How to Make an American Quilt

At first,I thought I ould study art.Art history,to be exact. Then I thought,No,what about physical anthropology?--a point in my life thereafter referred to as My Jane Goodall Period.I tried to imagine my mother,Sarah Bennett-Dodd (called Sally by everyone with the exception of her mother),camping with me in the African bush,drinking strong coffee from our battered tin cups,much in the way that Jane did with Mrs.Goodall.I saw us laid up with match- ing cases of malaria;in mother/daughter safari shorts;our hands weathering in exactly the same fashion. Then,of course,I remembered that I was talking about my mother,Sally,who is most comfortable with modernity and refuses to live in a house that anyone has lived in before,exposing me to a life of tract housing that was curious and awful. Literature was my next love.Until I became loosely acquainted with critical theory,which struck me as a kind of intellectualism for its own sake.It always seems that one has to choose literature or critical theory,that one cannot love both.All of this finally pushed me willingly (I later realized)into history. I began with the discipline of the time line --a holdover from elementary school --setting all the dates in order,allowing me to fix time and place.History needs a specific context,if nothing else.My time lines gradually grew more and more ornate,with pasted-on photographs and drawings that I carefully cut from cheap history books possessing great illustrations but terrible,unchallenging text.I was taken with the look of history before I arrived at the "meat "of the matter.But the construction of the time line is both horizontal and vertical,both distance and depth.Which,finally, makes it rather unwieldy on paper.What I am saying is that it needed other dimensions,that history is not a matter of dates,and only disreputable or unimaginative teachers take the "impartial " date approach,thereby killing all interest in the subject at a very early age for many students. (I knew,in a perfect world,I would not be forced to choose a single course of study,that I would have time for all these interests. I could gather up all my desires and count them out like valentines.) The Victorians caught my eye almost instantly with their strange and sometimes ugly ideas about architecture and dress and social conventions.Some of it was pure whimsy,like a diorama in which ninety-two squirrels were stuffed and mounted,enacting a basement beer-and-poker party,complete with cigars and green visors pulled low over their bright eyes;or a house that displayed a painting of cherubs,clad in strips of white linen,flying above the clouds with an identical painting hidden,right next to it,under a curtain in which the same cherubs --babies though they were --are completely nude.Or a privileged Texas belle 's curio cabinet that contained a human skull and blackened hand.Or still another young woman (wealthy daughter of a prominent man)who insisted on gliding through the family mansion with a handful of live kittens clinging to the train of her dress. I enrolled in graduate school.Then I lost interest.I cared and then I didn 't care.I wanted to know as much about the small,odd details that I discovered here and there when looking into the past as I did about Lenin 's secret train or England 's Victorian imperial- ism or a flawless neo-Marxist critique of capitalism. There were things that struck me as funny,like the name Bushrod Washington,which belonged to George 's nephew,or the man who painted Mary Freake and her baby,known only as the Freake Limner.And I like that sort of historical gossip;I mean,is it true that Catherine the Great died trying to copulate with a horse? And if not,what a strange thing to say about someone.Did Thomas Jefferson have a lengthy,fruitful affair with his slaveOtto, Whitney is the author of 'How to Make an American Quilt' with ISBN 9780345370808 and ISBN 0345370805.