Words by Natalie Chanin | Photos by Rinne Allen
Dear Bitter Southerners,
During a recent hike with a group of friends and new acquaintances, talk turned to home and all that it means. As we filed through the forested landscape, we wondered together: Is home the place we are born, the home where we spent the most time,the home we claim, or the home we are required to embrace?
“Home is where the heart is,” is often attributed to Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-70) and eventually made its way into the American lexicon. Since then, it has been embroidered or needlepointed,framed,and hung on walls of homes acrossmy community of The Shoals in northwest Alabama — and, I assume, across the nation.
But for me,born into the violence and turmoil of Alabama in the early 1960s,“home”represented a heart-wrenching dichotomy. There were the warm, red-dirt gardens of my grandparents, smelling like summer and feeling like protection. There was the sound of George Wallace pledging to preserve his South’s “racial order.” There was Forest Hills Elementary School, where my mother was a teacher, beginning the process of integration when I was in the first grade—more than a decade after Brownv.Board of Education. There was the Sears“Wish Book,” used in part as a fashion magazine, informing the clothing my grandmothers lovingly crafted for our family. There were also the signs, meticulously hand- lettered, designating the segregated water fountains at the local Sears showroom. And there were the rows and rows of cotton. Cotton production casting a long, dark shadow of oppression and abuse but, at the same time, becoming a story of economic development as our community, working three shifts a day, evolved into the “T-shirt Capital of the World.” All these stories were part of home: inspiration, injustice, industry, and introspection.
When, as a teenager, I set out into the world, I often found myself belittled precisely because of that home I left behind. And yet, family, farm, and community were stitched onto my heart, my identity, and my sense of design.As I traveled and worked,I took with me the things from home that were filled with love.I felt deep resonance when writers, like Alice Walker, leaned into telling our stories.I took pride when President Jimmy Carter sought not only to build a better nation but to build homes with his own hands. There was the music of my community, the Muscle Shoals sound, that crossed all boundaries of genre, color, and class.
As for me, I leaned into making textiles. I gardened and made biscuits, which my Latinx friends called “Pan de Alabama.” I learned to embrace “Alabama” as my nickname — eventually giving this nickname to my business and, later, to my daughter. As I built my life,
I used the skills and stories from my past to create a future with needle, thread, and embroidery. I took pride in our people, our food, our craftsmanship, our sense of place. But while I longed for my family and communityasIlivedinotherregionsandabroad,my Alabama “home” did not feel like it had a place for me.
All that changed in August of 2000. I found myself standing on a street corner in the Garment District of New York City after a series of meetings with various embroideryshops.I was holding a bag containing samples I’d cut from recycled T-shirts and hand-stitched back together again. They were part of a collection I’d envisioned: 200 one-of-a-kind, hand-embroidered pieces to show during Fashion Week the next February.Ineeded help to realize the project, and every one of the embroidery shops I visited that day turned me down. Standing there on the street corner, feeling defeated, I thought of home. The recycled T-shirts I held in my hands likely originated from my own community. Since they would be sewn and embellished with a simple quilting stitch, I knew there were women from home who knew exactly how to do this work.In fact,they had taught me how to do this work and had stitched quilts with my own grandmothers. They were still there, in rural Alabama, creating, growing, making for their friends, family, and community. At that moment, I decided to go home.
Twenty-one years later, I’m still here. Home for me now is so much more than a sentimental cross-stitched saying. It is where I’ve built Alabama Chanin and The School of Making; it’s where I’ve nurtured my family and, hopefully, my community. Home is where I’ve learned to embrace the past, work in the present, and plan for the future. In 2019, I helped to found Project Threadways, a nonprofit that records, studies, and explores the history of textiles and the impact that cotton and textile creation—from raw material to finished goods — have had on our community, the South, and the nation. These are the threads woven through our collective history of home that I want to embrace as a living part of who we are becoming.
Today,I want to embroider and frame a new story:
Home is where we build it.
