At Belle Grove, a former plantation and National Trust Historic Site near Middletown, Virginia, more than 270 adults and children were enslaved between 1783 and 1851 by Isaac Hite Jr. and his family.

Now, artists and community members are coming together to ensure those names are never erased from the fabric of history.

How long has art been a part of your life?

I have been an artist, I think, all my life. Around 12 years old, I had access to a sewing machine and some cloth, and I just taught myself how to sew. I continued to make anything you could make out of cloth. Until maybe 2001, I made everything but quilts.

How were you introduced to quilting, and how did this become your preferred artistic medium?

We moved [to Ohio] for my husband’s job. My husband was off traveling all over the country, my daughter was off at school at Ohio State, the youngest one was in school all day. I didn’t know anybody. So I said, OK, you’ve got to do something, Carole. And I said, well, let me sew something. Sewing always made me happy. Sewing was something I could do.

For some reason, I decided—I call it divine intervention—I'm going to make a quilt. I didn’t know anything specifically about making quilts, [except] that you make a block, and you sew blocks together. So I got a piece of paper, and designed myself a block, and started putting them together.

Maybe three weeks into our move, my sister came to town. She [showed me] an article about Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, the head of an organization called the Women of Color Quilters Network. She lived in West Chester, Ohio, where I lived.

So I called her. She said, “I meet with a quilt group, you should come.” So I went. From then on is when I started my career as a fiber artist and an exhibiting artist.

How has your work evolved over time?

I started making [quilts that depicted] women who were rejoicing. I did that for many years. I always wanted to show rejoicing and gratitude in my work.

I would say the biggest way [my work] has changed is just from the different events in our nation. I still do the women; they’re not always rejoicing now. I make quilts about injustice. But positive messages too, about unity and diversity, or equality.

As we went on, she kept saying, “Carole, it won’t work. This is going to have to be two quilts.” So that’s when it was decided that I would do them in two quilts.

Once I got over that hurdle, I could really think about how I was going to design these quilts. I knew that I wanted to do family trees.

Most of these people were from West Africa. I knew of a store up in New Jersey, and I called up and said, do you have any authentic West African batiks? I said, I have 29 families, so I need 29 different ones. I bought fabrics that I thought would work nicely in the quilt.

I [also] took a trip to Ghana, West Africa. When I would go to the fabric markets, these guides were helping us. When I looked at the black fabrics, they’re like, “No, no, you don’t want those, those are for mourning.” I [decided to] use this fabric for the background of the quilt. The bright colors [of the batik fabric] show how we honor them, and how we illuminate them. But the black is symbolic of us grieving them.

Once I got the fabrics, it was time to make the blocks. I probably spent six months-plus cutting. Some of these families were huge. It was very tedious cutting, and very tedious sewing.

They really came alive as people. Sometimes it was very difficult reading the stories. Sometimes you will see the mother, the father, and they had a child. Then you’ll see that the child was given to the [plantation] owner’s sister as a wedding gift. Then you would see, OK, this woman had 10 children. Three of them died within a year of birth. Five of them [were] sold to somebody else. Or you see a mother, and then you see the only child she had was sold. It was emotional.