Patterns of Freedom Still Sending Special Messages

As he put together an exhibit of ceramic sculptures, quilts and paintings for Black History Month, art student Sean Beard of Cal State Northridge drew on his roots.

“Mother Weep No More” at the campus Performing Arts Center Gallery features a dozen quilts made by members of the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles, including his aunts, skilled quilters who love the traditional and practical art form.

Beard, 28, said he was inspired by the work of his mother, painter Jeanette Brewer, whose scenes of African American quilting and plantation life are on display. The show also includes a freedom quilt made by a great-aunt, Elizabeth Ramsey, that incorporates symbols used to send secret messages to slaves traveling the Underground Railroad.

Ramsey, who will be 86 on Feb. 18, said she learned to quilt as a little girl on the farm her father sharecropped in Arkansas.

“We used quilts then to cover up and keep warm in the winter,” she recalled. “It wasn’t anything fancy like they make today.” Her childhood quilts were typically made up of nine patches, “mostly strips and blocks,” she said, and they were designed using her imagination, without benefit of pattern books or designs downloaded from the Internet.

Ramsey quilts every day, sometimes using her treadle sewing machine and sometimes doing handwork. “I can see to thread the tiniest needle,” she said. “I had cataract surgery last year in June, and that helped a lot.”

Her freedom quilt is done in what she describes as African colors--green, orange, black, yellow and red--a departure from her usual, more subdued palette.

The quilt incorporates motifs that are believed to have been used to help slaves make their way to safety in Northern states and Canada.

The quilt code, Beard said, is described in a 1999 book by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard titled “Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad.”

The authors write that certain symbols were incorporated into quilts to tell escaping slaves when to get ready and what routes to take, and to relay other information vital to evading those who would have kept them in bondage.

Much as Harriet Tubman sang certain spirituals in a particular way to send messages to those she was leading to freedom, messages were sent “by hanging a quilt on the rails of a fence,” Beard said.

Tobin and Dobard write that they learned the code from an African American quilter in South Carolina, the late Ozella McDaniel Williams, who said the meanings of the symbols had been handed down in her family from one generation to the next.

The authors acknowledge that they cannot prove Ozella Williams’ story. But they describe how a quilt with a monkey wrench motif casually tossed over a windowsill or a fence told the enslaved to gather up their tools and other belongings; they would soon be on their way to freedom. A quilt that featured a motif called the drunkard’s path reminded potential escapees that a zigzag route was safer than a straight one in eluding potential captors.

“I get chills just talking about it,” said Dottie Brown of Bellflower, who made a black-and-white freedom quilt for the show. Its center square provides a key to the dozen or so symbols of the Underground Railroad code.

Louise McGee of Inglewood made a three-dimensional quilt featuring a figure of abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth.

A quilt by Doris Parker of Los Angeles includes African symbols that appear on traditional Adinkra cloth from Ghana. “Africans communicated with textiles,” Beard explained.

Beard said his aunt, Sondra Brewer, is the family’s premier quilter. Several of her creations are on display.

“Every time we have a family reunion, a quilt is auctioned off,” Beard said. “It’s to benefit the kids; it’s like a scholarship. Everybody fights over hers. And she just laughs.”

Beard has created art since childhood, he said, encouraged by his mother and inspired by Ernie Barnes, the African American artist whose paintings were featured on the 1970s television series “Good Times.”

Beard, who lives in Burbank, enrolled at CSUN to study business and play football. But his NFL dreams ended with knee injuries. Now he finds his bliss in the art studio and readying his work for firing.

When he looks at his sculptures of people who have known slavery, he said, “I see pain and sadness, but I also see spirituality and growth.”

Although the show, which continues through June 1, may be especially appropriate for Black History Month, Beard said he hopes it speaks to everyone.

“I don’t just look at color,” he said. “I look at a group being oppressed and coming to victory. I know about the potato famine. I know about the Holocaust. . . . If you understand each other, it’s gonna be all right.”