May: Seeking Justice
 |
| "Workclothes Quilt" by Mary Lee Bendolph |
 |
| Quilt by Lucy Mingo (b.1931) |
As a beginning quilter, part of my interest in making this quilt with my leftover covid era mask material was to try out different quilting styles and techniques. In the first two squares I've made for the project, I started with an assembly of simple squares in my picnic quilt, and progressed to a slightly more challenging basket pattern inspired by the quilt made by my great-grandma Rose. From the start I was drawn to the idea of trying to mimic the spirit of the Gee's Bend quilts in one of my squares, because they are such unique and beautiful works of art, and because they offered a challenge to the would-be quilter. I could tell that there was a special, improvisational quality to the work of these women that would be difficult to mimic, and that there was a history of a technique specific to this small community of about 700 and the shared history of the women in it that would be impossible to mimic. I knew I couldn't ever truly make something that was the product of generations of experience passed down from older to younger. Nor could I truly make something that came in part as a reaction to the experiences of poverty and prejudice that shaped the feeling of the Gee's Bend quilts. However, I was interested in trying to imagine and create something inspired by what I saw and what moved me in their work.
It was while looking through some images of the Gees Bend quilts, that I came across this quilt, made by Irene Williams in 1975, the year before the US bicentennial, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. What is most striking about this quilt, beyond its striking patterns of red, white and blue, is her use of a fabric printed with the word "Vote." This fabric choice makes her quilt a creative work with a political statement, drawing attention to the ongoing fight for voting rights in her black community, a fight that continues in new forms to this day. (The MFA Boston has a short blog post with more about this quilt.)
 |
| Detail of "Vote" quilt, 1975 by Irene Williams (1920-2015) |
 |
| Large view or Irene Williams' "Vote" quilt. |
Seeing Irene Williams' vote quilt suggested a similar idea to me, which is how I came to make a small Black Live's Matter patch the centerpiece of my own quilt square in a modern statement advocating social justice. It also was how I decided to make my Gee's Bend inspired quilt square the square representing May of 2020.
May 2020
May 2020 was, of course, the month that George Floyd was killed in Minnesota, sparking protests across the United States. I remember clearly when I first saw the horrifying video of Floyd's death. Following the initial outrage that most people felt when seeing the video for the first time, I remember bracing myself for the worst part of it. I had seen the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor reported in the months just preceding Floyd's death and after each one had felt that pang of outrage that has no outlet. I remember especially seeing Taylor's picture on the news, trying to post her picture on my social media, as a completely insufficient way of expressing the hurt and anger that people were being treated like this in my country, that this smiling young woman had so needlessly lost her life. In this context, when I saw the reporting on Floyd's murder, I remember bracing myself because I was sure that the worst of it was going to be that it was yet another story that would get some attention and then fade away quickly within a week or so. Just another unjust death in the long history of unjust deaths in our nation.
So, it was a surprise, and an unexpected release to see the enormous reaction that unfolded across the end of May and into June. The size of the protests all across the country was amazing. It finally gave me a sense of what things may have been like in the peak of the civil rights era in the 1960's. The fact that people were turning out, in person and online, in the middle of a global pandemic in such numbers to protest police brutality and systemic racial injustice was a sign of hope. It was hope that we could make this a moment to push forward, that there was widespread support across America for a future in which reports of innocent people killed by police are not commonplace stories, forgotten in the next week. Having lived in both Philadelphia and Chicago for several years, I had seen the forms of modern segregation alive in those cities and the imbalance between the black and white worlds. If I felt frustration and outrage when so little happened in response to stories like those of Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor, I can't even imagine how greatly that anger and fear and frustration is compounded in people whose everyday experience is shaped by the kinds of injustice that allow these kinds of deaths to continue to happen. The May 2020 protests in these major cities, and in cities and towns of all sizes felt like a brief chance to release a little piece of that anger and to try to build something from it. The protests were messy and difficult in many ways. Like any large social movement, there were some excesses of anger that spilled out in the spontaneous destruction of property in some places in those first days, and there were instances of police exerting undue force on protestors. However, for me, the thing that transcended all the details of the moment was that this was a historical statement, a step forward like some of the events of the civil rights movement. Millions of Americans could see that Floyd's death was an injustice, could see that his death symbolized more injustices that are too often ignored, and had stepped forward and raised their voices to start demanding change.
Change, of course, is slow. Its slowness can be both tragic and frustrating when it takes whole lifetimes, whole generations, to make a few steps forward. The mass fever pitch of rallying around a cause does, inevitably, fade into the pull of everyday life. A few months after the Floyd protests, in August of 2020, Barack Obama alluded to the gradual nature of the fight for social justice in his eulogy for Congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis. Obama spoke of the way Lewis had fought for voting rights, from spilling his blood on the Pettus Bridge, to working as a lawmaker in congress. He concluded with a call to continue Lewis' fight into the future:
And someday, when we do finish that long journey toward freedom; when we do form a more perfect union--whether it's years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries--John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.
The "long journey toward freedom" is made up of many steps. It is made of the large and small acts of many individuals, and the collective shift of understanding, attitudes, beliefs, and laws spurred on by historic moments like the 2020 protests. Change might be the work of years, or decades or centuries, and in the meantime people persist and exist as well as they can.
Gee's Bend History
I realized, as I read more about the women of Gee's Bend, that their persistence in seeing the possibility of something better ahead in the face of a seemingly unchanging and unchangeable existence is a great deal of what gives their quilts their distinctive feeling and power. Following the Civil War, the black community in Gee's Bend, like so many others in the south, made the move from working as slaves on the nearby plantation land to working as tenant farmers. This meant that, though they had risen beyond the status of literally being the property of the white plantation owner, their lives were still very much in the control of white men who owned the land and who, like so many other places at that time, quickly found ways to put the community in perpetual debt to the nearby stores they depended on for essential provisions. In the best of times it was a challenge to even get the bare necessities, and in years when the cotton crop was bad the community went through periods of near starvation. Ella Mae Irby remembers the struggles of her Mother, Delia Bennet, who was born in 1892:
It was hard for her raising all us. Didn't have hardly nothing to feed us. We raising our own food, made sweet potatoes, syrup; we had peanuts and corn, milked our cows. We had a hard way to go. My daddy, Eddie Bennett, was head of the family. We picked cotton and things, but it wasn't for us. It was for the white man, the boss man, Old Man Spurlin. They lived in Camden. We didn't get nothing for doing it. We had to do it cause we was living on his plantation. He took every last bit of it. Did not give us nothing. We come up hard.
In 1937, as part of a depression era program, the government bought up the former Pettway plantation. A government loan program then enabled many of the poor farmers to buy their own land, a shift that allowed the community of Gee's Bend to find some stability, establish a real church and a school, and have a little more control over their own lives. It is one of the reasons that the community has such a long history. Due to the fact that many people now owned their land, fewer people from Gee's Bend compared to those in continuing sharecropping situations, joined the Great Migration in which Southern Black communities dispersed to other places in the United States in search of a better life.
Photos from this transitional period in the 1930's show how the Gee's Bend community lived in log cabins with so many cracks between the logs making up the walls that the interior images show the walls covered with pages from catalogs and magazines meant to help keep the cold wind from blowing in.
 |
| Lucy Mooney (1880-1969) sewing a quilt with her grandchildren in 1937. Note the papers pasted on the wall to keep the cold out. |
 |
| Lucy Mooney with her grandchildren, 1937. |
That cold blowing into the house was the main reason that the women in the community quilted. It was, first and foremost, a practical craft. Layers of quilts on the beds would help keep the family warm in the cold months. However, reading the accounts of Gee's Bend women, it becomes apparent that the quilting became an outlet for much more than that. These women spent full time, cooking, cleaning, and otherwise maintaining their households. In an era before birth control, this meant taking care of large families of children from as young as 13 or 14 on. During planting and harvest seasons they also spent full days of hard labor in the cotton fields every day but Sundays. Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935) notes that quilting season followed the pattern of the farming season:
In them days, they farm three months, then when the lay-by time come—’round the last of May, June—they go to piecing quilts. August, go back to the field. October and November, up into December—and then after Christmas and New Year over with—back to piecing and quilting. Piece by yourself; quilt together.
A common theme in the accounts of the quilters is that their quilting activities became a space of creative, emotional and intellectual freedom in the midst of so much daily work and struggle. Many women describe the process of coming up with their quilt designs as taking the scraps of fabric they had at hand to work with and improvising new patterns by arranging and rearranging them until they felt that the quilt expressed what they wanted. Some described spending time while working at other things envisioning their quilts, or even having quilt patterns come to them in dreams. Annie Mae Young (1928-2013) describes her process:
I liked to sew them however they be. I work it out, study the way to make it, get it to be right, kind of like working a puzzle. You find the colors and the shapes and certain fabrics that work out right. I always like cotton, but not the other stuff too much. Didn't like silk, or crepe, and didn't use wool much. I stayed with what I started with: old clothes that I could tear up. It always come out level.
As she writes, most of the quilts, especially in the early days, were made up of pieces of old clothes. Bettie Bendolph Selzer (1939-2017) remembers these fabrics including "old clothes, pants, fertilizer sacks, dress tails, and meal and flour sacks, too." The women were literally using every scrap of material available to make what they were able. That very necessity also produced a particular kind of creativity. The constraints of working with what was available to them, sharpened the ability of these women to work out their patterns like "puzzles," leading to an incredible amount of variety in their quilt designs.
Quilting was also a community activity. While the women would usually piece the patchwork tops of their quilts together on their own, they would gather to do they actual quilting that stitched together the top, batting, and backing. Sue Willie Seltzer (1921-2010) remembers the way they would go from house to house:
Quilt one or two for one person, go to the next house, do the same thing. Way back yonder. From house to house, quilting quilts. If they got the quilts ready, us used to do it that way for them.
One of the most striking things about the short New York Times documentary, which shows footage of modern Gee's Bend quilters at their work, is the amount of time they spend singing while sewing, both alone and in groups. The women's voices in song embody the way their work is a sphere for both their individual expressions as quilters and their communal gathering as creators.
Eventually this community activity became the source of both fame and income for the community. As early as the 1930's fabric woven by Minder Coleman (1903-1999) and others was used in both curtains in the FDR White House, and as a part of a suit worn by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Apparently the thank you note from the president thanking their ladies for their work quickly became the source of much excitement and subsequent local lore that FDR was later buried in that suit.
A visit from Martin Luther King in 1965 galvanized the small community, some of who marched with King to the nearby town of Camden, AL to protest in favor of voting rights. On that trip Mary Lee Bendolph recalls tasting "white water" from the "whites only" drinking fountain for the first time and feeling surprised that "It wasn't no different." Around the same time, a civil-rights worker named Father Francis Xavier was deeply struck with the quilts he saw displayed on the clothes lines around Gee's Bend. With his help and with the encouragement they were finding in the new horizons being opened up in the Civil Rights era, the women subsequently founded the Freedom Quilting Bee in 1967. This became the first black owned business in their county and a new source of income and expression for the Gee's Bend quilters.
The Freedom Quilting Bee opened up new economic opportunities, including the sale of quilts to major department stores and orders for corduroy pillow covers that appeared in the Sears catalog. The remnants of the corduroy from the sears commission in the mid 1970's also began to make their way into the women's quilting work, shaping the look of their quilts in new ways.
 |
| Corduroy patches in a quilt made c. 1975 by Willie "Ma Willie" Abrahms (1897-1987) |
Even as the Freedom Quilting Bee opened up new ways to earn money for their sewing work, many women noted that the retailers who ordered from them wanted consistency in the products they ordered, so much of the work for the business became more standardized and reliant on patterns that would yield consistent and replicable products. One of the drawbacks to this for some of the quilters was that this way of working meant losing some of the creativity and freedom that piecing together quilts solely from their own inspiration had produced.
In the modern age that individual creativity and inspiration is what has been most celebrated about the Gee's Bend Quilts. They have been displayed in museums across the country and become celebrated for their artistic merits. Very recently the Nest organization has also given the women a new outlet to profit from their art by giving them an online platform to help advertise their quilts for sale on their own Etsy stores. (See the modern work for sale here.)
My Quilt Square
Both the long history of the women who made these quilts and their style of improvisation from necessity was very much on my mind as I made my own quilt square. I was intimidated at first at the prospect of trying to emulate a style that was so tied to the particular experiences and techniques of women whose lives were and are so different from my own. I selected mostly monochrome fabrics that I had used for single colored masks or mask backing, because I could see that so much of the power of the Gee's Bend quilts were in their geometric structure and didn't want to risk over cluttering my square with too much pattern. The one exception was the beautiful butterfly pattern that I used in strips toward the outer portion of the square. I thought it was perfect as a pattern that expressed multiple ideas that I was interested in for this square. The colorful butterflies are perfect as a symbol of May as a joyful spring month. I also like the way they stand out against the black background, suggesting hope springing up against the darkness in the way that the colors of the Gee's Bend quilts feel like brightness created even through dark and difficult circumstances.
 |
| A selection of fabric scraps I chose to work with for my Gee's Bend square. |
The Gee's Bend quilters have many different design motifs, but one of the popular ones is called "Housetop," which is itself a variant of the traditional American "Log Cabin" Quilt pattern. The most traditional Housetop patterns are very regular nesting square patterns, like this 1982 quilt by Arlonzia Pettway (1923-2008).
 |
| Housetop quilt, 1982, by Arlonzia Pettway. |
There are also many variations on the Housetop pattern, that are more varied and uneven, but still maintain the sense of concentric rectangular pattern. This one by Mary L. Bennet (b. 1942) from 1965 is a great example of a Housetop variation.
 |
| Housetop variation, 1965, by Mary L. Bennet |
I decided to use the Housetop variation as the inspiration for my own square and was surprised by how right the ladies were about the process of designing in this way. It was incredibly fun and freeing feeling to cut some strips from the scraps at my disposal and play with them until they felt like they fit right, just like Annie Mae Young's "puzzle."
 |
| A few of the designs I played around with before deciding on my final patchwork pattern. |
 |
The design work gave me an appreciation for the pleasure of improvisational quilting, and the process of stitching them together gave me a real appreciation for the challenges involved inputting scraps together in sometimes uneven and unexpected patterns. It was in the process of sewing them together that I could imagine how big a factor the generational wisdom passed from woman to woman must be in creating the impressive quilts that I had been examining in books and online. I did figure out my own ways to get my square to fit together, but the process definitely left me curious about what kinds of unique techniques and wisdom the women of Gee's Bend have been sharing with one another across the years.
Quilter Ruby Gamble (1918-2001) beautifully describes some of the significance of the quilts her Gee's Bend community has produced over the years:
We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt. It's like building a house. You can start with a bedroom over there, or a den over here, and just add on until you get what you want. Ought not two quilts ever be the same. You might use exactly the same material, but you would do it different. A lot of people make quilts just for your bed, for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history.
As I've embarked on the journey of making my own quilt, I can definitely relate to Gamble's statement that "a quilt is more." I am very aware of joining in a long tradition of women creating "safekeeping," "beauty," and "family history." For me, researching the Gee's Bend quilters and then making my own square also meant connecting on a much larger scale to my nation's history and to the visions Americans could have for our future. Over a year later, the intensity of the passion that rose up in so many Americans who protested in the wake of George Floyd's death has mellowed back into day to day life. The cry for social justice completely dominated the minds of a nation and a world in May of 2020. Such intensity on such a scale is not sustainable long term, but it is important not to let that mean that we forget that injustice persists for too many people. The design of my quilt square, with its butterflies and bright colors expresses the pleasures of spring and the enjoyment any of us might take in a beautiful May day. The roots of the pattern's inspiration in the work of the women of Gee's Bend ties the quilt to a history of women creating beauty, love, and community even in the midst of hardship and injustice. The addition of the Black Lives Matter patch is an explicit reminder that an awareness of the injustices of the past and present should always be with us. Every day cannot be a day of passionate protest. We cannot always feel society's injustice with the pain and intensity that truly awful events provoke, either at the national level or in our private lives. May days must sometimes be times of unreflective happiness. Still, even in quieter times, there is a longer goal. It is important for each of us to carry with us the desire for change for the better, for ourselves and for others. Stitching together the pieces of this square, and stitching the modern civil rights slogan to it is a reminder to me to stitch a desire for what Obama called "the long journey towards freedom" into the pattern of my life. As one of the quilters says in the NYT documentary: "It's OK now, but not like it should be."
Resources:
Here are a few helpful resources I found in my research on the quilts of Gee's Bend for anyone interested in learning more:
--The Souls Grown Deep website is a great resource for both learning about the quilters of Gee's Bend and seeing images of their work. The site includes pictures of many of the quilters and first person accounts of their lives and work. The hyperlinks I've attached to the names of quilters in this blog go to their pages on this site.
--The Quilts of Gee's Bend by Susa Goldman Rubin is a great introductory book about the Gee's Bend quilters with lots of big full color pictures. It is written to be accessible for late elementary to middle grade children, but would also be great to read aloud to younger children, and is a wonderful introductory resource for adults too. the back of the book includes a template and instructions for trying out your own simple quilt square design.
--The Gee's Bend Nest site provides links to the Etsy shops of modern Gee's Bend quilters.
--This 15 minute New York Times documentary shows modern Gee's Bend quilters in their life and work. Note that at the end they allude to a controversy about what happened to some of their quilts after exhibition. This article details the issues.
Comments
Post a Comment