I enjoyed Tracy Chevalier’s ‘The Last Runaway’ and so when I came across a book about the underground railway I wanted to read it. The underground railway was of course neither of those things. Instead it was a system of safe houses that enabled escaping slaves to move from confederate southern states in the USA to more liberal and free states in the north. Also, of course, many slaves were aiming to cross the border into Canada.
The book I bought was called ‘Hidden in Plain View’ by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard and played to my interest in quilts. It writes of a secret code within patchwork quilts that would lead escapees along a certain pathway or suggest that a particular house or barn would be safely available to them. There was a tradition of hanging quilts out of windows or over fences so they would have been seen and it would not have been odd.
However, researching this wider online I came across more than one article that totally debunked the whole quilt involvement. It was fabricated. There was no truth in it. It didn’t happen. I was quite thrown by this and found that I couldn’t approach the quilt book with the same anticipation and enjoyment.
How do I know what is true? You hear the phrase ‘this is my truth’ quite frequently these days and it seems to me that it doesn’t refer to truth at all but to opinion and subjective thought. I remember a long ago history lecturer instructing us to always look for primary sources. In some cases this is fairly easy and obvious but at other times it is clouded and obfuscated and subsequent revisionist writings create greater confusion.
So, instead of being left with more knowledge about quilts and their history, I am consumed with thoughts about the nature of truth and how to recognise it. In this case I would have been happier if I hadn’t delved deeply online.