With Our Hands: Quilting Communities that Flourish

Hi beloveds,

As many of you know, a few weeks ago we hosted the Jereann King Johnson Documentary Fundraising Event a few weeks ago at The Fruit. It was a beautiful evening. In conversation with Dr. Chelsea Yarborough over dinner, I thought she raised a poignant reflection about the connections between quilting and community. I hope you will find some illumination from our conversation that I recorded in a moment of spontaneity below. 

Racquel: Dr. Chelsea, you were able to attend the fundraiser for the Jereann King Johnson documentary and more importantly than it being a fundraiser it was also an evening where we got to witness a trailer of the film and engage with some of her quilts. What were some of your more present takeaways from seeing the quilts and learning more about her life and her story in the trailer?

Dr. Chelsea: One of the things that I thought was really interesting was not just being able to witness Jereann King Johnson’s work but also hearing her story and seeing the community that surrounded her. This was my first introduction to her. I remember seeing Bree Newsome on one of her quilts and every kind of quilt had its own story that I was interacting with. I’m sure that everyone could kind of engage with them differently but really what I began to resonate with was , and I’m not gonna quote this directly, but something that she said in the interview was just seeing what she could do with her hands and what these kind of gifts not just offered her but offered to the community around her both in conversation and in kind of practicality for folks who got to witness. So that began my thinking about what it means for quilting itself to be a methodology of community.

Racquel: “Quilting as a methodology of community” I think that is a beautiful phrasing. I want you to say more about how Jereann’s description of quilting reminded you of how we craft, how we create, and how we sustain communities?

Dr. Chelsea: Listening to the bits and pieces of her story and the different trails of communities and places that have made her own narrative come alive had me thinking like man all of that goes into these quilts. I know there are different types of quilts, different patterning etcetera but what I also tend to know is that quilting often brings disparate things together that might not otherwise find themselves together until the quilter sees something beautiful, something connected, and threads something throughout them. So, I think particularly for me as a queer person, a chosen community or chosen family is so crucial to survival and so crucial to what it means to exist. Crafting that community has been such a quilting process of taking things, people and ideas that often seem disparate and threading them together through the radical act of love. From that threading, believing that something beautiful, something protective, and something worth displaying can be created. It is literally an act of pulling multiplicity together in a way that I think supremacy and homogeneous acts of power try to keep things apart. So, as I was hearing her talk about what she does with her hands and what she has created in these quilts and in her community around her, I found myself thinking about what I’ve created with these hands and with my life and the folks that surround me; a quilted community if you will. 

Racquel: I find it so interesting that what has stuck or stayed with us both some weeks later is the way Jereann mused about the work of her hands. I think I’m quoting verbatim what she said in the Q&A which was that “the work of our hands can make a difference.” This idea that very ordinary hands, black hands that sometimes have not been loved or honored by society are the hands that can make beautiful things in our lives and make a difference in our world. Whether it is quilting, gardening, cooking, sewing, or any other task. It reminded me of a passage in Nehemiah where Nehemiah’s people were underestimated and there were attempts to distract them from the work of rebuilding and restoring their community. People were saying “their hands will get too weak for the work, and it will not be completed” but scriptures say that Nehemiah prayed, “Now Lord strengthen our hands.” In this current climate there are so many forces that try to tire out those that are working for community transformation. There are so many systems that seek to distract us and pull us away from the work of empowerment for those on the margins, but we must continue to pray “God strengthen our hands” so that we can continue to do the work of rebuilding and quilting communities that flourish. I just wanted to ask you if there was any final take away that you witnessed from that night or anything that is still sticking with you?

Dr. Chelsea: I think the last thing that I would like to say is I was really struck that when they first started interviewing her, her first inclination was like why me? A part of my work is studying so many women, black women particularly, whose work speaks for itself. My initial reaction is always who are the hands of the folks that we miss as we walk by each day? Who are the hands of folks whose creativity, ingenuity, cleverness and invention have created the worlds that we currently live in? What a profound gift and sacred moment to sit at the feet and listen more clearly to someone who has done such incredible things, but our inclination is to move by so fast that we don’t always take notice. To take notice of these black women is an act of radical love which is a crucial thread of community for me. 

Rev. Dr. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough, PhD, is the Associate Director of Leadership Programming at the Association of Theological Schools. Yarborough is a preacher, an ordained minister in the Baptist tradition, a poet, and an Enneagram coach.