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Abstract
Embroideries stitched by girls at schools for Black children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare finds. The few embroideries likely stitched by Black schoolgirls that do survive often offer historical evidence in the stitched names of their makers and the schools they attended. Yet there is little scholarship on these embroideries or the education these schoolgirls were pursuing while creating their samplers. Examined with methodologies that use material culture as primary evidence, these embroideries can provide valuable clues about the lives of Black girls in northern cities during the antebellum period. This paper examines the materiality, textual content, and design aesthetics of these needlework pieces, as well as the context in which they were stitched. Previous scholars have automatically attributed the girls’ needlework skills to their European schools or influences. My work considers the needlework skills likely taught to the girls by their family and kinfolk. Moving outside of the home, I examine school and organizational records to understand the motivation and methodology for teaching children of color in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after the Revolutionary War. These embroideries reveal young girls who were learning and being taught how to be young Black girls, and all that entails in terms of the performance of domesticity and republicanism. The quiet activism revealed in their embroideries continued with the formation of their families and the support they gave their communities. “Reading” needlework offers invaluable insight into the early history of Black children’s formal education before Emancipation and illuminates the formation of Black American girlhood identities in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. On a larger scale, these embroideries represent another form of Black American cultural production to add to the long list of contributions people of the African diaspora have made to the Americas.
Notes
1 Unfortunately, many people in eighteenth-century society misread the poem as being about the cruelty of animal experimentation at the time. Barbauld was upset by society’s literal reading of her poem, as revealed by scholar Katherine Ready in her article “‘What then, poor Beastie!’: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’” in the journal Eighteenth-Century Life 28 (1):92–114. Barbauld clarified that her poem was referring to “mercy” and “justice” rather than to “humanity” and “cruelty.” It was requoted in 1773 publications in defense of the protests against animal experimentation.
2 In this paper I am purposefully capitalizing the “B” in Black when referring to people of color of African descent and using a lower case “w” for people who are largely of European descent. Black is capitalized to represent the group of people whose ancestors were born on the continent of Africa, taken against their will, and brought to the Americas in the past 400 years. I am not speaking about the color black. As Lori L. Tharp states in her essay written on her blog and later for the New York Times, I am giving Black people the same respect and acknowledgement as Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, and many other ethnic groups around the world. I decided not to capitalize “white” because the term does not classify a group of people the way “Black” does for people of the African diaspora, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America. People of European descent often still referred to themselves by their ethnicities of Irish, Italian, British, Welsh, Dutch, and so forth. See blog post on Ask A Radical Copyeditor entitled “Black with a Capital B” https://radicalcopyeditor.com/2016/09/21/black-with-a-capital-b/. It is from this post that I also referenced Lori L. Tharps’s “I Refuse to Remain in the Lower Case” on My American Melting Pot, http://myamericanmeltingpot.com/2014/06/02/i-refuse-to-remain-in-the-lower-case/, her New York Times article, “The Case for Black with a Capital B” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b.html and Touré. 2010. Whose Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now:vii.
3 Hine explains this dissemblance as a reaction to the racial and sexual violence Black women and girls received at the hands of their white owners and peers. Black girls and women hide their subjectivities behind a veil of protection, which Hine termed a “culture of dissemblance.”
4 See Hartman, S.V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America and –––. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval; Fuentes, M. J. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive; Johnson, J. M. 2020. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World; Wright, N. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century; Simmons, L. M. 2015. Crescent City Girls; Chatelain, M. 2015. South Side Girls; Owens, T.C., Callier, D.C., Robinson, J. L., and Garner, P. R. 2017. “Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies” in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 6 (3):116-132; Baumgartner K. 2019. In Pursuit of Knowledge; and Webster C. 2020. “The History of Black Girls and the Field of Black Girlhood Studies: At the Forefront of Academic Scholarship.” The American Historian https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2020/the-history-of-girlhood/the-history-of-black-girls-and-the-field-of-black-girlhood-studies-at-the-forefront-of-academic/
5 See also Bolton, E. S., Coe, E. J. and Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America. 1921. American Samplers; Schiffer, M. B. 1968. Historical Needlework of Pennsylvania; Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Moss, G., and Hyde, S. 1984. Embroidered Samplers in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Krueger, G. F. 1984. A Gallery of American Samplers: The Theodore H. Kapnek Collection; Edmonds, M. J., and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1991. Samplers & Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700-1850; Ring, B. 1993. Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850; Humphrey, C. 1997. Samplers; Witney Antiques. 2006. Stitched in Adversity: Samplers of the Poor; Allen, G. S. 2007. A Maryland Sampling: Girlhood Embroidery 1738–1860; Howell, W. H. 2009. “Spirits of Emulation: Readers, Samplers and the Republican Girl, 1787-1810.” American Literature 81 (3): 497–526; Connecticut Historical Society and Schoelwer, S. 2010. Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art, and Family, 1740-1840; Tyner, J. A. 2016. Stitching the World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education; and Huish, M. B. 1913. Samplers and Tapestry Embroideries.
6 These are the books and articles that I have found thus far that mention needlework made by Black girls and young women: Bolton, E. S., Coe, E. J. and Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America. 1921. American Samplers; Hull, G. T., Bell-Scott, P., and Smith, B. 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies; Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Moss, G., and Hyde, S. 1984. Embroidered Samplers in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Allen, G. S. 2004. “African American Samplers from Antebellum Baltimore.” The Magazine Antiques 165 (4):134-150; Schoettler, C. 2004. “Stitches in Time.” The Baltimore Sun, July 1, 2004. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2004-07-01-0407010161-story.html; Connecticut Historical Society and Schoelwer, S. 2010. Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art, and Family, 1740-1840; Allen, G. S. 2007. A Maryland Sampling: Girlhood Embroidery 1738–1860; Interview with Linda Eaton and Amy Finkel in “Endnotes: African American Schoolgirl Embroidery” in The Magazine Antiques July 2009. https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/african-american-schoolgirl-embroidery/; Finkel, A. 2021. Samplings: Antique Samplers & Silk Embroideries from M. Finkel & Daughter; Bolden, T. 2001. Tell All the Children Our Story: Memories and Mementos of Being Young and Black in America; and Anderson L. 2016. “Transnational Influences on Louisiana Samplers: Traditions, Teachers, Techniques, and Text” in the Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1953&context=tsaconf
7 There are a few narratives of the nineteenth century that center the work of Black women and their needlework or textile production. See Wilson, H. E., Foreman, P. G., and Pitts, R. H. 2009. Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black; Keckley, E. 2011. Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years A Slave, and Four Years in the White House; Jackson, R. 1987. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress; Glymph, T. 2003. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household; Morgan, J. 2004. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; and Walker, A. 1983. “Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Womanist Prose:71-82.
8 See Jones, J. 2010. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present; Berry, D. R. 2010. “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia; Glymph, T. 2003. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household; Morgan, J. 2004. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; Fuentes, M. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive; and even historical fiction novelist, Kidd, S. M. 2015. The Invention of Wings for further discussions of enslaved and free women’s ability to participate in the markets of various cities for financial gain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
9 See Allen, G. S. 2001. “Slaves as Textile Artisans: Documentary Evidence for the Chesapeake Region.” American Quilt Study Group Uncoverings 22 (2001): 1–36 and Berry, D. R. 1998. “‘She Do a Heap of Work’: Female Slave Labor on Glynn County Rice and Cotton Plantations.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (4):707-734.
10 Scholar Basil Davidson would argue that this was due to European justifications of slavery, the slave trade, and the beginnings of modern racism. (See Davidson, B. 1980. Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade). Europeans could not deny the many advances in art, science, architecture, and math made in ancient Egyptian civilization. Therefore, there was great controversy among Egyptologists, with many believing that Egypt could not be a Black/African civilization. They posited that a Black civilization could not be so advanced and therefore anything that was exceptional in African countries was attributed to having European roots. Davidson states in Old Africa Rediscovered, “time and again, the achievements of men in Africa – men of Africa – have been laid at the door of some mysterious but otherwise unexplained ‘people from outside Africa’…a whole galaxy of non-African people are dragged in to explain it. The Phoenicians are brought in to explain Zimbabwe in Rhodesia. The Egyptians are produced as painters of the “white lady” of the Brandberg in southwest Africa. Greeks or Portuguese are paraded as the inspirers and teachers of those who worked in terracotta and worked in bronze in medieval West Africa.” (1959:31). See also Diop, C. A. 1974. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Bernall, M. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Maloba, W. September 21, 2016. “History of Africa” class lecture; and for a rebuttal argument, see Lefkowitz, M. 1996. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.
11 See Bradley, H. F. 1997. New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in Antebellum South; Brett-Smith, S. 2014. The Silence of the Women: Bamana Mud Cloths; Idiens, D. 1980. Textiles of Africa; Picton, J. and Mack, J. 1979. African Textiles: Looms, Weaving, and Design; and Rovine, V. L. 2011. “West African Embroidery: History, Continuity, and Innovation.” In Cooksey, S., ed. Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas.
12 Professor Diagne adds that Islam was introduced to Africa in the seventh century in Abyssinia, Ethiopia. Companions of the prophet Muhammed sought refuge in Abyssinia from persecution in Mecca. After the passing of the prophet Muhammed in the eighth century, Islam was formerly introduced in North Africa and Southern Spain. Islam slowly spread through the Sahelian West African region in the ninth and tenth centuries, becoming one of the prominent religions of the region.
13 See also Weaver, K. K. 2012. “Fashioning Freedom: Slave Seamstresses in the Atlantic World.” Journal of Women’s History. 24:44-59; and “Syllabus.” 2002. Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History. https://renderingrevolution.ht/syllabus, which features a list of sources discussing the importance of dress, materiality, and textiles around the Haitian Revolution.
14 The culture of this ancient design motif is not specified in Schiffer’s text but is a detail I hope to discover in my research.
15 I am deeply grateful for the research and conversations I have had with Linda Eaton and Amy Finkel in establishing this connection between the D’Silver family, the British family, and the Associates of Dr. Bray.
16 Reverend Sturgeon was the assistant minister at Christ Church and catechist to Black people in Philadelphia supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP); Reverend John Waring was the secretary for the Associates of Dr. Bray in London, England (Van Horne Citation2009:83).
17 Mary’s father’s name was also spelled DeSylva. Her baptism record spelled her name as Desylva and her parents as Desylvus.
18 Harris’s sampler is approximately seventeen and one-quarter inches square.
19 This area of the city is now known as the Chinatown section of Philadelphia. Adaline Harris’s name appears in the “Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s Board of Education, Clarkson School Entrance of Girls, 1828-1838” book, as cited in Sumpter Priddy’s 2017 unpublished report on Harris. I am grateful for the research on Adaline Harris conducted by Sumpter Priddy III, Inc in collaboration with Weckea Dejura Lilly, researcher, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
20 The embroidery measures twenty-one and a half inches by twenty-four and a half inches inside of the frame.
21 Instead, publishers perpetuated Black girls as idealized, almost static two-dimensional figures who needed assistance from white people to become American citizens. See Wright, N. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century:90.
22 Capshaw and Duane argue that the cross-over between white and black publication contexts enables a new consideration of the mutability of identity—and associations with blackness—in early literary communities. Texts recirculated from white to Black audiences as well as from adult to child readers, and in a way this defied the control of state-sponsored white supremacy common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (xv). Furthermore, they argue that children’s literature articulates cultural rules and values, while also framing constructions of identity and the development of communities (xvi). In Black children’s literature, the focus often is on helping the child learn, grow, and progress into adulthood, which helps the Black community to flourish. The growth of children becomes a political action for Black cultural survival (xix).
23 This is cited in Silcox, H. C. 1973. “Delay and Neglect: Negro Public Education in Antebellum Philadelphia, 1800-1860” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (4):444-464.
24 This is cited in “Without Concealment - Without Compromise: The Coloured People of Philadelphia,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 12, 1854, Accessible Archives.
25 Further research would involve figuring out if Absalom and Judith D’Silver (née Jones) are related to one another. An Israel D’Silver is also present in the records of the church, however his connection to Emanuel, Judith, and Mary is not stated nor has been found.
26 I have been unable to find her profession or death certificate in the archives.
27 This was also the opinion of the late Linda Eaton, John L. and Marjorie P. McGraw Director of Collections and Senior Curator of Textiles, Winterthur Museum, as expressed in one of our discussions about the samplers I am studying. I have been unable to find or have not been given any more information about the family at this point.
28 In this record the family name is spelled “Bristal” but names and ages link to what is known about the Parker and Brister families. Cobb Street had a name change in 1897, becoming Lawrence Street, which existed between Queen to Catherine Streets, west of Fourth Street in Philadelphia. “DOR - Historic Streets Index.” https://www.phillyhistory.org/historicstreets/default.aspx (accessed December 11, 2017).
29 This would be approximately $10,855 in 2020 according to inflation calculator, https://www.in2013dollars.com/ (accessed September 19, 2021).
30 Olive Cemetery was located on the western side of the Schuylkill River. The remains buried there were moved to the Historic Eden Cemetery in suburban Delaware County at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the beginning of the Jim Crow era in the north, when racist city ordinances closed the burial places of African Americans at the Lebanon and Olive Cemeteries and enacted a municipal ordinance that prohibited the creation of new African American cemeteries within city limits. Eden Cemetery was established in 1902. For more information see, “Historic Eden Cemetery – Beginnings.” https://www.edencemetery.org/beginnings (accessed December 4, 2020).
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Kelli Racine Barnes
Kelli Racine Barnes is a History PhD Candidate and African American Public Humanities Initiative Fellow at the University of Delaware. Her research centers needlework made by Black American girls and young women in the 18th and 19th centuries. She seeks to understand the emergence of Black American girlhood identities, republicanism, domesticity, and the formation of educational systems for children of color in the United States. [email protected]