The wondrous quilts of Gee’s Bend

The early history

The slow brown river moves like molasses, twisting and turning its way through the state of Alabama. Eons ago, the Alabama River chose one particular spot to carve itself a nearly-complete circle, and the land inside that loop has long been a separate place, largely closed off from the rest of the world, an isolation often intensified by human intervention.

The place is called Gee’s Bend, named for the first white man to build himself a plantation here. Joseph Gee came here in 1816, bringing with him 18 African American slaves for his cotton plantation. The property was sold by Gee’s heirs in 1845 to settle a debt; a short time later the Pettway family arrived with 100 slaves. When slavery was abolished after the Civil War, many of the former slaves continued to work for the Pettways as sharecroppers.

In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. The U.S. government stepped in, purchased 10,000 acres of the former plantation and then provided loans, enabling residents to acquire and farm the land that their ancestors were forced to work in slavery. Unlike the people of other communities of sharecroppers, who were so often forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were occasionally evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of Gee’s Bend were able to retain their land and homes.

This was a mixed blessing. The ability to own one’s own home and land is a fine thing, especially at a time when home ownership was painfully elusive for a great many Black Americans. Because of their ability to own their land, most Gee’s Bend residents did not participate in what came to be called The Great Migration, during which over six million African Americans from the rural South migrated to the cities of the North, the Midwest, and even the West, from about 1916 to 1970. By remaining in Alabama, the Benders missed an opportunity to participate in the rapidly-growing American middle class. Sure, they owned their homes, but it was a difficult life. Wilcox County, home to Gee’s Bend, is consistently one of the poorest counties in the United States; according to the 2012 Census, it was the poorest American county as measured by household income.

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Who needs a quilt in Alabama?

The quilting tradition at Gee’s Bend dates back to the plantation’s founding in the early 19th century, and may have been influenced in part by patterned Native American and African textiles. The enslaved women of Gee’s Bend made quilts to keep their families warm in their unheated shacks. It was a difficult life, and there was no hint that these women would develop a unique style that would eventually shake up the art world.

What fabric did they use? They certainly had no access to bright new fabrics. Most often, their quilt pieces came from worn-out, cast-off work clothes and other textiles; they cut out whatever tiny or oddly-shaped pieces they could manage to salvage. Through the necessity of frugality and recycling, a sturdy fabric such as denim—now faded, torn and stained from hard work—became something of a testament to their own hardscrabble life, while finding new use in keeping the families warm.

Along the way, the quilting tradition of Gee’s Bend took a fascinating turn, much like the river that defined their home. Perhaps in part due to living on land that was both physically and socially isolated, the quilters began to develop a distinct style, largely unrelated to more classic quiltmaking. They created abstract patterns that had never before been expressed on quilts, using lively improvisations and geometric simplicity. These patterns and assembly styles have been passed down from generation to generation, and continue to this day.

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Recent history woven with quilts

Martin Luther King made a visit to Gee’s Bend on a rainy night in February 1965. He was there to encourage the Benders to do what they could to vote. He was there to tell them that they mattered. He was there inspire them to take action, and they did. Three weeks later, several people from Gee’s Bend went to Selma to march peacefully with John Lewis and scores of others; White policemen arrived, violence ensued, and the day became known as Bloody Sunday.

The Civil Rights Movement had begun before Dr. King arrived in 1965. A seismic shift was underway. For many years, Black residents of Gee’s Bend had used the ferry to cross over to the nearest town, Camden, to see a doctor, to shop for groceries, to mail a letter … and to try to register to vote. They were always denied the vote. But things were changing, the (White) people in power didn’t like it, and local authorities decided to close the ferry.

What began as a geographic isolation created by the path of a river had now been intensified by the social reality of racism. In place of a ferry crossing that took a matter of minutes, Benders were forced to drive an hour each way on unpaved backroads to get to Camden. The people of Gee’s Bend would remain without a ferry for another 44 years.

But light always comes after darkness. It was during this time of change that local women banded together to found the Freedom Quilting Bee, an offshoot of the civil rights movement that was designed to increase family incomes and foster community development by selling handicrafts to outsiders.

Willie Abrams and her daughter Estelle Witherspoon were among the founders of the Freedom Quilting Bee, and Estelle was a long-time leader of the organization. She was also active in the Civil Rights Movement and marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Her mother Willie was quoted in Good Housekeeping as saying that 1969 was the first year she did not have to work in the fields where she had picked 100 pounds of cotton a day for $2. She was 72 years old.

The quilt in the photograph that opens this story was made in about 1975 by Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams (1897-1987). The quilt is titled “Roman Stripes,” and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s made with scraps of corduroy from Sears, a fabric not normally seen in quilts.

Following their success with contracts from Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller, the Freedom Quilting Bee had received a contract with Sears Roebuck and Company in 1972 to make corduroy pillow shams. The abundance of leftover fabric from that project inspired many local quiltmakers to incorporate the unusual fabric into their designs. Although difficult to work with due to its rigidity, corduroy was well suited for bold, simple designs.

Quoted from the Souls Grown Deep website:
“Corduroy’s coexisting qualities of weight and manageability give it a character that would literally provide an artistic catalyst to several of Gee’s Bend’s most accomplished and inventive artists. Somehow, this material inspired a remarkable style from which an otherwise diverse group of artists seemed to play off each other’s conceptions… Sometimes bold, even reductive, patterns work perfectly in corduroy when they might not in other materials… ”

Speaking about the quilt at the top of the page, the site continues:
“A more complex rendition of the rectangular block structure—twenty, now, rather than nine—is turned into a spectacular, heraldic triumph here by ‘Ma Willie’ Abrams.”

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Speaking about the quilts

Alvia Wardlaw, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, wrote:
“The compositions of these quilts stand in stark contrast to the ordered regularity associated with many Euro-American quiltmaking styles. There is a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the major abstract painters of the 20th century than with textile design.”

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote this in a review of Gee’s Bend quilts at the Whitney Museum of American Art:
“Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I’m wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee’s Bend was a plantation.”

Author Joanne Cubbs wrote:
“The work of many Gee’s Bend quilters is based on a willingness to defy the ordinary, and this tradition of aesthetic daring has produced stunning visual results.”

Quilter Mary Lee Bendolph, quoted on the Souls Grown Deep website, said this:
“We just try to put it together and get it through with. We don’t try to style it or nothing. Folks call some of this kind of stuff “crazy quilts”—don’t know which-a-way it going. I never did go by a pattern. Didn’t none us.”

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Music and quilts

Speaking for myself, when I look at these quilts, I hear music. The music is insistent, demanding to be heard as an integral part of the experience of viewing the quilts.

I hear voices singing old spirituals. I hear the spontaneity of improvisational jazz. I hear—and feel deep in my bones—soul-stirring blues.

Here’s the thing: I look at a lot of art, but this is the first time that any art has had me hearing music. And another thing: this is not my favorite music. I listen to it once in a while, blues more than the others. I don’t know that much about music, I don’t play an instrument, I don’t sing in public. That makes it all the more noticeable that I can hear, for example, Robert Johnson when I look at a quilt from Gee’s Bend.

Music made visual: I’ve picked three quilts to show what I mean. I’m curious to know if you also hear music when you see these quilts, and what you hear.

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Well-deserved recognition

In 2015, three of the most respected quilters of Gee’s Bend received great honors. Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway and Lucy Mingo, all of whom claim a long lineage as quilters, received National Heritage Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This is the highest honor awarded by the U.S. government in the field of folk and traditional arts.

The quilters of Gee’s Bend followed quite a trajectory: from the depths of despair during a time when one human could legally own other humans, through the halting and painful steps of achieving freedom, to the ability to own one’s own business, and at last to national recognition for artistic merit. Hallelujah!

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Sources

I could not have compiled this story without a great deal of help from online resources. The history, the geography, and the art are separate-but-together stories that required some teasing out and organizing in order to tell what I hope is a cohesive and understandable story of a unique place that was home to remarkable women and their art. My thanks to all of these sources.

Souls Grown Deep, soulsgrowndeep.org
Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, fqblegacy.org
National Endowment for the Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org
Baltimore Museum of Art, artbma.org : A Timeline of the Freedom Quilting Bee
Alabama Life and Culture : From Slavery to National Fame: The Gee’s Bend Quilts That Changed Modern Art
Smithsonian Magazine, smithsonianmag.com
Artland Magazine, artland.com
The Los Angeles Times : Crossing Over, by J.R. Moehringer (Pulitzer Prize winner for feature writing in 2000; a great read)
The New York Times : Art Review: Jazzy Geometry, Cool Quilters
The New York Times : Gee’s Bend Quilts in  Shows at Lehman College
Widewalls, widewalls.ch : The Remarkable Story of Gee’s Bend Quilts
Wikipedia
Google Arts and Culture : 100 Years of Gee’s Bend Quilts

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