Lucinda Toomer grew up on her family's farm in Georgia. In her later years she remembered childhood on the farm as a better time, when "everything people had, they made." She also recalled being awakened each night during her twelfth year, when her mother would come into her room to teach her to sew and quilt. Toomer was very conscious of the effects of color and placement in her quilts, remarking that "a strip divides so you can see plainer...red shows up in a quilt better than anything else...you can see red a long while." In this example, red is used to powerful effect as vertical slashes in long strips, providing strong contrasts in blocks of diamonds. Art historian Maude Wahlman has noted that the pattern of light and dark triangles and squares evokes a special cloth dyed by Nigerian women to symbolize the spots of a leopard, whose attributes of power and courage were admired and emulated in male societies. Toomer was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship in 1983, shortly before her death.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Ancestry and Innovation: African-American Art from the Collection," in Folk Art Magazine. New York: Summer, 2005, 39.