Juneteenth book melds history, quilting tradition

Seated at the dining room table in her storybook-style Tudor home, Kim Taylor mused over her new status as a published author.

“I’m still kind of pinching myself,” said the 59-year-old Baldwin resident, who has had a long career as a speech-language pathologist and school administrator. But the recent release — and subject — of “A Flag for Juneteenth,” her imagined chronicle of the June 19, 1865, celebration of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas, is certainly no fairy tale.

The picture book, out this month through Holiday House, not only reveals Taylor’s considerable talents as an inspiring raconteur but as a self-taught quilter whose creations uniquely and symbolically illustrate the historically based narrative.

Though the story is tied to her heritage, Taylor noted that she was once unfamiliar with both her book’s topic and mode of expression. That changed, she explained, with Barack Obama’s election.

“It was just stunning to me. A country that once had slavery as a legal institution now had an African American president,” she said of her thinking at the time. “I had to find a way to express this.”

She did, with her first quilt, “Full Circle, A History,” featuring a portrait of Obama fashioned from cloth scraps and surrounded by images of African warriors. Not only does its iconography connect Taylor with her ancestors, but so too does her artistic medium of choice. For centuries, West African men and women have stitched together boldly colored snippets of fabric, embedding history lessons and cultural symbols in their work. During the years of the Underground Railroad, quilting practices brought to America through the slave trade continued their function as vehicles for storytelling and community building, but also contained secret codes to help guide Southern Blacks to freedom.

For the quilt’s background, Taylor chose Jacob’s ladder, an escalating diagonal design that predates the Civil War and was likely part of the Underground Railroad vernacular. Such traditional patterns, however, have since proved less appealing to the self-taught artist. “I don’t like to follow rules. If you cut something wrong, then you need to throw it away. With story quilting that doesn’t matter,” she explained. “I need to be free.”

A quilting practice

As evidenced by the dynamic patchwork of fabric hangings that today cover her home’s bright yellow walls, quilting is as much a therapeutic outlet for Taylor as an artistic one. “I emote and digest through the process,” she said. In “Haiti’s Sorrow,” for instance, Taylor commemorated the devastation suffered by the Caribbean nation from an earthquake in 2010.

“So many people died there and, in my eyes, didn’t get the help they needed. Making that quilt helped me heal myself,” she said, noting her inclusion of materials resembling broken glass and spilled blood in the composition.

On an adjacent wall and striking a more upbeat note, “Feeling Good as Sung by Nina Simone” depicts the 1960s singer and activist immersed in a dazzling, dreamlike landscape. “I love jazz,” said Taylor. “When I make a quilt, there is usually a catalyst for my inspiration.”

The catalyst for her book began with an invitation. In 2014, a friend asked her to attend a Juneteenth celebration at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Central Nassau in Garden City.

“I was never taught about it in school,” Taylor said of her first experience with the commemoration, which included an abundance of soul food, folk music and high-spirited socialization. “It was first called Jubilee Day. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863, people had to come and tell you about the abolishment of slavery. Two-and-a-half years later, African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were the last to learn they were free.”

Unsurprisingly, Taylor felt compelled to craft a quilt to honor the momentous day. She magically configured bits and pieces of fabric and thread to portray a couple standing beneath a canopy of trees holding up their infant and a replica of the official Juneteenth flag with one hand, while wearing broken chains on the other.

“I always begin my creative process by asking myself ‘What do I want to depict?’  ” she said. “I wanted to showcase a feeling of freedom and to pass it on. I was also thinking if I had been there at the time, I would have gone into the woods and spent time there being grateful.”

The textile artist returned to the church’s annual Juneteenth celebration with her handiwork. Encouraged by the positive responses the quilt received, Taylor began to present it at other Long Island venues and a number of schools. “Most of the students had no idea about Juneteenth,” she said. “The kids wanted to touch the quilt. It definitely created in them a feeling of pride in our resilient ancestors.”

A spread from "A Flag for Juneteenth" depicts the lead character's 10th birthday. Kim Taylor created sketches that were transformed into individual quilt squares. | Photos by Holiday House Publishing / Text and Illustrations by Kim Taylor (book pages); Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr. (sketches)

Sharing and learning

Taylor has also conducted a series of quilting workshops through the Baldwin Public Library, where the results currently hang on display.

“The children made paper dolls that helped them to recognize the beauty of diversity,” said librarian Marialisa Arnold, who organized the event. “The teen workshop focused on how important and powerful their voices are in the fight for justice and equal rights, and the adults made beautiful squares that focused on making a commitment to change by writing out ‘I will’ statements and other powerful sentiments. The participants all walked away with information and a sense of accomplishment.”

To help students better understand the significance of Juneteenth, Taylor one day decided to take out crayons, paper and a stapler and went about crafting a short story. “I needed someone who the kids could connect to,” she said of her young protagonist, Huldah, whose 10th birthday Taylor imagines to coincide with the arrival of federal troops who brought word of emancipation to Galveston.

Along with the pandemic came the opportunity for Taylor to tweak her tale about the close-knit African American community processing and celebrating the news of their emancipation. She then decided to send it off to a literary agent and a few publishers.

“I was naive,” she said. “Publishers really only read three or four unsolicited manuscripts a year. But I did get an email the next day from Serendipity, a New York agency known for its diverse representation.” After a fair amount of persuasion, Taylor admitted, she agreed to incorporate her quilting talents in the project, which she had submitted without illustrations.

After full workdays as the head of the speech and language department at the Lexington School for the Deaf in East Elmhurst, Queens, Taylor spent hours at her dining room table playing with scraps of fabric and gluing them on squares of off-white muslin.

“I do a lot of experimenting,” she said. “You can’t find on YouTube or in a book how to make colors, patterns and textures work together.” In addition to quilting, Taylor taught herself embroidery — employed as a design element to relay select sentences in her book — and how to paint with watercolors, which she often uses to render background elements in her panels.

‘Gift from my ancestors’

During the February 2022 school break, Taylor gathered the squares and retreated upstairs to her sewing room. Much of her time there, she explained, was spent engaged in the practice of free-motion quilting, a highly expressive method in which the sewing machine’s “feed dogs” (which move the material under the needle) are disengaged, allowing the quilt to be shifted in any direction.

She has used the technique to great effect, juxtaposing the meandering, arabesque-like lines she sewed across the backdrop of one spread, for instance, with Fawohodie, a Ghanaian symbol that means “independence,” that the male elders in the book carve on smooth branches made into flagpoles.

The hand-embroidered words on the book’s opening page also echo Taylor’s freewheeling thread designs, suggesting the unseen scents of vanilla and nutmeg wafting up from a plate of just-baked tea cakes. Invisible, too, is the smile the author describes landing on the face of her hero.

“I decided that the people in the book wouldn’t have facial features,” she explained, “and by doing so, I hope my readers will see themselves in the characters in some way.”

It is a practice Taylor has adopted with all of her quilts, including “Life Story (The Way My Ancestors Would Have Told It),” an autobiography made of 12 quilted squares. Identifying herself in each frame with a yellow hair ribbon, she traces her personal trajectory, from her childhood in Brooklyn through her college graduation, the birth of her daughter, and her divorce.

The narrative also touches on another aspect of Taylor’s ancestry. “My mom was raised Jewish, and my dad was Baptist,” she said, noting frames depicting her on a dock at her Jewish summer camp and as a member of the Black congregation at Temple Beth Shalom in East New York.

While the quilt looks back at significant events in Taylor’s life, its final block is curiously prescient. It portrays a present wrapped in African kente cloth, topped with a yellow bow. Inside is a likeness of the Bible quilt made by Harriet Powers, a formerly enslaved woman, in 1886, incorporating the appliqué and storytelling techniques of West African textiles. “It represents my gift from my ancestors,” Taylor explained. “That is, the quilting.”

And now, with the release of “A Flag for Juneteenth,” it can also be read to symbolize the quilt-maker’s gift to us.