Codes of the Underground Railroad

There is a fair amount of disagreement about whether quilts were used as codes on the Underground Railroad. The evidence in the affirmative comes from oral history, passed down through families over time. We know that stories that families tell are like a game of Telephone, you hear what you want to hear and disregard the rest, but on the other hand, slave stories were largely oral history. They were not taught to write and they weren't allowed to be literate so while there were those who defied that, the majority could not.

There is agreement that spirituals were important as communication of the railroad to the north and that there were codes within them that helped in planning and navigating your way northward. The North Star pattern at least reflects the importance of the Big Dipper in helping escaped slaves navigate at night. The destination for many slaves was Ohio. Cleveland was known as 'Hope', but was also a crossroads for slvaes traveling from the south and from the west to get passage northward--I know this pattern as Jacob's Ladder, and made it over 35 years ago for my eldest son. I also made him a Monkey Wrench quilt, another symbol stemming from slavery. The blacksmiths on plantations were slaves, and they were the slaves who were afforded more privlege than field workers--it is plausible they were the local communicators. There is so much we don't know.

Connie Martin spoke to my quilt guild, and she tells the stories passed down to her great-grandmother Lizzie of how her family survived the antebellum period through trials and tribulations, and how they used quilts that contained hidden codes and secret messages to assist abolitionists–white and black–to guide enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad to Canada. During this presentation, Connie shared eighteen different quilt patterns in replica quilts and refers to a book her mother, Dr. Clarice Boswell, wrote about their family called Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journey to Freedom.