A patchwork of life stories

PETER'S WAR: A New England Slave
Boy and the American Revolution
By Joyce Lee Malcolm
Yale University, 272 pp., illustrated, $28

THE OLD LEATHER MAN: Historical Accounts of
a Connecticut and New York Legend
By Dan W. DeLuca
Wesleyan University, 232 pp., illustrated, $35

In the years since the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project got underway in 1994, it has examined 6,000 quilts preserved in museums and historical societies and treasured in private homes.

They are, as historian Marla R. Miller notes, "artifacts of sentiment . . . mediums for nostalgia, affection, and veneration across generations." And they are also, she writes, "texts of historical insight."

Some 200 examples are now handsomely displayed in "Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth," edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett, the project's founder.

The book offers commentary on each quilt, its design and composition, the particular circumstances surrounding its making, and, frequently, the maker herself. In all, it is a valuable document of the Commonwealth's cultural history.

The antislavery movement triggered a flurry of production as quilters created them to be sold at fairs to raise money for abolitionist activities.

The novelist Lydia Maria Child is credited with making a quilt in the Sawtooth Star pattern sold at an antislavery Fair in Boston in 1836. It fetched $5, according to a letter from Child.

Several quilts are associated with the lost towns of the Quabbin, those central Massachusetts villages that were flooded during the 1930s during the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Italian-born Josephine Rossi Anzalone came to Boston as a child and moved to Cambridge after her marriage. She died in 1966 and is remembered as "a creative woman who knitted, crocheted, tatted, and even painted." "The relatively airy feel" of her quilt in the Attic Window pattern suggests that she "embraced the lighter-hued colorways of the early twentieth century."

The quilt is currently owned by Josephine's granddaughter, Janice Bakey, who took up quilting to help her dying sister finish the ones she was making for her grandchildren. Bakey has now taught those grandchildren to quilt, saying "quilting keeps that [family] connection."

Switching gears, Joyce Lee Malcolm, a law professor at George Mason University, offers us another look at history on ground level in "Peter's Way."

Malcolm tells us that Peter was sold into slavery when he was 19 months old and grew up in the childless household of Josiah and Elizabeth Nelson. As a 12-year-old, Peter happily accompanies Nelson and other members of the Lincoln militia as they head off to join the gathering Continental Army after the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Peter gains his freedom in December 1779 as a reward for enlisting. Known as Peter Sharon, he returned to Lincoln, where he farmed, and eventually died uneventfully in the winter of 1791-92.

Through her book, Malcolm manages to tease out the complexities of race in the colonies. Recounting an overland march to Peekskill, N.Y., in the spring of 1778, Malcolm writes that Peter would likely have seen "slaves gazing warily" at his militia unit. "Did [they] think Peter a fool for risking his life in a war for white freedom? Or did they admire his ability to fight as an equal with the white men of his state?"

In any case, she writes, Peter would have known that "he was not toiling away at some thankless task. He was in the militia because he wanted to be. He was also away from home and worries about his future."

In "The Old Leather Man," Dan Deluca, an independent historian, recalls the wanderings of a strange, tragic figure through hundreds of contemporary newspaper accounts.

It was about 1856 when people in the towns along the lower Connecticut River and into the Litchfield hills began to notice an odd character, a disheveled man dressed all in leather, who passed through their town about once every 30 days.

These mysterious visits continued for 30 years. A few people befriended him, inviting him into their houses for a meal. But he slept in the open, often in rough shelters he made in the woods along the route he followed, year after year, some 360 miles through western Connecticut and into eastern New York. He died alone, in one of those shelters, in 1889.

A typical account, from the Connecticut Valley Advertiser in April 1876, reports that "the Leather Man with knapsack and staff, last Friday, once more struck queerly upon our vision as with unwashed aspect and serious mien he passed silently by on Main Street, headed South, as he invariably heads in all his journeys through Deep River."

DeLuca, a retired teacher who lives in Meriden, Conn., has spent 20 years researching the wanderings of "Old Leathery." His account is a compelling recreation of a curious chapter in regional history.

Michael Kenney, a Cambridge-based freelance writer, often reviews books of local and regional interest.