I am reading an interview with a historian that set out to weave the type of textiles that was sold to plantations for use by enslaved people using period appropriate looms.
But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself...
The great challenge of our work as scholars—at least, those who are interested in historical reconstruction or the histories of any craft tradition—is that almost none of what we want to know is written down—because it didn’t have to be and it didn’t need to be articulated. So to be in a situation where expert weavers had to talk to me like I was a child was one of the best things that happened to me in the course of my research for this book.
“But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England's leading manufacturers of low-end woollen cloth for enslaved w
For my textile, weaving, historic textile, history enthusiasts
The interviewer is also a weaver!
SW: ... That’s really awesome. You’ve taught this class now for two semesters. What have you learned from your students?
SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.
And this took me in new directions in my own research. You might remember a discussion of sewing labor in the final chapter of Plantation Goods and the implication of a cloth’s width for a woman’s work routine. If you know how to cut the pieces for a shirt from a 32-inch-wide piece of fabric, it is going to mess everything up when you’re given a bolt of 28-inch-wide cloth. I had seen letters from slaveholders in the 1830s and 1840s complaining about the narrowness of the cloth and how enslaved women didn’t “understand” these fabrics. This wasn’t transparent to me as a historian. Only with students talking about the expertise involved in cutting cloth into the components of a garment did I realize what a difference it made when, say, a New England weaver was haphazard and turned out fabric four inches narrower than the usual variety. That error would reverberate in the lives of people 1,000 miles away who might face extreme forms of violence because they couldn’t meet their daily production quotas. Or they might experience other kinds of privation—a lack of rags for postpartum women, for example—because a wider fabric left scraps while a narrower one did not.
The conversation that happens in this relatively short interview about all the processes and choices in textile production (then and now) are really important.
From the arguments made and lengths slave holders went to to acquire the worst wool, to under appreciated labor of textile and clothing production.
