Railroads, Quilts and Myths

Continued from "The Underground Railroad Slept Here"

In the past ten years, a new layer has been added to the Underground Railroad mythology with the stories that enslaved women made quilts that provided maps of the route to freedom. This myth began with the 1999 book, Hidden in Plain View, and was perpetuated through a documentary and grade school curricula. Most recently, the story was embedded in the plans for a Frederick Douglass memorial to stand in Central Park, despite the fact that the quilt myth has no connection whatsoever to Douglass, including his own escape. The book and its supporters have been completely refuted by scholarly historians, most recently on the H-Net listserv H-Slavery, on the History News Network blog Cliopatria, and by historian David Blight in regard to the Douglass statue. Yet, the myth retains a strong hold on the public imagination.

The popularity of the quilt code story probably lies in the new dimension that it brings to the Underground Railroad myth. The standard narrative depicts the frightened slave running north where he (or she, but usually he) is hidden and assisted by white abolitionists. The hero of the story is the white sympathizer, the villain is the white slave catcher, and the slave is the victim. Harriet Tubman provided a compelling counter-narrative as the slave who not only escaped, but returned and helped others escape. She became a black hero in an Underground Railroad story. Additionally, the fact that she returned to Maryland to help other fugitives suggests the existence of a broader black community in which kin assist one another.

Tubman, however, was exceptional in all senses of the word. The quilt story takes on the part of Tubman's story that incorporates the enslaved black community and enslaved women into the popular Underground Railroad narrative. The quilts that allegedly gave directions to freedom were made by enslaved women incorporating both women's skills and African symbols into their codes, thereby placing emphasis on the women, their work, and the African heritage of the slaves. The quilters become heroic and an awareness of an African past is retained. Thus, those millions of people who remained in slavery are granted a central role in undermining the institution by assisting fugitives.

The quilt story, then, incorporates some of the realities of slavery into the Underground Railroad by placing black people at the center of the narrative. In this way, the quilt story incorporates some of the realities of slavery into the Underground Railroad myth and at the same time broadens its appeal.

The problem with these myths, however, is that they are just that. Expanding the appeal of a fiction does not make it a truth. The problem with the Underground Railroad story, quilts and all, is the same that is encountered wherever scholarly research meets with the public. Somewhere there is a demand for "heroic" stories, stories that are uplifting, that have heroes and villains, that end happily ever after. The demand is for an archetypal narrative that simply does not exist in history (or in life). When people attempt to shape historical events into that archetype, they create myth; and on these myths they create a form of public religion. They do not create history.