I would recommend carefully verifying anything Fry claims in her book against other, primary sources.

Although the subtitle of the book is "Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South," buried in the preface is the admission that many of the textiles pictured were made *after* the Civil War. It is worth noting that Fry personally examined textiles only "when possible" and that (rather amazingly, since Fry is not a quilt historian), oral histories regarding the age of the quilts were often taken at face value. Apparently Ms. Fry, a folklorist, did not think it necessary to routinely corroborate the ages claimed for the quilts by using a very simple process: examine the printed fabrics the quilts contain. That is the first step a legitimate quilt appraiser takes in dating a quilt, since printing and dye technology has changed in measurable ways over the past 200 years, and obviously a quilt cannot be any older than the fabrics it contains.

That omission in methodology may explain why, for example, the five quilts described as "made by Phyllis, a slave imported from the Congo in 1818 as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl" are quite visibly made from fabrics dating to the 1930s and 1940s (if the maker had been well over 125 years old, would Fry not have noted it?), and why those made by "slave Nancy Vaugn Ford" (described as "good examples of the utilitarian quilts slaves made by slaves for their own use in their own time") contain an op-art heart print in several colorways and a cheery apple kitchen curtain fabric, both from the 1960s.

But Fry's confusion is not limited to quilts with only oral histories. The Batson figural applique quilt was extremely well-documented before her book was written, but Fry gets not only the maker's name but the date wrong. Perhaps Fry was for some reason unaware of this documentation; perhaps also she is unfamiliar with the changes in dyes and patterns in 19th century cotton fabrics. But surely the fact that the female figures on the quilt are wearing mid-1870s bustles should have suggested to her that the quilt could not date from 1850 as she claims.

There are other problems with the book. Fry describes an African-American language "code", giving, among others, the examples of pronouncing "any" as "ary" and using "bushwhacker" for "Confederate soldier". She must be unaware that in 1848 John Russell Bartlett documented "ary" as a colloquialism common throughout the US (it is still used in rural Appalachia), or that "bushwhacker", in general use since at least 1809, was from the 1850s universal slang for pro-slavery guerrillas (e.g. Quantrill's Raiders). And although certain astronomical events are pictured in Harriet Powers's *Bible* quilts, Fry inexplicably ignores the religious meanings 19th century believers conferred on those events, instead discussing the phenomena solely in terms of general folklore.

There are more problems, but please keep what I've described in mind when considering Fry's mention of the "quilt code", a single paragraph in which she claims that quilts (pattern not described "with the color black in them" were hung on clotheslines to indicate a safe house. (She also says that clothes were hung on the line in a certain direction to indicate troop movements.) Three sentences later she claims that "the color black indicated that someone might die." Fry provides no source for any of these assertions, and in four years of researching I have found nothing to support them. In fact, if memory serves, Fry is the earliest source I have found making such claims.