Quilting a legacy

New Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 1999 by Freeman, Roland L

Beverly and I arrived at Alice Walker's Victorian row house on a pleasant, rainy Sunday afternoon. Alice has a gentle, quiet personality, and the sound of her voice is very soothingand the peaceful aura that surrounds her also draws you in. I quietly went about setting up my lights, as Alice talked about her recent film on female genital mutilation and her new book, "Possessing the Secret of Joy. " We then spread out a few of her quilts and Alice got comfortable on her sofa. I asked Alice to talk first about the tradition of quilting in her family.

Well, my mother was a quilter, and I remember many, many afternoons of my mother and the neighborhood women sitting on the porch around the quilting frame, quilting and talking, you know getting up to stir something on the stove and coming back and sitting down. My mother also had a frame inside the house. Sometimes during the winter she would quilt and she often pieced quilts. Piecing . . . I'm really more of a piecer, actually, than I am a quilter, because I can get as far as piecing all of the little squares or sections together, and sometimes putting them together into big blocks, but then I always have to call in help-spreading it out on the frame, or spreading it out on the floor and putting the batting in and doing the actual quilting.

[The first quilt] I worked on [was] the In Love and Trouble quilt. And I did that one when I was living in Mississippi. It was during a period when we were wearing Africaninspired dresses. So all of the pieces are from dresses that I actually wore. This yellow and black fabric I bought when I was in Uganda, and I had a beautiful dress made of it that I wore and wore and wore and eventually I couldn't wear it any more. Partly, I had worn it out and also I was pregnant, so it didn't fit, and I used that and I used the red and white and black, which was a long, floor-length dress that I had when I was pregnant with my daughter, Rebecca, who is now twenty-three. I took these things apart or I used scraps. I put them together in this quilt, because it just seemed perfect.

Mississippi was full of political and social struggle, and regular quilts were all African American with emphasis on being here in the United States. But because of the African consciousness that was being raised and the way that we were all wearing our hair in naturals and wearing all of these African dresses, I felt the need to blend these two traditions. So it's a quilt of great memory and importance to me. I use it a lot and that's why it's so worn.

Well, I actually have an essay, "How I Wrote The Color Purple" in which I describe how, when I started thinking about that book, I had to change everything in my life in order to write it. I had to leave my husband, sell my house in New York, sell two houses in New York, in fact, come here and try to find a place to work. I settled in San Francisco and that wasn't right, and I went north to the country and that was right, finally, although I went all over the country, this part of the country, looking for a place. I knew that in order for me to have the kind of meditative depth to the book that I needed, that I had to do work with my hands and I asked my mother to suggest a pattern that would be easy, and she said that there was nothing easier than the Nine-Patch. You know, you just get some fabric and cut up the pieces into nine blocks and you sew them together and that's it. So, I followed her advice and I went to Boonville, in Northern California, and I was with my partner, Robert Allen, and we would make big fires in the stove and go apple picking, or swimming in the river, or whatever, and then in the evenings I would work on this quilt. And as I worked on it, the novel formed.

I asked Alice about the significance of the colors she chose:

I am very deeply influenced by colors, and there are certain colors that come into my life with real persistence. And this kind of reddish or fuchsia, along with one of my old Indian dresses, black, green, and maroon stripes-these are colors that just struck me as colors I needed to give me strength to go on into the work I was doing, so that it always felt cheerful and strong and interesting working with those colors. I couldn't have written "The Color Purple" working on a brown quilt.

I asked her what happens when she sleeps under that quilt:

Oh ... I am warm and I am secure and I am safe. I feel that I know how to create my own environment, and I know how to protect it. And I know how to choose it. I realize that my quilts are really simple, and yet, they give me so much pleasure, because even in their extreme simplicity they are just as useful as the most complex. And in their own way, they are beautiful because they do express what I was feeling and they clearly mark a particular time for me.

Well, the Crazy quilt I have, by Rosie Tompkins of Oakland, is very special because unlike so many quilts, it has a lot of satin in it and what else-almost party-dress fabric-and I get under that quilt and I just feel real snazzy, and I can't be depressed but so long, lying under that. Under this Log Cabin Windmill quilt, I-it is just so lovely. I mean, I wake up and I just feel that I am sleeping under a beauty that is as complicated and as rich as the beauty I see out my window, which is nature. And so it just makes me feel all the more connected as a human being to what is created constantly in and among nature.