They were utilitarian bed covers, made from pieces and strings of old cloth, sewn into strips, then joined together to make the right size for a bed. Her early quilts belong to a tradition of Southern Black vernacular quilting practiced by many other Southwest Mississippi quilters. It was there that twelve-year-old Hystercine began to learn about quilting. The day her father was buried, her grandmother Alice loaded up Laula and her children in a wagon and took them back to live with her on Joe January’s farm. They didn’t like that.” Violent tragedy struck in 1939 when Hystercine’s father was shot and killed by a white man in the road near their house.
She took pride in the reputation of her father as a man “who didn’t cow down to white folks, and… if he saw a white man bothering anybody colored, he’d stop him. Their third daughter, Hystercine, was born in 1929. That’s just the way it was in those times.”Īlice’s child, Laula, red-haired and freckle-faced like her white father, married Denver Gray on Christmas Day in 1925 at the age of nineteen. Hystercine recalled being told, “ sat in the hallway of the big house he’d built, with a shotgun on his lap, and just cried like a little baby… He had his family to look after, and if he went for that white man, they would have killed Daddy Joe, probably burned his place and taken the land. “Daddy Joe” raised as his own the two daughters born from these violent attacks, but it pained him that he couldn’t defend his family. One local white man raped his wife and another raped his daughter Alice. Prosperity, however, did not mean security for a Black man and his family. In 1878, Joe married Elvira Segrest, an educated woman who taught him to read and write. His youngest son, Joe January, who was Hystercine’s great-grandfather, survived and prospered by dint of hard work, earning enough to buy 100 acres of bottomland and build a substantial house. Her great-great-grandfather was an enslaved Black man conscripted by the Confederate Army “to dig ditches, carry water, and gather wood.” He and two sons were killed during the siege of Vicksburg in 1863.
Her family tree’s roots go deep in Mississippi’s troubled past and help to explain her extraordinary self-reliance, industriousness, and devotion to family. Hystercine (pronounced Hur’-tuh-seen by all who knew her) was the third of eight children born to Denver Gray and his wife, Laula.
We weren’t rich, but we had our land and a big garden, so we didn’t go hungry. “We did a lot of quilting.Wasn’t no buying and selling quilts in those days. Just as there were always mouths to be fed, there were always beds to be covered. I’ve been quilting on something ever since…” She learned her craft in the most traditional of ways, in and among her family and the community near Blue Hill in Southwest Mississippi. “ quilted in the front room, in front of the fireplace….After we’d come from school and finish our homework, she’d have a lamp on the mantelpiece and we’d quilt into the night. As she remembers it, learning to quilt at age twelve signaled the end of childhood and the beginning of responsibility. When Hystercine Rankin received a National Heritage Fellowship award in 1997, it capped her 56-year journey as a quilter, homemaker, teacher, and artist. “It’s amazing my little needle could carry me so far!”
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