This is one of many Middle Passage quilts that I’ve made over the years. I began it a long time ago (2013?) while reading about the transatlantic slave trade but didn’t bind it until last week.

All the usual reasons for delay pertained, prime among them that I am a better starter than finisher. I lose track. Things pile up. But also this: early on a reader of this blog suggested that I was not “staying in my lane.”

All these years later, I say fuck that. Not fuck her, but fuck that. Fuck that. (Cultural appropriation discussed in part here and here and again here).

I will never tell Black women what to think or how to feel, but it certainly matters to me that learning about the history of slavery has made me a more informed, more sensitive person. A better citizen, a better reader of novels, a better writer, a stronger and more informed consumer of American culture and politics.

Before continuing, I have to thank the cadre of readers here, mostly older white women like myself, who have let me know over the years that what I share about American history and race is meaningful to them. It’s not that I set out to teach per se, but by sharing what I’m learning and having you along for the ride, the learning gets amplified and transforms what would otherwise be a solitary process into a communal one. It really matters to me. YOU really matter to me.

I like quilts to stand on their own, leaving interpretations up to the viewer but I thought in this case it might enhance the experience of looking if I were to explain the visual connections between fabric choices and the Middle Passage. So here goes.

The triangular shapes refer to sails. I suppose they could also refer to the triangular shape of the trading routes but I didn’t think of that until just now.

Swatches of indigo, bubble motifs, fish prints, and a black swirly-spiral print call to mind the Atlantic Ocean.

The half-circle black and silver print (at the bottom, above) looks African to me. The black and deep green hand-dyed swatch IS African.

The inclusion of a map print refers to the shores at either end of the Middle Passage — say, Sierra Leone on one side and Charleston on the other.

The brown stripes and the green lozenges both refer to the ship itself. The brown stripe is suggestive of the planks, while the green lozenges call to mind those illustrations that depicted Black bodies packed in the hold below deck.

One reason it’s important to focus on the Middle Passage now and again is because the number of people who died en route is often overlooked when relating the costs of slavery. It’s a huge number.

A conservative estimate puts lives lost en route at 1.8 to 2 million. Another 1.8 million died while housed in the barracoons awaiting transport. Another 1.5 million died during the first year of laboring here.

So one way to look at this is — roughly 14 million Africans were kidnapped to yield 9 million slaves.*

It is hard to wrap one’s mind around these numbers.

Check out the Equal Justice Initiative’s website — it highlights, among other things, the lesser known slave-practices and sources of slave-related profit in New England.

Below is another Middle Passage quilt. You’ll notice many of the fabrics are the same.

I’ve linked to these novel-adjacent pages before, but here again is a kind of warm up exercise done in the style of Colum McCann and describing the Middle Passage. It’s called Water Was.

* these figures and the framing of the figures came from a documentary I was watching about a week ago. I tried to back track and figure out what it was. No luck. If I do, I’ll come back with attribution.