Atlanta movie and TV mogul Tyler Perry, the recipient of this year’s Governors Award, accepted his Emmy with a story-turned-metaphor about a homemade quilt his grandmother once gave him.
Perry said his grandmother gave him the quilt when he left home at 19 and that he didn’t respect it like he should have.
Perry later saw a similar quilt in an antique store years later. The salesman told him the quilt was made by a former slave who added each patch of the quilt to represent a part of her life. Perry said the story made him so “embarrassed” about his grandmother’s quilt and brushing off the significance of the gift.
“Here I was a person who prides myself on celebrating our heritage, our culture, and I didn’t even recognize the value in my grandmother’s quilt,” Perry said. “I dismissed her work and her story because it didn’t look like what I thought it should.”
“Whether we know it or not, we are all sewing our own quilts with our thoughts, our behavior, our experiences and our memories,” he said.
Perry noted how he now owns land that once was a Confederate Army base. Now, “on that very land, black people, white people, gay, straight, lesbian, transgender, ex-cons, Latin, Asian, all of us come together working,” he said, “to add patches to a quilt that is as diverse as it can be.”
“In my grandmother’s quilt, there were no patches that represented Black people on television. But my quilt, her grandson, is being celebrated by the Television Academy. I thank you for this. God bless you.”
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