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Authors: Earlene Fowler

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BOOK: State Fair
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“Sometimes they even marry them,” Hud said, shooting me with a finger pistol.
“And if I were a
bad
girl,” I replied, “you’d be getting a certain one-finger salute.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Please, please, be bad, ranch girl. Just for a minute. You’ll like it, I promise.”
“Seriously, this particular quilt being stolen has a lot of bad connotations. I hate to think about what it might stir up.” I chewed the inside of my cheek.
“No worries. We’ll catch the big bad quilt thief. You have my word.”
While we walked to the administrative building where the sheriff’s department had a command post, Hud told me that this year he was in charge of security at the fair. It explained why he was particularly annoyed that Levi or the Paso police hadn’t told him about the letters. Hud normally worked cold cases so his commanding officer thought they could spare him rather than any other detectives working current crimes. We entered the building and walked down the long hallway past Levi’s closed door. I wondered how Levi would handle the media once the quilt theft was public knowledge. Chances were that some people knew about it already, so he couldn’t keep it quiet like he had the threatening letters.
The sheriff’s department had been given an empty back room for their command post. Hud sat down behind a battered gray metal desk and pulled an official-looking form from a side drawer.
“Pull up a chair and rest your weary boots,” he said, taking a gold Cross pen from his shirt pocket.
“I really want to believe the theft isn’t about race,” I said, sitting in one of the plastic visitor’s chairs. On the desk there was a black phone, a metal filing tray and a yellow legal-sized tablet. Behind him were a small beige filing cabinet and a plastic trash can. A metal-framed bulletin board and a fair poster from last year decorated the tan walls. Two folded notes were thumbtacked on the cork board with “Bob” written in felt pen.
Hud started filling out the report. “Wish away, but though we’d like to believe all of that is in the past, it isn’t.” He looked up from the report. “Let’s look on positive side. Maybe it’s a jealous quilter.”
“Quilters aren’t like that,” I said, nibbling on my ragged thumb nail.
“Yeah, right,” he said, his brown eyes mocking.
“Frankly, it would be a lot less frightening if it was just some whacked-out quilter who was envious of the quilt.”
“Whatever.” He went back to writing.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Give me a description of this quilt.”
I leaned back in my chair, causing it to emit an ominous creak. “It’s a copy of Harriet Powers’s first story quilt. It’s an appliquéd quilt.”
He looked up at me, his face blank.
“Appliqué is a technique. You take small pieces of fabric and sew them onto a larger piece of background fabric. Harriet Powers’s quilts show biblical stories like Adam and Eve naming the animals and Cain going to the land of Nod in search of a wife. Harriet Powers is probably the most famous black quilter in history. The quilt that the Ebony Sisters copied was Harriet Powers’s first known story quilt. The original is at the Smithsonian.”
“The Ebony Sisters? That some kind of singing group?”
“It’s the quilt guild that Maggie and Katsy belong to. They formed a smaller quilting group out of our bigger San Celina Quilt Guild. I mean, anyone can join them, but they like having, you know, their own . . .” I let my voice trail off. It was often hard to explain why the Ebony Sisters wanted to have their own group.
“I get it,” Hud said. “Is there a photo of the quilt? That would make it easier.”
“I can find you a photo. The quilt is double bed size. There are eleven panels. I could describe each panel, but a photo would probably be better.”
He nodded and continued filling in blanks.
“So, what now?” I asked.
He signed the bottom of the form with a flourish. Then he opened a drawer in the desk, took out a manila file folder and, his eyes not leaving my face, dramatically slipped it inside, and then placed the folder in the vertical metal file holding a few similar folders.
“Not funny. This quilt really is special. One of the contributors died a few months ago so they’ll never be able to duplicate it exactly.”
The Ebony Sisters Quilt Guild had started this quilt over a year ago in preparation for the museum exhibit. Hundreds of hours of work had gone into its making.
He leaned back in the old office chair, locking his fingers behind his head. “I’m just messin’ with you, Benni. I do understand how important this quilt is and I wish I could say you have a tinker’s chance in Hades of getting it back. But if it
was
one of these hate groups, believe me, you might not want it back. If it’s just a person who wanted the quilt, chances are it has already gone to wherever stolen quilts go. The quilter’s pawnshop?” He laughed at his own joke.
I sighed and stood up. In terms of being a significant crime against humanity, this wasn’t even close. Still, it was important to some of us. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
“Find me that photo and then I suggest you make up some posters, offer a reward. If it was some carnie taking it on a lark, you might actually get it back.”
“That’s not a half-bad idea. I’ll tell Maggie and the others.”
Back outside, the fairgrounds were elbow to elbow with people and the temperature pushing 100 degrees. That actually wasn’t too bad for an August afternoon in Paso Robles. I could recall Mid-State Fairs where the temperatures soared to 115 degrees, though the heat had seemed easier to take when I was younger. A thin stream of perspiration trickled down the side of my neck as I walked back to the home arts building.
I felt sick for Maggie, Katsy, Jazz and the rest of the Ebony Sisters who met at the folk art museum every other Tuesday night. I’d watched this quilt’s birth from the initial bantering over fabric choices to practically the last binding stitch. Before the fair, it had been displayed at the folk art museum. The Sisters had seriously debated whether they should take a chance on showing it at the fair whose security didn’t match ours at the museum. It was Jazz who had been the driving force for it to be shown at the fair. It wasn’t surprising that she’d taken its theft so personally.
“Hardly anyone will see it at the museum,” she’d said at the quilt guild meeting eight months ago when we first discussed the fair exhibit. She glanced at me, blushing slightly. “No offense, Benni.”
I held up my palm. “None taken. I’ll be the first to admit our museum’s viewership is limited.” I was attending this particular Ebony Sisters guild meeting because I was Oneeda Cleary’s ride. After the meeting, she and I were meeting Gabe and Jim, her husband, for chicken pot pie night at Liddie’s Café.
“It could be damaged,” Katsy had argued. “People can be so careless. I hate the thought of any food or drink being near it.”
“But isn’t it more important that people see it and learn about Harriet Powers?” Jazz insisted.
“She’s right,” said Flory Jackson, her white hair a striking contrast against skin the color of burnished copper. “It’s just fabric and thread, ladies. Both are replaceable. It’s more important for us to tell Harriet’s story to as many people as we can. The fair does that in a way this lovely museum cannot despite how hard Benni works to entice folks in here.” She smiled at me.
“Agree,” said Oneeda Cleary, sitting next to me in her wheelchair.
Because of her advanced MS, her words were garbled, but we’d all been around her long enough to understand her. She took a deep, labored breath and slapped one hand down on the armrest of her wheelchair. “Folks . . . need . . . to know.”
So, the African American quilt exhibit at the fair, cosponsored by the museum and the quilt guild, was centered on the replica of the Harriet Powers quilt. The exhibit at the museum was running concurrently and had been a huge success. It had been Katsy’s idea to ask her friend in Oakland to loan the museum some of her collection of black cloth dolls, African American dolls made from 1870 to 1930. She and I had worked together on the brochure using information we gleaned from a similar exhibit curated by Roben Campbell of the Harvard Historical Society. We mailed out our brochure to both local and out-of-area newspapers and magazines.
Black cloth (as well as white cloth) dolls are a folk art tradition that came about because of newly available low-priced factory-made fabric. In 1822, Lowell, Massachusetts, factories started producing inexpensive cotton cloth which, along with the newfangled sewing machine patented in 1847, made it possible for women to stitch quilts, dolls and clothing with relative ease. Black cloth dolls followed the natural progression of many folk arts—an early period of original work, a second period of prolific output and great popularity and a declining third period that eventually ended the craft altogether. With black cloth dolls the three periods follow the African American struggle for equal rights and freedom. The early dolls (1870-1890) are finely stitched and hopeful; the middle dolls (1890-1910) are more neutral, not as optimistic and the later dolls (1910-1930) show a decline in the craft and seem to wear expressions of patient fatigue. Most dolls proudly show the loving care of the creator as well as the adoration physically bestowed by the child who played with them.
The museum had received more media attention for these exhibits than any other except for the time we showed some original, previously unseen photographs by my famous stepgrandpa Isaac Lyons. When the media got wind of the theft, it would bring publicity of a different kind.
Before facing the anxious faces of my friends and informing them that it was doubtful the sheriff’s department would be doing much to recover the quilt, I decided to fulfill the request of the San Celina Historical Society secretary and head nagmeister, Sissy Brownmiller. She wanted photographs of the Family Farm exhibits.
According to the fair program, there were fifteen Family Farm exhibits this year. That was down from a high of thirty-seven in 1968, because, sadly, a lot of our county’s family farms no longer existed. San Celina County was definitely changing and every year it was never more apparent than at the Mid-State Fair.
Inside the agriculture building the swamp cooler unit chugged hard keeping the room fairly pleasant. The damp, cool air felt luxurious on my skin after the blistering temperatures outside. I pulled out my camera. Snapping photos of the Family Farm exhibits would relax me.
This fair competition had always been one of my favorites. When I was a little girl, Dove, Daddy, my uncle Arnie and I planned and worked all year on our exhibit. In 1972 we actually won Grand Prize. We’d made a detailed diorama of the Ramsey ranch and I personally painted thirty-five heifers myself—their markings exactly matching some of our actual cattle. Arnie, who’d just gotten his own camera, made us dress up like ranchers circa 1880 and took surprisingly realistic photos that he enlarged in his high school photography class. I surrounded them with frames made from corn cobs cut in half.
These exhibits revealed our county and its incredible variety of agriculture to a section of our population who didn’t always remember what county fairs were originally about—a way for the everyday farmer and rancher to show off their produce, animals, or expertise in quilting, woodcarving, jam making or leatherwork. County fairs were as much a part of the American lifestyle as apple pan dowdy and the right to vote. And nothing shouted county fair more than these homemade exhibits. This year’s theme was “Cow Town Boogie.”
I laughed at the Vieira Family Farm exhibit where the kids showed Mom and Dad (in Wranglers and old checkered shirts stuffed with hay—their faces painted on pale pink fabric) dancing in front of a thirties-era radio while the kids did all the work of gathering eggs from hens made of calico fabric and chicken wire, feeding papier-mâché calves and pulling weeds in a garden showcasing the Vieira ranch’s carrots, corn and giant pumpkins. “Ranch kids boogie hard for their money” was their motto. The exhibit’s homespun look hit just the right note. The crooked printing and offset eyes painted on the mannequins revealed immediately that the ranch family’s children had participated in the exhibit’s creation and construction.
I took photos of the exhibits, attempting to capture the uniqueness of each one, recording something that I suspected might not be prevalent in ten or fifteen years—the family farm. Change was inevitable, and sometimes even good, but a part of me was saddened as every year I observed hundreds of acres of San Celina ranch land sold for wineries or developed for tract homes. The best I could do was record what San Celina County once was.
When I reached the Piebald Family Farm exhibit, like everyone else around me, I momentarily gawked. It had won the huge Grand Prize blue ribbon and it was obvious why. On one side of the large coveted corner booth, there was the rusted shell of an old 1940s pickup truck. Crowded into the truck’s bed were boxes of huge Golden Delicious apples, giant-sized avocados, perfect bales of alfalfa and two smiling, one slightly panicked-looking cow made of cow-print fabric with a leather face. Inside the cab, a grinning stuffed sheep sat at the wheel wearing a red gimme cap that said Eat More Beef. The banner across the front of the truck proclaimed Templeton Cattle Auction or Bust.
On the other side of the booth sat a realistic-looking fabric rancher sitting on a hay bale staring at a splayed deck of cards while a bunch of intricate topiary calves watched him over a wooden fence. Professional caricatures of the Piebald family members—Milt; his young second wife, Juliette; his sons, Justin and Billy—looked out of frames shaped like playing cards: heart, diamond, spade and club. They were colored with red, black and white flower petals and looked as professional as a Rose Parade float. A king-sized quilt—Hole in the Barn Door pattern—made of fabric printed with fruits, vegetables, cattle and horses bore the bold, black machine-embroidered phrase “Ranching is a gamble—but what a way to live!”
BOOK: State Fair
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