The Black Women of Gee’s Bend Work Hard and Easy The wonder world of quilt-making

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art.”

—Virginia Woolf

The first Gee’s Bend quilters are long dead, but they would spin a furrow into the ground if they could see Questlove wearing one of their quilt patterns to the Oscars. Or the Metropolitan Museum of Art selling a “Gee’s Bend silk scarf” for $95. Or the Royal Academy of Arts in London commissioning quilts from their great-granddaughters. The first quilters never dreamed they were making something special. They stitched together feed sacks, flour sacks, and scraps of faded denim to warm their families in houses where frozen ground sliced between the floorboards, and sometimes a hog wriggled under there and stared back at you.

The quilts covered men ashamed to shiver with the flu’s chills, women screaming in hard labor, children heavy-lidded after days crouched in the cotton fields, dragging their home-sewn sacks over clods of earth. Mothers sewed these quilts when everyone else was asleep, so there was no time to fuss over the details. For batting, they beat the dirt out of trash cotton or swept the floor of the cotton gin. Quilts were women’s work, therefore practical and unquestioned.

How were those women to know, tucked into a paper-clip curve of the Alabama River with scant access to the rest of the world, that their quilts echoed the best and most daring modern art?

I. Scraps

Driving southwest from Montgomery to Gee’s Bend—a Black community fifty miles from a grocery store or restaurant and cradled on three sides by the river—you pass long, silent stretches of loblolly and shortleaf pine and hickory trees draped in Spanish moss. The last place with any bustle is Selma, where this nation’s most familiar brand of atrocity, the killing of a young unarmed Black man, gave rise to three grim marches in 1965. Cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where those peaceful marchers were whipped and clubbed by state troopers on horseback. The country’s shock helped push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Just three weeks before that massacre, Martin Luther King Jr., having learned about Gee’s Bend, made his way south through a hard rain. He reached Pleasant Grove Baptist Church at midnight. “To see you out in large numbers gives me new courage,” he told the crowd pressed tight in the pews. You have the right to vote, he said. You are somebody.

Three years later, Gee’s Bend mules would pull the wagon that held his casket.

•  •  •

Jennie Pettway and another girl with the quilter Jorena Pettway (Library of Congress)

Gee’s Bend’s march had been involuntary. Back in 1847, plantation owner Mark Pettway forced one hundred enslaved men, women, and children to walk there from North Carolina. One woman, told she had to leave her baby boy behind, wrapped him up in a warm quilt, then stitched him into the mattress ticking that would be loaded on one of the wagons.

After the Civil War, Black families stayed on as tenant farmers, turning Gee’s Bend into one of the nation’s first Black communities. In 1895, the plantation was bought by a Yale-educated attorney, Adrian Van de Graff, whose dream was in his book: The Redistribution of the American Negro. Eager to remake the South for Whites only, he fell into debt before he had the chance. And so, instead of being “redistributed,” the families of Gee’s Bend steadily continued to work his land.

During the Great Depression, the price of cotton plummeted, and they had to borrow seed and fertilizer from a local merchant at crazy-high interest rates. When the merchant died, his widow promptly foreclosed on sixty of the families, sending men into Gee’s Bend to seize livestock, food, tools, anything of any possible value. That winter, families shot furry-tailed squirrels and picked tart berries to stay alive.

Then things came full circle. De Graff’s heir sold all 10,000 acres to the federal government, which parceled out Gee’s Bend to the families of men and women who had worked that land enslaved. The government also issued low-interest mortgages so families could buy and help build their own Roosevelt houses: simple white frame homes with wide porches, cool in summer and far cozier in winter than those wind-whistled old plantation cabins.

Mary Ann Pettway grew up in one of those houses.

Now she manages the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective, and I want to meet her. Driving at night through one of those hard rains, with fog swirling up from the river, I keep a death grip on the steering wheel and hunch forward, the defogger on the rental car not worth a damn. Fear of a crash distracts me from my other anxiety: Mary Ann’s initial refusal to be interviewed; her fury at the last reporter who tried; her failure to return my last two texts. Why should she be eager? Yet another clueless White woman come to gawk.

I am coming anyway. In grad school, I researched domestic needlework, awed by its skill and symbolism. In the years I watched a close friend sicken and die, the traveling AIDS quilt reduced much of the nation to tears. Quilts were stitched into social history, women’s history, American history. But—lean close to hear the guilty whisper—I loathed all those pastels and country-cute patterns. Discovering the Gee’s Bend quilts felt redemptive: I loved them at first sight.

•  •  •

A designer making fresh use of the quilt designs

Mary Ann texts back, and the next morning, I show up at the Quilting Collective and promise to try not to drive her crazy.

“Oh, I’ll let you know,” she says—but she is smiling. She lets me gape at the quilts’ dancing colors and shapes, then says she has sweet potatoes in the oven for a snack. “They’re not done yet,” she adds. “Haven’t started smelling them.”

On my way to the Collective, I stopped at the Visitors Center and met two other Pettways. Many people in Gee’s Bend still carry this surname—not because their parents fell in love but because it was stuck on their forebears by Mark Pettway, who thought he owned them. The town itself was named for its first slaveholder, Joseph Gee. In 1949, it was officially renamed Boykin for Frank Boykin, a White segregationist congressman from Mobile with zero connection to the community.

“Does it bother you that these are all names of White people who screwed you over?” I ask.

Mary Ann shrugs. “Doesn’t make no difference, because I didn’t know in the beginning. I was born a Pettway, and I love my name. As far as I was concerned, it made everybody kin to everybody.”

“The joke’s on Mark Pettway,” I realize. “You’re the ones who made the name famous.”

She bends a mitered corner and secures it with barely visible stitches. “His grandson came here once,” she remarks, not looking up. “He wanted to stitch a little on one of the quilts. Actually did a pretty good job.”

My jaw clamps tight. Mark Pettway’s grandson? Probably a great-great-grandson. “Did he…talk about the past?”

“All he told me was, he was Mark Pettway’s grandson. He never did come back. But Mark’s granddaughter came once, and she bought a quilt for $5,000. I think it was Florine Roundtree’s quilt.”

These people just show up like customers? The door swings open before I can blurt the outrage. The visitors, who are from Virginia, have just been to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.

“And they got a quilt hangin’ on the wall?” Mary Ann asks. “That’s the one we did.”

They also visited the nonprofit formed to preserve the legacy of Gee’s Bend’s Freedom Quilting Bee, started in 1966 by a White Episcopal priest and civil rights activist to boost local income by selling handcrafts to outsiders. That was the first revelation of the Gee’s Bend quilts, and people were blown away. Jackson Pollack bought one; so did fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Soon there were contracts with Saks and several other department stores. For consistency and efficiency, the women were told, they would all have to sew the same pattern.

“It was almost like a sewing factory,” Mary Ann says. “My mother worked there. They did pillows for Bloomingdale’s and Sears. But see, us, we are not like a sewing factory.”

One of the visitors nods. “Your quilts are originals.”

When they leave, I ask Mary Ann’s opinion of the Freedom Quilting Bee. She refuses to give it. The initiative brought income and awareness, but quilting as self-expression went by the wayside. Quilter Nettie Young said later, “In the quilting bee time I started using patterns, but I shouldn’t have done it.  It broke the ideas I had in my head.”

One of Mary Ann Pettway’s latest quilts

II. Piecing

For more than a century, scholars have drawn, erased, and redrawn the line between art and craft. Can what is useful be art? Those who burn to be seen as Artists wallow in self-pity when their work is not recognized; they have tied themselves up in knots trying to Make Art. I look at these ladies, piecing together scraps of paper on broad knees, then stitching quilts that will be warm and loved and beautiful no matter what.

“We weren’t trying to make art,” Mary Ann says, easing into a low chuckle. “Still don’t know nothing about art.” Yet to begin a quilt, she says, “I go by my colors. Quilting is just like designing a dress.” People around here can recognize her quilting rows even on an unsigned quilt. She eyeballs them an inch apart, and they are perfectly parallel, as evenly spaced as rows of cotton, but never on a grid. “I stay away from curves, but when they show up, I just follow them,” she says. “And I love triangles. For some reason, a triangle does something to a quilt.”

Adds tension and dynamic energy, an art teacher might say—but “does something” is what you need to know. Curious, I ask if she has ever seen the famous Amish or Shaker quilts.

“No,” she says, not the least bit interested. “I don’t like patterns. I do my own designs.”

In Gee’s Bend, inspiration comes from prayers, dreams, experiences.

“It’s dependent on how you are feelin’ that day,” Doris Pettway Mosley told me earlier. “All your feelings, you put in that quilt.”

Then you refine. “If it didn’t look too sweet to me,” Mary Lee Bendolph once said, “I’d take it back off.”

“Never make a path somebody else made,” Arlonzia Pettway used to say.

“Ought not two quilts ever be the same,” echoed Mensie Lee Pettway.

Originality, intentionality, self-expression—how is this not art? We have been stingy with our definitions, placing artists high above the crowd where only they can hear the whispers of the Muse. Now, finally, even the most elite critics and theorists acknowledge that just as there is craft in all art—the finesse in the brushwork, the deft arc of the sculptor’s chisel—art can be attained by any craft. Contemporary artists—Bisa Butler, Tracey Emin, Dawn Williams Boyd, Michael A. Cummings, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Sanford Biggers—use quilts without a second thought. Faith Ringgold, whose talent stops your breath, paints on, and with, her narrative quilts, influenced by African culture and American society. “We are all artists,” she once remarked of Black women. “Piecing is our work.”

•  •  •

From Gee’s Bend to the runway….

In the late 1990s, Bill Arnett, a White art dealer, noticed a quilt in an old newspaper photograph and drove to Gee’s Bend to see if the quilt still existed. Startled by the odd request, Annie Mae Young tossed her closets and dug under the bed and dragged out the quilt out for him. He wrote her a check for a few thousand dollars, buying that quilt and several more.

During the Depression, quite a few people had traveled down to Gee’s Bend: New Deal photographers, social workers, ministers. They stayed a minute and left. In the 1960s, the Freedom Quilting Bee sparked interest, then fizzled. Now and then, someone would show up to do what I am doing: peer in, grab what is of interest, and leave. But the Arnetts, first Bill and later his son Matt, kept coming back.

One of the first quilts Bill loved was drab, stitched from faded gray, blue, and brown work clothes, with a single bar of blood-bright red. Others were Joseph’s coats, splashed with so much color it near burned his eyeballs. He loved the quilts’ playful geometry, their deliberate asymmetry, their refusal to complete a design as expected. Abstraction seemed to come naturally, designs turning rooftops into angled squares, trees into green circles, railroad tracks into off-kilter black frames.

Bill showed museum curators what he had found, and in 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston mounted an exhibition called “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.” The show traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art and several other museums. Over the next years, the Arnetts published a book, filmed a documentary, and started a foundation called Souls Grown Deep.

What delighted Bill (and the critics and curators he persuaded to examine the quilts) was how the makers had conducted the same experiments as the best of the modern artists, all without a scrap of art-world knowledge. The lineage he saw so clearly seemed ludicrous: Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Arlonzia Pettway? But others saw it too.

Indeed, the Gee’s Bend quilts were received in the elite art world with such gusto that you might wonder if, chastened by history, the White critics were bending over backwards. Were the quilts really “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced”?

Their makers did not think so.

“That quilt of mine in his book, that u-g-l-y one—he came and got that quilt from me,” says China Pettway, who teams up with Mary Ann to do quilting workshops, “and he said that was art. ‘No, Mr. Bill, this is not art.’ I thought art had to be straight and pretty. But when I saw our quilts hanging at the museum, I could see what he meant.” She looks up from her sewing and fixes her eyes on me. “Who discovered art, do you know?”

I stammer something about how I guess it has always been part of us, thinking wildly of the caves at Lascaux, that spontaneous prehistoric impulse. She nods, unsurprised.

When I admire the little strips of bold color in Mary Ann’s quilts, strategically placed to add contrast and foil symmetry, she shrugs: “I just ran out of that fabric.” Except, she could have just cut off the mismatched bit, creating a clean edge that would not compromise the design’s symmetry. Instead, she threw it off balance on purpose, delighted by that mischievous jolt of color. She loves to add bright slivers, irregular black frames, strips and bars and triangles, all to keep life interesting.

Quilters here are practiced in the art of the possible, well used to saving and re-using scraps. Surely work is even more artful when your materials are limited and random, and you cannot order luxe fabrics in the exact shade and pattern you want—yet you somehow piece together a miscellany of scraps that delights the eye?

Gee’s Bend quilts make room for surprises, improvisations, deviations. By now it is a cliché for outsiders to discover jazz music’s syncopated riffs in the designs. Yet it is gospel the quilters sing as they work, sinking into its wider harmonies, old hope, and solidarity. While modern art, like jazz, made a point of breaking rules, the quilters in Gee’s Bend had never followed any. White people had laid down plenty of rules for the rest of life. What little was theirs was all theirs.

•  •  •

Mary Ann Pettway at work (Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

As times grew a little easier and the rest of the world came a little closer, the quilters could have sought out patterns and conventional methods. They did not. Even when Mary Ann tries to copy another design, “it always ends up being a Mary Ann quilt.” Every woman’s work is her own, though “every quilt remembers the ones that came before it.” Gee’s Bend quilts wave and bow to one another, using the motifs begun by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers: Housetop, Half Housetop, Pig Pen, Railroad, Zigzag, Bricklayer, Thousand Pyramids, Nine Square, Courthouse Steps. Look past the motif, and you can see how the color choices, quilting direction, and stitch size fingerprint the artist.

Dealers, collectors, and curators want that fingerprint as much as they want the innovation. If the Gee’s Bend quilts had been stitched by a fancy White artist in Tribeca as a playful experiment, they would not feel as real. They would not be stained by sweat and fresh-tilled soil; they would not carry memories that are tender and private—yet tell a story we all own.

Mary Ann never married, and she carries an air of self-determination. She has made herself a life, a good one. In 2007, two of the quiltmakers sued Bill Arnett, saying he exploited them. The charge seems inevitable, given the way the quilts gained attention and exploded in value. And God knows, White people exploiting Black talent is an old habit. But Mary Ann says firmly, “He didn’t exploit me.” Sure, she wishes she had charged more for her early quilts, but their commercial value had not yet been established, and Bill was the impresario who sent it soaring. “I bring him flowers,” she says, quoting a hymn his son loved, “because if he never would have been a collector, nobody would have known about us.”

Hearing people say they were artists felt good, she adds, but mainly, “it helped me finish paying for my house and a 2007 Impala.” She has mentioned that proud car three times already.

She does push back, though, when people say, “Oh, Arnett made you all famous.” “What we did,” she says, “and only by the grace of God, was what made us famous.”

Quilts by Mary Ann Pettway, still in progress

III. Stitching

“What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time?” asks Alice Walker. “In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.”

The first Pettway women had to quilt with big, heavy needles, stabbing them through denim and broadcloth and sometimes, late at night when their bones were tired, puncturing their own fingertips, already swollen and roughened by plucking spiky cotton bolls or boiling laundry.

Mary Ann’s sliver of polished steel pierces the fabric easily, sliding through the weave like a scalpel, then gathering three stitches before she pulls through. “Neat,” they call such sewing: each stitch the same length, the same angle, the same distance from the previous stitch. Her work is closer to perfect than my sewing machine’s perfunctory, sometimes zigzaggy or loose output. When I sew by hand, the stitches look like a kid did them with fat yarn and an awl, and each heads off in a slightly different direction. The only time Mary Ann’s stitches change direction is when she quilts, following the curve her mind has chosen ahead of her. “Doing a quilt, it’s no hurrying thing,” she says, showing me how she carefully buries her knot. No wonder this is a dying art. As Doris Pettway Mosley told me earlier, “Some of the younger women are too—they ain’t got the time. But I take the time.”

“It must be soothing,” I said, imagining how those hours of patient repetition would hollow a deeper, fuller sense of time, unhurried and continuous. “A good way to get rid of stress.”

“Mmhmm. It will take some of that off you.”

After Mary Ann finishes her hem, she shows me the back room, lined with stored quilts for sale. Her computer is back here, too, where it will not annoy her. She turns it on, and years of work appear: row after row of tiny icons, each depicting a full-sized quilt. She scrolls down: “Jane Fonda got this one and made a clock out of it. This one’s at a university in San Antonio. Iowa University has ‘May Day.’” “Robot at the White House—that one is in the gift shop of the Smithsonian.” I love the names she chooses: “It All Worked Out.” “It Just Happen.” “Scatter About.” A theorist would talk about “trusting the process,” but she stays matter-of-fact.

Looking at old newspaper photos on the wall, I ask what people get wrong about Gee’s Bend.

“It’s not,” China snaps, “an island.” She is sick of reporters using phrases like “isolated hamlet.” Mary Ann still bristles at Bill calling it the poorest place in Alabama—they had a cucumber factory, and a peanut factory, and a cotton gin! And now, they have the quilts.

Still, the place has changed, she says. Her first example surprises me: “More trees. Before you could sit on my mama’s porch and yell right across the woods. Now you gotta get on the telephone or walk.” She hesitates, and now the hard part surfaces: “People have changed, too. They’re not loving like they used to be. Seems like they don’t want to see you have anything, and they don’t want to help you get anything. For some people, money is the root of all evil.”

For her, it just meant a 2007 Impala and a paid-off mortgage. When I ask if she works with any fashion designers, she says, “Only if we agree.”

“You mean you would say no?” I am thinking of all that money, all that fame.

“I have said no. Sometimes when they say, ‘We would like to partner with you,’ or have ‘a collaboration,’ I feel like they take over.”

She does not want to cede control. Nor does she want, as she made plain from the start, the media’s attention. She gave them her best, early on. “I even had some guy come stay in my house and watched me fry fish,” she says. “Somebody else told me they saw what he did, but I never did see it.”

People here are justifiably proud of their hospitality: how they make tourists feel welcome, how they stay patient with goggle-eyed reporters. They may not realize that it takes a minute; the welcome is not instantaneous. With each person I meet, there is a cordial but impassive beginning, not wary or hostile, just…calibrating. Then the match strikes, and the warmth flares.

At first stung by the delay, I soon realize it means the welcome is genuine. And once that hospitality starts flowing, it does not stop. Not only does Mary Ann copy her famous pound cake recipe for me, but she brings me a giant bottle of the vanilla butternut flavoring I will not find up north. Cakes are important here, especially after a sociable Sunday dinner of collard greens, chitlins or salt pork, cornbread, mac ’n’ cheese, potato salad, tea as sweet as the cake, and maybe a sweet potato pie too. The Southern comfort I thought might be a cliché is as real as sunshine. And its ease and warmth matter more to the people who live here than the history of hate.

•  •  •

When Mary Ann and China were little, no ambulance ever shrieked into Gee’s Bend. Babies were brought by the midwife—or by one of the ladies who had watched the midwife. Beneath each new mother, they placed a soft quilt. In Stitching Love and Loss, by by Lisa Gail Collins (2023), Onnie Lee Logan describes how the midwives boiled the bloodied quilts afterward, “outside. Big old pot. And they just push it down and push it down until it boils and boils and boils. And when they get it outa there it’s sterile and no stains at all.”

What, today, is that sturdy?

All you needed to heal you, Mary Ann tells me, you could walk into the woods and find. A raw potato’s juice was for pinkeye; you chewed pine sap for a headache. When China’s hand swelled from picking cotton, her mother wrapped it tight in fatty meat “to bring down the rising.” Mary Ann’s mother crumbled up an old dirt dauber’s nest to cushion her sprained ankle. Fireplace ashes and axle grease made a paste to set a broken bone. “We had to drink this mineral tea, cowmenu,” Mary Ann remembers. “My mama would dry it and boil it and strain it into jars.”

I stumble on the name: “You sure it wasn’t chamomile?”

“It ain’t that good.”

Cowmenu was probably, she adds with a twinkle, “the stuff the cow ate. We had our own names for everything.” Once home, I will pull out a jotted list of those names and search, and they will bring the internet to its knees. Gee’s Bend has always been its own place.

The women return to their stitching, talking idly, sometimes to the fabric. You cannot spend this much time with anything, even a pile of muslin scraps, without forming a relationship. Now and then the fabric balks, and China informs it, “I’m making you. You ain’t making me.”

Mary Ann picks up two corners and carries the fireworks of color over to a wide bare spot on the floor. Here she will sandwich cotton between the top and its plain muslin backside. The fluffy batting, the bold reds and oranges and blues of the top, the muslin—all of it pulled or woven from puffs of cotton. The same stuff that once made enslaving Africans seem like a good idea.

The hatred that ginned up should have dissolved long ago. “These young people coming up prejudiced, somebody had to teach them,” Mary Ann observes, deep disappointment in her voice. “Why do White people feel they have to be over Black folks? It’s much easier to love than hate. And it feels good to love.”

“And if I love Mary Ann,” China chimes in, her eyes resting on her friend and then returning to me, “I got to love you just as much. That’s what God wants.”

Her words wrap around me, the generosity of them. In my secular life, affection is meted out in concentric circles, measured by my own appraisal and not a larger love’s mandate. Set against China, who has far more reason to withhold love, my judicious diagram feels only selfish. Why, I wonder, is there no bitterness here? Because for almost a century, White people have stayed on the other side of a wide river or come as temporary guests? Would the faith that soaks this place be strong enough to tolerate proximity, with its daily reminders of injustice?

A Gee’s Bend road sign honoring Mary Lee Bendolph, whose quilts are included in the permanent collections of fifteen museums, including MoMA, Tate Modern, and the National Gallery of Art. (Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

IV. Backing

Quilts by Arlonzia Pettway, whose mother-in-law urged her, “Just follow your imagination,” are now in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Phillips Collection. Jessie Pettway’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Toledo Museum of Art. Mary Lee Bendolph won a 2015 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is now in the permanent collections of fifteen museums, including MoMA, Tate Modern, and the National Gallery of Art.

Loretta Pettway, who also won a National Heritage Fellowship, was never interested in learning to quilt. She had to keep her babies warm, so she figured it out, but she grew up hard, “never had much of a child-life,” and spent thirty years with a man who knew no gentleness. Most days she felt too anxious and sad to get excited about anything. When the other women gathered to help finish one another’s quilts, she hung back. The fabric took her over, though, and when collectors saw the result, they were stunned. Her quilts are now in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art—and the list goes on.

These are just four of the women who are called, with reverence, the original quilters. Not because they were the first; that line is long and unbroken and crosses an ocean. But they were discovered, and feted, and U.S. postage stamps were printed with images of their quilts.

The attention was delightful, but it baffled them.

Quilts were about loving people. And saving and re-using honored the material world. When Missouri Pettway’s husband died, she made a quilt from his old work clothes (Arlonzia helped stitch it), so she could warm herself with the memory of him, “cover up under it for love.” Making the quilt became, like washing his body, part of the necessary work of grieving. The grief felt healthier moving through her hands.

At age twelve, to get enough fabric to finish her first quilt, Mary Lee Bendolph picked up “a raggly old shirt what the wagon had rolled over” and washed the mud out. She was still using castoffs years later: “It hurts me to see people waste up things.” Once a neighbor who had moved to Connecticut mailed back a passel of double-knit leisure suits, suggesting they be given away. “Didn’t nobody want them,” drawled Bendolph. “We ain’t that out-of-style down here.” She cut them up for quilts.

She preferred old cotton, though; they all did. Secondhand clothes had spirit in them, and history. The fabric was what it had been, stained by the sweat and grime of people they loved, but stitched into a quilt, it also became what surrounded them. They pieced in the orange-red of a startling, glowing sunset, the bright yellow of ripened corn, the faded violet blue of twilight, arranging the references not in logical positions but to please their eyes, the way they sought relief from the monotone of chores.

Most of the original quilters are gone now, and their daughters and granddaughters have moved away from Gee’s Bend. Those who stayed cannot understand why. The expats could live like kings and queens here, where life is quiet and crime, like convenience, almost nonexistent.

•  •  •

(Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

In the sixties, hardly any Gee’s Bend residents owned a car. The only way they could vote was to cross the river on an old cable ferry that was nothing more than a leaky raft. The state of Alabama shut it down in 1965, the year of the protest marches.

“We didn’t close the ferry because they were Black,” the county sheriff was rumored to have said. “We closed it because they forgot they were Black.”

Three decades would pass before Congress allocated money to restore the ferry. In the 1990s, the Alabama Department of Transportation finally hired a boat builder—one who had never built a ferry. His effort grated onto a sandbar and stuck there.

Another decade passed.

The Gee’s Bend ferry did not reopen until 2006. But ironies never end: Gee’s Bend now has a shiny new ferry, first in the nation to be all electric. And Gee’s Bend residents can now vote at a new polling place in Gee’s Bend, no need to cross the river.

I want to cross, though. I want to see the Camden courthouse where, in 1965, they waited all day to register to vote, and nobody ever came out to speak with them. I inch the rental car onto the ferry, and we glide slowly across the river, past brown pelicans and water buzzards. “People have come from China, Australia, and Africa,” the ferryman tells me, “to see those quilts.” When we reach land, I make my way to the stately courthouse, its façade framed by massive white Doric columns. A sign says the building is temporarily closed because of black rot.

In the quaint stores of downtown Camden, I see only White people. Even in the gallery and store that sells work by local Black Belt artists, I see only White people. When Mary Ann was in high school, she came here to join a picket line asking that Black people have equal opportunities to work. The girls were all thrown in jail. “Took the mattress off the iron bed,” she drawls, “so we wouldn’t be comfortable at all.”

Houses in Camden are white frame, magazine-pretty, the porches hung with ferns. Nothing like the eccentric tin roofs of Gee’s Bend, with their patches of different color metal. “They look like quilts,” I exclaimed to Mary Ann. “Are they meant to?”

“I’m assuming they did it on purpose,” she said—I eagerly flipped open my notebook—“’cause the metal roofs are cheaper when you buy them that way.”

•  •  •

“We made a quilt for Obama,” Mary Ann says. “I was told he’s going to hang it in that library he’s building.” The dress Michelle Obama wears in her official portrait? Its pattern reminded the artist, Amy Sherald, of Gee’s Bend quilts. This September, several of the quilters were invited to the White House to meet Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mary Ann pronounces “a very nice person to be with,” though she did not linger to chat.

China found the White House thrilling: “We saw the red room, the blue room, the green room….” But she saw even more colors when, after years of sewing worn and oft-washed scraps, she went to a fabric store in Virginia. “I came out of there with $207 worth of material! Had to buy myself another suitcase.”

When I ask what they think will happen if Trump wins the next election, Mary Ann slowly shakes her head. “Only God can know that reason.”

She keeps focused on the quilts. Because others partner more readily with designers, Gee’s Bend quilt designs have found their way into Prada, ABC Carpet and Home, Tessa Traeger for Ikea, British designer Marfa Stance. Chloé brought Gee’s Bend motifs to the 2022 Paris Fashion Week. And Etsy now sells Gee’s Bend patterns, so the rest of us can follow the sort of instructions the quilters of Gee’s Bend refused to obey.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.