An American Quilt

When we think of slavery, most of us think of the American South. We think of back-breaking fieldwork on plantations. We dont think of slavery in the North, nor do we think of the grueling labor of urban and domestic slaves. Rachel Mays rich new book explores the far reach of slavery, from New England to the Caribbean, the role it played in the growth of mercantile America, and the bonds between the agrarian south and the industrial north in the antebellum eraall through the discovery of a remarkable quilt. While studying objects in a textile collection, May opened a veritable treasure-trove: a carefully folded, unfinished quilt made of 1830s-era fabrics, its backing containing fragile, aged papers with the dates 1798, 1808, and 1813, the words shuger, rum, casks, and West Indies, repeated over and over, along with friendship, kindness, government, and incident. The quilt top sent her on a journey to piece together the story of Minerva, Eliza, Jane, and Jubathe enslaved women behind the quiltand their owner, Susan Crouch. May brilliantly stitches together the often-silenced legacy of slavery by revealing the lives of these urban enslaved women and their world. Beautifully written and richly imagined, An American Quilt is a luminous historical examination and an appreciation of a craft that provides such a tactile connection to the past.