In the hands of Lesyslie Rackard and her sewing sisters, quilts talk.
Listen to this story told by The Laundress, a quilt Rackard dedicated to her Auntie Maggie Bell Rackard, a domestic worker who migrated in the early 1940s from Daytona Beach, Florida, to Poughkeepsie, New York. Immortalized in fabric, her aunt stands at the ironing board, wearing a blue dress pieced from a scrap of her favorite house dress. Next to her is a laundry basket and washboard, honoring Lesyslieâs mother, also a domestic worker. Two quilts within the quilt tell more of the story: One, on the wall, depicts the North Star, symbolizing the Underground Railroad and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North; the other, on the ironing board, represents the quilter herself.