 | Students Stitch stories together.
|  | Student’s square dedicated to Billie Holiday.
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Quilting through black women’s historyUniversity of Rhode Island senior Jason Charron looked at the quilt square he created, wrinkled his nose and asked if the stitches he made along the square’s bottom look like a fence. When told that they do, his face fell. “Darn,” he said with at least the tip of his tongue planted in his cheek, “they’re supposed to be railroad tracks.” His classmates laughed.
Charron and 23 other students, sat around a table in URI’s Multicultural Center last semester putting finishing touches on their squares and assembling them into a diverse quilt.
The quilt was part of the class, “Black Women in America: From Colonial Times to the Present,” taught by History Assistant Professor Rae Ferguson. “I always try to interject interactive projects into my classes,” she said. “It changes the dynamic and creates a better understanding of the topic.”
African-American quilting is much different than European, explained Ferguson. The quilt is often used as a metaphor. Each square represented individuality, suggesting that a person’s centering comes from the inside rather than the outside. Only in stitching the squares together does the whole come out of the diverse roles.
This differs from European quilting where the design of the quilt is established beforehand and then imposed onto the fabric.
Ferguson required that each of her students create one quilt square, representing either a black woman, event, scene or idea they found interesting from their readings. A paper explaining the choice was also required.
“When I announced that the last four weeks of class would involve quilting, some of my male students rolled their eyes,” recalled Ferguson with a laugh.
“I’m a natural as it turns out,” said Paul Roy, wearing a wide smile and a baseball cap backwards. He created a square with the words “Respect” and “Think” in tribute to Aretha Franklin. The words are timeless messages, he said.
Dave Morris drew the American flag, the symbol for woman, and the words, “We, too, Sing America,” playing off of “I, too, Sing America,” the poem Langston Hughes made famous. The senior said he created his square to remind people that black women’s contribution to history has been either misrepresented or lost.
Charron looked almost satisfied at his fenced railroad tracks. He picked the subject of the Underground Railroad for his square mainly because as a kid he had always pictured a train running underground and wondered how that worked. Now, of course, he realizes that the words represent an historical network of people and safe houses that helped slaves escape to freedom.
“I love this class,” said the political science and history major. “You know, there’s a saying that there’s always a course or a professor you’ll remember after you leave college. This will be the one for me.”
By Jan Wenzel
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