Rarely does an object give you so much information about another person in another time and another world—yet withhold even more.

The silk words handstitched into the wool fabric are clear enough: Charlotte Turner was 10 years old. She was a Liberated African in the village of Bathurst, Sierra Leone.

Wait. Liberated African? Liberated from what? Where? Had she been enslaved in another country, then somehow returned to Sierra Leone?

And how liberated was Charlotte Turner? Was Charlotte Turner her real name? Bathurst was a British missionary school, and they gave all their students names, it turns out. Why did they pick that name specifically? Did she think of it as her name? Did she believe in their God?

Did she even exist?

I really wanted to know more about this piece, but it wasn't deemed important enough to put on immediate display at Seattle Art Museum, where it was donated to the permanent collection about a month ago in a trove of 45 "early American" objects assembled by the interesting American collector Ruth J. Nutt, who died in 2013. The objects deemed important enough are now out in the gallery; they were all made by men with known names or companies like Tiffany. (In a minute I'll get to why I add quotes around "early American.")

SAM did acknowledge the rarity of Charlotte Turner's sampler by mentioning it in the press release about the whole collection: "This is the only known example produced within this population.”

SAM collections coordinator Sarah Berman let me into SAM's storage one morning to see the sampler in the flesh. (A serious treat; thank you, Sarah.)

It is a modest thing, measuring a foot high and 10 inches across, stretched neatly and sealed under glass in its wood frame. It's in perfect condition. Up close, you notice details, like the places where Charlotte Turner nearly ran out of room. It seems obvious that she's trying her best to do this perfectly, to please her teacher. It also seems obvious, given the fact that it's still here, that she succeeded in pleasing her teacher.

I had so many questions, so I started digging.

Berman gave me the two paragraphs of information SAM had on file, from Nutt. From those:

Throughout the first forty years of the 19th century, schoolgirls in English speaking countries, notably the United States and the British Isles, made needlework samplers. As missionary movements, both American and English, intensified their activities in outposts such as India and Africa, the tradition of samplermaking traveled with them, providing an opportunity to teach the English language and instill religious beliefs. ... The settlement of Bathurst included a school administered by the Church Missionary Society which was responsible for the education of thousands of children over the years.

The mission wrote its intentions in its 1830 log: "We are convinced that the instruction and right education of the Children of the African Race will do more to advance the cause of Universal Emancipation, than all other means put together. Whatever is achieved in this way, strikes at the root of the evils against which we are contending: it counteracts, and in measure abolishes, that prejudice against the Colour, which is the greatest barrier to Emancipation."

There was no other information, except for a name on the back of the frame: "M. Finkel and Daughter." Berman didn't know who that was, but the Internet did. It's a well-established Philadelphia samplers dealer, so I called them, and Amy Finkel (daughter of M.) remembered Charlotte Turner's 1831 creation well. "I've never had one like it since or then," Finkel told me.

When she bought it—auction records show that was in 2004—she had Nutt in mind, and sure enough, Nutt purchased it for her collection. Finkel said the seller was "a reliable source," but "he knew nothing" about its history or travels. The auction house, Bonhams, has a record of the piece selling (to Finkel, as it turns out) in London on January 20, 2004 for 293 British pounds, or $467, including the auction house's premium and "together with another embroidered picture."

Finkel is the source of the claim that "This is the only known example produced within this population." She told me the same thing on the phone.

But it isn't!

A little Googling revealed a dozen more specific African girls' samplers from mission schools in Sierra Leone. I found an essay called "African Girls' Samplers from Mission Schools in Sierra Leone (1820s to 1840s)," by a scholar named Silke Strickrodt at the German Historical Institute in London. The essay was published in the journal History in Africa in 2010. I don't have a JSTOR account, so I emailed Strickrodt with my questions about "Liberated African Charlotte Turner, Aged 10 years, Bathurst Sierra Leone."

She knew exactly which piece I was talking about. Recognition!

Since writing about the first known 13 samplers, Strickrodt has found two more, she emailed. There are 15 known examples. One other is by a "Liberated African" going by the name "Charlotte Crowther."

In her essay, Strickrodt explains that the samplers are special because they were "generated by a group of people for whom we do not usually have first-hand documentary material." But—"these 'textile documents' present serious problems of interpretation."

"What," she asks, "do they express of the girls' own perspectives, as distinct from the European missionaries who directed the girls' work?"

I found out so much in Strickrodt's essay.

Charlotte Turner was "probably one of 147 liberated African girls who in late January 1831 were returned by the colonial government to the care of the [Church Missionary Society] at Bathurst, following their withdrawal in the previous month, after it had been discovered that the local CMS missionary, the Rev. Thomas Davey, had a sexual relationship with a girl placed in his household for education."

Had she known that girl? Had she been that girl?

How did CMS living conditions compare to where she'd been before she was "returned"?

Usually, the teacher designed the samplers and the girls executed them, Strickrodt wrote. The girls spent most of their time making boys' clothes, and samplers were considered a treat. (Samplers were meant to teach girls the "feminine" virtues of "perseverance, industry, and obedience," Strickrodt explained.)

The samplers were also fundraisers for CMS. If a sponsor back in Europe paid for a sampler, that sponsor got to name the girl who made it. So that's how Charlotte Turner got her name. The samplers "were missionary propaganda pieces that were sent to Europe to supporters to ensure their continued support," Strickrodt emailed, "which however does not mean to say that the girls who stitched them did not enjoy making them."

"Liberated African" was the term applied to people who were "rescued from 'illegal' slave ships on the West African coast by vessels of the British navy's anti-slave trade patrol," Strickrodt wrote. In 1807, Britain's Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, which abolished the slave trade, but not slavery itself (that wouldn't come until 1833). Ships were stopped on their way out of Africa and people "rescued" were put into the British military or apprenticed, which could mean being sent out in service. The majority of the people rescued, Strickrodt writes, were Yoruba.

Charlotte Turner might have been Yoruba. Her "liberation" probably involved being captured, marched onto a ship, caught by the royal navy, marched off the ship, and conscripted by the missionaries.

Probably she was freer before she was liberated.

Often, samplers made by African girl in missionary schools bore European flora and fauna, not African: strawberry border, rose twigs, dovecots. There's none of that in this one. Strickrodt sees in it "baskets, crosses, peacocks, and a bird (a chicken?)." The initials "C B" at the bottom, she guesses, probably referred to the sponsor in England, and given that the piece ended up in private hands rather than in the archives of the CMS in London, this sampler probably made it to its recipient.

Should this sampler be part of an "early American" collection at all? There is no evidence that it has any link to America, other than its 2004 purchase by Amy Finkel and then Ruth J. Nutt.

A sampler like this represents less a single person—Charlotte Turner—and more the triangular relationship between the girl, her teacher, and the sponsor, Strickrodt explains. A little more is known about Charlotte Turner's probable teacher at Bathurst in March 1831, Sarah Warburton. She was an Englishwoman who came to Sierra Leone with her husband, who died there, and Warburton went on to marry the man who replaced the lecherous Davey at the mission.

It's not much, but it's something.

SAM has no firm plans to display Charlotte Turner's sampler.