Digital Snapshots
Hystercine Rankin Quilts & Black Quilting Traditions
Quilt, "After My Father's Funeral"; February 23, 1993
Dublin Core
Title
Quilt, "After My Father's Funeral"; February 23, 1993
Object Name
Needlework--Quilt
Label
Hystercine Rankin's memory quilt "After My Father's Funeral" depicts her grief-stricken family moving by mule-drawn wagon after the racially charged murder of her father. According to the artist, the arrangement of the Log Cabin style strips symbolizes for her the journey from darkness into light.
Detailed Description
From the Mississippi Department of Archives and History's Historic Objects Collection. A communication textile (cotton and polyester) artifact demonstrating needlework artistry. Features several frames of various patterned cloth with a central scene. There is a light and dark difference in colorscape, with the left and top sides in reds and dark blues, and the bottom and right sides in whites, pinks, browns, and light blues. The central scene includes a paragraph in dark needlework with a gold fabric background on the top-central panel. The bottom-central panel shows a Black woman in the driver's seat of a plaid, open wagon and she is driving a dark colored mule. There are nine figures in the wagon.
Creator
Rankin, Hystercine Gray (1929-2010)
Date
1993-02-23
Catalog Number
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT - EDUCATIONAL USE PERMITTED; http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives & History
Text Transcription:
AFTER MY FATHER’S FUNERAL
The day of my father Denver Gray’s funeral was also the day we left Union Church. My Grandmother, Alice Whelman, moved us to the Blue Hill community to live with her father, Joe January, who was born a slave, and later bought 100 acres of the land he was a slave on, and built a very large house in 1890. He died in 1941. I moved in 1946, when I married Ezekiel Rankin, a state sergeant in the US Army. My Grandmother died in 1943 and my mother brothers and sisters continued to live with my great uncle, Lovie January My Mother Laula Gray died in 1950 of cancer