Eudora Welty from A to Z: Q to Z

Q for Quilt, Patchwork

Piled up in wardrobes, spread out on beds, draped over porch railings, quilts confer a powerful presence on Welty’s work. It seems that Eudora Welty was exposed to quilts from a very early age: they were to be seen in most American homes, in Mississippi as elsewhere, and perhaps more so there than elsewhere, given that this particular state had retained traditional ways of life as illustrated in Mary Elizabeth Johnson’s 2001 book Mississippi Quilts.¹

Illustration for the masthead page of Oh, Lady (Early Escapades 102). Printed by permission of Eudora Welty, LLC.

The most original image of a quilt pattern appears very early in Welty’s work in an illustration for Oh, Lady, a magazine founded in 1927 by Eudora Welty and her classmates at Mississippi State College for Women. The sketch features an elegant lady at an easel drawing something fairly geometrical and wearing a patchwork kimono with a pattern of the type known as “crazy quilt,” a quilt made of all sorts of odd-shaped pieces in a style inspired by the cubist manner as was fashionable in the 1920s.

When photographers documented 1930s rural America on behalf of the Farm Security Administration, the images they took frequently recorded the presence of quilts in the background where they bear witness to the living conditions of the era, illustrating the simple, if not bare, domestic lives of families who could not afford ready-made consumer goods. Whether the photographer was Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, or Marion Post Wolcott, the camera reveals the quilts as objects but also, and especially, as a practice, the purpose of which would have been warmth. Eudora Welty had a different purpose. She has no particular message to get across about the people she is capturing on film because, as Pearl McHaney shows in her recent book, Eudora Welty as Photographer, her work is to collect information, and she snaps photographs along the way. A few quilts appear in her photographs, in particular “Hat, fan, and quilts / Jackson / 1930s” (Photographs 14), but in this particular case, the quilt is less featured for itself than used as an element within a visual composition. Among the photographed textile pieces appears a slave’s apron made of appliqué (OTOP 100), and its presence bears witness to Welty’s interest in how women, and in this particular case African-American women, expressed themselves in needlework.

Quilts, as emotionally charged objects, are sewn, given, and passed on within the family circle. Situated at the intersection of space and time, of surface and depth, made from pieces of fabric each of which embodies a piece of family history, they turn diachronic time into a synchronic whole that is closed in on itself, though without erasing the dimension of depth which rises up to the surface. The quilt is a “lieu de mémoire” as Pierre Nora would put it, a “site of memory,” whose form, function, and design unfolds in Welty’s writing.

In The Golden Apples Katie Rainey proceeds to list one after the other the items she intends to pass on to her daughter Virgie: “Road to Dublin, Starry Sky, Strange Spider Web, Hands All Around, Double Wedding Ring. Mama’s rich in quilts, child” (431). In Delta Wedding, Troy Flavin delights in showing his in-laws that he knows by heart the name of the quilt patterns that his mother has just sent to the bride and bridegroom-to-be as wedding gifts: “I swear that’s the ‘Delectable Mountains’.… Look, ‘Dove in the Window,’ Where’s everybody?… Let’s see. I think it’s ‘Tirzah’s Treasure,’ but it might be ‘Hearts and Gizzards’” (201). In Shellmound, patchwork as practiced by Troy’s mother is considered to be a rather rustic form of the craft of sewing: Troy’s mother lives in the country, and the Delectable Mountains pattern, inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, expresses a particular attachment to the land, which contrasts in every point (or stitch) with the more...