LIKE FAMILY: Relationships, Gate-Keeping, and Opening Space
In this episode, I share more about a quilt I call LIKE FAMILY. It's part of the Southern White Amnesia Collection, which explores the kinds of stories that Southern White families tell one another, or maybe more importantly, the ones they don’t tell one another about their own family history. You may have heard me talk about other pieces in the same collection on SEAMSIDE before, and if not, I'd encourage you to check out some of those episodes. So far, we've got SILVER DOLLAR, SNAKE HANDLER, OUR CHILDREN, and ONUS // ON US.
In this SEAMSIDE conversation, we explore:
① an old Southern family burial ground
② why the phrase “like family” can often describe a one-sided view of relationships
③ a moment from THIS HERE FLESH by Cole Arthur Riley
WHY LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE?
This episode weaves together a vulnerable exploration of identity, history, and responsibility, providing listeners with a deep, reflective experience on how historical legacies impact our current world
REFLECTION PROMPTS:
LIKE FAMILY explores how we are all inadvertently part of systems larger than ourselves. Reflect on any systems you feel connected to and consider ways you might consciously engage with or disengage from them.
Zak's journey through the burial ground led to various discoveries and insights. Reflect on a time when learning more about your personal history changed your perspective or understanding of yourself.
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[00:00:00] You're listening to Seamside, where we explore the inner work of textiles. I'm your host, Zach Foster, and today we're going to talk about a quilt I call Like Family. It's part of the Southern White Amnesia Collection, which explores the kinds of stories that Southern White families tell one another, or maybe more importantly, they tell one another.
Don't tell one another about their own family history. You may have heard me talk about other pieces in the same collection on Seamside before, and if not, I'd encourage you to check out some of those episodes. So far, we've got Silver Dollar, Snake Handler. And so today is the fourth in this series. I hope you enjoy this talk on like family.
I want to start us with the time when I took my friend Dennis out to a bar after work. We walk in together and Dennis just stops in his tracks, looks at me and says, Oh, you brought me one of these white bars, [00:01:00] huh? And sure enough, looking around, Dennis was the only person of color in the entire bar, even here in Brooklyn, I often find myself in a largely white world and that world is not coincidental.
That world was built and has been constructed and maintained in some small part by me. And so what I'm curious about for myself is how I can open up my own life. So this not so hermetically sealed, it's not this hermetically sealed snow globe of a world. This quilt is part of that exploration.
The quilt like family was born about four or five years ago when I took a road trip down to Lawrence, South Carolina. Lawrence is where my whole mother's side of the family hails from. It's upcountry South Carolina, just on the other side of the North Carolina and Georgia borders. the [00:02:00] reason I had wanted to come see this county, where so many of my family members had come from, was that there was an old burial ground where my fifth great grandfather Solomon and his wife Sarah, along with several other children, are buried.
Both Solomon and Sarah were born well before the Revolutionary War and died well before the Civil War. They were buried here on what was once their land but now was so far off from any modern road That it'd have been difficult for me to find it on my own.
So after a few phone calls, I was connected with a local woman named Melanie, who goes to the church bearing my family's last name.
She agreed to come meet me out at the main road, and then guide me back through the woods, down this dirt path. Until we found the family burial ground. I'm so glad Melanie went with me. I don't think I could ever found the place on my own because I'm assuming when my relatives were buried there, this was probably the corner of a field or something like that.
But now looking at it 200 [00:03:00] years later, We were standing in the middle of the woods. Tall oak trees, hickory trees, some pine mixed in there growing up amongst the graves and what not.
I could tell that we were getting close. When Melanie points out a low stone wall about knee high. In the middle of the woods. It encompassed maybe, I don't know, 30 by 50 feet, something like that There was a small opening on one end of the wall, and when you walk inside, you pretty quick saw the tombstones at the far end and the back, maybe about a dozen or so.
That's where Solomon and Sarah and their kids are all buried. And they got some nice tombstones, y'all, elaborately carved. We're talking about names, dates, Bible verses, roses, angels. I mean, all kinds of stuff.
Their tombstones were nice and they were so mostly upright. Some were a little bit askew, kind of cattywampus, as we say.
The funny thing to me, though, as I was looking around this burial ground, was that [00:04:00] it only seemed about half full. And when I made a comment about that, Melanie says, Well, I don't know. Look over here. and she points to an area at the front of the burial ground that I had just walked right by.
There was a large indentation in the ground, five or six feet so,
and once my eyes adjusted, I could see that it wasn't the only one. There was another indention on the ground over there, and another one just over there. Maybe about six or so, hard to tell, barely perceptible. What made them stand out, once I saw them, wasn't that slight indentation in the ground under all the leaves. It was the fact that at one end of each of those indentions was a rough, uncut rock. A tombstone. No names, no dates, no angels, just a small rough rock.
One of the things that puzzles me about this particular burial ground, and we'll never know the answer [00:05:00] to it, but it's why, looking around, were some of these enslaved folks buried inside the wall with the family. But when you start looking, out in the woods, there were more indentations. Each one with a small rough rock at the head of it.
Why were some of the enslaved folks buried inside the wall with family? And why were others outside, off in the woods? We'll come back to that puzzle here in just a minute. The quilt that I've made, that I'm calling Like Family, I like to say, is a memories version of this graveyard I just told you about in Lawrence, South Carolina.
I took a lot of photos, but when it came time to make the quilt, I was more interested in the people here than the statistical facts about the place. This quilt is about 4 feet by 3 feet, taller than it is wide.
and it's my one and only topographical quilt, at least to date, [00:06:00] because I knew I wanted to explore that tension between my ancestors graves and the graves of whom we assumed were then enslaved. I really needed there to be some layers in this quilt. I wanted some peaks and valleys, some ups and some downs.
And so to accomplish that, I would need a lot of polyfill, which is not my favorite thing to buy. So I went to the thrift store. Found an old comforter. the fluffiest one I could find. I deconstructed that comforter, and use the polyfill folded up on itself four times to get the loft that I would need for this quilt.
The rest of the fabric and material came from the scrap bin at Penland where I was making this quilt. There was though one piece of significant personal fabric and that was a swatch of material from my parent's comforter that they had on their bed when I was a kid. It was gray with a staggered seashell pattern all over it.
Some zigzags here and there. I remember it [00:07:00] well. Being on that comforter when I was a kid meant that I was in mom and dad's bed. It meant that I was safe, I was warm, I was loved and comfortable. So why pull that fabric into this story? For me, it has something to do with my own unasked for, unsought involvement with all that happened down there in Lawrence, South Carolina 200 years ago.
I didn't ask to be born into a line of slave owners, yet here I am.
I've inherited the benefits and the legacies that come with it. I talked quite a bit about that in the silver dollar episode about how the fact that my ancestors exploited the labor of black folks which set up our family for generations to come with access to higher education. I'd encourage you to listen to that quilt talk if you haven't heard it yet. With this memories version I first set out to make the actual walled in [00:08:00] portion of the burial ground. I wanted to build the tombstones out of the scrap material from my parents comforter, so I stitched the names Solomon Langston and Sarah Bennet Langston on those seashells. I stitched their dates, I stitched their kids names, and I tacked them all down.
There's a lot of white yarn hand ties in this particular part of the quilt.
Tall, grown up, ghostly grasses. fallen over the tombstones. The stone wall was made from a strip of dark batik fabric, right out of the scrap bin and perfect for the job. this dark batik set off the graveyard from the wild woods beyond. The sunken graves were made simply by a repeated density of stitches through all four layers of that polyfill over and over and over in the same place, piled one on top of the other, so that those areas would concave and sink down.
I had a small selection of shell beads I'd been collecting. They were flat, creamy, [00:09:00] iridescent with streaks of brown through it. I stitched one of those beads at the head of each grave as an offering, wishing whoever's body was buried in those graves, wherever their soul is now, a double portion of peace in the next world.
On this quilt, you'll see five big crosses, each with a name embroidered on it. Adam, Jane, Edie, Spencer, and Leah. Adam, Jane, Edie, Spencer, and Leah are just five of the hundreds of people my family enslaved at one point in time. We know their names because they appear on historical documents.
You know, the funny thing about documents in this country is that there's a lot of them. Especially if you have property, especially if you're wealthy. Paper just seems to. follow you wherever you go. We've got deeds, we've got wills, we've got [00:10:00] censuses. In the 1850s and 60s, we even had a document called the slave schedule.
Most of these documents recorded scant information about the black lives they were describing. Generally, there was an age, a best guess at one, at least. There was color, black or mulatto were usually the two choices, and gender, male or female, And that's all we would know. But there are rare glimpses in the historical data where you get to see a little bit more about the people.
So those five crosses, let's take a look at what we know.
know There're three records that I want to share with you comes from a deed book from Lawrence County, South Carolina, dated May 9th, 1796. Bill of Sell.
Solomon Langston of Lawrence County, South Carolina, to Henry Langston, his son, of the same place, [00:11:00] in consideration of the sum for 100 pounds, have sold unto said Henry Langston a certain Negro boy named Adam. Aged 16 years next April.
The only reason we know Adam's name and that Adam existed at all is because my great great grandfather sold him to his son. is a bill of sale. It is a receipt for a life once lived. That's how we know Adam lived in this world, a receipt, a piece of paper. That's why Adam's name.
It is on a cross of my quilt.
Fast forward a few years, Same great-great-grandfather wrote in 1825. He says, I give and bequeath to my son Solomon Jr. One negro boy named Spencer to him and his [00:12:00] heirs forever. That phrase, to him and his heirs forever, that's more than likely just kind of a throwaway phrase of legalese for Solomon back then. But is actually really compelling for me because it points back yet again, that I, me, Zach was born in a position of responsibility. I was put in that position because of my fifth great grandfather, not only having given a black boy named Spencer to his son, but also to his heirs forever.
Which includes me. This phrase, to his heirs forever, feels like a mandate.
I'm in his will. 150 years before I was even born.
One more document. Last one. In the same will, Solomon says, I leave the youths of three negroes. Edie, Jane, and I. And Leah to my well beloved [00:13:00] wife, Sarah, together with all, and it kind of breaks away here, it's hard to read, but with all my stock furniture and working utensils and all the rest of my estate where, and when during her natural life and at her death, my will is that Edie be set for emancipation.
So here, Solomon has given his wife. Edie, Jane, and Leah. And of those three women, Only Edie can expect to be emancipated at the end of her master's life. We'll never know why Edie and not Jane and not Leah. We'll never know the circumstances. We won't know the relationships.
But what we do see clearly. Are white folks making decisions for other people, acting as gatekeepers, who's in, who's out, keeping everyone in their place. We saw this in a very physical way in [00:14:00] the burial ground. Some folks buried inside the wall, some folks buried out.
Why do I call this quilt like family? I have to admit that when I first stepped. into the woods, into that family burial ground. And I saw the enslaved were buried there alongside, in some cases, their masters. My first reaction was something kind of warm, right? Like, oh, they must have had such a close relationship.
They wanted to be near each other, even in the afterlife.
Maybe they felt like family. Maybe. That reaction, the warm one, lasted a fleeting second or two. Because when I started thinking about that phrase, like family, I remember hearing it from the other side of my family now, my other grandmother. Grew up with a black woman in her house that her mom had hired to help her keep things in order.
In many ways, this black woman [00:15:00] that my great grandmother hired was more present in my grandma's life than even her own mother.
She was there day in and day out to see my grandma when she got home from school to make her a snack, do her laundry, all those things. My grandma would say that that black woman was like family, But today, my grandma doesn't remember her It's been years since she could recall it.
Regardless, every day that woman showed up for work, It was work. They were paying her to be there. You don't have to pay your family. So I don't know if she would have agreed with this whole like family business. You'll see that phrase, like family, stitched in oversized cross stitch letters on this quilt.
It's just south of the graveyard. You can't miss it. We've talked broadly about this quilt and the world it represents. And now we've arrived at the very [00:16:00] dense core of what this quilt points to. And that is in my mind, in what ways do we keep people in their place today? Denying them full access and freedom to move through the world as they see fit.
And when I say we here, I am referring largely to white folks
because white folks are so often the ones in position of power.
We live on a planet with 8 billion brothers, sisters, and siblings. It's an incredible family. However, I don't want to live in a world where only some of my brothers, sisters, and siblings have justice. I don't want to live in a world where only some of my brothers, sisters, and siblings have food on the table.
So what do we do?
We can pray. That's good. We can make quilts. We can march. We can call our representatives. All of that's good. [00:17:00] But the root, I would argue, still hasn't been touched. We gotta pull up the root, and the root here is the idea of white exceptionalism.
It's this story that we white folks often tell ourselves, whether we realize it or not, that, you know, We've pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We've got origin stories, even if they're vague and fuzzy, that says our our ancestors crossed the ocean in giant ships, chasing this newly-minted idea called the American Dream.
We envision that they made it on their own here in this new land through hard work and pluck and ingenuity. But like the American Dream, maybe that's part of the myth that we tell ourselves. Because in reality, nobody's an island. My peace is your peace. Your struggle is my struggle.
This war in Palestine, for [00:18:00] example, let's talk about it. I'm not interested so much in conversations about sides, who's at fault, who's to blame. What I am interested in is people being able to stay alive another day. And then let's talk about food and housing and healthcare and justice.
All that said, at the time of this recording, and I'm just going to be vulnerable and real with you.because if I'm going to talk about gatekeeping, I got to be honest and think about how I see it in my own life.
So at the time of this recording, I haven't been to a single march. I haven't called a single representative. So that makes my role in this war in Palestine, that of the bystander who does nothing.
Because I have agency and power. I know that I could be doing something. And yet here I [00:19:00] am a good person choosing to do nothing.
And that choice, in some small way, Is fueling the war in Palestine. And that makes me a part of the system that keeps war in place. Every day, I'm searching for more ways to step out of this system, but I need help. We all need help. We can't find the way out of this system on our own. And so. With that said, I'd like to end with the words of Cole Arthur Riley, a. k. a. Black Liturgies on Social, whose words made it onto this quilt, and you'll hear them in this passage. This comes from Riley's book, This Here Flesh, Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. And in this vignette that I would like to read for you, Cole is reflecting on a time when she saw her father [00:20:00] look in the mirror and she noticed her reaction.
She says, I was staring at my father in the mirror one day. When it occurred to me, he didn't look at all like his reflection. I I said, do you think that is your face? He looked at me like I was setting him up for a joke. I wasn't. With the mirror reversing his image, it was clear that his eyes were not in the right place.
It looked like someone was trying to recreate him, but they couldn't line up his lips just right. Everything got thrown off a hair. That's not your face. It was the first time it occurred to me that we will never really see our own faces. We can see a mirror, and it's doing its best, but that's not your face.
It's just an image of it, reversed and distorted. We need other [00:21:00] people to see our own faces, to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself. I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I've never seen it.
I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God and one another and believe it on one another's behalf. Audre Lorde said, Without community, there is no liberation.
There is no promised land without a multitude. You can think you can get there alone, and maybe by some rare chance you do. But what will become of the promise when it's collapsed by loneliness? Who is going to drink all that milk and honey with you? Look down at the cool running stream. You cannot see [00:22:00] yourself.
Maybe you can make it to the promised land on your own. But who will eat all that milk and honey with you?
So I'll leave it there for now, folks. I've Got some milk. And you've got some honey. So let's team up. There's plenty to go around, and there always will be, but we got some work to do. I hope you've gotten something out of this conversation. I'll be back soon with another chat, but until then, I hope that you're well.
I hope you're sewing something good, and I hope to see you soon. Take care.