'Now They Call It Art'
June 2004
Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is a community with a proud history. The residents are mostly farmers who’ve lived for generations on the very land where their ancestors had once been slaves. The settlement is situated on a remote peninsula on the Alabama River and it has, since the Civil War, been a poor, isolated place. Despite the outward poverty, "Benders" have long sustained themselves with a rich private world that includes Baptist rituals, gospel singing, storytelling, and quiltmaking.
An exhibit of 60 quilts by a group of black women from this rural Alabama community, "The Quilts of Gee’s Bend," is now on national tour. The colorful patchworks, which echo the textile designs of West Africa, have won critical acclaim. "The best of these designs...are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it’s hard to know how to begin to account for them," wrote New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman when he first saw the Gee’s Bend quilts. "But then, good art can never be fully accounted for, just described."
Until recently, the African American women who made these lasting works of art would never have called themselves artists. Farmers, yes. Churchgoers, yes. Veterans of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, definitely.
During the 1960s, the citizens of Gee’s Bend enlisted as foot soldiers in the fight for civil rights, standing up for the rights of black Americans to register to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Gee’s Bend in 1965. Three years later, mules from Gee’s Bend carried the assassinated leader’s body through the streets of Atlanta.
One cultural gift from Gee’s Bend’s civil rights work was the Freedom Quilting Bee, a rural collective that produced quilts for eastern department stores. For 30 years, the Quilting Bee provided employment for local black women who lost work when they took a stand and registered to vote. In the late 1990s, the Quilting Bee ended, for the most part; many of the key participants had either died or grown infirm.
But the quilts that Gee’s Benders created—both at the Quilting Bee and in their homes—have had a lasting legacy. Their journey from Alabama shacks to national museums began in 1997. That’s when Atlanta folk art collector William Arnett and his son, Matt Arnett, an art historian, came to town and purchased six quilts by Annie Mae Young for $4,000. One of them, a patchwork of old blue jeans, "was one of the most beautiful works of art we’d ever seen," recalls Matt Arnett.
As they met with other quilters, the Arnetts discovered that world-class art could be found in every wooden cabin, every trailer. Art was on the beds and piled in bundles over mattresses.
"I was making quilts to keep the children warm. I just make a quilt to throw on the bed. And sometimes I’d give them away."
In time, the Arnetts and their foundation, the Tinwood Alliance, bought up about 700 Gee’s Bend quilts. Eventually, the Arnetts convinced top museums from around the nation to book a traveling exhibit of the quilts they’d collected. Harrison Arnett, another son, says he’s organizing a Gee’s Bend Foundation to develop an arts center and museum in the town, among other things. "We want the foundation to be a catalyst for some economic development and an educational component to help people," he says.
Gee’s Bend could use the help. In the area’s town center of Boykin, there is only a post office and grocery; no other stores, no factories, no businesses. The residents mostly live in secondhand trailers and old sharecroppers’ shacks. Though some Benders raise cattle and keep gardens, farming is the work of the past. Many of the younger residents have moved on to jobs in Birmingham and Mobile. Today, Gee’s Bend is a place of the elderly poor. Yet the dusty sadness of the town makes the brilliance of the Gee’s Bend quilters all the more inspiring.
Voices of Civil Rights special correspondent Claudia Dreifus visited Gee’s Bend and spoke with Nettie Young, 86, and Lucy Mingo, 73, former civil rights activists and key figures in the Freedom Quilting Bee.
Mrs. Young, do you remember the day in 1965 when Martin Luther King came to Gee’s Bend to preach at the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church?
Young: Oh yes. We were so joyful to see Martin Luther King. I remember being glad to see him, glad to meet him, glad to shake his hand because he was doing so much for the people.
I felt like he was going to help us to get the right to vote, which he did.
Mingo: The feeling I had, to hear him speak: I felt like we had been in slavery all our lives. He was touching to my heart. He was just very special.
After he spoke to us, he got us to understand why we needed to be registered voters, to do better things for ourselves, to get out from sharecropping and get a job and get out on our own. We needed to be on our own. When we were working for the white man, we couldn’t get anywhere. Sharecropping was a terrible life.
How did the segregationists of Wilcox County resist your civil rights campaigns?
Young: Well, getting the vote took a lot. And we went through a lot. The main plantation was what the most of us was farming on, a lot of our people had to move after they tried to vote. That turned out to be good because farming is the hardest job you ever worked in your life! And what makes it so hard was that you worked a whole year and you might not get a dime. Took all your labor to pay your bills, left you nothing.
I was one of the first ladies from here who went to the courthouse in Camden [the seat of Wilcox County] to be a registered voter. They turned us down several times. We tried to march to the courthouse. We stood before tear gas and guns, which they used to keep us from the courthouse. We were put in jail. We were…some of us, whipped. We were treated awful there. I stayed in jail three or four nights. When we tried to vote, they’d say, "You can’t vote." You had to have a white person vouch for you; you couldn’t vote. They had all the power. We didn’t have any.
How did you feel about them having "all the power"?
Young: I felt: "This has to stop!" I felt like all of us are human beings, and what’s hurting them hurts me. All of us flesh and blood, and I felt like all us ought to been treated alike. You know, in them days, if one of us went to a white person’s place, you couldn’t go in the front door! They had big bathrooms, in the public places, and we couldn’t go there. They had big water fountains. We couldn’t drink from the fountain they drunk from.
Mingo: When the people from here started getting active in the freedom movement, a lot of us got put off the land we’d been sharecropping on. All of the people around here were behind the movement. Everyone was just pushing. A whole lot of us Mingo people had worked for [one man] and we had to leave his land. We had farmed and worked for him all our lives and he sent us away! He told us, "If you go down to Camden and agitate, I’m going to put you off my land." And he did. When he put us off his place, I said, "Thank you, Jesus, I ain’t got to go to the fields anymore! I’m going to find me a job and I’m going to go to work!" And that’s what I did. Had I stayed on that man’s land, I wouldn’t have my own house today. He did me a good favor.
"…A patch of stars…someone told me their name was ‘Milky Way,’ and I sighted them and decided I would make me a quilt and call it ‘Milky Way.’ "
There’s a chorus to one of the freedom songs, "We Shall Overcome," that goes, "We are not afraid...we are not afraid." When you were marching, were you afraid?
Mingo: Sure you was afraid. I’m going to tell you the reason why: They was lynching some people! And colored people was getting killed. I was afraid. But you know, I prayed a lot. Everyone in Gee’s Bend was behind the movement. We marched. We all suffered. It wasn’t smooth.
Bad things happened until the day the movement was won, which was on the day those marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge in Selma. But do you know something? I wasn’t there that day. That was the only march I ever missed because I was really into the movement. Every other one, I was there. The reason that I missed that one day was because my husband had to go to the doctor. I had children who went to jail. I had a son who stayed in jail a week and a daughter who went to jail, too. They got arrested because they was marching over there and they were still in high school. I prayed a lot.
One of the flowers that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement was the Freedom Quilting Bee here in Gee’s Bend. How did it start?
Mingo: We were doing the quilts for a long time before the Quilting Bee. We’d get $5 for them. Mostly we made them from scraps and old clothes and we made them to keep the family warm. We knew how to make quilts.
A priest named Francis X. Walter helped start it—and a guy from New York, Stanley Selengut. Francis X. Walter saw quilts hanging in people’s yards and he thought that we might be able to make them and sell them to people around the country. The big thing was that the Quilting Bee provided jobs. You could go every day and work and that was a big change. Mrs. Estelle Witherspoon managed it. And she was the sweetest, nicest woman.
Young: The Quilting Bee, that was my first job out of the cotton patch. I’d been doing quilting before the Freedom Quilting Bee came around. I was making quilts to keep the children warm. I just make a quilt to throw on the bed, and sometimes, I’d give them away. I get my Social Security now because I worked at the Quilting Bee for thirty years. I wouldn’t be getting that if I’d stayed farming. I thank God for the Quilting Bee, yes. It was a blessing God gave me.
Why did you learn to quilt?
Young: When I was a little girl, [my mother] was making quilts. And I wanted to do what she did. And I would pick up the little scraps that she dropped and sew them together. My mother’s name was Eliza Green. I was always good at sewing. I used to make all my kids’ clothes. I had 11 little kids and I made all their clothes with my hands. We didn’t have machines.
Why did the Freedom Quilting Bee end?
Young: People just got too old, and most of them died. There’s nobody hardly left, nobody but me. Some of the younger people didn’t want it open again. We still need it.
Mingo: The Freedom Quilting Bee worked real well when Estelle Witherspoon ran it. But she passed away. It ended about two years ago. People now want it open again.
Young: I’m hoping we can get the idea for it. Young people have come to me and said they want to learn to make a quilt, even the young men. And they see they could make quilts too. They see what the art is about in a quilt. They’re seeing how quilting is taking us places.
"[Dr. King] showed me what was possible if we voted."
The quilts you made during the civil rights years now hang on the walls of great museums. There’s a quilt of yours, Mrs. Young, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington that looks like pure modern art. Its title is "Milky Way." Where did you get the idea for it?
Young: You know, we didn’t live in airtight houses. We lived in our houses where air could come through, and you could look at the roof and see the stars. That’s why our mothers learned us how to make quilts because that was our way to keep warm.
This quilt you’re talking about, it’s a patch of stars. I don’t know whether you all ever seen them in the sky? Someone told me their name was "Milky Way," and I sighted them and decided I would make me a quilt and call it "Milky Way." I drew it from my mind.
Mingo: I think that way, too. I’ve been making quilts since I was 14. I think I must have made hundreds of quilts over my lifetime. I get some fabrics and I’ll be thinking about quilting with my eyes closed. With my eyes resting, I’ll see a quilt pattern. I’ll be thinking about it for a long good while. It comes right into your mind, what the quilt will be.
Your designs sometimes look very African. How is it that people here in Gee’s Bend remember Africa in the way they make their quilts?
Mingo: We had one lady here, her name is Arlonzia Pettway, and she knew all about Africa because she said her grandmother was sold for a dime and they brought her over and she had one piece of fabric with her.
Some art critics have written that you are among the greatest of American modern artists. Do you think of yourselves that way?
Young: No, I sure don’t. I ain’t never thought about I being an artist. But I knew I had something in me. Like I tell you, I made things out of my head. I know it’s something in me that makes me able to do that. Do you want me to tell you the truth? All of this, it hasn’t changed my life. I enjoy it, but I had a good life to start with. And I’ve still got a good life. But I’m proud of what’s going on in my old days, and now they call it art. When I was young, they didn’t call it nothing but a quilt.
Mingo: When we see our quilts in museums, we’re just amazed. We never thought quilts would get there. We are just amazed what quilts can do. They can bring people from all over the world together to look at them and to stand back and say how beautiful they are. I never thought I’d be able to have a quilt on the wall of a museum in Tennessee, Boston, Atlanta. When that man was throwing us off his land so many years back, I couldn’t have imagined that.
Can we talk about Dr. King again? After he was murdered, the mules that carried his casket through the streets of Atlanta came from Gee’s Bend. Was Gee’s Bend a special place to him?
Mingo: I’ll tell you about Dr. King and what I really had in my heart when he came here. He showed me what was possible if we voted. I wanted to grow my children, get them educated. That was my hope. I didn’t want them working in the fields and having a hard time. Now, I raised 10 children and all but two boys went to college. The boys finished the 12th grade and they got good jobs. My husband, he worked himself almost to death, but we did it. Once we started, we weren’t going to turn around.
"The Quilts of Gee’s Bend" can be seen at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until May 17, 2004; the Cleveland Museum of Art (June 27-September 12, 2004); the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia (October 15, 2004-January 2, 2005); the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (February 13-May 8, 2005); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (June 1-August 21, 2005); the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama (September 11-December 4, 2005); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (February 18-May 14, 2006).
The Gee’s Bend Quilters continue to create art from clean worn clothes and textiles donated from around the country. You may send your donations to:
Lucy Mingo/Bettie Seltzer/Nettie Young
c/o U.S. Post Office
14030 County Road 29
Boykin, Alabama 36723-2500
