Editor’s note: This article is part of a special edition of this year Craft Archive Scholarship Cohortorganized in conjunction with the Center for Craft to support new work by emerging and established scholars in the field, with a focus on underrepresented and non-mainstream stories.
That I, a calm and radical African-American fiber artist, raised in a black community by a nautical lake in the Pacific Northwest, would find the book A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten by Julie Winch, about a woman born free, calm, radical, elite African-American fiber maker, living in North America from 1766 to 1842—the most prosperous and philanthropic of sailing ships, born in Philadelphia during the turbulent period of the Revolutionary War—was truly a cosmic alignment that could be straight out of Farmers Almanac (if the almanac were as astrologically suited to human movement as it is to the prediction of nature).
I saw this book a few steps from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, on the table of a peddler and bookseller, Brother Mustafa. It has been carefully placed among a pile of equally intriguing and influential books by historical and futuristic people of African descent.
The miraculous life of James Forten and his role in shaping prominent African-American history is one of my biggest inspirations. Unbeknownst to me, I opened my fiber arts studio in Philadelphia, far from where Forten’s sailmaking loft was at Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River. It was my research into Forten’s life that connected my wild and aquatic childhood along Seattle’s Lake Washington to my current fiber arts practice, which focuses on the evolution of Afro-American home textiles. Americans before and after emancipation.
In retrospect, it was fulfilling growing up in a black community on a lake “in red” in Seattle’s Central District, with a pack of rambunctious neighborhood kids. We played in the ponds and wooded area around our homes, venturing through the Washington Park Arboretum to a now gentrified and forgotten area of natural bodies of shifting sand and clay mounds. They would rise and fall with the tides that created patches of land that we claimed and named as our islands.
We played pirate captains, imitating the rowdy Seafair Pirates who opened the annual Seafair summer festival of parades, seaplane races and carnivals throughout the city. We built three-walled log cabins with open roofs and gathered floating logs for rafts from fallen logs, broken roots, branches, mud and stones, and as furniture we used the beautiful organically carved driftwood that was scattered along the edge of the lake.
Like James Forten’s community, ours was an unknown story of the African-American experience. Our playground was the shore, with a backdrop of flying hawks, seagulls, rowboats, motorboats and houseboats. And, like Forten, we were fascinated by the majestic sails of sailboats. We called their names as they were anchored, floating quietly or fishing further out in the lake.
Like young James Forten in the mid-1700s, we too had childhood curiosity and freedom of imagination – characteristics that continue to serve us as adults. We were aware of the community activism, cultural revolutions and events of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. In our imagination, this was our private utopia. We made believe what we wanted. It was our platform that took us anywhere we could dream of going.
James Forten and my siblings and I also share the experience of having a father who was an intuitive and skilled creator. Elder Forten was a master sailmaker who repaired worn sails and prepared raw materials to sew the strong textiles into tents for surveyors and sails for tall ships. During this period, sailing ships were the only means of intercontinental transport.
My father was a self-taught electrical wiring manipulator. He bought an abandoned van for about $100 and a broken floor pad for $25 from a local junkyard and rewired them, which allowed him to start our family’s janitorial business. This recycling practice was common in our underserved but sustainable community in booming industrial Seattle.
Ms Forten, a ‘fierce’ stay-at-home mom, refused to give birth until she could buy her freedom at 42; this was followed by the birth of two free and healthy children whom she grew into exceptional adults. One of my fierce housewife mother’s many gifts was enriching our home with Afghans and vintage crochet quilts she would buy at the Goodwill Store, then draping and elegantly storing the handmade textiles on our used furniture.
Forten was an abolitionist. His benevolent service to free and enslaved black people during the troubling times of the Fugitive Slave Acts (passed by the U.S. Congress in 1793 and 1850), the American Revolution, and the pre-emancipation situation is deeply admirable.
Forten learned his discipline from the age of seven, going to work with his father in the absence of an apprentice, at the sailmaker near their home. This is the same loft that young Forten would buy for his future successful sailmaking business, from Robert Bridges, the man who employed his father.
In his prestigious sailmaking loft, Forten employed black, white, and native men who were supported by his engineering of a unique suite of sails, and a device I am currently researching enabled his commanded ships to overtake ships of war british during sea battles and pirate ships looking for spoils. He fitted ships with elaborate sails that allowed for faster sailing and required fewer repairs when returning from a voyage. He received commissions from merchants and captains for transportation and warships.
Forten used his fortune to secure his time to co-establish a Back to Africa mission on ships built and commanded by Paul Cuffe, an African-American Indian shipbuilder from Massachusetts. (Forten campaigned against the American Colonization Society’s Back to Africa mission, founded in 1816 by Robert Finley.)
He was a decolonizer, feminist (supporter of the suffrage movement), father, husband and craftsman extraordinaire, an organizer, a leader of the elite free community of African Americans living a good life in Philadelphia before emancipation. So when I opened this book on Brother Mustafa’s table, it illuminated chapters of my own study of the material culture of the pre-emancipation free radical elite black manufacturers.
Forten’s inventive success in sailmaking was an inspiration for the creation of my sculptural, liquid, and uniquely crocheted indoor transportation project. Rebuilding Paradise in Funk Aesthetics: Living a Dream in a Social Engineering Nightmare. The project began during my artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, cosmically, in 1999-2000 – the beginning of the 21st century.
