How potholders got me thinking about racism, my father and the whitewashing of US history

Last month, the day after Christmas, I taught two of our young granddaughters how to weave potholders.

This is a family tradition, in which both boys and girls learn how to stretch vertical loops of cotton onto a metal rack and then weave horizontal loops through them to form a tight weave. Eventually, this resembles a potholder, at which point it is declared a masterpiece and will never know the business end of a dirty pot.

My son’s 40-year-old faded green-and-white potholder currently rests on my desk under a glass candle jar. He is now a math professor. With his weaving roots, how could he not be?

The final step of the potholders requires a crochet hook. For my granddaughters, this was my task, along with my daughter-in-law, Stina. I don’t often hold a crochet hook, and as I began pulling one loop through the next my mind wandered back to a time when my own childhood hands crocheted a work of art.

I have the evidence.

Hope for me and my opinions

After our grandchildren returned to their respective homes and left our tomb silent, I walked into our guest room and opened the Lane hope chest at the foot of the bed. This was a gift from my parents for my 16th birthday, when it was still a thing in small towns like ours. Parents gave their teenage daughters cedar-lined wooden chests, which we were supposed to fill with household goods for a future marriage. Hence the word “hope,” certainly in my family, where every expressed parental concern seemed to end with some version of, “and you, with all those opinions.” They worried I would intimidate the boys.

I never used the hope chest for its intended purpose – don’t pretend to be surprised – but I’ve never been able to part with it. The chest was a big purchase for my working-class parents, at a time when they were worrying about the costs of my college years to come. It has traveled with me to every place I’ve called home, including dorm rooms and student housing.

This time, I was opening the chest to find the one thing I had ever crocheted. My mother’s only acquaintance with a needle was the type used for hemming and mending.

Fortunately, Mrs. Sawicki, my friends’ mom, lived just a block away. Most of my memories of Mrs. Sawicki involve her with a lap full of beautiful yarn that she crocheted into throws, scarves and sweaters.

Soon after my ninth birthday, she agreed to teach me after I begged my mother to ask her. I crocheted one tear-shaped doily, from a skein of yarn in shades of cream, pale pink and blue. My mother, after briefly displaying it, wrapped it in tissue and stored it in her hope chest until her death, when Dad gave it to me. My masterpiece, preserved.

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Now, when I hold that doily made by my own little hands, I think about how my father had never wanted me to hang out at the Sawickis. We were Presbyterians and they were Catholics, and even though Dad seldom attended church he felt this was an insurmountable difference. Mr. Sawicki was an immigrant from Poland, which to my father was more proof that he was not our kind.

This was destined to be a losing battle for my father. I was lucky to learn early, in one integrated classroom after another, that my friends didn’t need to look like me to be like me. Religion was just another square on the hopscotch.

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It surprises people when I tell them that, in little Ashtabula, Ohio, half of my classmates were Black throughout elementary school. I loved my father, but he struggled with racism all his life. By second grade, I understood this to be Dad’s problem, not mine. It was a major source of tension between us for all his years.

This is when some readers will feel the need to let me know I committed a bait-and-switch on them. Here I was, writing about potholders and doilies, and now I’m talking about Black people. If it bothers you that I didn’t tell you where this was going, you are precisely the reader I was hoping to find.

Weaving in our country's history

You know how the mind works. One thing reminds us of this, and then this, and then this. Under the doily in my hope chest was an envelope with my classroom photos from elementary school. As I studied the faces – I can still name most of them – I thought about how too many white parents and elected officials these days don’t want their white children to learn about our country’s history of racism.

This fictionalizing of America is less likely to happen in diverse school districts, where some family trees include slave owners – and children who were sold off to the highest bidder. But this latest round of whitewashing of American history is not new. It has been going on for years, by design and ZIP code. Three years ago, The New York Times reported that “more than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite.”

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As a journalism professor, I see how this plays out. I can often discern in a single class discussion which white students grew up in school districts where most everyone looked like them, and no one helped them expand their point of view. When I realized how few of my white students had heard of Ruby Bridges, John Lewis and Rosa Parks, it was time for a pivot. No matter which course I’m teaching, we learn about the civil rights movement, too, and the brave reporters and photographers who covered it. The ensuing conversations sure raise my spirits.

To bring us back to potholders, think of it this way: It’s another kind of weaving, one thread of American history at a time.

Connie Schultz is a columnist for Paste BN. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz

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