Word: quilting
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...Green Zone is guarded by a crazy quilt of security personnel--Georgian soldiers, Peruvian security guards, Iraqi army, Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers. Moving around the area requires learning a peculiar patois. Upon arriving at a routine checkpoint, you are typically greeted with a succession of questions and demands, issued in Georgian ("gamarjoba," or hello), Spanish ("amigo"), English ("badge"), Arabic ("silah," or weapon) and Iraqi slang ("mamnoon," or thank you). During the course of a recent day of meetings in the Green Zone, I was sniffed by dogs six times, sent my bags through four metal detectors, was photographed once...
...record straight every chance they get. They present papers for publication and at conferences. They fill pages and pages of websites debunking what they believe to be a myth akin to George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. They engage in heated debates on Underground Railroad and quilt studies e-mail lists. And a few months ago Barbara Brackman, a renowned quilt historian, even published her own book called Facts and Fabrications; Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery (C&T Publishing) to present what she considers to be an accurate assessment of slavery, quilts and the Underground Railroad...
...Nevertheless, the story continues to be told in places like the Plymouth Historical Museum in Plymouth, Mich., where an exhibition entitled "Quilts of the Underground Railroad" is up for the fifth year in a row. Over 6,000 school children have seen the exhibit, which presents the thesis of a quilt code. There are also smaller lectures taking place at local libraries, churches and quilt guilds all over the country. The story has also ended up in lesson plans and textbooks (TIME For Kids even published an article about Hidden in Plain View in a middle school art book published...
...women like Anna Lopez, the education coordinator at the Plymouth Historical Museum, see no reason why the story of quilt codes can't be fact. "What I tell kids is, who writes history? Men do. Mostly white men. Then I ask, who made quilts? Women did, and a lot of black women made quilts and passed on their oral history. No one wrote down their history, so who knows...
...Folklorist and quilt historian Laurel Horton, who has lectured and published papers about the quilt code, says she's given up on trying to debunk the myth. Instead, she says she's more interested on focusing on why the story continues to persist. "This whole issue made me realize it's not a matter of one group having the truth and another not. It's matter of two different sets of beliefs. It's made me realize that belief doesn't have a lot to do with factual representation. People feel in their gut that it's true...