African American Quilts

African American quilts, and the African American quilting tradition have not gotten the exposure they deserve. That is, with African American quilts one gets not just warm or decorative blankets and throws but experiences a history, storytelling, and emotional import that is unparalleled by any other bedding, wall hanging, and culture.

According to scholars and students at the University of Virginia (and scholars they quote), the early African American quilts have an inter-textile character, because they were created by individual slave groups who were often sold and transported, sending their quilts, their techniques, and, I assume, their stories and characters to other environments with different cultural traditions and weaving techniques—thereby making the African American quilts an amalgamation of multicultural habit, skill, and personality, if you will. The quilts were made, then, by four distinct then blended “civilizations”—in Burkino Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Senegal, the Mande-speaking peoples; in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, the Fon and Yoruba groups; in the Cameroons and Nigeria, the Ejigham peoples; and in Angola and Zaire, the group known as Kongo.

The weaving of those earliest African American quilts incorporated not only the skills and techniques of numerous regional groups but also included, directly and indirectly, religious, cultural, and aesthetic experience: as the University of Va scholars also contend, colors and size of shapes, for instance, were continuations of groups and tribes (warring or traveling) having to have high visibility from great distances. Therefore, many African American quilts today still have those unique characteristics.

Another fascinating reality concerning African American quilts is in their design: first, quilt-makers would not stick to symmetry of pattern, for the culture then believed that evil spirits would travel in a straight line—so to throw off the demon spirits was to throw off the perfectly aligned pattern and mix up the design. Second, changing the pattern would protect makers from others copying their exact creation. And third, the changes of not the design but the material pointed to the status of the owner of the African American quilts. Again, as the students at U of Virginia suggest, quilt bearers could represent their prestige, power, esteem, and wealth through their quilted belongings.

Just as interesting, too, are the African American quilts that are story quilts. These quilts were not made for slave owners but were made years later, on the women’s (and some men’s) own time—which they had little of but which they used to make quilts for necessity and then quilts which expressed their views, experiences, and even emotions. These kinds of quilts are not unique to the African American tradition, however, and if you go to a modern day quilting bee—or party—you will find many people willing to tell you the stories that their quilts tell.

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