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Yesterday, despite having had a double booked to-do list all week, I drove to Jackson to the MS Museum of Art to see the Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South exhibit. I’m an avid quilt fan and first became enamored with quilting when I lived in San Francisco and went to the Gap Headquarters where they had a collection of Amish quilts on display.

My ex mother-in-law was a quilter, and I thought one day I’d become one too, but as with all things crafty, the patience and skill eluded me. I did ask my ex MIL to make me a quilt in the Amish style, and it is one I treasure so much I don’t even put it out. Most likely because it used to be my bedspread till friends came over and changed their newborn baby on top of it – leaving an indelible stain of diaper rash ointment.

The Southern Black Quilters works fall into the theme of if it breaks your heart, make art category. Two of the quilts told a story with one word so disturbing I had to walk away. They were small quilts, meant to be hung, not used as blankets. One quilt had a Black mother figure with children standing in a cotton field and the word POWERLESS written below. The next was a Black woman looking down to the right of the frame and to the left a white man taking off his shirt, and below it read POWERFUL. One word stories that made my blood boil.

Serendipity was the exhibit of artwork from Mississippi high school students lining the corridor. An incredible outpouring of talent and moving images. A colorful painting of a crowded bus, and in the back of the bus, in black and white, a drawing of a Black mother clutching her child to her tired body. Another was a garbage can with a mother’s toothbrush the artist could not throw away after her mom died. It was energizing and amazing to see these 8th to 12th grade students express themselves so profoundly through art. The exhibit was by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, whose mission is to identify students with exceptional artistic and literary talent and present their remarkable work to the world through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

I came back invigorated to get to my collage book, to write, to live in the world of art and escape reality. I felt a need to do something that might help me piece together my own heartbreak that seems to show up without invitation. On Valentine’s Day, a dear friend said to me as I hugged him, “I feel so lonely today.” I hugged him tighter and shared with him this meditation I had listened to a week earlier – I too have felt the yearning for something from someone that at the time seemed overwhelming. I too have felt vulnerable.

I am learning to embrace vulnerability. I’m learning to express my vulnerability. It’s all learning.

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