Stitching together pieces from the past
Gee’ s Bend’s quilters preserve the past and pave the way
for future generations.
By Cara Clark and Lee Hurley
There’s a rhythm in the movement of the needle and a cadence
in the flow of conversation, punctuated by the click of a thimble, moments of laughter, and the soundless harmony of souls joined by shared experience. The celebrated community of Gee’s Bend in Alabama, recognized internationally, comprises intricately designed quilts created by women who learned their craft from their mothers and grandmothers.
Yet, Gee’s Bend is only about quilts in the way that the Statue of Liberty is about freedom. They are both symbols of something more profound. In Gee’s Bend, quilts represent dignity and the struggle to survive and prevail.
Like Mahatma Gandhi at the spinning wheel, Gee’s Bend is the story of smart women literally taking matters into their own hands. Those magical hands created quilts, which initially helped them stay warm and later helped them fight for the right to vote and earn a decent wage. This art became as vital as the soil and trees, inspiring creativity in patching together simple pieces of fabric and elevating the whole to treasured artwork.
Through Souls Grown Deep, which promotes the work of Black
artists from the South, quilts and stories are being preserved, and people are recognized for the importance of passed-along traditions.
According to Souls Grown Deep Curator Raina Lampkins-Felder, “There’s a paucity of narratives around those who were enslaved, but we work with genealogies, libraries, and handwritten texts from the time Joseph Gee brought a number of enslaved people from North Carolina to Gee’s Bend.
The question of the genesis of this art is a bit of a tricky one, but from what we’ve understood, it’s probably Dinah Miller, who came from what is known as the Clotilda (the last known ship to bring enslaved African people to America, arriving in the Mobile Bay area around 1860) and ended up in Gee’s Bend. Because Gee’s Bend is a very specific non-incorporated sort of village, sometimes there is confusion about that area versus Alberta or Rehobeth in the surrounding area.”
Souls Grown Deep began working with the Artists Rights Society in 2012 to assist Gee’s Bend quilters in protecting, managing, and profiting from their intellectual property. Raina explains that the quilt-making tradition in the community, defined by the land encompassing a 6,000-acre plantation at the bend of the Alabama River, is unique from any in the world.
“What happens in Gee’s Bend is this continual transference of knowledge — something that, for us as Americans, we should take pride in because there is really nothing like this on the planet that has been continuing in this way — you have an area and source materials and people whose histories go back 150 years. Sometimes, you have material that’s from 70 years ago that you find in a quilt today. There’s very much a mélange — this mixing of history, past, and present that makes this place quite remarkable. It’s unique not just for the ingenious use of recycled and discarded material. It speaks to the circumstances of the time, from enslavement through Jim Crow.”
The community of quilters relied on materials such as old work clothes, flour sacks, feed sacks, and any other discards they could repurpose into a practical and aesthetically pleasing covering. Ideas, stories, and patterns emerged from discarded materials — there were no bolts of fabric to choose from and make grand plans.
“These quilters are known for their ingenious use of materials but also for the fearless, improvisational nature of their pattern creation,” Raina says. “It’s so interesting to see their textile selection and the sort of chromatic vibrancy in their work. There’s a wonderful kind of creative and artistic intentionality behind many women finding fabrics and finding a way of expressing themselves while at the same time really needing these quilts in their unheated homes. There’s that absolute practicality married with beauty and finding beauty in the everyday. That is something that’s being transferred from generation to generation and is embedded in the mindset there.”
The quilts drew the women together from early times to the present in a shared mission and vision, and the knowledge was transmitted like clicks on a telegraph wire.
“The women would sit together and sing spirituals and share stories as they hand-sewed these quilts,” Raina reflects. “It was a communal experience. Then, the young children, who had very nimble fingers, would thread the needles or beat the dirt out of the cotton flock that was left over from picking cotton to be used as batting. That was kind of their after-school chore. After they did that, they could go to play. When you have that kind of gentle introduction to quilt making, this idea of communal collaboration from a very young age proves inspirational to young girls. Then they would take up the artistic challenge that’s been presented to them by their elders.”
From the shared necessity of making quilts and the imaginations of crafting them into beautiful patterns, the community also embraced the idea of using and not wasting — even a flour bag.
“They knew you don’t just throw things away,” Raina says. “You can find a use for that and embed beauty into it. It becomes an ethos of a place, and it’s manifested in these quilts. They become autobiographical, in a way. You can see the history of a family, of a place, of a story that someone wants to tell through the fabric, pattern, and colors. Each quilt is so populated by history and by people.”
Raina says Gee’s Bend quilters often begin with one pattern and then let the work take shape — seeing where needle, fabric, and memory take them. Most artworks can be called “My Way” quilts because “you start in one direction, then go off your own way.” That could be a memory of beloved family member or a scene that captured the imagination and was transmitted through painstakingly stitched swaths of material.
Keeping tradition alive
A visit to the renovated Freedom Quilt Building in Alberta found local leaders Polly Mooney Middleton, Lue Ida McCloud, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Pattie Irby, and Marlene Bennett Jones willing to share their
accumulated wisdom, laughter, and kindness. These women are friends, sisters-in-law, cousins, quilters, civic leaders, board members, and historians.
After high school, in 1969, Lue Ida moved to Brooklyn, New York. Her family of 12 gave her $30 to go, which was more money than she had ever seen. She came home years later when her mother got sick and picked up quilting. Polly left home, too.
“I wanted to get away from the cotton field, so I went to Birmingham for a year. But I didn’t like that fast living at all. When I came back, I started getting into quilting real good. Because it was our turn, right?”
Pattie and Lue Ida shared their thoughts about the intricate shapes and stitches that pull together these iconic Southern quilts, each rich with meaning and beautifully crafted in geometric patterns or free-form shapes — all planned to the last detail.
“Later on when we got our start, putting our own quilts together, it might not come out the way you want it, but it would still be beautiful,” they say. “You have a love for it, you know. It’s a lot of meditation. We don’t draw our quilts out. We just have it in our minds. Sometimes, we do straight lines, some horizontal lines; sometimes, we do diagonal lines. It depends on how you feel and what you want to do. You go all over the place.”
Marlene Bennett Jones puts it all into perspective: “I quilt now because it gives me peace of mind, helps me stay out of other people’s business, and do my work. I don’t get into any trouble. I just make my quilts, doing my thing. That’s a good philosophy of life right there.”
Resiliency of the Spirit
Gee’s Bend is enclosed on three sides by the Alabama River, named after a North Carolina plantation owner named Joseph Gee, who bought 6,000 acres in the early 1800s and established a cotton plantation in 1816. The Gee family operated the plantation until 1845, when, to settle their debts, they relinquished the property and its 100 enslaved men, women, and children to a relative named Mark Pettway.
Like everywhere else in the country, Gee’s Bend was hit hard by the Great Depression. Cotton prices continued to plummet, farms were foreclosed, equipment sold, and citizens became destitute. Yet help was on the way. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, through his New Deal, purchased the former Pettway plantation, some 10,000 acres, and provided low-interest loans to help Black families buy the land and build homes. To this day, descendants still own their land and homes.
During the civil rights era, Martin Luther King visited nearby Alberta and Boykin. His encouragement helped the communities organize to vote, taking the ferry across the river to Camden to register. Authorities responded by discontinuing the ferry. An Episcopal priest, Father Francis X. Walter, noticed the colorful quilts hanging on clotheslines in the area, and with the help of a local, Estelle Witherspoon, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established to sell their homemade art and create critically needed economic independence.
The Freedom Quilting Bee cooperative began to gain recognition for the “free-form, improvisational designs,” which came natural to these quilters. And as awareness grew, so did accolades and sales. These Boykin
and Alberta Alabama quilts (Gee’s Bend), made from old work clothes and fertilizer sacks, were being purchased and displayed in museums worldwide — and sold at department store giants Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued ten commemorative stamps featuring images of Gee’s Bend quilts.
In 2012, the Freedom Quilting Bee closed after the death of its last board member, Nettie Young. It remained dormant until 2019, when Kim Kelly, whose family is from the area, helped refocus attention on Gee’s Bend. Others jumped on board, including Souls Grown Deep, which also supports artists’ communities by fostering economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement.
In 2020, the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy was formed to help preserve and honor the past while envisioning the future. That future includes bolstering tourism and increasing economic opportunity for the community with quilting workshops and classrooms, a library and technology lab, a walking trail, a restaurant, and an event center.
Artistry of the Soul
Raina, who was first introduced to Gee’s Bend quilts during a 2002 quilt exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City. She was an associate director of the museum and recalls being surprised that the Whitney would host a quilt show. She was accustomed to working with celebrated modern and contemporary artists and wasn’t prepared for the impact the quilts would have — visually, artistically, and emotionally.
“As soon as I saw the work, I was so overtaken with the artistry,” she says. “I could approach these works. I could read these works. I could find myself within these quilts in the way that I could find myself within the works of other artists. And that was something that I found so fascinating and exciting.”
Almost twenty years later, she works closely with the community in Gee’s Bend and the surrounding areas, researching their stories
and histories.
“I jumped at that opportunity to be able to do this,” she says, of the place where artistic form meets function. “It’s incredible to see the minds of these women who were using textile patterning design and artistic solutions and presenting something very new. That’s what artists who are interesting and who are good do. They expand us. They expand the possibility of what we are able to imagine visually.” The oldest quilts in the Souls Grown Deep collection date back to the 1920s, but many older quilts are in private collections or among the descendants of quilters.
The organization is constantly exploring to unearth new quilts and to learn about collections within the families — treasures as yet unseen.
As with any artwork, the value lies within the artistry, and Gee’s Bend quilts generally range from $2,000 to in excess of $100,000. More than 30 museums around the world have acquired quilts for their permanent
collections. An exhibition of quilts at the Royal Academy of Art in London, England, last year included quilts as old as the 1930s and as new as 2021, illustrative of the continued value of this tradition passed along through generations and among family and friends in this small area in Alabama.
“There’s still that kind of peace and spirit that is what continues to be passed on,” Raina says. “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to pass on tradition, to pass on an incredible artistic feat. And within that, there is a kind of glory. There’s always hope; there’s joy; there’s a movement outward and upward. In this small, isolated hamlet of a place, we find such incredible innovation that, in some way only, sadly, could come out of a sort
of oppression. These incredibly resilient people have overcome to create these majestic works of art. It speaks to the resiliency of the human spirit.”
The annual Airing of the Quilts Festival is Saturday October 12, 2024. Join the Gee’s Bend community in this annual celebration of its generations-old quiltmaking tradition, featuring quilt displays and sales, workshops, guided tours, food, music, and more.
Learn more about the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy on their website.
You can learn more about Gee's Bend and take home your own piece of history at geesbend.org.