Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Huron/Cherokee In the Fields 1975. Sixteen. My birthday half a season away. In a few weeks I would be settled. The families had agreed. The two of us worked together side-by-side in these fields, and migrated for work as well, in search of crops to pick—beans, potatoes, tobacco, lemons—whatever was ripe and ready for harvest. We’d settled together, back in North Carolina, where our southeastern Indian ancestors had always been—home. His mother was Indian, his dad a white man. We were both mixed-bloods and bore the pain of taking urban jobs when the fields went dry though neither of us could stand living in town long, so we’d often end up sleeping outside, waiting for paychecks . For the last year we’d mostly lived in the car, hunting in winter, fishing in summer, and following work in the fields. An old man always came to wake us before the others got to the field. A thin man with a face creased from smiles and weathered from working in the sun. The sun rose as we moved from one plant bed to another. Again and again, the men raised Visqueen, exposing green leaf on black soil and we worked throughout the morning gathering tobacco plants strong enough to survive transplanting to the fields and replanting them. In this way we gave in to the rhythm of fieldwork. The steady bend and rise, the motion of tending new growth, opening and closing spaces in earth, creating patterns —motion, united in movement, much like communal dance during celebratory and ceremonial times. There was a glory in this motion. It often caused one to sing out loud and sometimes the singing was so great the mighty sun felt as if it gave way to the beauty of the sound and burned a little easier down upon us in the rows. The oldest woman was a grandma many times over. I’d taken her some snuff and asked for help in learning to quilt. She was next to me now, telling stories about these fields from 30 decades ago. Her arthritis made it impossible to work much, yet she came out every morning to help, mostly watching over the workers with smiles and sighs of approval. Looking at her hands, I remembered the top sheets my dad’s mother left when she died. Unfinished quilts for her descendants pieced from a bag filled with scraps from homemade clothing remnants. My dad said fifty-pound bags of chicken feed and flour came in floral cloth bags when he was young, and two feed bags were enough cloth to make a dress; one would make a blouse or skirt. My dad was the youngest in the family and his mother would have him collect up the scraps for her at times. When he was around fourteen (1936), he drew a design for a quilt he called “Birds in the Garden.” The birds were made of triangles pieced together standing out against a blocked garden background. This is one of the quilts his mother never finished, though she did piece the top fully and pass it on to him. After working with this grandma on a few of her own quilts, and helping her clean cow guts, Birds in the Garden was the first one I finished myself. I didn’t have a frame then. I’d used a large embroidery hoop to hold the cloth and batting tight. My dad came over and I showed him the work. I knew he was pleased because he took me out back and taught me how to construct a quilt frame which you could raise and lower from the ceiling with a rope-pull. Here in the beds, I pulled another baby tobacco, the roots drawing dank scents, and remembered the smell of antique cotton from mysterious pieces of shirts, dresses, and skirts which came from ancestral clothing of strange designs, prints only familiar from seeing these quilt-tops in the wooden chest in my parents’ room. Some of the quilt pieces older than my father came from my grandmother’s family before her. The cloth travelled along with the family until this time. I presented the quilt to my younger brother so the passage would go female, male, female, male in the family. My grandmother collected the 31 scraps. My father designed the pattern...