Quilting a legacy

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

I asked Alice about the relation of quilting to the camaraderie of women and whether that relation fits into the whole process of creation.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's even higher because it's communal. It's one thing to get into eternity by yourself, but to get into it with five or six other people, all of them cooking and talking about whatever. It's really incredible. I mean, you're talking about some high states of being. We just have taken this as being completely ordinary. What's happening is very fine. Very high. I mean really evolved.

And yet, the people doing this, they say, "Get out of here-What are you talking about?" But the evolution is there. Because they are creating out of the heart. But not in a precious way. And they're together on it. They're making something together. It's really quite remarkable. And when you think about that kind of creation and then you think about these rugs that you can buy from India where they literally steal these children and they beat them and force them to make these rugs... this is the other end of it. This is where the moment is not a glimpse of eternity, it is a moment of hell. I mean it's eternity in a different way. And that is what you get. You get the rug and you think that this is a beautiful design, but you can feel that it just doesn't have the life. It doesn't have that purity; that moment where you were just, as the creator, up there.

I asked her to comment on her sense of my attraction to the environment women created in quilting, one in which they were away from men.

Well, first of all, even though you thought what you wanted to hear was what they were saying, what attracted you was the feeling that they generated. You were attracted to their eternity. They had taken their eternity back from the men around them. And this was the form that they used to have their eternity. You see. And then when you get one of their quilts, you can see that this is what their eternity, externalized and made into a form, looks like, but in fact, they experienced their eternity long before you saw their quilt. They took it. God bless them. God has blessed them. Because think of the people who don't know how to steal their eternity back from people who have stolen it! And there they are without an eternity. They're mad. People who take drugs are trying to get their eternity They're trying to have their time, their endless time of being, who they are, as they are, their eternity, and they take the drug and-they think this feels like it, you know, this feels like ... this must be. ..this is so good it must be my eternity. But it's not. Because you don't need drugs to get it. You need creative work to get it. You need creativity to get it. You need to create just like, whoever created all of thisthe earth, the cosmos-needed to create.

An Excerpt from A Communion Of The Spirits, Africa-American Quilters, Perservers, and Their Stories