"The idea that enslaved people would take the hundreds of hours to make the multiple quilts necessary to pass on some very simple instructions, when they could have done the same thing in a five minute conversation behind the barn, suggests not ingenuity but, at the very least, very odd priorities. The cartoonist Rube Goldberg made a career of designing machines that took thirty steps to do what any normal person could do in one or two." Christopher Densmore.