Sold "Old Land" to a man in Chicago because of the back of it

I always put a label on the back of a quilt. Name, year, and a few lines about where the cloth came from. My granddaughter put one of those labels on the internet for me, just the label, no quilt in the picture.

Man from Chicago bought it. Two weeks later.

Meanwhile the picture of the whole thing sitting on the fence out back got 41 likes and not one word from anybody.

I don't know what to do with that. I really don't. I pieced that quilt out of my uncle's work shirts and a dress my mother wore to a funeral in 1971, and what moved him was me writing it down. I keep thinking maybe I been selling the wrong half of the thing all along, but I don't know how you show somebody the back of a quilt without showing them the front.

I'm 63 and I only got on here because my granddaughter said folks should see them. So tell me plain. Is it the story or is it the cloth. Because I can't tell anymore.

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Karen Wessel·3h

I think it's less that the quilt doesn't matter and more that people need a door in. A photo of a quilt on a fence is pretty, but I don't know anything about it, so I scroll. Your label gives the story a handle to grab. Your uncle's work shirts, the funeral dress from 1971, that's a whole life sitting in one object. The right buyer didn't need to see it hanging up, he needed to know what he was looking at.

I paint, not quilt, but I've had the same thing happen. Posted a finished landscape and got a handful of likes. Posted the same painting with a note about it being the field behind my grandparents' place and got actual messages about it.

So I wouldn't call it selling out. Don't stop making them, and don't stop writing the labels either.

Gloria Mae JacksonOP·3h

A door in. Mm. That's the truest thing anybody's said to me about it yet, and I been chewing on it all morning.

Here's what nags at me though, and I'll say it plain. I came up in a time when a Black woman's cloth didn't get looked at unless somebody white wrote it down first. So part of me wants to holler, why do I have to explain myself to be seen. And part of me knows you're right, that the story ain't the toll I pay, it's the gift I'm handing over. Both of them live in me at once and I don't reckon they'll ever fully settle.

That field behind your grandmother's house. What was growing in it.

Kasia Nowak·2h

I keep coming back to the part where the label alone sold it, no quilt in the picture at all. That would sting me too. But I think what he bought was the proof that a real person made this and knew where every piece came from. My uncle's shirts, your mother's dress from 1971. That is not decoration, that is a record. A quilt on a fence is beautiful and I would scroll past it too, honestly, because I have nothing to hold onto. The words give me something to hold. I paint faces and I am always chasing the story under the face, so maybe I am biased. But I do not think you been selling yourself short. I think you been writing down the thing most people never bother to say out loud.

Gloria Mae JacksonOP·2h

That part about the story under the face. Yes. That's the whole thing, isn't it. I don't paint, but I know what you mean, because I'll look at a piece of cloth and I'm not seeing cloth, I'm seeing whose hands was in it before mine.

And honey, I hear you about nothing to hold onto. That's fair. I scrolled past plenty of pretty things myself. I just never figured a person could hold onto words the way they hold a quilt.

You didn't say the last word of that sentence, but I know how it ends. Go on and say it if you want to. I can take it.