This Far By Faith

Readings in African-American Women's Religious Biography

Judith Weisenfeld, Richard Newman, Judith Weisenfeld, Richard Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136663581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This Far By Faith brings together a collection of essays on the religious identities and experiences of African-American women. Spanning from the period of slavery to the present, the essays profile American figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Willie Mae Ford Smith, exploring the role that religious institutions and impulses played in their lives.

PART 1

AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ARTS

1

MARIE JEANNE ADAMS

THE HARRIET POWERS PICTORIAL QUILTS

Only two quilts from the hand of Harriet Powers, a black American woman, are known, but each is in the possession of a major museum. The artist, born (1837) a slave in Georgia, survived the Civil War, and with her husband established a small farm on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia, where she lived until her death in 1911. Both her quilts are “pictorials,” depicting scenes from the Bible in appliqué technique. The exhibition of Afro-American decorative arts, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, brought these historic textile treasures together for a tour of several cities in the eastern United States in 1978 and 1979.

Harriet Powers created these quilts at a time in the late nineteenth century when quilt-making had become, for the most part, the unimaginative repetition of simple traditional designs or a garish mixture of commercial patterns. Her Bible quilts are original, lively and subtly balanced statements of her deeply felt spiritual life. Fortunately, the exceptional quality of Harriet Powers’s work was sufficiently evident in her own time that an interested white woman, Jennie Smith, took the trouble of recording the artist’s interpretations of each of the scenes in the two quilts. Because few personal records of black women from this period exist, the pictorial quilts and its texts are precious documents.

Mrs. Powers exhibited her first Bible quilt (fig. 1) at the Cotton Fair of 1886 in Athens. It consisted of a large rectangular cotton cloth (88 × 73¾ inches) on which eleven scenes were arranged in three rows. By means of small appliqué figures, the scenes represented the tempting of Eve in the Garden, the killing of Abel, Jacob’s dream, Judas at the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion. This showpiece, now in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, captured the imagination of at least one of the town’s residents, Jennie Smith. Most of what we know about the artist derives from an eighteen-page manuscript written by Ms. Smith and published by a scholar from the University of Maryland, Gladys-Marie Fry.¹ Ms. Smith, an artist and art teacher of considerable local reputation, was fascinated by the originality of the design. She tracked down the maker and recorded the encounter as follows:

I found the owner, a negro woman who lived in the country on a little farm where she and her husband made a respectable living. She is about sixty-five years old (actually she was 49), of a clear ginger-cake color and is a very clean and interesting woman who loves to talk of her “old miss” and her life “befo de wah.”

However, Mrs. Powers refused to sell the show quilt at any price.

About four years later, in need of money, she sent word to Ms. Smith that the quilt was now for sale. Ms. Smith’s account gives a clear notion of how Mrs. Powers treasured the quilt and was reluctant to part with it.

She arrived one afternoon in front of my door in an oxcart with the precious burden in her lap encased in a clean flour sack, which was still enveloped in a crocus sack…. After giving me a full description of each scene with great earnestness, she departed…

Mrs. Powers visited Ms. Smith several times to see again “the darling offspring of her brain,” as she called the quilt, and in this way, her comments identifying the scenes on the first and ultimately on the second quilt were recorded.

It seems almost certain that Jennie Smith arranged the exhibit of the first Bible quilt in the Colored Building at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 and that this resulted in a commission from the wives of professors at Atlanta University to create the second Bible quilt (fig. 1), as a commemorative gift in 1898 to a trustee.²

Mrs. Powers seems to have given much more thought to the arrangement and design of the figures in the commissioned work, because it is larger (69 × 105 inches) and more complex than the first quilt. This now-famous, much-exhibited quilt portrays fifteen scenes. Ten are drawn from familiar Bible stories which concern the threat of God’s judgment inextricably fused with His mercy and man’s redemption, among which are the Fall, Moses in the wilderness, Job’s trials, Jonah and the whale, the Baptism of Christ and the Crucifixion. One scene refers to local events she knew from hearsay about a rich couple and a runaway pig. Four others depict astronomical or meteorological events, only one of which occurred in Mrs. Powers’s adult life, an extremely cold spell of 1895 in the eastern United States. Given Mrs. Powers’s intensely religious outlook, she interpreted these events in the celestial atmosphere as messages from God to mankind about punishment, apocalypse, and salvation.

Visually, one’s first overall impression of the Boston quilt is of a melee of scattered figures on a crowded surface. Upon further viewing, individual scenes, defined by red polka-dot outlines, gradually emerge. The many small, rounded figures floating freely in space yield an impression of spontaneous gaiety and grace. In its liveliness and charm, Harriet Powers’s quilt looks the epitome of folk art: the human figures in cut-out shapes, anachronistically costumed, make fanciful gestures and ignore the restraints of gravity; the animals look coy and harmless; and bits of color appear unrealistically over the surface. The contrast between the grand scale of the subject matter and the tiny simple forms with their concrete detail is enough to bring a smile to the viewer’s face, as in such easily recognizable scenes as Adam and Eve (square 4), touching as they stand beside the huge snake in the garden under “God’s all-seeing eye and God’s merciful hand,” and Jonah shown just at the vivid moment when his arm is seized by the whale (square 6).

Mrs. Powers could not read but committed the Bible stories to memory from sermons and folk tradition. The serpent in Eden is shown with feet which he had, according to legend, before he suffered God’s curse at the Fall. She was fascinated by animals and may have known that large snakes can have tiny feet. The reality of the Bible stories to her shows in the wish she expressed to attend the Barnum and Bailey Circus to see the “Bible animals.” In two of the non-Biblical scenes, she incorporates characters from traditional folk narratives: the hog named Betts (square 13) and the man frozen at his jug of liquor (square 11).

The work of Harriet Powers fits into the category of folk art narrowly defined as the product of unschooled craftspersons who incorporate elements of metropolitan traditions of style, technique or form as essential parts of their own work. In representations, the color is often arbitrary, proportions and spatial relations awry, shapes generalized and details emphasized. Harnet Powers’s style of storytelling and composition belong to this folk tradition of image-making. Nevertheless, her subject matter draws on the world-church doctrines of Christianity and she has formed the quilt by piecing together milled cloth and applying the figures by sewing machine. This kind of artistic mixture is associated with rural populations who rely partially on urban society—for its markets, machinery, or social attitudes—to maintain their way of life.

The more one examines the style and the content of Harriet Powers’s work, the more one sees that it projects a grand spiritual vision. Pondering the pictorial content of each scene and its relationships to the others leads one to realize the depth of her concern for and how well she grasped the apocalyptic yet redemptive vision of Christian doctrine.

The loving spirit in which Mrs. Powers handles the pictorial and decorative elements makes exploration of every part of the quilt a pleasurable and rewarding pursuit. For each square she invents a new composition. The scope of her interest shows in the many different kinds of motifs she introduces, representing men, women, children, large animals, birds and other small creatures, fantasy beasts of Revelations, trumpets and a bell, a house, a boat, a coffin and special symbols such as the hand of God, stars, comets and other cosmic bodies. Although small, these objects are defined as solid masses, and all are set at a variety of angles to each other. The human figures are visually arresting because of the pose of outspread arms or arms held away from the body. All the poses involve gestures of action: Job calling on God with arm outstretched (square 1), the figures on the weather’ scene (squares 2, 8, 12) raising their arms in seeming alarm.

For each event, Mrs. Powers abstracts a few figures to convey the action and introduces informative detail: the frozen breath of the mule (square 11), the metallic thread used for the crown of the rich woman (square 13), blood and water streaming from the side of Christ, indicating an intense phase of His suffering (square 15). She carefully varies yet reuses patterned cloth pieces in the appliqued figures and repeats types of motifs, such as the heavenly bodies, devices which subtly link the scenes together. The cosmic, stellarated designs appear in every square except the one in the lower left corner, which depicts the only recent (1895) event. She lavishes attention on these heavenly bodies; they give the scenes their scale and aura of importance. In contrast to the other figures, each of which is formed by one piece of applique, the cosmic motifs are composed of tiny pieces of cloth, painstakingly fitted into sharply pointed forms of contrasting color, and sewn together by hand.

Yet the vaguely whirling sequence of objects within each square, the multitude of directional lines which do not meet or correspond across the surface, the action stances and upraised arms of so many figures, and the choppy, changing colors arouse feelings of violent activity and alarming uncertainty. Mrs. Powers’s greatest formal achievement lies in maneuvering the stylistic elements conveying the two extremes of effect—carefully tended arrangements and threatening chaos—into a dynamic equilibrium.

The strongest stabilization comes from the light-and-dark color contrast of the backgrounds of the squares which creates a visual checkerboard effect (See fig. 1). The darker tones of squares 2, 4, 8, 12, and 14 provide an underlying stable geometric order for the entire varied, crowded surface. At the right end, separated by a broad band of mottled pink, a dark, center square (square 10) marks the head of the bed.

If the squares are read from left to right as Ms. Smith did when recording Mrs. Powers’s comments, the scenes seem to be simply strewn across the page not in any order, briefly as follows:

first row:	Job praying for his enemies His coffin Black night of 1780 Moses with the brazen serpent Adam and Eve John the Baptist with Christ
second row:	Jonah and the whale Multiplying pairs of birds (last days of Noah) Falling stars of 1833 Creation of pairs of animals, continued Angels and beasts of Revelations
third row:	Creatures frozen in the cold night of 1895 Red light night of 1846 Rich people who go to punishment and the independent hog named Betts Creation of pairs of animals continued Crucifixion

Considering that Mrs. Powers was drawing on stories she had heard in various sermons and in oral tradition, it is unlikely that she would aim to follow events in the strict order that they are fixed in the Bible. Judging by what she selected, I think she recorded fateful events concerning people in her society, cataclysmic natural occurrences, and Biblical figures which demonstrated the Christian themes of her interest: threat, deliverance, and repose.

The Old Testament heroes she chose, Moses, Noah, Jonah, and Job, are well-known examples of men who experienced not only God’s harsh judgment but also His power to deliver them from frightening circumstances, and Christian doctrine interprets each as a foreshadowing of the eventual comprehensive salvation to be offered by Christ. Mrs. Powers shows each one at a different phase of his interaction with God’s powers, and artistically contrasts action scenes for Moses and Jonah with the placid charm of the animal pairs (squares 7, 9, 14) who are to be saved from the Flood.

Her great originality, dramatic gifts, and thematic interest come to the fore in her remaining choices of subject matter: the spectacular happenings in the skies over the United States (squares 2, 8, 11, and 12), drawn from tales that circulated orally throughout the country. The remarkable part of her usage is that her references are so accurate that comparison with diaries and other contemporary accounts, done by Gladys-Marie Fry of the University of Maryland,³ confirms and elaborates the specific occasions she records.

Mrs. Powers notes “the dark day of May 19, 1780” (square 2). Dark days, when the daytime atmosphere turns black with pollution from forest fires, have been known throughout history, but the most famous in her day was that Black Friday in May in New England when some observers were convinced the end of the world was at hand. Mrs. Powers indicates visually the ominous character of this event by the presence of seven stars and a trumpet, New Testament signals of Judgment Day.

Another spectacular event that she chose is the “falling of the stars on November 13, 1833” (square 8). This can be identified as the Leonid meteor storm which produced not an hour-long but an eight-hour long display of shooting stars. Eyewitness accounts believed that “the sky is on fire,” and “Judgment Day is here.” The impressive character of the storm is shown in a print by a contemporary artist. Common people attached great significance to the event, and it was used as a time-fixing device by which births and deaths were determined. In Jennie Smith’s record, Mrs. Powers said of this day: “The people were frightened and thought the end of time had come. God’s hand stayed the stars.”

The events (square 11) that Mrs. Powers recalls from the “cold Thursday, 10 of February 1895,” when people and animals froze in their tracks, also took place in New England. That cold spell was so severe that the temperature even in Athens, Georgia, fell to a minus one degree (F). The next scene (square 12) the “red light night of 1846” probably (Fry 1976:22) refers to the meteor showers on the tenth and eleventh of August that year, which seemed to set the sky aflame. Of her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: WE HAVE BEEN BELIEVERS: PATTERNS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOSITY
• PART 1 AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ARTS
• PART 2 AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN AND CHURCH INSTITUTIONS
• PART 3 AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN AND CHRISTIAN MISSIONS
• PART 4 AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN, RELIGION, AND ACTIVISM
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
• INDEX