When I search to find information about quilt codes and the underground railroad, an article from  the Smithsonian’s Folklife magazine shows up again and again, wherein former staff writer Marie Clare Bryant positions herself as both expert and skeptic, dismissing Sharon Tindall, a Black quiltmaker who explores these codes in her art, even as Bryant purports to seek to learn from her. Bryant keeps citing an absence of evidence even as Tindall is sharing the evidence with her, citing oral tradition and material artifacts. The worst is when Bryant asks for Tindall to interpret the “flying geese pattern” and Tindall offers: “Flying geese are blue; the sky is blue, red and black [.] Follow the geese flying north. If the sky wasn’t clear, look for or listen to the geese flying north in the spring.” Bryant then  comments on this response; “I was disappointed by her answer because I didn’t understand. It came off like verse, or a nursery rhyme.” Here we see a stakeholder in the white mainstream saying the quiet part out loud: she is disappointed that this history is not entirely legible to her, thus, she concludes, this history cannot possibly be rooted in truth. 

Part of the disconnect comes from an illiteracy in black language and style, and an apparent resistance to actually listening to the women who have acted as stewards for this history. Geneva Smitherman notes the lasting influence of both Africanisms and histories of enslavement in Black semantic concepts and that “proverbial statement and aphoristic phrasing” are key components of Black sacred-secular oral traditions(43, 95). Furthermore, James Padilioni Jr., discussing the significance of Nat Turner’s reliance on the stars in sparking a large-scale rebellion writes that “Black folk’s observations and perceptions of the nonhuman world, while rarely afforded the legitimacy of empirical science, have nonetheless seeded many political projects of Blackness.” further illuminating the deep historical context behind Tindall’s response to look to the skies. Is it really so hard to believe that enslaved people would, to adapt Heather Andrea William’s description of fugitive literacies during enslavement, fuse ecological literacies with a desire for freedom, or that the collective and strongly gendered labor of composing and preserving quilts would provide a venue for Black women and girls to communicate these fugitive ecological literacies cross-generationally?

Anna Lopez, an education coordinator for Plymouth museums responds to skepticism from museumgoers, asking “who writes history? Men do. Mostly white men. Then I ask, who made quilts? Women did, and a lot of black women made quilts and passed on their oral history. No one wrote down their history, so who knows?’" (Stutkin, emphasis added) Black quilters’ compositions resist a singularity of authorship favored by colonial canons, a rapturous expression of incompleteness (Harney and Moten). No one wrote these histories down, but countless artisans stitched them, generations of families and loved ones passed these stories down. These quilts are composed of relations and thus by no one, rather than “somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire,” (Gumbs).

I fuse Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ adaptation of M. Jacqui Alexander’s palimpsestic time and S. R. Toliver’s Black quilting methods for qualitative research to consider how the works of Black Quilters function as collective compositions by no one, writing and rewriting histories nonlinearly and cross-generationally, stitched into a larger image of Black language, life, and fugitive literacies across space and time. I argue that quilting itself functions as a kind of palimpsestic practice, (derived from a term denoting a surface written on and reused multiple times, such that previous writings are never fully erased) composed of layered meanings as materials are figured and refigured, resisting immediate legibility by the white mainstream as they “make visible the ways that ideologies and practices traffic within multiple spheres” (M. Jacqui Alexander, qtd in Gumbs, 239). 

I consider Black Quilter’s compositions also as literacy artifacts (Kirkland), employing S. R. Toliver’s Black Quilting method  which “asks researchers to contemplate the larger codes in research data while also attending to the specific histories, lives, and stories of individual people.” to consider how communal stories of Black life and episteme are communicated through the motifs and strategies of Black quiltmakers.  I employ Toliver’s applique method to thread together discussions of Black quilter’s literacies, epistemologies, and compositions, through vignettes of Black quiltmaking, coalescing into a larger story about the futurity of Black language, literacy, episteme, and life.