Free Cion by Zakes Mda Page A

their Charleston, but another Charleston in South Carolina—and was executed a decade or so before, waited for the time when only the two boys remained.
    At first the boys took these stories passively, but as they grew older the stories acquired new meaning. So did the quilts that their mother gave them one Christmas. Abednego’s was the crazy quilt with the map. For Nicodemus she created a wonderful sampler with the well-known designs: the Drunkard’s Path, the Log Cabin, the North Star, the Monkey Wrench, Crossroads, and the Flying Geese. Those who saw the quilt admired its beauty—the way she had arranged each of those designs and the color combinations that made each pattern stand out and yet blend in with the rest.
    This was not beauty for its own sake; the Abyssinian Queen stressed that to the boys. Each design carried a message. The idea of making quilts talk a secret language first came with the forebears from the old continent, she went on. In the old continent works of art, including garments that people wore and lids that covered pots, talked secret languages that could be understood only by those who had been initiated into the circle.
    In the same way that she taught them how to read the map on Abednego’s crazy quilt, she taught them how to interpret the sampler. They enjoyed it most when she told them what the Drunkard’s Path meant, for she acted out with silly exaggerations the staggering walk of a drunkard. The pattern, she said, told them never to take a straight route when they escape. They should always take a zigzag path. That way the evil spirits would not catch them, for evil spirits always traveled in a straight line. Like the evil spirits, slave chasers would be confused and lose track of them. The boys were not only fascinated by the meaning of the pattern but by the actual sewing of the Drunkard’s Path…how their mother cut one-quarter circles and then rearranged them to form the zigzags. It looked so simple when she did it yet so complicated when one looked at the finished product.
    The other patterns on Nicodemus’s sampler transmitted messages to escapees along similar lines: the North Star advising them always to follow the North Star for that was the correct direction to Canaan, which existed on official maps as Canada; the Monkey Wrench warning them of the necessity of thorough preparation and of acquiring appropriate tools and provisions for an escape; the Flying Geese and Crossroads once more identifying the directions to be taken; and the Log Cabin denoting Underground Railroad stations. There were many other patterns that they would learn all in good time, most of which she herself had yet to learn from the matriarchs.
    What registered in the boys’ minds throughout all these lessons was that rather than identify a specific direction for escape as her map on Abednego’s crazy quilt attempted to do, the designs on Nicodemus’s sampler were general warnings and advice. Although they did not give specific instructions on what to do at a specific time and point, they inspired the boys to aspire to escape. But most of all, as the Abyssinian Queen indicated through her performances, they celebrated acts of escape, hence encouraging others to do the same. She taught the boys the code every night, until they mastered it. It did not matter at all if it would ever serve any practical purpose in their escape. It was enough that it served them spiritually and nourished their hopes of freedom.
    The closer Abednego got to the age when he would have to be sold, the more frantic the Abyssinian Queen became. Her stories of escape were filled with more urgency. Songs of escape permeated the very air that the occupants of Fairfield Farms breathed. The mother taught the boys to have sharp ears for every sound spoken of escape. The warbling of the birds in the morning. The croaking of the frogs in the evening. The chirping of the crickets. The hymns that the worshippers sang on Sunday. All these