The Art of Necessity
by Thomas Canfield
Like kaleidoscopic portraits in a family album chronicling adversity, struggle and triumph, the extraordinary quilts created by generations of women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are a remarkably personal, picturesque record of their community’s resilience under difficult circumstances. In a materialistic age of manufactured commodities, the fact that the deep-rooted art of quilting has endured in Gee’s Bend is a testament not only to the community’s devotion to tradition but also the result of prolonged geographical segregation from the modern world at large.
Secluded on three sides within a massive, oxbow-shaped curve of the Alabama River in one of the nation’s poorest regions, Gee’s Bend is about 30 miles southwest of Selma and seven miles directly across the river from the Wilcox County seat of Camden. The community, spanning an area five miles long and eight miles wide, comprises approximately 750 African-American citizens. Their earliest ancestors were brought from North Carolina as slaves in 1816 by Joseph Gee, who established a cotton plantation there. Ownership of the plantation changed twice before the Civil War. Mark H. Pettway, the plantation’s final antebellum owner, marched an additional 100 or more slaves there in 1845-46. They walked over 700 miles from North Carolina to Alabama. After emancipation, the freed black population remained on the land, in virtually unchanged circumstances, as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Many of their descendants retain the Pettway name to this day.
After the cotton market crashed during the Great Depression, the widow of a merchant who had extended credit to the families of Gee’s Bend foreclosed on the community in 1932. Arriving on horseback, armed collection agents took all the Gee’s Benders’ possessions, including food, livestock, farming tools and seeds. Only emergency rations distributed by the Red Cross alleviated the near-starvation that families suffered that winter. In 1934-35, supplementary aid followed when the Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided small farm loans as well as seeds, implements and livestock. As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the late 1930s and 1940s, the government acquired 10,000 acres of the land and made no-interest loans to Gee’s Bend residents, allowing them to purchase their small farms. Approximately 100 Roosevelt Project houses were erected, along with a general store, cotton gin, blacksmith shop, sawmill, school and clinic.
The result was a self-sufficient, landowning community of African-Americans who were marked by a strong sense of identity and an indomitable spirit fostered in the face of hardship. In the 1930s, Farm Security Administration photographers captured the isolation of the residents, and the Library of Congress recorded traditional gospel music in Gee’s Bend during the following decade. Although the hamlet’s name was officially changed to Boykin in 1949 (the same year the first post office was built), locals still refer to it as Gee’s Bend, as do the road signs. Electricity did not arrive until 1964. Only one road, unpaved until 1967, leads out of town. Gee’s Bend had no telephone service or running water until the mid-1970s.
Because of its isolation, Gee’s Bend was referred to as “Alabama Africa” by other blacks in the deep south. Yet the community’s independence not only helped to preserve the distinct traditions of quilting, storytelling and gospel music; it also led the people of Gee’s Bend to play a notable role in the civil rights movement. During the voting rights activism of the early 1960s, many Benders rode the unreliable ferry across the river to register at the Camden courthouse only to face armed law enforcement, tear gas and jail. Those Gee’s Bend residents who were property owners could not be evicted for their actions, yet further retaliation came with the termination of the ferry service and loss of jobs in 1962, part of an overall effort to halt black civil rights workers from traveling between Camden and Gee’s Bend.
As a result, those few Gee’s Bend residents who owned cars had to drive approximately 100 miles round trip to get to Camden. Reportedly, the county sheriff at the time stated that “We didn't close the ferry because they were black. We closed it because they forgot they were black.” Today, while the town has four churches, it has only one post office and a grocery store. Such basic facilities as the school, hospital and police station are located miles away, a fact that has only served to encourage the ardent self-reliance of the Benders over time. Their isolation prevailed for 44 years, until a new ferry began operating in September of 2006.
In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Gee’s Bend. A few days later, he spoke outside the jail in Camden. Many Benders who attended were subsequently jailed. Inspired by the strength of the community, King used the geographical divide posed by river as a rallying point, motivating several residents to join him in the famous October 30 march from Selma to Montgomery. After King’s assassination in 1968, mules from Gee’s Bend pulled the wagon carrying his casket through Atlanta.
In 1966, Francis X. Walter, an Episcopal minister and civil rights worker, developed the idea of marketing local talent to provide economic empowerment for area quilters. Farming came largely to a close when a federal dam construction project, completed just south of Gee’s Bend in 1970, flooded thousands of acres of the area’s most fertile farming land. Nearly one-third of the women in Gee’s Bend joined the Freedom Quilting Bee, an offshoot of the Civil Rights movement designed to boost income and foster community development by selling their work to outsiders. This cooperative, centered in the nearby town of Rehoboth, provided some financial relief to the community. In the late 1960s, Gee’s Bend quilts were featured in Vogue and Life magazines, and local artists received a long-term commercial contract to sew for several department stores.
The quilts of Gee’s Bend reflect an artistry born from utility. Their beauty emerges from, and in spite of, an inherited material dearth reaching back to the days of slavery. Many Benders had little or no heat and lived in barely furnished, ramshackle homes, so quilts provided warmth and protection from the wind, cold and dust. While Gee’s Bend quilts look like Minimalist art, their earliest creators were actually inspired by the newspaper and catalog collages pasted on their walls to provide insulation. Quilts were often made of limited available materials, including feed and flour sacks, rags and tobacco pouches. Some artists fashioned “britches quilts” out of castoff clothes, such as over-alls, trouser legs and shirt tails, often employing such materials to keep memories of deceased relatives alive. Yet until the outside world began applauding their quilts as art, the creators viewed them as merely functional items. Old quilts were burned to repel mosquitoes, or used to mop up motor oil and protect automobiles from the elements.
Today, the quilters of Gee’s Bend have garnered nationwide acknowledgment and are being celebrated for their accomplishments. Gee’s Bend quilts have appeared in museum exhibitions from New York to Houston and San Francisco. Books, articles, short stories and films have highlighted the unique stories of the quilts and their creators who, for the first time in their lives, have a real income from their work. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued a series of Gee’s Bend stamps. This recognition has helped to revive a once-dying community and the nearly-lost art of quilting that has been passed down for generations from mothers and grandmothers to daughters and granddaughters.
My essay was featured in the program as well as in the Sprint Series Learning Guide.
