Black History Talk Rescheduled

With the multitude of snowstorms bedeviling everyone’s schedule, the Newtown Historical Society and the Booth Library announce the rescheduling of a program planned for Black Heritage Month.

In the long and dark history of slavery in America, the vision of escape to a land of promise, was always present, real, and full of hope in a world of otherwise little future. The vision may have been of magical flying to freedom, of following the Drinking Gourd/Big Dipper to the north, or possibly of something more concrete: a map sewn into a quilt.

Using a symbolic language transmitted only among themselves, slaves would sew what appeared to be harmless quilts in a fashion to give directions, distances, landmarks, and even locations of safe refuge on the way north. In a celebration of Black Heritage Month, the Newtown Historical Society and the C.H. Booth Library will combine to offer Freedom Quilts and the Underground Railroad, in two performances, on March 28 in the meeting room of the library, 25 Main Street (Route 25). The early performance for children will be at 4 pm; the evening program for adults and families will begin at 7.30 pm. Both presentations will be made in period costume by Trish Chambers.

Ms Chambers will give a brief history of the Underground Railroad and will discuss the use of quilts as a means of communication among the slave population. She will explore African traditions of “story quilts” that gave rise to the concept of communication through symbolic images on fabric, and using a facsimile quilt as an example, she will examine the meanings and instructions represented by the various quilt patterns and how they were used by slaves to initiate their difficult and dangerous journeys to freedom.

Trish Chambers is a Civil War reenactor who has performed widely in person, as well as participating in the Civil War movie Gods & Generals. She is a member of the Daughters of Orange, the women’s auxiliary of the New York State 124th Volunteers, a Union Civil War reenactment group, and, for balance, the Confederate Reenactors Field Music, a fife and drum corps.