The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Sylvia gasped in recognition as she examined close-up photos of several examples of the signature motif.

  Though the arrangements varied from precise to abstract, the triangles were unmistakably minor variations upon the Birds in the Air block.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Sarah asked. Wordlessly Sylvia passed her the brochure and waited, dumbfounded, for her young friend to reach the same conclusion. After a few moments Sarah placed her hand on her gently rounded tummy and sat down. “Birds in the Air.”

  Sylvia nodded.

  Sarah studied the brochure, shaking her head in disbelief. “Do you think this Joanna North is the Joanna that your great-great-aunt Gerda knew, the woman we’ve been calling Joanna Frederick?”

  “If not, the appearance of the same block is a striking coincidence.” Sylvia remembered the envelope, checked to see if Grace had included anything else, and discovered within a single sheet, a letter from her friend.

  “Dear Sylvia,” Grace wrote, “there’s so much more to this story than any show brochure could possibly contain. It defies letters, emails, and phone calls too. How would you feel about meeting me in Charleston so we can see and hear it for ourselves, together?”

  Two weeks later, Sylvia and Sarah arrived at the Charleston International Airport and rented a car for the forty-mile drive south and west to Edisto Island. Grace Daniels had arrived the previous afternoon with her daughter, Justine, and they were waiting to meet Sylvia and Sarah in the lobby of their lovely inn, a restored antebellum plantation house. Sylvia was pleased to see that her friend was in good spirits and in even better health than the previous August, when Grace had returned to Elm Creek Quilt Camp for her annual reunion with a special group of beloved quilting friends. Her doctor had placed her on a clinical trial for a new treatment for her multiple sclerosis, and it appeared to be going remarkably well. Two years ago Grace had required a wheelchair to move from room to room, but the next year she had gotten by with only a walker, and now it appeared that she could make do with a single cane and an occasional assist from Justine, a strikingly lovely woman in her thirties, who had been blessed with her mother’s strong cheekbones, sharp intellect, and rich brown skin. Unlike Grace, who favored short, natural curls, Justine wore her hair in dozens of fine, long braids tied back in a batik headwrap. She kept a protective watch over her mother but balanced carefully between stepping in when needed and letting Grace complete tasks she could handle just fine on her own. Only Grace herself seemed prouder of each bit of independence she had regained.

  The women exchanged news about mutual friends, the manor, Grace’s work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and Justine’s son, Joshua, but catching up quickly was all they spared time for in their eagerness to meet Grace’s colleague from the local historical society. As soon as Sylvia and Sarah checked in and left their suitcases in their rooms, they climbed into Sarah’s rental car and set out for the Edisto Island Folk Museum to learn more about Joanna North and the Freedom Quilters.

  “Sophia Lawrence told me that the Quilts of North Freedom have been part of a touring exhibit for the past four years,” said Grace. “They return to Edisto Island only one month out of the year.”

  “We’re fortunate the timing worked out so perfectly for us,” Sylvia remarked as Sarah pulled into a parking spot in front of the museum. Her heart fluttered and she took a deep breath to calm her nerves. The answers to all her questions—and the questions that had plagued her great-great-aunt Gerda until her death—could lie just beyond those museum doors.

  Her eyes met Sarah’s as they climbed out of the car. Sarah, her long shirt all but concealing her early pregnancy, threw Sylvia an encouraging grin as she hefted her tote bag to her shoulder and gave it a protective pat. Sylvia smiled, knowing Sarah would allow no harm to come to its precious contents.

  Sophia Lawrence greeted them in the vestibule, embracing Grace like a long-lost friend and clasping Sylvia’s hand as if she were an honored guest. “I admire your work very much,” she said, her salt-and-pepper dreadlocks brushing her shoulders. “I keep an old American Quilter’s Society calendar open to Sewickley Sunrise on the wall of my office.”

  “So within your museum it’s always May of 1982,” Sylvia remarked.

  “May of 1982, December of 1861—we try to preserve all significant eras here,” replied Sophia. “But from what Grace has told me, it’s the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction that interest you most.”

  Sophia led them into a spacious gallery where the quilts from the brochure as well as several others fashioned in the Freedom Quilters’ unique style were displayed. As they toured the exhibit, Sophia shared what she knew about the creator of each quilt, the materials she had used—almost always scraps preserved from worn clothing or remnants from a now-defunct local fabric mill—and the quilt’s provenance. Most of the contemporary quilts had come from the artists’ own personal collections, while the antique pieces had been donated or loaned by the quiltmakers’ descendants. In recent years, media attention and the respect of the art world had brought the current Freedom Quilters a measure of national success that the founders of the quilting circle would have found astonishing. They had quilted to beautify their homes, to make frugal use of worn clothing, and to take pleasure in creative work. They never would have imagined that their handiwork would be displayed in museums, sold for astonishing prices, admired by collectors, and praised in art reviews in magazines and newspapers from coast to coast.

  “If not for Joanna North’s vision,” Sophia said, “these quilts would never have been created, their unique style would never have evolved, and so much beauty would have been lost to the world.”

  “Tell Sylvia what you’ve learned about Joanna North,” Grace asked. “But please start at the beginning. I wanted her to hear the story from you.”

  “There’s so much to tell,” said Sophia, smiling. “We’re fortunate that Joanna was literate, that she taught her children to read and write, and that she kept a journal.”

  “A journal?” exclaimed Sylvia.

  “Yes, but unfortunately only a few pages have survived the years.” Sophia indicated a glass display case on the opposite wall. “They’re very precious to us, as you can imagine. But even so, most of what we know of Joanna’s history has come down through the oral tradition, stories passed down from daughter to daughter.”

  Born in Virginia, Sophia explained, Joanna had been sold down south after a failed escape attempt. She worked as a seamstress and laundress in the household of Stephen Chester, one of the most prosperous Sea Island cotton planters in South Carolina. On the Chester plantation, Oak Grove, Joanna married and had a child, a daughter named Ruth. Given to Chester’s eldest daughter as a wedding gift, Joanna and Ruth were brought to Charleston to serve her new master and mistress, Colonel Robert and Mrs. Evangeline Harper. Family lore told that during the early years of the war, Joanna had served as a spy for the Union by passing along valuable military secrets gleaned from Colonel Harper’s office. However, she had not known her Union contact’s real name and thus after the war she was unable to prove her record of service.

  “We have court documents detailing her fight to receive the military pension which she had rightfully earned,” Sophia said. “Eventually the government awarded her and her heirs a modest annual stipend for the years she spent working for the Union army at Port Royal as a laundress, but nothing for her time as a spy in Charleston, which was by far the more dangerous duty. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  At some point during the spring or summer of 1862, Sophia continued, Joanna’s husband ran away from the Chesters and managed to get word to Joanna that he intended to join the African-American regiment formed by General David Hunter on Hilton Head after the fall of Port Royal. Joanna had never lost her thirst for freedom and she was determined to reunite her family, so when the Harpers decided to evacuate the city, she managed to slip away in the chaos, bringing with her Ruth and her two adopted children, Hannah and A
dam. They managed to make their way to Port Royal, where Joanna discovered that her husband had indeed joined Hunter’s African-American regiment, but that it had been disbanded under charges that Hunter had acted without authorization and that his soldiers, former slaves all, had not volunteered but had been forced to enlist.

  For years afterward Joanna had struggled in vain to discover what had become of her husband. All that was known for certain was that for many months he had served the Union army as a laborer, the only service available to African-American men at the time, but inconclusive evidence suggested that he had later joined up with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an African-American regiment led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and had died in the ill-fated but valorous attack on Fort Wagner.

  “According to family tradition, Titus Chester was an expert hunter,” said Sophia. “He would not have been content to dig ditches and pitch tents when he knew how to handle a rifle so well. In one of Ruth’s surviving letters, she recounts a visit from Lewis Henry Douglass, a sergeant major from the Fifty-fourth, and says he told Joanna that Titus had fought bravely and died with honor.”

  “Lewis Henry Douglass,” Grace said. “Frederick Douglass’s son?”

  Sophia nodded. “That’s correct. Apparently he kept in touch with the family for several years afterward, and Joanna probably would not have received her government stipend without his intervention.”

  As Sylvia listened, tears of joy and wistful discovery gathered and threatened to fall. She wondered if Joanna North had ever met Frederick Douglass himself. The Joanna that had come to Elm Creek Manor had learned to read after being inspired by Douglass’s Autobiography. If these two Joannas were one and the same, it would have been fitting if she had eventually met the man whose life had helped shape her own.

  Sophia continued the astonishing tale. Alone at Port Royal with three young children in her care, amidst ten thousand other slaves abandoned by owners fleeing their barrier island plantations ahead of the Union advance, Joanna found work as a laundress and seamstress. Although those were her official roles, she served however she could be useful, sometimes as a nurse, as a cook, and often as a teacher, helping other newly freed slaves learn to read.

  She served faithfully throughout the Civil War, and later, as the head of her household, she was granted forty acres of land as part of the Port Royal Experiment, wherein property that had once belonged to the rebellious planters was divided up among the newly freed slaves. Joanna accepted forty acres of the Chesters’ abandoned plantation, Oak Grove, perhaps believing that her husband would think to look for her there.

  He never came, but others did: Titus’s two nieces and a nephew; Sally, a cook from the Harpers’ Charleston home; and George, another house slave who had been instrumental in arranging Joanna’s escape. In 1868 Joanna and George married, and since Joanna refused to accept George’s surname—Harper, that of their former master—he changed his last name to North, which Joanna had assumed upon her escape.

  Joanna had named the farm North’s Freedom, and as the years passed and the community grew, the possessive was dropped and the small town that sprung up became known as North Freedom. “Most people believe it refers to a direction,” Sophia said, shaking her head in amusement. “Or they believe it’s the northern part of a town called Freedom. That’s not the case at all. The town and the quilting circle that arose from it were named after Joanna. She lived out the rest of her years in North Freedom, and according to family stories, she both appreciated the blessings of her hard-won liberty and endured difficult times throughout Reconstruction, when the promises of slavery’s end failed to materialize. For most African-Americans in the South, the struggle for true freedom had only just begun.”

  “Did Joanna ever leave North Freedom?” asked Sylvia. “Didn’t she ever travel north once she was free?”

  “According to a family history her eldest daughter, Hannah, wrote, Joanna often spoke of traveling back to the Pennsylvania farm where she had once found refuge. But in the early years, she felt compelled to remain on Edisto Island in case Titus came searching for her. Later, after Titus was gone and she remarried, she had two more children by George, not to mention so many other responsibilities that travel became impossible.” Sophia smiled ruefully. “Travel was also prohibitively expensive for a family that struggled to get by on very little. But Hannah’s family history offers another suggestion.”

  “What’s that?” asked Justine.

  Sophia hesitated, thinking, weighing her words. “It’s a cryptic passage, one I never could quite puzzle out. Hannah says that once, when an opportunity to travel north came her way, Joanna mulled over the opportunity for days before finally deciding to remain home. When Hannah asked her why, Joanna replied, ‘Everyone I knew from those days has gone on to make better lives for themselves. They probably wouldn’t thank me to come to them carrying tales from unhappy times. Sometimes the past is best left alone.’ Or at least that’s how Hannah remembered the conversation.”

  “How sad,” said Sarah. “I would think her former protectors would have been thrilled to have heard from her, to know that she was alive and safe.”

  “Perhaps they knew,” replied Sophia. “Joanna was reputedly a prolific letter writer. Perhaps Joanna had informed them of her safety and was only awaiting an invitation to return, an invitation that never came. We’ll probably never know.”

  Sophia led them on through the gallery, pausing to study and admire individual quilts, each of which retained the traditional characteristics of the Freedom Quilters while also expressing each woman’s unique artistry. Gazing upon them, Sylvia could imagine the Joanna she had discovered in the pages of her great-great-aunt Gerda’s memoir persevering through unimaginable hardships, doggedly pursuing her freedom, and going on to teach and share and inspire those around her. Could there have been two such courageous, amazing women in the world at the same point in history?

  She knew the answer already: There had been hundreds, even thousands, of such remarkable women in every era, but their stories had gone untold or had been forgotten. It was up to current and future generations to preserve the fragments of women’s history that remained, to mend the frayed edges, to tell everyone who would listen about the strength in the warp and the beauty in the weft so that no one could dismiss their unsung contributions as mere scraps of faded fabric.

  Even if she never confirmed that Joanna North was the brave runaway who had found shelter with her great-grandparents, even if she never discovered why that runaway had never returned for her son, even if Gerda’s long-lost quilter were never found, it was enough to know that such a woman had existed, that she had faced loss and hardship with courage and faith, and that she had remained undaunted. If one such woman or two or thousands had lived, it should give all women hope that they too could live as bravely, would live as bravely, whatever dangers or sorrows confronted them.

  At last Sophia brought the tour to a stop before what appeared to be the oldest quilt in the collection. Though the pieces were worn and faded, the pattern had retained its striking boldness—a Courthouse Steps variation surrounded by an outer border of solid squares occasionally replaced by a Birds in the Air block. Beside her, Sylvia heard Sarah draw in a sharp breath of recognition and excitement.

  “We’re certain that Joanna North herself made this quilt,” Sophia said proudly, pleased by Sarah’s reaction, though she could not possibly suspect its cause. “It’s the jewel of our collection.”

  “How do you know Joanna made it?” asked Sarah, although she surely knew that Sophia’s conclusion was true.

  Surely Sarah must have recognized the size of the Birds in the Air blocks, the blue-and-brown homespun fabric used in the large triangle in the lower right corner, the double pinks scattered here and there in the smaller triangles, the dark wools, the soft faded cottons. Sylvia had known them the moment she saw them, for she had seen those same prints and patterns in another quilt, studied them and wondered about the
m and the woman who had sewn the small pieces together for so long that they were engraved on her memory.

  “Yes, how can you be sure?” Justine asked. “Did Joanna sign the quilt or embroider her initials?”

  “She wrote about it in her journal,” Sophia explained. “One of the few extant complete passages describes how she enlarged a quilt that had turned out too small by attaching borders made from blocks left over from an earlier project. I only wish our collection boasted that first quilt, the quilt that influenced all the Quilts of North Freedom that followed, but I’m afraid that treasure has been lost to history.”

  “Perhaps it’s not lost after all,” said Sylvia, beckoning Sarah to open the tote bag, to show Sophia the tattered Birds in the Air quilt that had set her upon a quest to discover what had happened to Gerda’s lost quilter, a quest that seemed, at last, to have reached its end.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven