The same hands that pulled okra and collard greens, that lifted well water and fed the mules, would come to make beautiful things.
The same hands that midwifed, that held family members tight before they rushed off for that Selma-to-Montgomery march, that baked biscuits and wrung the necks of chickens for evening supper, the same hands that would wave the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. himself into Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in their hard-luck town on the Alabama River, would come to make beautiful things.
Quilters Arlonzia Pettway (left) and Mary Lee Bendolph stand in front of their handiwork, now on display at the Corcoran.
(Michael Robinson-Chavez -- The Washington Post)
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The beautiful things are quilts, some of which are now hanging at the Corcoran Gallery, and some people are calling them art. The quilts have brought two ladies from a tiny place called Gee's Bend, in southwestern Alabama, to the nation's capital.
Mary Lee Bendolph is 67 years old. She's never worked a steady 9-to-5 job in her life. The land was her job, and she left a couple lifetimes of hard labor upon it, picking cotton, beans, melon. "My first time in Washington," she says. "I'm glad to be here."
She's come, along with Arlonzia Pettway, to talk about their quilts. They're climbing some stairs inside the Corcoran. They're not related, but, in the Southern sense of the word, they're family: Mrs. Bendolph's ailments becoming Mrs. Pettway's ailments. Ladies talking about the grandbabies, about the high cost of medicine. Each one right at home in the other's home.
"I believe it was 1986 when I was last here," says Mrs. Pettway. "My son was living here at that time."
The ladies were recently in Canada. "Real clean up there," says Mrs. Pettway.
"That's right. Real nice," agrees Mrs. Bendolph. "But the only thing is, it's cold."
They're cackling a little and walking slowly in their soft-soled shoes.
At a long table, lunch is sitting before them. Some sandwiches with fancy bread, chips and cookies. They won't touch a bite just yet. They're bowing their heads, saying grace. They're silently mouthing Bible verses.
The silverware is missing. Just before a gallery host turns away to get a knife to slice the sandwiches, Mrs. Bendolph says, "Well, we're used to using our hands anyway."
And the two quiltmakers start chuckling.
An Alabama life never was easy, particularly so if you were born on the grim side of the Depression. In the early 1930s, the Roosevelt administration, under the auspices of its Farm Security Administration, started sending photographers out across the country to document life in unknown places. Such a thing, it was reasoned, might elicit sympathy and understanding. The Dust Bowl and the Deep South were fertile ground. Poverty, forced into the camera's eye, seemed to possess an attached honesty. Of course, much has been written of that era and photographers like Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Gordon Parks. (Many of Wolcott's and Rothstein's photos of Gee's Bend are on display at the Corcoran with the exhibition, which runs through May 17.) They produced photographs that looked, if not gorgeous, then nearly handsome. And yet so many in those photos were threatened with rickets, scurvy, malnutrition, the Negroes with lynchings.
A lady with the rhythmic name of Missouri Pettway, Arlonzia's mother, had little in her life. She was a sharecropper. She lived and toiled on land that wasn't hers. There would come a time when she and other blacks started buying the land in Gee's Bend. But the work didn't get any easier. What Missouri Pettway had was a ferocious mind to make something out of nothing, out of scrap. Thus old jeans found on roadsides, and strips of cloth found on riverbanks, and rags found at campsites, and old flour sacks became quilts. And those quilts provided nothing more than simple warmth.
"It could get cold in Alabama in May," Bendolph recalls.
In 1939, Marion Post Wolcott showed up in Gee's Bend with her cameras. One day she snapped a group of schoolgirls watching a nurse give a demonstration on how to make up a sickbed. The tall girl standing at the back in the Wolcott photo -- it's included in the volume "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" -- is Arlonzia Pettway. In the photo she has a piece of cloth tied around her hair. She looks so eager to learn, her eyes alert, as if the learning is something she might snatch from the air any moment.
The lady now nearly seven decades removed from that photo is wearing beige slacks and a blue blouse with a white sweater over the blouse. She's got a soft voice and is wearing four rings spread over her two hands. She is 80 years old. Her hands have seen the glory.
"I've had a hard life," Arlonzia Pettway is saying. "They had some farmers do good on the land," she says of her upbringing. "Some didn't do well. My daddy was one of the farmers who didn't do well. The boss man would get mad. Well, one year, I'm pretty sure it was 1931, some bulls were brought to Gee's Bend. The so-called good farmers got a bull to plow with. The farmers that weren't doing well didn't get a bull. My daddy and brother had to pull the plow themselves because they couldn't get a bull."
She fiercely remembers "13 rows of corn and sweet potatoes being plowed" that season. "And five bushels of peas. Which is what we had to live off of."
The overseer, the boss man, died. His widow thought it time to tally up, and went from farm to farm, demanding payments that she said the sharecroppers owed him. And now owed her. Absent cash, food and supplies were taken. "I heard screaming all over Gee's Bend, people saying, 'Lord, what am I going to do?' " says Pettway.
Her mother was a quick thinker and hid some corn in sacks down near the creek. She hid a chicken. "That's how we also survived, that chicken."
Missouri Pettway gave birth to 12 children. Hers was a long and hard life. Born in 1902, she died in 1981.
"When I was 9 I used to stand and stare at her at night, while she was quilting," Arlonzia says of her mother. "After school I first had to get the wood and water in. Then she'd ask me to thread her needle. We didn't have any big lights. Just a kerosene light. What you had to do, well, your daddy had to go to the woods and get a big piece of wood, shaped like a hog's head, and throw it on the fire. . . . That would last two hours, giving my mother light to quilt."
For a long while she could only watch her mother. The magic age seemed to be 13. "Mostly, when you turned 13, your mother would teach you how to quilt. I would go to school during the day and quilt at night."
Over the years she'd quilt bedspreads, something to drape over the knees in the chill of an Alabama night. Every now and then, photographers would arrive. They were followed by the sociologists. Who were followed by the folklore crowd. The women of Gee's Bend lived, died, lived and quilted.
Some of them made a little money starting in 1966 with the Freedom Quilting Bee. It was an organization, formed in an adjacent community, that allowed the women to sell their quilts and make a political statement about civil rights. The word "Vote" appeared on one quilt in big, bold lettering. It was an act of courage. "I don't know which lady made that particular quilt," says Pettway, who was mighty impressed as it made its way around the community.
The men and women of Gee's Bend went over to Camden, the nearest town, to register to vote in 1966. They were tear-gassed, Arlonzia Pettway among them. They kept going back. "Some of the bravest people you'll meet," she says, "come from Gee's Bend."
Gee's Bend, as remote as it happened to be, could not have stayed long removed from the movement anyway. Alabama was one of the flash points. Alabama was George Wallace. "I felt bad when he stood in that door to keep the colored girl out," Pettway says, referring to the governor's crusade to stop the state university system from integrating. "What cause was we to be punished so? I grieved about that."
The land didn't give an inch, but the times did. And the quilts were made and given away and sometimes hung on clotheslines where their colors blazed. They were folded into trunks, stored in cedar chests. In 1996, Roland Freeman published "A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories." It focused attention on Gee's Bend quiltmakers. In 1998, Bill Arnett of the Atlanta-based Tinwood Alliance, a foundation that supports African American folk art, visited the ladies of Gee's Bend. The quilts, he told them, had value, certainly artistic, maybe even monetary. "When Bill started buying these quilts," remembers Pettway, "saying we might do well, I said, 'Bill doesn't know what he's talking about.' "
Soon, there was a big, fancy exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
And these days visitors from far away as Europe and even Africa find their way to Gee's Bend. "They don't even need my address. All they have to do is ask someone for Arlonzia," says Pettway, chuckling again.
Community Aesthetic
The all-black community is wrapped around a bend in the river and named after a powerful white landowner. These days, its residents number fewer than 800. Many of the young have moved to Atlanta, Birmingham, New York. It is hardly the only quilting community in America. But "few other places can boast the density of Gee's Bend's artistic achievement, which is the result both of geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity," Alvia Wardlaw writes in the introduction to "The Quilts of Gee's Bend."
She goes on: "In few other places can we find surviving examples of work by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or trace the lineages of different community quilting groups. And in few places can we find so many quilts with so much flair, pieced in bold, improvised geometries from salvaged work clothes and dresses, cotton sacks and fabric samples."
Even though the Gee's Bend quilters are hesitant to refer to themselves as artists, when work hangs in prestigious art institutions, the world wants to know how the art gets created, where the motivation comes from, how particular colors are chosen. Their methodology, Pettway and Bendolph say, is really rather simple: They imagine they're making quilts for family members. Thick quilts for sleeping, flowery and lighter quilts for babies, squares and octagons for quilts they imagine might hang on a wall.
A lot of the needlework got done by hand. A sewing machine was a rare luxury. Mary Lee Bendolph's mother, Aolar Mosely, had one. "She had a machine but wouldn't allow me on it. You had to work it with your feet."
Sometimes they'd be tired. Sometimes they'd wonder if there was much more to do in the world than work in the fields by day and quilt at night. "You couldn't tell your mama you didn't want to quilt," says Pettway. "If your mama say, 'Come here and quilt,' you went and quilted. It's not like today where the children say no to things."
"I always wanted to be a lady and know how to do things," says Bendolph.
She was 12 when she became pregnant. "I couldn't go back to school because they said I was a bad influence." Her mother slipped a quilt over her pregnant daughter in bed at night. "It was blue, red and white. There were flowers on it. She had it made out of old shirts."
The sheets were made of fertilizer sacks.
"After my baby got up to some size, I went back to piecing quilts. I think I had four quilts when I got married. They weren't good quilts, but they were quilts."
Bendolph would give birth to eight children, seven boys and a girl. A son, McDuffie, died in 1963. He was 3 years old. And he had a quilt made by his mother's hands. When she noticed the child becoming ill, she summoned a nurse. "I asked her what to do for the baby. They took the baby to Camden. When I went to Camden, they had moved the baby to Selma. Without my permission or nothing." She circled back home, got a ride to take her to Selma. But it was too late. McDuffie was gone.
And so they, along with all the other ladies of Gee's Bend, were minding their business, checking up on children and grandchildren, helping to bury the dead and heal the sick, when people began saying such lovely things about their quilts. "When they started talking about the quilts being beautiful, I was surprised," Pettway says. "We didn't know."
They used to practically give them away. "When I was 8 years old I remember my mama sold a quilt to this white lady. For $1.50. It was called 'Grandmama Dream.' That was the name of the quilt."
These days, an Arlonzia Pettway or Mary Lee Bendolph quilt can go for as much as $6,000.
"See how the Lord works?" Pettway says.
"It just lightens me up," says Bendolph. "I feel so good about it. I don't have but one quilt hanging out there," in the exhibition, "but that one quilt done made me famous."
"That's what they say," Pettway says to her friend, finishing her lunch, taking some pills from a bottle in her purse.
"You remember that blues song that came out? 'I Never Had a Feeling Like This'?" says Pettway. "Well, I never had a feeling like this. Just wonderful."
They didn't want to discuss their finances in detail. Their quilts are sold by a collective in Gee's Bend. They'd still be classified, however, as living far below middle class. It's a far better life than before. In her best year of farming, Pettway says, after paying off debts, she cleared "a little less than $300."
"I take my money and put it on my bills," says Bendolph. "I don't get much from Social Security."
They came from a community of sharing and can hardly stop now. "Sometimes I pay a gas bill for one of my sons," says Pettway. "I save a little money for hard times."
"Especially if you have to go to a funeral," says Bendolph.
Work found them even when they weren't looking for it. "Seeing to sick people a lot" is what she's also done, she says. "In a sense the Lord gave me that job. I didn't get paid for it. My husband died in '92. I waited on him hand and foot."
They'll go to some town, and go back home to Gee's Bend and packages are stacked high waiting on them. "We have friends who send up print cloth to make quilts," Mrs. Pettway says. "I have a friend from Michigan, she sends me wonderful material. I can make new-style quilts. But I make old-style quilts now and then too."
"I still like to make my quilts out of old material," says Mrs. Bendolph.
"But those jean quilts are tough," says Mrs. Pettway. "I hate making those jean quilts."
The two Alabama quilters stayed in a well-appointed hotel in Dupont Circle during their visit to Washington.
"It's nice," Mrs. Pettway says.
"Slept on nice blankets last night," says Mrs. Bendolph.
"Yes, they were nice," agrees Mrs. Pettway.
"Wasn't a quilt, though," says Mrs. Bendolph.
