Tag Archives: south carolina

Sea Island Indigo – at Rebellion Farm

For days Two and Three of the Sea Island Indigo workshop*, we convened at Rebellion Farm, about 20 minutes west of my airbnb host in West Ashley. Donna Hardy was not kidding that she had grown us a field of indigo, and we began by harvesting.
The straight-leafed crop in the three pictures above is Golden Rice, for which Carolina is famous. Indigo, below. Right about the time I was taking this shot, fire ants were swarming all over my feet. They sting!! After a comic amount of swatting, I managed to get rid of them. Thankfully, only one managed to crawl above my knee.
We selectively harvested because some leaves were more ready than others.
Donna is also growing Sea Island cotton (above and below). This variety has a longer staple and when woven, has the sheen and drape of silk.
I was lucky to be partnered for the day with fiber artist, Leigh aka Madame Magar (Charlestonmag.com article). After spending twenty years making hats, Leigh (below) is now designing funky, barely-constructed clothes and creating cloth-related installations. I encourage you to follow the link and see what she’s up to.

Our gas flame was exposed to a little draft and kept going out. For that reason, and perhaps others, our batch was fussy, non-compliant. This turned out to be OK because it meant we got to see how the experts make adjustments.

Aeration method: pour liquid from bucket to bucket 100 times. Some in the group went to 500! After Leigh and I reached 200, we stood in line for the blender.

Notes: Shelley flings ‘garden snake’ off into the shrubs… black snake / smallish.

We got a pounding rain the first afternoon, which sounded incredible on the pole barn’s roof! Tomorrow’s post will continue at the pole barn. You can read a nice narrative about the weekend here (Heather Powers’s blog).

* * *

Sea Island Indigo Workshop took place September 18-21, 2014 in Charleston, SC. A field of indigo was grown for us by Donna Hardy, on Rebellion Farm, in Ravenel, SC. Fiber artist Kathy Hattori, of Botanical Workshops, flew in from Seattle to co-lead.

Blood and Indigo — the great reveal

25 Replies

“Blood and Indigo” — that’s the working title for a novel taking place in the mid-eighteenth century in South Carolina. I wasn’t planning to be so open about the project yet (though I am now more than two years into it), but there is an indigo workshop in September just outside of Charleston and I’m planning to go.

It would be so perfect! I traveled to Charleston this past April, as some of you know, but was only there for a short while — I took tons of pictures and did two plantation tours and visited the Chalmers Street former slave auction site and spent two afternoons in the Charleston Museum, but this would be fabulous — I’d get to see the area in the fall (and take tons more pictures) and the indigo!! Well, check out Sea Island Indigo!!

It all started with a book by India Flint called “Eco Colour”. In it, she devotes a page to the colonial settler, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and her work with indigo. Next came Eliza’s letters. Once I started asking myself, ‘what were the lives of her slaves like?’ I was off and running.

For more than two years now, I have been writing, writing, writing, and researching, researching, researching (there’s an example of great writing right there). I have learned so much about American history that I feel like a different person than when I started out. Reading history about the enslaved changes you. Details about the slave trade, the slave codes, the brutality, the labor practices, the attempts at rebellion, the words used by the elite to describe “their” African Americans — all change you. The most recent and best thing I have read about racism (I cannot recommend this article enough) was published in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and it’s called “The Case for Reparations”. Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, it is hard-hitting, full of examples of ongoing harm, and it will make you shake your head in sadness and wonder at what we are — we Americans, this America.

An African American crafter will be teaching rag quilting and talking about Gullah culture. I cannot say how perfect this event feels as a boost for my writing project!

paper piece revealing what must be the name of one of Eliza's sons

Quilter Mary Alma Parker

12 Replies

“Memphis Blues” by Mary Alma Parker

Even if you have a loyal cadre of readers, sometimes blogging feels like dropping pennies into a deep, dark well. “Hello?!” you call out. “Anybody there?!”

In the spring, as some of you know, after a quick trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I posted some images from the Textile Wing at the Charleston Museum, including the quilt by Mary Alma Parker pictured above. My sewing readers voiced their appreciation. Plop! The penny dropped down. And, that was that — or so I thought.

Turns out, that was not it. Last month Mary Alma Parker’s daughter, Clare Butler, emailed me. Not only had she had found my post (really?! by what miracle?), but she had read it to her mother and my appreciative words ‘really made her mother’s day’! How cool is that?!

Ms. Butler and I exchanged a couple of emails, and she has given me permission to tell you more about her mother and her mother’s quilting.

First, find better pictures of “Memphis Blues” in the Charleston Museum’s flickr set.

sorry so blurry! a phone picture shot through glass

I was taken with the quilt’s exuberant use of prints, its lovely colors, and the playful departures from traditional patterning. Based on those three aesthetic traits, as well as the title, “Memphis Blues”, I speculated that the maker was African American. I could find nothing online to contradict that assumption. Well, I was wrong.

Mary Alma Parker was born and raised in Memphis and has lived in Charleston with her husband (a Charleston native) for the last 25 years. Her daughter told me that her mother was “very influenced by African-American design aesthetics and artistic composition from her early years and throughout her life”. Mrs. Parker took my incorrect assumption about her origins “as a compliment”.

Her daughter also wrote this: “She chose to use the paper template hexagons as her motif on Memphis Blues because many quilters viewed them as crafty and trite”. She wanted a familiar visual motif so that the “focus could be on the randomness of her composition, color, and pattern choices”. That certainly worked!

I also learned that Mrs. Parker never used a machine for anything and that she belonged to a quilting group in Charleston where they “focused on learning a variety of techniques”. It was in that group where she discovered a love of the applique method. Mrs. Parker went on to make a completely original Baltimore album quilt, as well as a one featuring collard greens, called “State Vegetable”.

Like many quilters, Mrs. Parker was a recycler before recycling was a thing. Her daughter wrote: “I now recognize her as one of the thriftiest recyclers of just about everything — way before it was popular as it is today. You’ll notice the circles used as the quilting pattern on Memphis Blues in the borders — those are tracing of cans of food from her pantry. She always used cans as pattern weights when she sewed all of our clothes when my sister and I were growing up, so it is logical that she would use them as patterns for her quilting stitch designs too”.

Clare has promised me pictures of the Baltimore album quilt, and if she finds them, I shall be sure to post them.

P.S. Mary Alma Parker was also a collector of unusual vintage quilts and many of those in the permanent collection in the Charleston Museum were her finds. Here are two links and some text her daughter emailed me:

One in particular that you may recall seeing in the museum is the cigarette silks quilt. A partial picture and description can be seen on this page: http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/early-20th-century-quilts. Cigarette silks were one of the first premiums marketed to influence sales of a product in the US and targeted the growing leisure class of women interested in crafting. Here is a brief explanation of the trend: http://www.geocities.ws/nimue_139/history.html

gratitude and slavery

6 Replies

“If the only prayer you say in your entire life is ‘thank you’, it would be enough.”
Meister Eckhart.

That shell and that driftwood came from Sullivan’s Island, SC. On the beach, which oddly reminded me very much of Martha’s Vineyard, I could look out to the east, knowing that Africa lay beyond the horizon. I wondered how many ‘recent slave imports’ did exactly that. I wondered what mix of bewilderment, rage, defeat, and sadness they might have felt. I acknowledged how little idea they had of what lay ahead.

Sullivan’s Island is where captives coming into the port of Charleston were quarantined for a few weeks before being taken to the auction block. During the very busy slave importation years of the 18th century yellow fever, malaria, and small pox repeatedly and vengefully swept through the lowcountry. Any slave sick enough to die within the quarantine period was allowed to do so. It is heartrending to learn that a ten percent loss of cargo (read: African life) was deemed an acceptable margin in the slave trading business.
With the obvious aim of fattening them up for sale, the Africans were fed better during quarantine than at any time during the Middle Passage. They were groomed, oiled, and if plagued by dysentery (but not sick enough to die), plugged up temporarily with whittled corn cobs. If punished, they were paddled rather than whipped, for welts on the back signaled a wayward, unmanageable African, and would reduce his value on the block. There are reports of the sailors miming monkeys scratching their underarms to get the Africans to wash themselves. There isn’t much you can read about this island’s history without feeling sick.

~~There is no memorial.~~ Toni Morrison saw to changing that. See images of the Memorial Bench here. [Update: just learned on a website called African American Charleston that in 1999, “On July 3, a 6-foot historical marker is placed on Sullivan’s Island near Fort Moultrie to honor those enslaved Africans who arrived in bondage via Charleston Harbor.”]

Right before I went to this trip to SC, I heard a sliver of coverage about how much slaves contributed to the building of the ivy league schools in the Northeast. Maybe it was a review of the following book by Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, & the Troubled History of America’s Universities:

Many of America’s revered colleges and universities—from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC—were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.

[from the Amazon page selling his book].

So — for the beautiful quads that populate this neck of the woods, with their stone edifices, filigreed ironworks, brick walkways, and carved doors: thank you to the enslaved, skilled laborers. Thank you.

It sounds lame, the previous paragraph, but how much MORE lame would it be never to say thank you, never to acknowledge the contributions made? I am deciding to trust Meister Eckhart on this one.

Sweetgrass baskets

16 Replies

Meet Rose Marie Manigault, basket-maker extraordinaire. She is holding the basket that I purchased from her at Magnolia Plantation, near Charleston, SC. There is so much to say about her work and methods and presence, but let me start by directing your attention to the poking tool in the basket on her lap. It is a utensil (spoon? fork?) with the utilitarian end removed and the remaining stem blunted. Thinking about all the harm I do to myself while quilting, I asked if her fingers were calloused. She said “no”.
As I watched her work, it was clear why she found my question puzzling (maybe it was just weirdly personal). She poked and tugged and wrapped with deft skill — no fingers harmed! Look at those incredible pine needle knots!

Her wares were lined up on a high table set up under a pergola draped with wisteria. It was a little too early in the season for the vine to be in bloom, but it couldn’t have been a prettier site — especially dovetailing, as the time did, with a horribly raw week in Boston.

Look at the variety! That central, smallish basket in the foreground is a pattern called “Elephant Ears”. I learned that the baskets darken with age and that sweetgrass, once abundant, is becoming harder to procure. Unlike osier and other basket-making materials, sweetgrass, palmetto, and pine needles require no soaking to render them pliable.

Many beautiful examples of African American basketry are collected in the Lowcountry Digital Library. The knowledge about how to weave fanner baskets and employ them to winnow rice were two of the many African skills that allowed planters to amass fortunes growing rice with slave labor. The fanner basket below, is at the Charleston Museum, and is made of bulrush.
Here are a few more examples of baskets at the Museum.
Ms. Manigault was kind enough to pose for my pictures and sign the bottom of my basket. Anyone presuming to take her picture without making a purchase was shoo’d away. As a crafter (even absent issues of race), I could relate to this.
I haven’t quite found the right place for my basket yet. But I will. And it will be used.
Here is a link to Magnolia Plantation. I could not find a single reference, pictorial or otherwise, to Ms. Manigault or her baskets. Can anyone else?!!