The tradition of American Patchwork Quilting is nowhere more vital than in the Mississippi Delta. The Gee’s Bend quilters, a group of rural Alabama African American women descended from enslaved people who create abstract quilts using improvisational designs, made their Delta quilting world-famous. A quilt can be many things, but at base it is a utilitarian covering. A quilt is a stitched product of two layers of fabric with fluff sandwiched between. Past generations combed cotton fibers by hand and inserted them into quilts in small patches. Quilting techniques are handed down among generations of makers. Quiltmaker Mensie Lee Pettway, a Gee’s Bend quilter, says this about their quilts: “A lot of people make quilts just for your bed for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history” (qtd in Sohan 113).
The process of producing contemporary quilts is machine-assisted in many ways, but the artistry of the quilt’s designer, the purpose of its creation, and the symbolism it carries remain unchanged. Southern fiction reflects the traditional meanings of quilts, and the absence of quilts in novels such as A Lesson Before Dying by Earnest Gaines and Sounder by William Armstrong speaks loudly of the deprivation of the communities represented.
A quilt is a form of textile art. The textile media include a vast array of choices. Different fabrics, battings, and threads carry different absorbencies, color variations, durability, laundering guidelines, and textures. The quilt maker must work the magic that selects from among such choices and create from them a work of art designed to endure practical and daily usage. Linda Eaton’s book, Quilts in a Material World: Selections from the Winterthur Collection, records the Winterthur “[M]useum’s first quilt conference and also an exhibition,” but Delta quilts usually find more practical lives (Klassen Quilts 205). Quilt scholar Teri Klassen traces how “family quilts [which] achieve heirloom status . . . become both security blankets for storing memories but also colorful and intricately patterned works of creative expression” (Hansen 155). Shelly Zegart explores how Gee’s Bend quilts took on a utilitarian function in the lives of their makers. They were made “to give as gifts, to use until they wore out” so that quilts represent functional art (Zegart). Thus, the quilt serves a function in the life of the community.
The purpose of a quilt is to cover something with the intention of expressing compassion, offering comfort, and declaring value through affection. Because quilting is a labor-intensive art, a quilt is a covering that conveys the idea that what it covers is precious. Quilts are usually created to celebrate a personal acquaintance. Quilts are “sources of warmth, comfort, and a secure home environment” (Klassen Tennessee 30). Like Gee’s Bend quilts, traditional quilts recycle scraps of fabric originally purposed for other reasons—clothing, curtains, or linens, for example. Through these tactile remnants of memories, quilts become heirlooms. Gee’s Bend quilters, like most modern quilt makers, learn the techniques they practice from elders in their community. The quilts produced are intended to function as part of daily community life and were used to pad bed springs and to be ground cover for mechanics working under vehicles.
Southern fiction which tells the story of African American communities should reflect similar quilt presences, but the normalization of quilt culture often results in the absence of commentary. An absence of quilts speaks loudly about a presence of want and a void of traditional needs. For example, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines uses the word “quilt” only once, though quilt substitutes are abundant in the novel.
The fact that the word “quilt” appears only once in A Lesson Before Dying emphasizes themes of absence and deprivation in the novel. If a quilt is meant to offer decoration, warmth, and comfort, the setting of Gaines’s novel lacks such human supports and instead focuses on the absence of the human connections necessary to dignify and identify life. In brief, this novel records the story of Grant Wiggins’s relationships with his community. He is the teacher in the quarter where his Tante Lou is best friends with Miss Emma. Wiggins must teach a young man that despite the dehumanization of his unjust death sentence, he must claim the integrity of his manhood.
Miss Emma has raised her orphan godson, Jefferson. He grew into a developmentally-disabled young man whom trouble often seeks. His current predicament results from his vulnerability to suggestions he take part in misbehavior by Brother and Bear, two community ne’er-do-wells. The circumstances of their robbing Gropé’s liquor store and then dying in the murderous shootout that follows are almost inconsequential. The simple facts of the trial are, as Professor Wiggins tells us, “A white man had been killed during a robbery” so Jefferson “would have to die” (Gaines 4). Jefferson’s court-appointed attorney pleads for his life on the basis of his intellectual disability.
The lawyer demands, “What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this” (Gaines 8). That image of a hog becomes the identity of young Jefferson, who is found guilty. It is an identity Wiggins is drafted to confront by teaching Jefferson to become a man with human dignity before his execution, and this lesson is a task neither Jefferson nor his teacher undertakes willingly. The relationship between the jailed orphan and his teacher begins as taut as the layers of a quilt framed for handstitching in a quilting bee. A quilt handed down through family generations is a form of identity, but Jefferson’s world is bereft of quilts even though it clearly needs them. As “producing change is ultimately a rhetorical act,” quilts can also be rhetorical acts of “communal affirmation” of “human dignity” (Auger 78, 79, 80). Vanessa Sohan attempts to “expand what counts as rhetoric” in her exploration of quilts (Walden 209). She claims that quilts employ “the needle as pen” to voice their maker’s rhetorical call to change (Sohan 114).
Jefferson is not the only one changing. As he learns to become a man, his teacher changes too, and “Grant’s transformation” is a matter of finding “dignity” among the racial color mixes, or quilt of people, around him (Doyle 466). Gaines contributes to this conversation by adding silence. Only one quilt appears in the pages of this novel. The quilt’s appearance speaks of Emma’s transformation from the godmother of an orphaned child into a woman facing bereavement and loneliness with his death.
Instead of quilts, though, readers are presented in this novel with items that substitute for quilts. These quasi-quilts emphasize the absence of the decoration, warmth, and comfort all humans need. For example, when Grant Wiggins rehearses the story of how he became the teacher at the little church school in the quarter, he tells about his own days studying there under Matthew Antoine, who is proud to be Creole and thus is different from the children he teaches. Antoine predicts tragedy for all the boys in Wiggins’s class, and the disasters mostly come, but Wiggins has an aunt who knows education can be the boy’s salvation. Later, when the Creole doomsayer has retired, Grant visits him. The angry old man speaks of the “blanket of ignorance that has [covered the quarter] for the past three hundred years” (Gaines 64). Ironically, Antoine himself holds a literal “blanket tight around him” and complains of the cold (64). He needs the warmth and the comfort a quilt could provide. About their relationship, Grant Wiggins says, “There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything at all” (64). A blanket can exist in such lack of human connection, but a quilt must be absent because its presence would alter the dynamic. Metaphorically, he is in a place where no one loves him enough to craft a quilt for him.
The idea of coldness recurs throughout the book, and many efforts are made to banish it: fire, wood, smoke, and even a rabbit fur coat are mentioned, but no quilts. The bricks walls of the courthouse have the appearance of blocks in a simple patchwork quilt, but they offer neither warmth nor comfort. Inside the jail, Jefferson has no quilt. His bed is “a metal bunk covered with a thin mattress and a woolen army blanket” in a room designed to dehumanize the accused (Gaines 71). In this cold place lacking decoration, warmth, and comfort, Grant Wiggins must help Jefferson find his identity and his dignity with no quilt to offer comfort or celebrate human endeavor nor integrity.
Grant receives a summons to Henri Pichot’s plantation-owner house when the date of execution is set. He struggles to face the necessity of encountering Jefferson’s nannan and turns to Vivian, his source of comfort. When he returns to the quarter, he pays the respect he owes by visiting Miss Emma’s house, which is crowded. The only actual quilt in the book covers Miss Emma, who has “taken to her bed” to endure the ordeal before her (Gaines 161). Grant Wiggins tells us “Miss Emma lay under a quilt, her head resting on two pillows,” so we know that all human care that can be offered has been (160). The quilt, the pillows, and the people in her house attempt to provide the decoration, warmth, and comfort Miss Emma needs, even though Jefferson must do without such human dignities.
Readers encounter the most soul-chilling of the quilt substitutes in chapter 30, when a truck rolls into town. The load in the back is hidden beneath an appropriately “gray tarpaulin cover,” which does little to conceal the death it carries (Gaines 235). When Sidney de Rogers is sent by his wife to buy her a spool of quilting thread, he encounters the townsfolk mesmerized by the sight of men smoking on the edge of that truck. In a domestic metaphor too obvious to miss, “the tarpaulin had been rolled back” to uncover the truck’s bed (236). This voyeuristic moment rife with sexual suggestion is countered by the following paragraph’s description of the previous night when Grant’s aunt along with “other older people in the quarter” served as a human quilt to cover Miss Emma’s sorrow (236). Because she is “distraught over the impending execution . . . a crowd gathers at [Miss Emma’s] house, now managed by Tante Lou” (Folks 259). They cannot keep Jefferson’s date with death at bay, but the community can cover her from facing its presence alone.
The final quilt substitute in this novel is the death cloth mentioned in the conversation between Grant Wiggins and Paul Bonin, who was a witness at the execution. Paul is a younger deputy who has dared to sympathize with Jefferson, Wiggins, and the women who love them. Paul is not emotionally numb enough from the demands of his life to dismiss the human suffering he watched grow among Jefferson and those who cared for him. He says, “After they put the death cloth over his face, I couldn’t watch anymore. I looked down at the floor,” indicating his recognition of the humiliation inherent in this quilt substitute (Gaines 254). A quilt celebrates dignity. This substitute indicates its opposite. The quasi-quilt death cloth offers comfort to the onlookers who need not face the agonies of death because of its covering. Paul avoids even the covered agony by gazing at the floor instead of the death mask.
Traditional Southern quilts are domestic art, patchwork in nature, that provide decoration, warmth, and comfort in a family home. Quilts act as rhetorical devices in Southern fiction written for both adults and younger audiences. Young adult fiction such as Sounder by William Armstrong assumes acquaintance with quilts in pivotal moments of its plot. Many stories of Southern culture for young adults focus on white boys and their dogs. A near miss to the tales of hunting dogs and hard working hunters, Sounder follows a family of share croppers and their dog, Sounder. The mother is hardworking and loyal, and she takes care of the family after the father’s arrest and imprisonment. The narrator recognizes her contribution in the form of patches on his and his father’s overalls. These faux quilts are missing the decorative element reserved for those above the poverty line and were strictly functional pieces of cloth. This fact, however, does nothing to degrade the comfort and warmth provided through the mother’s labor.
The author uses these as a status symbol of financial privilege, as the narrator develops an insecurity around their economic status and, representatively, his mother’s patches on the family clothes. The children who mocked him were acutely aware that “this family was poorer than their neighbors,” though they too patched their jeans (Huse 70). They could afford matching patches, but new pants were still out of reach. They teased the speaker about his mismatched fabric, referencing their monochromatic trousers, “and pointed to the gingham on the knees of his overalls” as evidence of their superiority (Armstrong 17). These patches should represent comfort and warmth against the elements through his school day, a mother’s love shielding out the cold. Instead they are permeable by demeaning taunts of heartless children who do not know how to value the handicraft necessary to make the clothes available suitable for the family’s needs. The inexperienced, privileged children see these patches as unnecessary decorations, badges of dishonor.
The narrator’s father is depicted sporting a quilted jacket: a blanket-lined, patched overcoat. He wears this garment on the night he steals the ham, and in his desperate act of providing for his family, he tears the thin patches lose from the worn garment once again. The narrator describes the scene the next morning as “like Christmas,” with a ham cooking and warming up the house from the winter outside (Armstrong 16). The mother is sewing the patches back on the garment, using love and artistry to repair the damage in his coat when the boy joins the family for breakfast. Her work foreshadows coming doom, revealing that something took the comfort, warmth, and decoration from the family. The father archetype wearing the functional quilt made by the mother gives the struggling family a covering of love in action. The patches, though, are testimony to the father’s crime, and so would be their downfall.
The racist police appear at their house a few days later. The heartless officials know the father is the thief they seek because, when he tore the patch free, thread and a bit of the fabric patch were left behind. In a disastrous climax, the men brutally arrest the father and shoot Sounder, the family’s guardian dog. The moment that they threw the narrator’s father into the back of the paddy wagon, “his overalls caught on the tail gate bolt, and he tore a long hole in his overalls” (Armstrong 24). Literally and symbolically, his imprisonment begins with the destruction of his quilt, the ruination of his decoration, warmth, and comfort.
The father was forced to do harsh labor far away from his family. The narrator felt his absence as his mother took on full responsibility for their family. The boy missed his father, and he worried about him “with that great rip in his overalls” (Armstrong 31). When the father did return home, he was in similar shape to Sounder, having suffered a mining accident. This novel comments on the horrors of racism that continued after the Civil War, but it gives hope and inspires education. The narrator’s mother supports him while providing for and mothering his siblings, refusing to let her young son shoulder the weight of his father’s actions. She holds his life together both by covering rips in his overalls and by holding the family together through daily domestic labor, one patch at a time.
Quilts pinpoint the qualities that make a dwelling into a healthy home: the presence of decoration, warmth, and comfort. Quilt designs are created to be decorative. Their colors, textures, and patterns beautify and enhance our lives. They are not just blankets, tarps, or patches but spots of prettiness that encourage our spirits to find joy in the privacy of our homes. Quilts are warm and padded, offering us a cushion from the hard realities of work or weather. In environmental terms, we can all lower our central heat reliance at night by sleeping under an extra quilt. Repairing and recycling used textiles lessens our environmental footprint. Quilts can make us better stewards of our world.
Quilts provide comfort. Human hands are needed to create these works of domestic art, and their beauty and warmth are forged in human minds and human hearts. Owning a quilt means someone cares. A quilt is a warm and loving embrace to strengthen us to withstand the cares of our lives and protect us from the troubles that seek us. It’s about time we all have and give the encouragement and support we need to withstand the temptations to dehumanize one another. Southern fiction such as A Lesson Before Dying and Sounder shows us the essential human value of a quilt primarily through the absence of actual mention of quilts in the texts. Quilts, their absence, and their substitutes in two representative works of Southern fiction declare the circumstances which the characters endure. The stories in these two novels lack decoration, warmth, and comfort at key moments of human need.
The dignity and identity quilting wisdom and its results passed down through generations of a family or community are notably missing in these books. In A Lesson Before Dying, only Miss Emma has a quilt. Its presence is literal as well as symbolic of the respect and support her human connections with her community offer her. She is comforted to live in a place where, “unafraid of being hurt, [the preacher] focuses instead on how he can relieve pain,” so she and her godson can endure his execution (Nash 357). In Sounder, the mother uses her handiwork to provide mini-quilts. Her efforts decorate, warm, and comfort the family and enable them all to endure the hardships they must face. The difficulties they face include both the coldness of the winter and the coldness of the white community which degrades them and ruins their quilts, destroying the comfortable identity they share.
Quilts are meant to connect humans, so their presence in fiction focuses our attention on the need for such connections. The approach Marcia Kaylakie employs to explore Texas quiltmaking through “human-interest ‘stories’ that combine facts . . . with . . . how the quilt connects people” is applicable to Delta quiltmaking as well (Klassen Texas Quilts 134). Every human deserves the clarification and support of dignity and identity that a quilt offers. We live in a world capable of using machines to actualize the evidence of integrity, dignity, and unique identity of human heads, hearts, and hands. This is the lesson the teacher learns in Gaines’s novel, that “he must teach his students the dignity and integrity they need to survive” (Magill 9). In Armstrong’s novel, the mother prepares her son to survive the lessons he must learn. It’s about time we listen to the lessons of Southern Delta fiction and learn to recognize and meet human needs.
Works Cited
Armstrong, William H. Sounder. Harper and Row, 1969, New York.
Auger, Philip. “A Lesson About Manhood: Appropriating ‘The Word’ in Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying. Southern Literary Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 74-85, 1995.
Doyle, Mary Ann. “Erasure and Identity in Ernest Gaines’s Louisiana.” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 452–470, 2001.
Folks, Jeffrey J. “Community Responsibility in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, vol. 52, no. 2, pp 259-271, 1March 1999.
Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. Knopf, 1993, New York.
Hansen, Gregory. Book Review of Tennessee Delta Quiltmaking by Teri Klassen. Arkansas Review, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 153-155, 2019.
Huse, Nancy. “Sounder and Its Readers: Learning to Observe.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 12 no. 2, pp. 66-69, 1987.
Klassen, Teri. Book Review of Quilts in a Material World: Selections from the Winterthur Collection by Linda Eaton. Textile, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 205-207. 2008.
—. Book Review of Texas Quilts and Quilters: A Lone Start Legacy by Marcia Kaylakie with Janice Wittington. Museum Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 134-135, 2009.
—. Tennessee Delta Quiltmaking. U of TN P, 2017, Knoxville, TN.
Magill, David E. “’Make Him a Man’: Black Masculinity and Communal Identity in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 61-76, Spring 2016.
Nash, William R. “’You Think a Man Can’t Kneel and Stand?’ Ernest J. Gaines’s Reassessment of Religion as Positive Communal Influence in A Lesson Before Dying.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol 24, no. 1, pp 346-362, 2001.
Sohan, Vanessa Kraemer. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. U of AL P, 2020, Tuscaloosa, AL.
Walden, Sarah. Book Review of Lives Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Rhetorica, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 209-211, 2022.
Zegert, Shelly. Why Quilts Matter: 05: Gee’s Bend: The Most Famous Quilts in America 2011.
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