and Nicodemus. We all gonna be free.”
Slave drivers didn’t take kindly to this type of wild talk. They gave him a few lashes on his naked back.
Like all the slave children of Fairfield Farms Nicodemus was brought up by nursemaids at the nursery, and then transferred to the African cabins at the age of about five or so. The Abyssinian Queen made it a point that Abednego, who lived at the mulatto cabins, got to know Nicodemus as his brother. This was achieved with the active assistance of those who were assigned to look after the children as they grew older and to oversee their labor. Right from the beginning the boys hit it off, and with a great deal of connivance at various levels it became possible for them to spend some evenings together.
The Owner was becoming even more compassionate and more liberal with age. The Abyssinian Queen took advantage of this weakness and asked him if she could have the boys stay with her at the cabin she shared with two aging matriarchs.
“How do you know they’re your boys?” asked The Owner.
“It don’t matter whose boys they are,” said the Abyssinian Queen. “I just like them to stay with me.”
“Those boys are marked already,” The Owner warned her. “The black one is gonna be a good stud. The mulatto will be ready for sale soon. In the meantime it makes no never mind to me if they stay with you.”
The lady of the house was dead set against this arrangement. But The Owner, who obviously still had a soft spot for the Abyssinian Queen, prevailed, and the woman lived with her sons in her small cabin. The matriarchs were happy to have young ones under their roof to spoil with treats as grandmothers are wont to do.
The Abyssinian Queen’s main occupation was to sew and mend clothes for the whole slave community. She was one of three women assigned this task. Two of them were the aging matriarchs, who had been saved from the auction block decades before because of their skill as seamstresses. It was from one of them that the Abyssinian Queen learned not only how to sew the most wonderful shirts and dresses from feed sacks, but how to create quilts from scraps of fabric gathered from all odd places, including old clothes from the big house and leftovers from the muslin that the lady of the house occasionally purchased for the Sunday dresses of house slaves’ children.
She spent her nights sewing the quilts. When the matriarchs discovered her interest in and flair for needlecraft they took upon themselves all the sewing and mending tasks, and let the Abyssinian Queen focus on her quilts. She became better by the day, and was voracious in learning new patterns. Soon the matriarchs taught her that the quilts her people made carried secret messages. Beauty that spoke a silent language, they called it. Openly it was there for all to admire, yet its meaning rested only with those who knew the code hidden in the colors and the designs.
Before learning the language of the quilts she used to specialize in crazy patchwork, at least four decades before these constructions of odd pieces of randomly arranged fabric became a fad in that part of Virginia—which had, of course, become West Virginia by the time the crazy quilt flourished. It was in the 1830s, and she did not know she was founding a tradition. Even if she had been conscious of the fact it would not have mattered to her that she would get no recognition for it.
Abednego and Nicodemus learned that there was some rhythm in the madness of her compositions. These were not crazy designs in the true sense of the later tradition. In the seemingly haphazard arrangements, she taught them to identify some landmarks. A hill here. A forest there. A creek. A river. The Kanawha River, the boys later learned. She had painstakingly stitched and knotted the map of the plantation and beyond, using information she had gathered from those who had seen those places. Patches of different colors represented actual landmarks.
She herself had
Slave drivers didn’t take kindly to this type of wild talk. They gave him a few lashes on his naked back.
Like all the slave children of Fairfield Farms Nicodemus was brought up by nursemaids at the nursery, and then transferred to the African cabins at the age of about five or so. The Abyssinian Queen made it a point that Abednego, who lived at the mulatto cabins, got to know Nicodemus as his brother. This was achieved with the active assistance of those who were assigned to look after the children as they grew older and to oversee their labor. Right from the beginning the boys hit it off, and with a great deal of connivance at various levels it became possible for them to spend some evenings together.
The Owner was becoming even more compassionate and more liberal with age. The Abyssinian Queen took advantage of this weakness and asked him if she could have the boys stay with her at the cabin she shared with two aging matriarchs.
“How do you know they’re your boys?” asked The Owner.
“It don’t matter whose boys they are,” said the Abyssinian Queen. “I just like them to stay with me.”
“Those boys are marked already,” The Owner warned her. “The black one is gonna be a good stud. The mulatto will be ready for sale soon. In the meantime it makes no never mind to me if they stay with you.”
The lady of the house was dead set against this arrangement. But The Owner, who obviously still had a soft spot for the Abyssinian Queen, prevailed, and the woman lived with her sons in her small cabin. The matriarchs were happy to have young ones under their roof to spoil with treats as grandmothers are wont to do.
The Abyssinian Queen’s main occupation was to sew and mend clothes for the whole slave community. She was one of three women assigned this task. Two of them were the aging matriarchs, who had been saved from the auction block decades before because of their skill as seamstresses. It was from one of them that the Abyssinian Queen learned not only how to sew the most wonderful shirts and dresses from feed sacks, but how to create quilts from scraps of fabric gathered from all odd places, including old clothes from the big house and leftovers from the muslin that the lady of the house occasionally purchased for the Sunday dresses of house slaves’ children.
She spent her nights sewing the quilts. When the matriarchs discovered her interest in and flair for needlecraft they took upon themselves all the sewing and mending tasks, and let the Abyssinian Queen focus on her quilts. She became better by the day, and was voracious in learning new patterns. Soon the matriarchs taught her that the quilts her people made carried secret messages. Beauty that spoke a silent language, they called it. Openly it was there for all to admire, yet its meaning rested only with those who knew the code hidden in the colors and the designs.
Before learning the language of the quilts she used to specialize in crazy patchwork, at least four decades before these constructions of odd pieces of randomly arranged fabric became a fad in that part of Virginia—which had, of course, become West Virginia by the time the crazy quilt flourished. It was in the 1830s, and she did not know she was founding a tradition. Even if she had been conscious of the fact it would not have mattered to her that she would get no recognition for it.
Abednego and Nicodemus learned that there was some rhythm in the madness of her compositions. These were not crazy designs in the true sense of the later tradition. In the seemingly haphazard arrangements, she taught them to identify some landmarks. A hill here. A forest there. A creek. A river. The Kanawha River, the boys later learned. She had painstakingly stitched and knotted the map of the plantation and beyond, using information she had gathered from those who had seen those places. Patches of different colors represented actual landmarks.
She herself had
Similar Books
