Posted on 01/23/2007 6:46:55 PM PST by neverdem
This might be something interesting for the crafters' ping list.
I always thought the "code" in quilts was a true story, that safe houses of the Underground Railroad would hang one over the balcony as a secret welcome to runaway slaves. Guess it was a myth all along.
Is this a typo?
Spell check just won't spot a spelling error that is a correctly spelled wrong word. Sigh.
Twin obviously = Twain.
I would put Douglass in the top twenty Americans of all time.
"While the project, which involves rebuilding roadways, will cost more than $15 million in city, state and federal money, the 15,000-square-foot plaza and sculpture were commissioned for $750,000. Its unclear how much it would cost to redesign it now. The memorial, at 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is expected to be completed in fall 2008."
I think there's a lot of wishing and grabbing for tangibles that just might not be there regarding the underground railway...the usual "make it simple so we can use it to tell edifying stories" type of thing that happens to history we want to enshrine and pass down to our children. A bit of finding symbols that we can wrap the story around.
It's nearly as interesting about what it says about how people want to view history as how history really works.
And just where does a Harvard historian get off dissing obvious history experts, "Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond Dobard, a quilting and African textiles expert."?
It is he & his ilk that call Washington's cherry tree chopping a 'myth', too. < /sarc
Right up there with John Brown?
"It's nearly as interesting about what it says about how people want to view history as how history really works."
Very true!
If there was a message in the quilts, it was probably more just a reminder of the possibility of escape, of hope.
People who needed to be reminded to take supplies, take evasive action and head north - they wouldn't get too far.
There was one light-skinned woman who disguised herself as a white man with a toothache (face bandaged to hide her beardlessness, arm in a sling so she wouldn't have to sign her name - she was illiterate) travelling on a ship with her manservant (her dark-skinned husband) - they made it north.
Yeah, I wouldn't particularly disagree on that. Just commenting on the picture of the statue, not the man.
"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."
http://www.bartleby.com/73/1599.html
"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."
ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Unverified.
Sounds like the quilting code. LOL! Thanks for the link!
Maybe it was J.C. Watts. :-)
Nice sculpture. It's so rare to see a new formal, non-abstract sculpture being made these days. Mostly piles of geometric junk labelled with some preposterous "title".
No, what your grandfather passes down is what people wanted to remember, shaded by their world view. Sometimes it holds things pretty good, but a lot of the time, when you go back and check the record books, it's been colored with nostalgia...or avoidance...Think of all those, "when I was a kid your age, I had to...." "Teenagers in my day didn't..." and so on.
My grandma grew up hearing how her uncle was killed defending a woman's virtue at a bar...we go back and checked the record, and he had been knifed by three husbands who were tired of him messing with their wives...
It ain't necessarily so. It might be, it might not. It's the documents that get left behind that tells stuff best...the account books, the diaries, the records at the general store, the court cases, all the bits and papers that anchor stuff to trust.
Oral history can and often does corroborate...but sometimes, it gets mythologized...
I haven't studied this particular set of stories myself, and I have no problem with it being one way or the other. But when you see what gets passed around and ends up on snopes, you know that sometimes things aren't exactly what they are talked about being.
I make no judgement to its right or wrong without doing some real study.
"My grandma grew up hearing how her uncle was killed defending a woman's virtue at a bar...we go back and checked the record, and he had been knifed by three husbands who were tired of him messing with their wives..."
Talk about rewriting history...
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