It began with a box of scraps of fabric, a prayer and the blessing of hands, and resulted in the creation of beautiful works of art in the form of unique quilts.
I was in awe as Karen and I observed the workmanship and listened to the angelic voices of Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway sing a Gospel hymn over the work stations of the many quilters at work. We were at the Mississippi Episcopal Church’s Gray Conference Center where a Gee’s Bend Quilting Retreat was underway.
I was dropping some papers off at the Gray Center office when the center’s director, Susan Merrill, reminded me that this was the weekend of the quilting retreat. It was not just any retreat but a Gee’s Bend retreat.
My knowledge of quilts is that I know what I like and not much more, but I knew about Gee’s Bend, Alabama. It is internationally famous for its beautifully unique quilts. Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway are members of the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective and Mary Ann is the Collective Manager. They both have displayed quilts at and have quilts in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The significance of this retreat is shown by its attracting participants from England, Canada, the Netherlands and 20 different states.
Though known as Gee’s Bend, the small black community is the census-designated community of Boykin, Alabama. It is located in a horseshoe bend of the Alabama River across from Camden. Its story begins with the 1816 plantation of Joseph Gee which in 1845 was sold to Mark Pettway. The plantation was said to have grown to have over 100 enslaved persons. After the Civil War many of the former slaves remained as sharecroppers and took the name Pettway.
Life was hard for the tenants but family values were strong. Their route to Camden, the county seat of Wilcox County, was by ferry across the Alabama River. By the late 1930s, federal assistance was helping many of the families at Gee’s Bend and during the 1940s many were able to purchase the land they had been farming.
Around 1960 many residents began participating in the Civil Rights movement and took the ferry to Camden to register to vote. Then in 1962 the ferry was shut down. It would be 2006 before a new modern ferry would be in full operation.
The isolation that the community experienced allowed the quilts made there to reflect unique designs. The special character of the Gee’s Bend community had been recognized as early as the 1930s and the Library of Congress has a large collection of photographs taken there around 1937. It was probably a New York Times article in 1969 that first opened the nation’s eyes to the unique beautiful quilts made there by generation after generation.
The women of Gee’s Bend created and passed on to their children and grandchildren their own style of mixing traditional American folk patterns with African-American inspired patterns to create their unique quilts. China said she was taught by her mother to quilt at the age of 7, but it wasn’t just for the beauty of the quilt. It was as much for its warmth on a cold night.
Mary Ann said she was 11 when under her mother’s watchful eye, she made her first quilt. A quilt Mary Ann made from scraps of a postal worker’s uniform is on display at the Smithsonian.
A New York Times review of a Gee’s Bend quilt exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art described them as a “version of Matisse arising in the South” and “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The quilts have been exhibited in museums across America including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Whitney in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
The retreat at the Gray Center was not just about making quilts. It also incorporated the spiritualty of working with your hands and using cast-off rags and cloth to make something that is a beautiful work of Art which expresses the vision of its maker. It is passing on Gee’s Bend’s old tradition of turning scraps of cloth into both useful and beautiful quilts for home and family. As described at the retreat: “Gee’s Bend quilts transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks and fabric remnants to sophisticated design vessels of cultural survival and continuing portraits of the women’s identities.”
The retreat began with a prayer over each person’s hands. A prayer which we might all take to heart. “We ask for your blessings upon our hands. Hands that will be about your work. Hands which will spread love and compassion in your world.”
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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