Quilts Keep Alive Memories of Hard Times : Art: Hystercine Rankin’s hundreds of works vividly capture her experiences growing up black and poor in rural Mississippi.

The bright, illuminating colors in her quilts help tell Hystercine Rankin’s story of growing up black in rural south Mississippi.

“It’s memories of all blacks in the South,” Rankin, 65, said. “It’s the work we had to do if you didn’t go to school.”

Her quilts number in the hundreds, many of them in the possession of museums and relatives. Some are done for relaxation and enjoyment, but others tell the heart-wrenching story of blacks struggling to feed and clothe their families.

When Rankin was 12, she said, her grandmother told her she would have to learn to quilt to keep the younger kids warm. “In those days, it wasn’t nothing but a fireplace,” she said.

One of 11 children, she was raised in the Blue Hill Community in Jefferson County. “My great-great-grandfather was born a slave. After slavery, he bought 100 acres of swampland and cleaned it up at night,” she said.

Rankin says her family still owns the land, which holds lifelong memories of laughter and tears.

It was years later when she decided to put those memories into her quilts.

“One day I was sitting quilting and I said, ‘Lord, I remember a time when I wouldn’t be sitting in this shade. I’d be out in the field, picking cotton.’ ”

One quilt tells the story of her father’s murder by white men in 1939 when she was only 10 years old. Rankin said she had gone to the pond to get her father water when four gunshots rang out.

“I thought it was hunting,” she said.

She said the family never learned why her father had been killed, and no one was ever charged with the crime.

“When I did this quilt of my father--that was a joy to put it on a quilt. It just relaxed me,” Rankin said.

In bright colors including yellow and green, the quilt’s panels relate that painful day in Rankin’s life. It shows her father lying on the ground with blood oozing from his body.

“He stayed in the road until the log truck came and picked him up. Blacks were afraid to come to the funeral,” it reads. Below, it lists all eight of her father’s children and their ages when he died.

Rankin said she would save the scrap material left from making clothes for her siblings and put them together to make quilts.

“All of my brothers and my children have quilts,” Rankin said. “Before 1986, I was giving them away. It was something to leave with them.”

Memory quilts take longer to make, Rankin said. On average, she spends three to four weeks making the individual squares of the quilt. It then takes another two weeks to combine the squares.

Rankin’s unique way of telling her heartache has brought national attention. She was designated a Master Artist by the Mississippi Arts Commission in 1987, and her works have been displayed in museums across the country.

One of her regular customers is Camille Cosby, wife of entertainer Bill Cosby. “When I first started, I was proud if I got $25. Today they’re $600 to $1,000,” she said.

Rankin now works with Mississippi Cultural Crossroads, an organization that sponsors children’s art and theater as well as a quilting cooperative.