored in people's homes," writes NPR's Veltman, "they're easily exposed to mold, insects and other destructive elements that cause the fabric to degrade over time."
To counter this degradation, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is putting its stellar collection of historic quilts through a complex and expensive process. Many of the 3000 irreplaceable quilts created by African American quilters, some dating back to the 1860s, must be carefully cleaned, disinfected, and stored or displayed, a preservation process involving "treating them with carbon dioxide gas for about a five to seven week period"
This process will cost $1.6 million, but it will safely preserve the quilts for future study and display. BAMPFA received federal grants totaling $460,000 and had already treated about half of the quilts before the grant was terminated. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which administers the grant and has been gutted by recent government cuts, wrote that "your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency's priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and IMLS programs."
And what are those interests? I'll let Veltman explain:
An IMLS statement said the agency is redirecting funding toward programs that "serve as a symbol to their communities of American greatness, ones that spark the imagination of children and provide an outlet for younger generations to immerse themselves in the inspirational story of our founding, ones that impart a renewed sense of pride and inspire the virtues of patriotic citizenship..."
I don't know about you, but a collection of beautiful quilts attesting to the tireless efforts and skills of often unknown and marginalized quilters would serve well as a symbol of American greatness, and perhaps it would even spark children to imagine how they could use their own skills and resources to beautify their communities.
But that kind of inspiration no longer "serves the interest of the United States," apparently. What does? More statues? More exaltation of loud and powerful men while other quiet contributions to culture go unremarked?
I am reminded of the collection of embroidered shawls stashed away in a trunk in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame. While powerful men in the novel take violent action cement their power in the new nation of Pakistan--or Peccavistan, as it sometimes appears in the novel--one marginalized woman sits silently embroidering the stories of the men's perfidy on fifteen shawls. No one fears or respects a powerless woman who simply sits embroidering shawls, but she observes the men and records their deeds in a history that remains hidden at the end of the book.
But what if someday someone were to open the trunk? The shawls are still there waiting to reveal another side of the nation's story.
And that's how I view these historic quilts. They tell stories too long overlooked of hard-working people who pulled together scraps and fragments to surround all of us with warmth, truth, and beauty. If that's not a foundational American virtue, what is?
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