Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt

Deborah Hopkinson takes the reader back to a time in our history when slavery ruled the south in her picture book Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt. This historically fictional book follows Clara, a young slave girl, as she tries to figure out a way to get back to her mother and reach freedom in the North. She is moved to a new plantation where she becomes close to her Aunt Rachel who treats her as her own daughter. Aunt Rachel teaches Clara how to sew and with the help of those around her Clara sews a quilt together with a map of all the different ways of reaching the North sewed on in different colors. She leaves the quilt with her Aunt Rachel before taking off on a journey to the North so that those who are left behind can follow her patchwork and eventually reach freedom also. The illustrator of this book, James Ronsome, took each page and made it into a beautiful piece of art work through paintings that shows what life would have been like through a slave’s eyes. They show the emotions of the characters like you are looking at an old portrait. I think that the author was using those sewn stitches in the quilt to portray those from the Underground Railroad who helped lay the land out for slaves trying to escape slavery. They followed the North Star and the sewn stitches and with the help of others along the way reached freedom.

Works Cited: Hopkinson, Deborah. Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.