PATCHWORK QUILT
ROMARE BEARDEN, 1970
She's resting. Everything else is working. Look at what's covering her. Checks, dots, stripes, flowers, plaid — nothing matches, and it all holds. And look at what it's made of. Paper. Fabric. A little paint. A fifty-nine-year-old man making a masterpiece out of scraps. The materials of the kitchen table, on the wall at MoMA. Now — 1970. Hold onto that year. Two years after they killed King. Five after Malcolm. The image of a Black body in every American newspaper is a body in trouble — marching, bleeding, on fire, carried. And in the middle of all that, Bearden makes this. A woman. At rest. Nobody doing anything to her. He just lets her lie down. Think about how radical that is. Her pose, by the way, comes from Egyptian tomb reliefs. Thousands of years old. The arm, the sideways posture — he's quoting it directly. He's putting her in a lineage older than America. And her face, if you get close, is made of photographs. Cut from magazines his wife brought home — Ebony, Harper's Bazaar. Fragments of faces that were already public, reassembled into one specific person. He knew how to make a person out of pieces because, he was a social worker in Harlem. For thirty-four years. He climbed those staircases. He knew who lived behind those doors. So when he sits down, he's doing what mostly women in those houses did. Same act. Cutting. Arranging. Stitching a life together out of what's left. He grew up partly in Charlotte, North Carolina, and down there a quilt wasn't decor. It was a whole family in fabric. A Sunday dress. A baby blanket. The shirt somebody was buried in. A scrap from a wedding. Every square a person you knew. Its what kept you warm.