The Bitter Nest, Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party

A vibrant pictorial quilt, roughly the size of a king-size bed, hangs vertically. The viewer’s attention is drawn first to the two-dimensional scene at the center of the quilt, where twelve figures surround a long rectangular dinner table. The scene has been painted onto the quilt. The figures all have medium-brown skin, and each sits in a patterned chair, except for an elaborately dressed woman who stands in the scene’s foreground. Delicate white quilting stitches form a floral wallpaper over a rich, royal blue background.

The woman in the foreground wears a multicolored, multitextured item of clothing. Her outstretched arms hold the fabric out wide like a cape, giving it shape. In her right hand, she holds a painted tribal mask, perhaps African in origin. It features a rectangular nose, a square mouth, and long locks of straw-colored hair that fall from its crown. The woman’s cheeks are flushed a bright pinkish red like strawberries. Her eyes are turned upward, and her neutral expression conveys focus. She wears a silver headdress with dangling tassels that hang over her shoulder-length black hair.

To her left, a girl with curly dark-brown hair sits in a bright yellow-and-green spotted chair. She watches the woman with a neutral expression that verges on apprehension. The girl wears white shoes with low heels and a plain white long-sleeved dress that stops at her shins.

Each figure sitting at the table has a yellow-rimmed plate of food and a drink. The table is dressed with a bountiful meal, along with a few brown bottles. The pearly white tablecloth is decorated with small blue dots creating long lines and S shapes over the fabric. Shadows and highlights on the figures’ skin are depicted with darker shades of brown and lighter shades of pink. There are three women and seven men, all dressed in formal attire including suits with ties, bowties, and gowns of varying colors including bright red and light blue silver. All eyes point to the woman in the colorful outfit with various expressions. Some people look amused, others look uncomfortable and confused. Some look apathetic. Upon close inspection of each figure, names appear painted onto each chair in varying spots. Clockwise, from top left, the names include W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Percel Trombone Prince, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alaine Locke, Langston Hughes, Florence Mills, Aaron Douglass, and Meta Warrick Fuller.

The rectangular scene in the center is surrounded by a multicolored border of quilted half-squares that suggest the elegant forms and glossy touch of origami paper. Triangles of various hues and patterns have been stitched together to form the quilt blocks. Two lines of peach-colored fabric run down the left and right sides of the quilt, bordering the center of the scene and appearing like unfurled rolls of parchment paper. These lines contain text written in fabric marker, which read as follows:

1. Cee Cee was meticulous about the house. Everything had a place. Cee Cee collected boxes and empty containers to put things in. Her mother sent her handwoven and hand-dyed fabrics from Africa which inspired her to sew an endless array of bags which she now used as containers for everything. Her method of working was always the same.
2. First she selected colors and patterns of the brightly dyed fabrics and cut them into squares. And then she sewed the squares together in a random order to form long strips. And then she sewed the strips together to form large lengths of fabric out of which she made the bags, covers, drapes, costumes, et cetera.
3. Celia was very disturbed by Cee Cee’s odd looking patterns. She learned in drawing to match colors tastefully and to select one pattern and repeat in some way to create a balanced harmonious design. Cee Cee had not gone further than the eighth grade in school when she married the dentist.
4. Her education in the subtleties of refined coloration and design was cut short or was never learned. At any rate, Cee Cee, shall we say, turned a ​“deaf ear” to any talk that her bags were ​“tacky,” as they said in those days, and that she was a ​“tasteless low class hussy to clutter up the dentist’s fine house with all that ​‘Mammy-made’ stuff.”
5. From the time Celia was a little girl, she took on the responsibility to keep a conversation going at the dinner table. Since Cee Cee was deaf and never spoke in public, it would put the guests at ease to hear another voice other than the dentist’s.
6. Celia became quite eloquent on the important topics of the day. She often vied with Cee Cee’s scrumptuously prepared dinners by talking too much and interrupting the guests’ praise of Cee Cee’s food. 
7. Cee Cee’s roast duck and fricasseed chicken, macaroni and cheese, candied sweets, peach cobbler and at Christmas time, Cee Cee’s fruit cake, drenched in 200 proof Jamaican rum you could set fire to, were unsurpassed in southern cooking.
8. Hardly a week went by that the dentist did not have a dinner party of 20 or more people in the large dining room. Almost every night there were two or three drop-in dinner guests. And on Sunday, after church, there was the family — Cee Cee’s cousins and her aunts and uncles and the dentist’s brothers and their wives and children.
9. So Cee Cee prepared a large dinner almost every night. She loved to cook — but what she loved even more was to sew and dance. After dinner, Cee Cee put on a show of sorts that topped off the evening and put the conversation of such frequent visitors as Alaine Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglass at a standstill.
10. Dressed in her oddly pieced and quilted costumes, masks and headdresses of her making, she moved among the illustrious guests to music only she could hear. Strange as it seemed, they looked forward to Cee Cee’s unusual presentations and thought of her as an eccentric undiscovered original.
11. The times pressed the artists of the Harlem Renaissance into a regiment of social and political propaganda for the elevation of Race People. But what was Cee Cee doing? Was this art? No one dared ask that question knowing full well that the interrogator would only look like a fool and the one who answered would be one.
12. And furthermore, no one wanted to offend the dentist or Cee Cee. Celia sat through these performances like an old man at a church tea. She hated Cee Cee’s unusual display and made it a point to let the guests and Cee Cee know it. ​“My mother is a family disgrace.
13. The only hope I have of not becoming the laughing stock of everybody is to get out of here and follow in my father’s footsteps and become a doctor. I cannot relate to her. As far as I am concerned, she is crazy like her quilts.” The dentist accepted Cee Cee’s shows as a peculiarity associated with her deafness.
14. “Cee Cee is just trying out something to express herself,” he’d say. ​“She will be going for sewing lessons as soon as Celia is older and off to college and she can get out of the house.” Celia got older and went off to college and came home a doctor and Cee Cee was still right there making bags and dancing to music only she could hear.

Faith Ringgold © 1988 NYC