Reason #1 Why I Might Write--Marcia

In working on a quilt exhibit for the High Desert Museum, I have inadvertently become immersed in American History. In entering it through the world of needlework and fabric choice I am finding history far more interesting than I did through the worlds of the Revolution and the Civil War. The quilts I'm investigating bracket those two seismic events and yet, like a sharp needle, stitch around the edges and reveal a world reflective of its times: wealthy, industrious, patriotic, religious, philanthropic, and artistically talented.

In less than a hundred years, one person's lifetime, America went from a new nation of 13 colonies to an industrial nation in the midst of a Civil War . . . And in the middle of it, women were stitching their hearts out expressing their love of Liberty, their president, The North, The South, the 12 apostles, or "gun boats". Yes, they made quilts to raffle off to buy gun boats. Some just loved fabric--really expensive fabric, challis and calico, block printed and hand painted in India and imported to England and then to America into the hands of the women of Charleston Harbor and beyond.

Fortunes rose and fell. Ways of life collapsed and were reborn.

Due to an embargo on textiles and textile workers in the early stages of our country, all fabric in America was handwoven until well into the 19th century. Colonists made their own fabric, thread, and dye. I can barely get my laundry done, I can't imagine actually making my own 3-ply thread, linen, and dye out of crushed beetles and pee, and then making my own chemise. No way, Jose. Where's my Lean Cuisine and Wife Swap, I can't handle all this industriousness.

I have read many a great quote from those swearing that a woman is only as fine as her needlework and mastering it as essential to good breeding as speaking French, to quilting being the "primary symbol of a woman's unpaid subjection . . . " oh, those Suffragettes!

One of the most amazing stories I have discovered is that of Eliza Lucas Pinkney. Eliza's mother died young. Eliza was educated in Europe, her father was British and lived in Antigua. At 15 she arrived in the colonies and, when her father returned to Antiqua with the British Military, almost immediately wound up in charge of three plantations just outside Charleston.

At 16, while reading Virgil, Eliza got to thinking South Carolina was mighty similar to Virgil's Indigo-growing Italy (!?). Eliza loved botany. Women loved fabric. Women loved blue. It was very, very expensive and had to be imported from India. It took 100 pounds of plant to produce 4 ounces of dye.

She found her own niche market. The young botanist decided to tinker around in her spare time with growing Indigo. Four or five years later, at 21, she had her first successful Indigo crop. She exported it to England, shared the seeds with her other plantation pals and Indigo became South Carolina's most profitable export.

"Indigo proved more really beneficial to Carolina than the mines of Mexico or Peru were to Spain.... The source of this great wealth ... was a result of an experiment by a mere girl."

--Edward McCrady, historian of colonial South Carolina

Eliza amassed a great fortune, and from all accounts worked really hard for it, and considered herself a patriot. During the Revolution, however, her plantations were destroyed and her life left in ruins. She lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the south, but there is a stone commemorating her as the mother of two sons of the Revolution. Hmmmm.

Something about Eliza's pluck, acumen, determination and demise is stirring, haunting, and disturbing. Indigo is my favorite color. Charleston is a fabulous city . . . Do I have an historical novel in me? Has somebody already done it? It certainly can't be as hard as handweaving flax.