The rhetoric of quilts: creating identity in African-American children's literature

African American Review, Spring, 1998 by Olga Idriss Davis

"Grandma isn't lonely," Tanya said happily. "She and the quilt are telling each other stories."

Mama glanced questioningly at Tanya, "Telling each other stories?"

"Yes, Grandma says a quilt never forgets!" (12)

Tanya's mother, Mama, appears detached from the symbolic power of Afrocentric motherhood. A product of the black middle class, she has become alienated from the cultural heritage symbolized by the quilt. Her embrace of Western culture causes her to value the commodification and mass production of the quilt rather than its African threads rooted in the transforming power of family experience. Mama exclaims to Grandma:

"You don't need these scraps. I can get you a quilt."

Grandma looked at her daughter and then turned to her grandchild. "Yes, your mama can get you a quilt from any department store. But it won't be like my patchwork quilt, and it won't last as long either." (5)

It is not until she has a personal experience with Tanya's grandmother in the presence of the quilt that Mama returns to her identity stitched within the values of traditional African culture:

Mama sat at the old woman's feet. Tanya ... knew Grandma was telling Mama all about quilts and how this quilt would be very special.... then she saw Mama pick up a piece of fabric, rub it with her fingers, and smile. From that moment on both women spent their winter evenings working on the quilt. (13-14)

Motherhood woven with the rhetoric of the quilt tradition offers Mama a way of transforming her self-identity and cultural identity. She locates herself in the realm of an intergenerational continuum, connecting her to mother, daughter, and African female ancestors. In so doing, Mama reclaims the tradition of Afrocentric motherhood and becomes a "bridge," as it were, between Grandma and Tanya. Her transformation becomes more evident when Grandma falls ill and cannot complete the quilt she calls "her masterpiece." Mama demonstrates the ethics of caring and personal accountability by looking after her mother, on the one hand, and continuing the daily task of the quilt with Tanya, on the other:

[Tanya] knew how to cut the scraps, but she wasn't certain of the rest. Just then Tanya felt a hand resting on her shoulder. She looked up and saw Mama. "... You cut more squares, Tanya, while I stitch some patches together," Mama said. (21)

The mother-child relationship is often submitted in literature from the perspective of mothers' influences on their children. However, the rhetoric of the quilt informs how Black children affirm their mothers and how important that affirmation is in a society which denigrates Blackness and Afrocentric motherhood. In her essay "A Child of One's Own," Alice Walker offers this vision: "We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are" (75). Flournoy connects the mother-daughter team as spiritual sisters, symbolic of the defiance against the illness which has denied Grandma a place in her family's quilting tradition. In their defiance, Mama and Tanya realize each patch is symbolic of experiences of the entire family, with the exception of Grandma. Removing a few patches from Grandma's old quilt, Tanya stitches her grandmother's experience of transcending illness into the family narrative, which illustrates the power of the child to imbue the Afrocentric tradition and avoid the circle from being broken. Flournoy persuades her readers to see how the quilt in its rhetorical dimension provides a source of renewal, ancestral traditions, and cultural connections to intergenerational relations. With delicate stitches, the quilt offers African-American readers a catalyst for self-definition and empowerment through the folkways of creativity and Afrocentric motherhood.