Susan Goldman Rubin - The Quilts of Gees Bend

To my friend Ann Whitford Paul, writer and quilter

Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-1-4197-2131-1
eISBN: 978-1-6833-5052-1

Text copyright 2017 Susan Goldman Rubin

For illustration credits, see .

Book design by Melissa J. Barrett

Published in 2017 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.

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The Area of Gees Bend, Alabama

Stacked Bricks, 1928, Nettie Young.

One Patch, Diamonds variation, circa 1975, Mary L. Bennett.

When Nettie Young was eleven years old, her mother gave her a pile of cloth strips and told her to make a quilt all by herself. Nettie had always sat with her mother and watched her quilting, picking up the scraps at her feet, but this time her mother walked away. She was testing her daughter to see if she was independent as well as talented. The cotton and corduroy scraps were in different colors and patterns: plaids, checks, dots, even a little yellow animal print. The odds and ends came from old work shirts, dress tails, and aprons. Looking back, at age eighty-nine, Nettie said, When I was growing up, you threw nothing away.... You found every good spot for a quilt piece, and thats how you made your quilts.

Nettie arranged the strips to form squares in a brilliant geometric design. She called her finished quilt Stacked Bricks. From then on, she became known as one of the best quilters in Gees Bend, Alabama. I always loved sewing, she said. Didnt need a pattern... I just draw it out the way I want it.

Mary L. Bennett, 2000.

Descendants of former slaves of the Pettway Plantation, 1937.

Mary L. Bennett also began on her own. Didnt nobody teach me to make quilts, she said. I just learned it by myself, about twelve or thirteen. I was seeing my grandmamma piecing it up, and then I start. I just taken me some pieces and put it together, piece them up till they look like I want them to look.

The women of Gees Bend have been making quilts for generations. They are descended from the slaves on the Pettway Plantation. In 1845, Mark Pettway moved his family and more than one hundred slaves from North Carolina to Gees Bend, along the Alabama River. The bulb of land is five miles wide and seven miles long and is surrounded by water on three sides. The place got its name from Joseph Gee, a white planter who had staked his claim there in 1816. After the end of the Civil War, many of the freed slaves took the last name Pettway and stayed in Gees Bend, forming their own all-black community. The old slave quarter grew into a village. In 1900, a white lawyer named Adrian Van de Graaff bought the plantation, and the Gees Benders worked the land for him as tenant farmers. The same Negroes and their descendants are upon it who tilled it as slaves, Van de Graaff wrote to a friend. The Gees Benders continued to work like slaves for the white people, said Loretta Pettway.

Aunt Nellie Pettway carrying wood for the fireplace from the yard, 1939.

Six days a week, the women went out to the fields along with the men. They hoed, plowed, and picked cotton and yams. But as they bent over cotton stalks, they thought about their quilts. At the end of the day, while they did chores at home and cooked dinner, they composed patterns in their heads. Pieces of cloth that had been tucked away safely were brought out at night, when, at last, it was time for quilting. We had no radio, no TV, no nothing, recalled Mary Lee Bendolph. Thats the way we learnedsitting watching our mamas piecing the quilt. When the sun came down, you be in the house together, laughing and talking. We were more blessed then.

Many of the African American women in Gees Bend learned how to make quilts from their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Mary Lees daughter, Essie Bendolph Pettway, is in the fourth generation of quilt makers in her family. Essie said, I was looking at my mama sewing back when I was seven, eightmight have been youngerand I was thinking, I want to do that for myself. Essie made her first quilt in 1968, when she was twelve. Right away, she showed extraordinary talent. When she was seventeen, she made a quilt called One Patch, which features bars of blue (from denim work shirts) and white (from flour sacks) on one side, and has stacked squares and rectangles in all sorts of colors and patterns, including a sliver of printed flowers, on the other. As an adult, Essie used remnants from dresses she had sewn for herself and her mother in a green leaf print to make her vibrant quilt Pinwheel, whose triangles in shades of green and blue seem to be spinning against the leaves.

Essie Bendolph Pettway, 1939.

When we got nine or ten years old, [our mother] gave us a needle and a thimble and told us to quilt, and thats why we quilted so much, said Arlonzia Pettway. Her mother, Missouri Pettway, showed her the basics. One of Arlonzias masterpieces is a Housetop quilt that has nine blocks bursting with color. Each block contains wide and narrow strips of bright red that frame a wild assortment of patterns. Yet the design holds the ravishing array together.

Housetop variation, circa 1965, Mary L. Bennett.

Front of One Patch, a two-sided quilt, blocks, stacked squares, and rectangles variation, 1973, Essie Bendolph Pettway.