Hidden in Plain View

This is subtitled A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad

I wanted to find out more about his subject after reading Ann Rinaldi's excellent book The Ever-after Bird. In that book quilts were used to convey messages to slaves fleeing the South along the Underground Railroad.

Unfortunately, this book proved to be beyond disappointing. It's written like an academic treatise of some sort, constantly siting other sources within the regular text rather than just using footnotes. Too much of the book is spent on the methods used to try to find sources of information, and too much emphasis is given to one single particular source.

There is also too much information given about the use of African patterns in Africa. What I was looking for was how the patterns in American were used to convey messages. Also, as far as I can tell, the quilts were made by whites who were aiding the abolitionist movement in the North, so they probably were not even using the same patterns.

I do know there from Rinaldi's fictional work that there were things on a quilt that could mean how many more stops were on the railroad, etc, and that's the thing I was looking for, not something something that appears more as a doctoral dissertation than a readable book.

Very disappointing.

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