From 1983: The author Andrea Lee returns to her Aunt Lucy’s house in Ahoskie, North Carolina, in search of a patchwork quilt.
I never cared about patchwork quilts until I spent a week with my Aunt Lucy, in Ahoskie, North Carolina, not long ago. When I was fifteen, my mother threw out a quilt that her mother had made, and I was glad of it, because the quilt was so ragged it was unmendable, and at night, lying under it, you could slide your whole foot into the tears in the brittle old fabric.
That summer, I developed a mania for whittling, and my ambition was to carve a miniature basket out of a peach pit—a difficult feat even for an experienced whittler. I had seen a peach-pit basket once; it had been shown me by an old woman, a cousin of my grandmother’s, who also came from this part of the country.
Aunt Lucy told him that I lived in New York, and he looked pleased. Twelve years ago, he told us, he had visited the city with his cousins Sherman and Winfield Hall. “We was only there one day,” he said. “We drove real slow all over the city—saw the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, and Yankee Stadium. We saw all the street lights in town turn off that night—we only slept but one hour.
Colice and Aunt Lucy looked very small in the big, lush garden, where, besides squash, they had planted pole beans, string beans, tomatoes, collard greens, beets, peppers, potatoes, and roasting ears. Aunt Lucy was wearing a green cotton hat that tilted up at the front like a child’s sunbonnet, accentuating the expression of grave innocence on her pretty face. Colice’s hat was a jaunty light-blue mesh cap, decorated with an insignia of crossed golf clubs, one pink and one blue.
When Miss Dessie speaks of the people she “knows,” she goes into minute genealogical detail, and her stories, like many stories I have heard out in the country, are seasoned with violence. In her slow, matter-of-fact voice, she told me about a nephew of hers who was killed in a tobacco-barn explosion; a farmer who had a stroke, fell into his hog pen, and was devoured by his hogs; a young boy who was struck by lightning as he ran in the fields with other children.
Miss Julia’s house was a small turquoise-painted cement-block house set in the midst of a group of four or five modest, low houses of brick, tarpaper, or clapboard which bordered on a short paved road off the highway. The house lay behind a privet hedge, and a screened side porch held magnificent geraniums, begonias, and coleus plants, and also a large freezer, a wringer-washer, and hanging bunches of dried peppers and mint.
In the car, Miss Dessie asked me if I was happy with my quilts, and I said that I liked them but that they were not exactly what I had wanted. “You should have taken the polyester,” she said. “It’s bright and washable and makes a right nice quilt.”
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