Hystercine Rankin (1929–2010), Memory Quilt, ca. 1994. Fabric; appliquéd, hand-embroidered, hand-quilted. 88 x 82 in. Collection of Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson. Museum purchase, with funds from the Searcy Fund, 2006.101.
To ponder Hystercine Rankin’s journey to becoming an artist is to issue forth a prayer of admiration—for steadfast devotion to family, for faith in a meticulous craft, and for an Old Testament-esque inner strength.
When Rankin made her first quilts as a teenager in 1940s southwest Mississippi, she had a simple utilitarian goal—to keep loved ones warm. But the number of people she loved was always expanding. While keeping up with keeping them warm, she discovered that the work itself brought her a rare sense of peace. So, she devoted herself to the craft; learning to perfectly mimic the straight lines and color patterns she saw others create. As her confidence grew, her works became more varied, with increasingly complicated designs and schemes indicative of an emerging, original vision. Over the next half-century, she became a master.
In her sixties, Rankin began sewing memories into her quilts. These “story quilts,” as they came to be known, reflected Rankin’s experience as an African American woman in the rural South of the twentieth century. Deborah Boykin, a Southern folklorist, said they “captured a sense of time and place in Mississippi” in the way Eudora Welty’s words did, and with the same level of artistry.
“I would argue,” Boykin added, “that Mrs. Rankin’s work is equally important to Mississippi and the nation.”
At age sixty, on a story quilt titled, “Memories of my Father’s Death,” Rankin quilted the seminal scene of the day a white man killed her father. She had only been ten years old. Her father was a man named Denver Gray, and her depiction of his murder listed the names and ages of the eight children he left behind. He lays on his back in the middle of the quilt, bleeding from his chest, while his killer stands over him, holding a gun. Regarding the lack of an investigation, Rankin sewed these words into the fabric: “ . . . they didn’t even arrested him [sic].” That day set forth the trajectory of her life and art.
After her father’s death, she and her seven siblings went to live with their maternal grandmother, Alice Whelman. It was Whelman, a freedman’s daughter, who first taught Rankin to make quilts from discarded pieces of scrap fabric. “At that time, you didn’t have a choice,” Rankin later told a reporter, explaining that she and her sisters were taught to cook and sew out of necessity. She learned traditional nineteenth century patterns with names like the Star of Bethlehem, Flower Garden, Jack-In-The-Pulpit, and Windmill.
When she was sixteen, Rankin married a World War II veteran named Ezekiel. In 1948, they purchased more than one hundred acres of land in Jefferson County, and built their home, where they raised Rankin’s five younger siblings, a pair of her sister’s children, and seven of their own. Rankin made quilts for them all, along with various others. Ashley Rankin, a grandchild, remembers her in the home’s front room, where the light was best, working with a “very calm, consistent presence and steadiness.” In middle age, she told people that ideas for new patterns arrived in her dreams.
Meanwhile, Rankin also ran the home and helped on the farm, gardening and canning vegetables. Ezekiel Jr., her oldest son, described their house as a “sanctuary,” explaining that his parents built a life “totally independent from really the influences of the South.” The Rankins’ self-sufficiency was intentional—Hystercine and Ezekiel were protecting loved ones from the culture of white supremacy that dominated much of Mississippi at that time. Any silent indignities they may have faced in the wider world, like drinking water from segregated public fountains or retrieving food from a restaurant’s back door, were balanced against a home life built upon the rhythms of self-reliance and respect.
Last September, the National Park Service recognized the Rankin homesite, still in excellent condition, for its significance as part of her artistic legacy by adding the home to the National Register of Historic Places.
The humble wooden bungalow where Rankin created most of her quilts stands along an unpaved Jefferson County road. Her family plans to someday make the property a community gathering place where visitors, children especially, can learn how small family farms in the area once operated.
“This moment is about more than just home or property,” Myrtis Rankin, her oldest child, said recently while discussing the family’s vision for the property. “It’s about honoring her and turning her hardships into a testimony.”
Emilye Crosby, a historian at State University of New York-Geneseo who grew up in southwest Mississippi, said that while it was primarily Rankin’s status as an artist that led to the home being placed on the National Register, the designation also stands as an acknowledgement of the many “African American families that created loving homes in defiance of white racism.”
“This moment is about more than just home or property,” Myrtis Rankin, her oldest child, said recently while discussing the family’s vision for the property. “It’s about honoring her and turning her hardships into a testimony.”
After decades spent mastering her craft in relative isolation, it was a growing sense of community later in life that led Rankin to produce her famous story quilts. In the 1980s, Mississippi Cultural Crossroads, an arts agency in the town of Port Gibson, asked Rankin to lead some quilting classes. In the years following, she helped found Crossroad Quilters, a collective of regional quilters.
Some of her story quilts—such as “Untitled,” which depicts a river baptism, Rankin’s mother feeding chickens, and other snapshots of rural life—celebrate faith, farming, and family. Others blatantly confront racism’s brutal realities, like “After My Father’s Funeral,” which portrays a carriage full of the suddenly fatherless Gray children on their way to Alice Whelman’s home. A keen observer will notice they are traveling out of a section of the quilt made of dark fabric into a section of light fabric, representative of the brighter future Rankin always envisioned.
By the late 1980s, Rankin’s quilts were being exhibited in galleries and museums around Mississippi, including at the state’s official Museum of Art. They then spread across the country into various university holdings and into the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan. Along the way, awards and honors descended upon Rankin.
[Read this: "Perspectives: Letitia Huckaby—Quilted legacies along Highway Nineteen."]
In 1997, at the age of sixty-eight, she traveled to Washington, D.C. to receive a National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed on folk and traditional artists by the National Endowment for the Arts. “When you think about how far that needle has taken you,” she said after returning home, “it’s a joy.”
Ezekiel Rankin Jr., who has maintained the Rankin property in Jefferson County, said his mother appreciated, but never got carried away with, the attention. How would she view the old family home being added to the National Registry?
“The way she treated everything that was sort of unexpected,” he said, “like a really cold glass of water when she was in the garden.”
