POCKETFUL OF STARS

with the walls and ceiling colored deep cerulean blue. The house sits next to another small white house and another and another all in a neat white line: Row Houses. Open the door. Step over the threshold. Breathe in blue. Overhead, upside down, and warmly glowing hang beeswax houses, constellation configurations pointing a path by way of the Big Dipper, Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus and Lyra. Single handspun cotton threads, like smoke from a chimney, hang from each diminutive, translucent house. Attached to the threads are cotton wrapped spindles of walnut or cherry, dangling like teardrops, or star dust, light years away, coming home.

A Pocketful of Stars explores the mystery and mystique of the Underground Railroad as a poetic metaphor of human determination, cooperation and ingenuity.

When I was invited to construct an installation at Project Row Houses, located in a predominantly African American neighborhood, I began researching the African American experience of the Southern United States. As a white woman born and raised in the Northeast, I asked the question: What was my relationship to this project and to this collective history.

My education concerning slavery, the civil war, and the history of civil rights, comes from a Northern sensibility, and after living in the South for fourteen years I have gained an appreciation that there are distinct yet subtle differences in interpreting historical events. I was raised in towns in New York State which were documented "depots" along the Underground Railroad. The stories told about secret hideouts and daring escapes had fueled my imagination since I was a child. This project gave me the opportunity to explore the layers of this hidden and complex bit of history. References abound on the subject of the Underground Railroad, but the breadth and scope of the written and oral record is broad and divergent. What in many references is portrayed as the rescue of helpless black slaves by white abolitionists, the Underground Railroad was in fact a broad network of people; black and white, wealthy and working class, urban and rural, Quaker, Methodist, Presbyterian and Jew, all working together to undo an inexcusable wrong. It was a secret mapping of architectural structures and natural settings connected to form a successful yet dangerous route to a new life.

The night sky signaled hope. I dotted the cerulean blue ceiling of the Row House with upside down farmhouses, barns, city apartments and churches, representing the many faceted architectural structures utilized by historically documented conductors and station masters along the way. Cast in wax, and arranged on the ceiling as specific constellations, the houses glow with soft light, like guiding stars in the sky, and are reminiscent of a secret code used to signal safe entry to slaves on the run. The houses symbolize momentary sanctuaries of human determination and struggle along the arduous journey.

The more evolved my research became with the Underground Railroad, all tracks led to cotton. Cotton, like the Underground Railroad, has a rich and complex history. Its effect on African Americans has been documented, much of it romantic myth and some of it disturbing recollections of bestial human nature. What is hidden in shadow is cotton's broad reaching role, happening synchronously, in the lives of people of diverse cultures and traditions. This revelation led to important visual and conceptual directions for the project.

Since the invention of hand spinning and weaving 5,000 years ago, cotton has been coveted universally. From muslin to fine cloth, denim to paper money, animal feed and bedding to explosives, the uses for the fiber, seed, stems and leaves have been limitless. Cotton's proliferation as a cash crop in the 18th and 19th C and its continued dominance as a fiber in the 21st C is responsible for great feats of ingenuity and invention as well as the physical and spiritual exploitation of humans and the environment.

The Industrial Revolution made cotton exorbitantly profitable for a small percentage of textile magnates and planter lords, bringing them disproportionate wealth and political power. The international effect on human lives was unsuspectingly devastating. In the West Indies and Southern United States "Cotton was King." African slaves led cruel and grueling lives in the cotton fields leading to one of the many reasons for attempted escapes to the free states of the north and Canada and the beginning of the civil war. Across the Atlantic, in Manchester mills, under horrendous conditions, British orphaned children worked eighteen hour days changing spools and repairing broken threads, and in India, where spinning was a sacred art and a path to spiritual renewal, England colonized the country and its people for access and control of their cotton fields. For the African, Indian, White and Asian, from field to factory, cotton has left a paradoxical trail of poverty and wealth, pain and pleasure.

I read about cotton. Now I wanted to touch its raw poetry, and see it growing in the field. I wanted to feel the fiber and know the calm described when spinning thread. I drove to the cotton fields and I walked down row after row in 100 degree Texas heat. I sat down and was immersed by broad green leaves and white blooming bolls. I gleaned cotton from the plant and I brought a handful home. I separated the seeds, combed the fiber and patiently learned to spin and twist the delicate thread. For more than 5,000 years, women, men, and children have spun cotton and other fibers using hand spindles. Made from a variety of materials, such as potatoes and radishes, fired clay and stones, to highly ornamented porcelain, I became enchanted with these ancient and simple tools. I crafted them out of richly colored woods and glass beads, wrapped the handspun cotton around each spindle and attached one to each silent house. Stripped free of its social, economic, and historical burdens; in the deep blue hued Row House, I found cotton's poetry. I found pure cotton.

-Jo Ann Fleischhauer 2005