An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery

May (Quilting with a Modern Slant) uncovers layers of history and tragedy in this imaginative, if occasionally naive, reconstruction of the lived experience of slavery in antebellum South Carolina. The discovery of a multicolored quilt top in a dusty archive prompts May to delve into the story of its white creators—the Crouch family of Charleston—and the Africans they kept in bondage—Minerva, Eliza, Juba, and Jane. May explores how slaveholding and resistance colored the practices of everyday life, from haggling over vegetables at the market to making quilts from fabric scraps. May draws both history lessons and intimate secrets—such as the Crouches’ guilt over the death of their infant son, whose brain was injured by a fall from a high crib—from her analysis of letters and domestic objects in the antebellum world. Tackling household production, the slave trade, and textile mills, the book argues that the early republic—not just the South—was knit together through slavery. While May’s writing can verge on melodramatic, as when she recounts “wanting to scream” warnings to a family member unaware of suffering about to befall her, her commitment to recovering the experiences of the enslaved people at the story’s heart is admirable. “Imagine,” she writes of Juba, having been freed: “Juba Simons chooses her dress carefully that morning, trying to decide if it will be the blue calico or green and yellow striped dress.” It is a moment worth savoring, in a book full of them. Photos. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (May)