Anatomy of a Quilt: The Gee's Bend Freedom Quilting Bee

Abstract

The incredible quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama, true masterpieces of American folk art with their jazzy geometry, on national tour following their initial display at Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, are finally receiving recognition they have long deserved. Michael Kimmelman's ebullient review in New York Times captured for all world to read bold, independent spirit of this distinctive art form. (1) Kimmelman said little, however, about artists and community that produced these gorgeous tapestries--especially during quilters' most audacious and productive years between 1930 and 1970--except for noting that quilters are descendants of slaves who worked local Pettway plantation that dominated landscape. I'd like to add my experience to story. In 1967, with my usual sense of poor timing, I left New York City and went south to join tail end of Civil Rights movement, which by that time had moved north--to Chicago, Detroit, and New York. The remnant of the movement in and around Selma, Alabama, had, of necessity, turned to Black Power, making white civil rights workers like myself redundant and anachronistic. But rather than being sent home (where I belonged!) I was assigned to Wilcox County, Alabama, as a field staffworker for Southern Rural Research Project, a SNCC-affiliated legal rights project, to help conduct a large and detailed survey of almost one thousand African American farm households representing five thousand people. My research was part of a larger project detailing working, living, and health conditions of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in eight so-called Black Belt counties of southwest Alabama. We, dozen or so quickly assembled and rapidly trained field staff, combed more remote corners of southwest Alabama, where we went, normally in twos (one white worker, one black), door to door and shack to shack with our sometimes invasive questions. We asked about access to food and healthcare, and about family composition and family illnesses and disabilities, relations with land owners, annual earnings, and access to federal farm subsidies, cotton allotments, and small loans. We uncovered a ravaged population often living on edges of starvation and largely dependent for survival on capricious federal farm programs, families who went hungry during lean winter and early spring months with meals comprised of starch, sugar, and fat--that is, grits, biscuits, cornbread, peanut butter, fried bologna, fatback, Kool-Aid, and coffee. Were it not for seasonal mustard and collard greens, and hunted meat--squirrels and possums--it is hard to imagine how so many of them managed to live at all. With help of two visiting civil rights physicians, late Charlie Wheeler of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Robert Coles of Harvard, we were able to identify signs and symptoms of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, including childhood rickets, pellagra, and night blindness. The average African American woman in a farm household in southwest Alabama had experienced seven pregnancies by age of forty and at least one miscarriage, stillbirth, and two infant or early childhood mortalities. It was portrait of an endangered population in a Third World nation. The misery we encountered then was largely result of corrupt land owners whose power was based on debt peonage, forged signatures on government subsidy checks, theft, and forced labor with tacit support of local representatives of U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cotton allotment cheeks for black tenant farmers were in many cases signed over to landlord because of outstanding debts, often for basic food commodities, household materials, seeds, and farm tools sold at hugely inflated prices and documented by fraudulently skewed bookkeeping at landlord's company store. …