Gee's Bend Quilts - Doing Itself Proud
A tiny community preserves its heritage and leverages artistic brilliance
My hike was magical. A patch of primeval prairie had survived in western Ohio, untouched and pristine. I walked on the protective boardwalk along the Stillwater River. Rare wildflowers nodded in the sun, scattered among the grasses. Land in my part of Ohio has been divvied up along straight lines since the first European settlers came. For the most part, natural features are ignored; ninety-degree angles are the rule. The Stillwater had curved across a corner of a parcel of land, creating a few acres not easily reached by the owner. Midwesterners respect boundaries. The neighbors left the land be. No one plowed it. The relict prairie survived.
Gee’s Bend, Alabama — like the prairie — has been isolated and protected by a river. Named after plantation owner Joseph Gee, the five- by seven-mile area is looped on three sides by the Alabama River. In 1815, Gee bought the land and through the labor of enslaved Africans, raised cotton.
By the Depression, most of the seven hundred people in Gee’s Bend were tenant farmers descended from the formerly enslaved. The price of cotton crashed in 1931. Life for them went from tough to terrible. Sixty families had their property seized in the late winter of 1932. One family recalled drawing the line: no, they would not give up their hen to their landlord. People survived as best they could. They foraged for berries and hunted small game — very small game, squirrels and opossums. By the spring, the Red Cross was moved to ship meal and grain by boat up the Alabama to Gee’s Bend.
The Federal government stepped in with other efforts. Photojournalist Arthur Rothstein, from the same group sent to photograph the Dust Bowl refugees, documented the community’s life. The Federal government bought land, split it up, and sold it back to the people of Gee’s Bend at low prices. Then, in 1962, came a stunning reminder of government’s inability to extricate people from poverty. The US Congress ordered the Alabama River to be dammed and flooded prime farmland. This forced many forever out of farming.
In the same way as the prairie flowers continued to bloom on in Ohio, traditions lived on in Gee’s Bend. The women quilted as they had for decades. In Rothstein’s 1937 photographs, the draftiness of the log homes is clear. Make-do wallpaper of newspaper and magazine pages plaster the walls to keep out the wind in several shots. Each bed in Jorena Pettway’s home is cozied with a quilt. And they are beautiful versions of “Tulips in a Vase” and “Dresden Plate.”
Like other cash-strapped wives and mothers, Gee’s Bend women recycled to get every ounce of use out of each and every resource coming to their hand. They squeezed their day to find the time to quilt. They placed scraps of worn work clothes into bed-sized arrangements, moving the cloth about until it not only was the right size but had the right look for them. Such quilts served, not only as sources of warmth, but also as reminders of the people who had worn the clothes and had, sometimes, passed on. They experimented within the framework of traditional quilt patterns. Along the way, the women of Gee’s Bend developed their own artform, the Gee’s Bend quilt. Recycled and upcycled castaways rarely look this good.
Gee’s Bend quilts are as distinctive in style as an appliqued Baltimore album quilt or a muted Mennonite quilt. Gee’s Bend quilts are bold. They are abstract. Free of the constraints of a ruler or T-square, angles are wonky. The edges flee from ninety-degree corners. Colors march to their own drum and pair up in fresh juxtapositions. Variations of the log cabin pattern, especially the “House Tops” one are popular. “Lazy Gal,” makes good use of the common long strips of leftover fabric any sewist hates to waste.
Chasing down the origins of quilt styles is like…well, there is that flying wild goose pattern. Was there one woman in the past with a new vision? Or a group of quilters? Or are the origins elsewhere? More than one person has found similarities between Gee’s Bend quilts and African textiles.
The quilters themselves speak of one ancestor, Dinah. In 1859, she was transported on the Clotilde from Africa for enslavement in Alabama. Did she teach her daughters remembered patterns from her youth? Or did African textiles make it through the ocean voyage? Did scraps of beloved memento cloth live on for enough time to serve as templates? These are poignant and likely unanswerable questions.
By the 1960s, Gee’s Bend quilting became linked with the fight for civil rights. The local ferry service was discontinued in 1962. Many believed this to be an effort to hamper voter registration and deter demonstrations for civil rights. The eight-mile trip to the county seat of Camden by ferry became a forty-mile car ride. Ferry service did not return until 2006.
In February 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Gee’s Bend and spoke at the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. “I came over to Gee’s Bend to tell you: You are somebody.” He exhorted them to register to vote and to march to Selma. Local people — including quilters — boarded buses and headed out. They never made it to Selma as they were jailed. King returned to the area the following year to encourage voter registration. His casket would be pulled by two mules from Gee’s Bend.
The next year, the Freedom Quilting Bee was founded as a way for Black women to earn wages. An Episcopalian priest civil rights worker driving through the area had been struck by the beauty of quilts he saw drying on a line. He helped start the Bee and, more importantly, brought the local quilt artistry to the attention of mainstream America. Eventually the Freedom Quilting Bee struck quilt-making business deals with Bloomingdales and Sears.
In the decades since Rothstein first photographed Mrs. Jorena Pettway sewing a Dresden plate quilt, Gee’s Bend quilts have captivated many. They are now firmly in the national psyche as cultural treasures. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts kicked off an exhibition of sixty quilts “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.” The exhibit moved on to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and a dozen other sites. The New York Times declared them “some of the most miraculous works of art America has produced.” By 2006, select Gee’s Bend quilts were garnering prices of $20,000 and up. That same year the US Postal Service released a set of thirty-nine cent stamps “American Treasures: Quilts of Gee’s Bend.”
Along the way, the women who continue to make the quilts and the descendants of quilters have learned the hard lessons of artists everywhere. They know the importance of protecting their intellectual property rights and of demanding the pay they deserve. At times this has meant going to court.
The US Copyright Office has copyrighted so many works involving Gee’s Bend quilts – from a song to mugs to a play to books – that a staffer became intrigued and looked deeper into their story. Her blog post details her findings. The foundation Souls Run Deep has the mission of advocating for Black artists from the South. Since 2014, Souls Run Deep has placed 163 Gee’s Ben quilts into the permanent collections of leading art museums. They provided over $1M in community-oriented initiatives in 2020.
Today Gee’s Bend is home to less than three hundred people. The official name was changed years ago to Boykin. The ferry carries cars back and forth across the Alabama River. When the weather’s right, women still sit out on their porch and quilt. Their children watch and learn. Gee’s Bend lives on
How can you write such an action packed, fascinating ( no pun intended🤣) story about quilting? Learned so much. Now I want to go see these quilt.
My guess is they were not on the Clotilde but brought back through memory.