Belonging: A Culture of Place (21 page)

I was a little girl in a segregated world when I first learned that there were white people who saw black people as less than animals. Sitting on the porch, my siblings and I would watch white folks bring home their servants, the maids and cooks who toiled to make their lives comfortable. These black servants were always relegated to the back seat. Next to the white drivers in the front would be the dog and in the back seat the black worker. Just seeing this taught me much about the interconnectedness of race and class. I often wondered how the black worker felt when it came time to come home and the dog would be placed in front, where racism and white supremacy had decreed no black person could ride. Although just a child, witnessing this act of domination, I understood that the workers must have felt shamed, because they never looked out the window; they never acknowledged a world beyond that moving car.

It was as though they were riding home in a trance — closing everything out was a way to block out the shaming feelings. Silent shadows slouched in the back seats of fancy cars, lone grown-up workers never turned their gaze toward the porch where “liberated” black folks could be seen hanging together. I was the girl they did not see, sitting in the swing, who felt their pain and wanted to make it better. And I would sit there and swing, going back and forth to the dreaming rhythm of a life where black folks would live free from fear.

Leaving racialized fear behind, I left the rhythm of porch swings, of hot nights filled with caring bodies and laughter lighting the dark like June bugs. To the West Coast I went to educate myself, away from the lazy apartheid of a jim crow that had been legislated away but was still nowhere near gone, to the North where I could become the intellectual the South back then had told me I could not be. But like the black folks anthropologist Carol Stack writes about, who flee the North and go South again, yearning for a life they fear is passing them by, I too returned home. To any southerner who has ever loved the South, it is always and eternally home. From birth onward we breathed in its seductive heady scent, and it is the air that truly comforts. From birth onward as southerners we were seduced and imprinted by glimpses of a civic life expressed in communion not found elsewhere. That life was embodied for me in the world of the porch.

Looking for a home in the new South, that is, the place where jim crow finds its accepted expression in crude acting out, I entered a real-estate culture where material profit was stronger than the urge to keep neighborhoods and races pure. Seeking to live near water, where I could walk places, surrounded by an abundant natural tropical landscape, where I can visit Kentucky friends and sit on their porches, I found myself choosing a neighborhood populated mainly by old-school white folks. Searching for my southern home, I looked for a place with a porch. Refurbishing a 1920s bungalow, similar to ones the old Sears and Roebuck catalogue carried for less than seven hundred dollars with or without bathroom, I relished working on the porch. Speaking to neighbors who did not speak back, or one who let me know that they came to this side of town to be rid of lazy blacks, I was reminded how the black families who first bought homes in “white” neighborhoods during the civil rights era suffered — that their suffering along with the pain of their allies in struggle who worked for justice makes it possible for me to choose where I live. By comparison, what I and other black folk experience as we bring diversity into what has previously been a whites-only space is mere discomfort.

In their honor and in their memory, I speak a word of homage and praise for the valiant ones, who struggled and suffered so that I could and do live where I please, and I have made my porch a small everyday place of antiracist resistance, a place where I practice the etiquette of civility. I and my two sisters, who live nearby, sit on the porch. We wave at all the passersby, mostly white, mostly folks who do not acknowledge our presence. Southern white women are the least willing to be civil, whether old or young. Here in the new South three are many white women who long for the old days when they could count on being waited on by a black female at some point in their life, using the strength of their color to weigh her down. A black woman homeowner disrupts this racialized sexist fantasy. No matter how many white women turn their gaze away, we look, and by looking we claim our subjectivity. We speak, offering the southern hospitality, the civility, taught by our parents so that we would be responsible citizens. We speak to everyone.

Humorously, we call these small interventions yet another “Martin Luther King moment.” Simply by being civil, by greeting, by “conversating,” we are doing the antiracist work of nonviolent integration. That includes speaking to and dialoguing with the few black folk we see from the porch who enter our neighborhood mainly as poorly paid, poorly treated workers. We offer them our solidarity in struggle. In King’s famous essay “Loving Your Enemies,” he reminded us that this reaching out in love is the only gesture of civility that can begin to lay the groundwork for true community. He offers the insight, “Love is the only force that can turn an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.” Inside my southern home, I can forge a world outside of the racist enmity. When I come out on my porch I become aware of race, of the hostile racist white gaze, and I can contrast it with the warm gaze of welcome and recognition from those individual white folks who also understand the etiquette of civility, of community building and peace making.

The “starlight bungalow” — my southern home for now, given the name assigned it in the blueprint of the Sears and Roebuck 1920s catalogue (as a modern nomad I do not stay in place) — has an expansive porch. Stucco over wood, the house has been reshaped to give it a Mediterranean flavor. Architecturally it is not a porch that invites a swing, a rocking chair, or even a bench. Covered with warm sand-colored Mexican tiles, it is a porch that is not made for true repose. Expansive, with rounded arches and columns, it does invite the soul to open wide, to enter the heart of the home, crossing a peaceful threshold.

Returning to the South, I longed for a porch for fellowship and late-night gatherings. However, just as I am true to my inner callings, I accept what I feel to be the architectural will of the porch and let it stand as it is, without added seats, with only one tin star as ornament. It is a porch for short sittings, a wide standing porch, for looking out and gazing down, a place for making contact — a place where one can be seen. In the old Sears and Roebuck catalogue, houses were given names and the reader was told what type of life might be imagined in this dwelling. My “starlight bungalow” was described as “a place for distinct and unique living.” When I first sat on the porch welcoming folk, before entering a dwelling full of light, I proclaimed, in old-South vernacular, “My soul is rested.” A perfect porch is a place where the soul can rest.

In Kentucky my house on the hill has a long wide porch facing the lake that is our water source. This is not a porch for meeting and greeting. Perched high on a hill, the house and the porch has no passersby. Like the “starlight bungalow” this is a porch for “quiet and repose.” It invites one to be still — to hear divine voices speak.

14
Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand

To write this piece I have relied on fragments, bits and pieces of information found here and there. Sweet late night calls to mama to see if she “remembers when.” Memories of old conversations coming back again and again, memories like reused fabric in a crazy quilt, contained and kept for the right moment. I have gathered and remembered. I wanted one day to record and document so that I would not participate in further erasure of the aesthetic legacy and artistic contributions of black women. This writing was inspired by the work of artist Faith Ringgold, who has always cherished and celebrated the artistic work of unknown and unheralded black women. Evoking this legacy in her work, she calls us to remember, to celebrate, to give praise.

Even though I have always longed to write about my grandmother’s quiltmaking, I never found the words, the necessary language. At one time I dreamed of filming her quilting. She died. Nothing had been done to document the power and beauty of her work. Seeing Faith Ringgold’s elaborate story quilts, which insist on naming, on documentation, on black women telling our story, I found words. When art museums highlight the artistic achievement of American quiltmakers, I mourn that my grandmother is not among those named and honored. Often representation at such shows suggests that white women were the only group truly dedicated to the art of quiltmaking. This is not so. Yet quilts by black women are portrayed as exceptions; usually there is only one. The card identifying the maker reads “anonymous black woman.” Art historians focusing on quiltmaking have just begun to document traditions of black female quiltmakers, to name names, to state particulars.

My grandmother was a dedicated quiltmaker. That is the very first statement I want to make about Baba, mama’s mother, pronounced with the long “a” sound. Then I want to tell her name, Sarah Hooks Oldham, daughter of Bell Blair Hooks. They were both quiltmakers. I call their names in resistance, to oppose the erasure of black women — that historical mark of racist and sexist oppression. We have too often had no names, our history recorded without specificity, as though it’s not important to know who — which one of us — the particulars. Baba was interested in particulars. Whenever we were “over home,” as we called her house, she let us know “straight up” that upon entering we were to look at her, call her name, acknowledge her presence. Then once that was done we were to state our “particulars” — who we were and/or what we were about. We were to name ourselves — our history. This ritualistic naming was frightening. It felt as though this prolonged moment of greeting was an inter rogation. To her it was a way we could learn ourselves, establish kinship and connection, the way we would know and acknowledge our ancestors. It was a process of gathering and remembering.

Baba did not read or write. She worked with her hands. She never called herself an artist. It was not one of her words. Even if she had known it, there might have been nothing in the sound or meaning to interest, to claim her wild imagination. Instead she would comment, “I know beauty when I see it.” She was a dedicated quiltmaker — gifted, skillful, playful in her art, making quilts for more than seventy years, even after her “hands got tired” and her eyesight was “quitting.” It is hard to give up the work of a lifetime, and yet she stopped making quilts in the years before her dying. Almost ninety, she stopped quilting. Yet she continued to talk about her work with any interested listener. Fascinated by the work of her hands, I wanted to know more, and she was eager to teach and instruct, to show me how one comes to know beauty and give oneself over to it. To her, quiltmaking was a spiritual process where one learned surrender. It was a form of meditation where the self was let go. This was the way she had learned to approach quiltmaking from her mother. To her it was an art of stillness and concentration, a work which renewed the spirit.

Fundamentally in Baba’s mind quiltmaking was women’s work, an activity that gave harmony and balance to the psyche. According to her, it was that aspect of a country woman’s work which enabled her to cease attending to the needs of others and “come back to herself.” It was indeed “rest for the mind.” I learned these ideas from her as a child inquiring about how and why she began to quilt; even then her answer surprised me. Primarily she saw herself as a child of the outdoors. Her passions were fishing, digging for worms, planting vegetable and flower gardens, plowing, tending chickens, hunting. She had as she put it “a renegade nature,” wild and untamed. Today in black vernacular speech we might say she was “out of control.” Bell Blair Hooks, her mother, chose quiltmaking as that exercise that would give the young Sarah a quiet time, a space to calm down and come back to herself. A serious quiltmaker, Bell Hooks shared this skill with her daughter. She began by first talking about quiltmaking as a way of stillness, as a process by which a “woman learns patience.” These rural black women knew nothing of female passivity. Constantly active, they were workers — black women with sharp tongues, strong arms, heavy hands, with too much labor and too little time. There was always work to be done, space had to be made for stillness, for quiet and concentration. Quilting was a way to “calm the heart” and “ease the mind.”

From the nineteenth century until the present day, quiltmakers have, each in their own way, talked about quilting as meditative practice. Highlighting the connection between quilting and the search for inner peace, the editors of
Artists in Aprons: Folk Art by American Women
remind readers that:

Quiltmaking, along with other needle arts, was often an outlet not only for creative energy but also for the release of a woman’s pent-up frustrations. One writer observed that “a woman made utility quilts as fast as she could so her family wouldn’t freeze, and she made them as beautiful as she could so her heart wouldn’t break.” Women’s thoughts, feelings, their very lives were inextricably bound into the designs just as surely as the cloth layers were bound with thread.

In the household of her mother, Baba learned the aesthetics of quiltmaking. She learned it as meditative practice (not unlike the Japanese Tea Ceremony), learning to hold her arms, the needles — just so — learning the proper body posture, then learning how to make her work beautiful, pleasing to the mind and heart. These aesthetic considerations were as crucial as the material necessity that required poor rural black women to make quilts. Often in contemporary capitalist society, where “folk art” is an expensive commodity in the marketplace, many art historians, curators, and collectors still assume that the folk who created this work did not fully understand and appreciate its “aesthetic value.” Yet the oral testimony of black women quiltmakers from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, so rarely documented (yet our mothers did talk with their mothers’ mothers and had a sense of how these women saw their labor), indicates keen awareness of aesthetic dimensions. Harriet Powers, one of the few black women quiltmakers whose work is recognized by art historians, understood that her elaborate appliquéd quilts were unique and exquisite. She understood that folk who made their own quilts wanted to purchase her work because it was different and special. Economic hardship often compelled the selling of work, yet Powers did so reluctantly precisely because she understood its value — not solely as regards skill, time, and labor but as the unique expression of her imaginative vision. Her story quilts with their inventive pictorial narrations were a wonder to behold. Baba’s sense of the aesthetic value of quilting was taught to her by a mother who insisted that work be redone if the sewing and the choice of a piece of fabric were not “just right.” She came into womanhood understanding and appreciating the way one’s creative imagination could find expression in quiltmaking.