In an interview shortly before her death, Cuesta Benberry explained her life’s quest: gathering patterns, blocks of fabric and remnants of memory that would change the world’s understanding of African-American quilts
By Jeannette Cooperman
Photographs courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum
A few months ago, an 83-year-old woman who used to teach reading in the St. Louis Public Schools died. Phones rang, emails flew across the country, the American Folk Art Museum made a formal announcement and The New York Times and The Washingon Post published long tributes.
Over the past half century, almost in her spare time, Cuesta Benberry had become arguably the nation’s foremost authority on the history of African-American quilts. It was a topic she’d fallen into by accident, back in the 1940s, when she visited her new husband’s relatives in Grand Rivers, Ky. The test of acceptance, she’d soon realized, was appreciating their quilts.
“I thought I knew what a quilt was—a blanket!” she told me in August. “I had never seen quilts like theirs. They called them by the pattern names; they might say, ‘This is my Catch As Catch Can’ or ‘my Sugar Bowl.’ And they were so proud.”
Their cherished source for patterns was a catalog from Ladies Art, which had been founded in St. Louis in the late 1880s. When the St. Louis native admitted she hadn’t heard of it, they were indignant. “I imagine in that village they thought Ladies Art was a big company!” she said, chuckling.
She stitched a few quilt blocks in the interest of marital harmony, but what really intrigued her was the elaborate history of the designs. She collected examples of all kinds of patterns—Ocean Waves, Flying Geese, Carpenter’s Wheel—but she didn’t focus on African-American quilts until 1976, amid the bicentennial hoopla about learning one’s heritage. “I started searching for information about African-American quilts, and there just wasn’t any,” she recalled. “Just dibdabs of information, mainly about the former slave Harriet Powers, who made two Bible quilts; one was in the Smithsonian.”
Benberry began interviewing black women all over St. Louis, many of whom had come from the South. “I found them through church members, quilting groups and Dr. Julia Davis—there’s a library named for her now. I would go to her home and take my little tape recorder. One day she asked me if I knew an African woman had made a quilt for Queen Victoria.”
Benberry hadn’t known—but she told the women she interviewed after that, and they glowed. “Nobody had ever talked to them about quilts,” she said, “and they had made quilts all their lives. Mostly for themselves, but if anybody in the neighborhood had a fire or some other disaster, they’d give them a quilt.”
By the 1980s black studies and women’s studies were sexy topics, and the new scholars started making assumptions, like “All African-American quilters make large stitches.” Many did, for speed and practicality, and here in St. Louis, Malverna Richardson even cut large hexagons for her Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. “I ain’t no fool,” the older woman told Benberry as she dished out warm blackberry cobbler. “I used to make those little-bitty hexagons, but now I make them big so I can get through, and that’s the way it is.”
Ah, but Benberry also knew of more patient, exacting African-American seamstresses who took stitches no longer than their needle’s eye. Elizabeth Keckley, for example, was a slave whose exquisite handwork kept her St. Louis owner’s cash-strapped family fed. When she was freed, she went to D.C. and wound up designing dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln.
Benberry used her summer vacations to travel to London and South Africa and Arkansas, stacking up her examples of patterns and designs. She was enraged by “the innocent arrogance of scholars who would pass over centuries of African-American quilt-making” just to prove themselves right. They were taking their own large-stitch shortcuts, and she said as much in a 1993 cover article for
American Visions.
Chastened, scholars began quoting Benberry in their work, citing her in their bibliographies. She wrote Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts and A Piece of My Soul: Quilts by Black Arkansans, and she co-edited an anthology of quilt fiction.
The response to her work shocked her: Most of the calls and invitations to speak that poured in were from white antiques dealers and white cultural institutions. Quilts were becoming hot—as collectibles, as cultural artifacts and film subjects, as political statements about everything from AIDS to Eastern Europe.
“Quilts have expressed many things that couldn’t be said in other ways,” Benberry said softly, adding that it’s folly to dismiss their power. That nearly happened in 1991, when the Smithsonian Institution announced a licensing agreement with China to create affordable replicas of Harriet Powers’ legendary Bible quilt. “With a matching rug!” Benberry moaned. “People walking on the Harriet Powers quilt!” Congressman William Clay of St. Louis was on the oversight committee, and Benberry remembered the bemused look on his face as he listened to hours of testimony from furious quilters. The Smithsonian hastily canceled the contract.
This year, when Benberry began feeling ill, she ignored the usual calls from New York antiques dealers and gave the American Folk Art Museum her entire, irreplaceable library and her Flanders Poppy quilt, one of the few readily identifiable World War I quilts in existence. To the Saint Louis Art Museum, she presented her Gee’s Bend quilt, made in a now-famous women’s quilting collective in Alabama. She saw the quilts as utilitarian, not quite traditional; a New York Times critic called them “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Benberry’s Gee’s Bend quilt was made by Lucy Mingo, and its pattern is the weighty, challenging, triangles-in-circles Pine Burr. “In the African-American community, Pine Burr has become the quilt of accomplishment,” she explained. “When Alabama made the design its state quilt, I told my quilt, ‘Well, you’re in good company!’”
In 2005 Benberry won the Distinguished Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, an organization established by the famous quilt artist Faith Ringgold to support African-Americans in the arts. In tribute, Ringgold made Benberry a small, priceless story quilt that showed her flying over St. Louis, and SLAM immediately began planning an exhibit for spring 2006 that included that Ringgold quilt, Benberry’s Gee’s Bend quilt and a slave quilt from Kentucky.
“We wanted to show the range of her scholarship,” which swiftly corrected the stereotype of folksy, vernacular, untrained quilt-making, says Andrew Walker, curator of American art. “We hung the exhibit on the modern and contemporary floor and got a strong sense of dialogue with the art.”
Walker visited Cuesta Benberry several times, and he found himself relaxing in her presence, becoming a student again. “There was this warmth and humanity in her home,” he says, “and she was a great storyteller. She was humble and quiet, but the depth of her knowledge was a force.”
She bequeathed the Ringgold quilt to the National Quilters Hall of Fame in Marion, Ind., along with five others, including a friendship quilt made for her by two of the finest quilters in the country. “In the quilting world you have celebrities, too!” she informed me, rattling off a list of national exhibits in which her friendship quilt hung. “That quilt got invited to places I wasn’t invited! Then my husband met one of the women who made it, and his first question was ‘But can she sleep
under it?’!”
In her entire life, Benberry had slept under only one important quilt: an antique shoe quilt, its shapes cut by eye and hand-stitched in the late 1800s by one of the early quilters in her husband’s family. The gift was proof of acceptance. “One day his aunt told me, ‘Sister, I think you might like this,’ and I said, ‘I certainly would.’”
The in-laws’ quilt was warm, and years of handwork gave it weight, but it most definitely wasn’t a blanket. It was a story, an art form, a legacy, part of a vast set of shared experiences Cuesta Benberry would spend her life piecing together for the rest of us.
