The Fabric of Their Lives!

Nestled in a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama, is a small, rural community called Gee's Bend. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850.

Gee's Bend, which for 40 years was isolated from the outside world, with not much more than a ferry that connected them to the county seat of Camden, still today remains rural and desolate.

Most of the families living in Gee's Bend today are descendants of slaves and still take the Pettway name (it was common for slaves to take their master's names back then). And today, just like in those days, their only means of survival has been farming.



It wasn't uncommon for the women to collect the firewood for cooking, working in the fields and bringing in the crops. They covered their walls with newspaper just to keep warm. Another means of keeping warm was by making quilts for your family out of whatever material you had available to you, mainly material from old clothes.


Quilt making for these ladies spans over 150 years, passed down from generation to generation. One of the ladies said this, "People think of an inheritance as land or something given to them, not something they've been taught."

And in the last 10 years people have been taking note of their artistic beauty.

These quilt-making women have become known as The Women of Gee's Bend.

These ladies never looked at their quilts as "art," just old blankets they used to keep warm. But Bill Arnett, an art historian, saw one of the quilts in a picture, thrown over a heap of wood in order to start a fire. He set out to find this piece of art, and the person who made it, and so goes the story of Gee's Bend.



Thanks to Bill Arnett, these lady's quilts have traveled across the country and have been displayed in the most well known museums around.



These ladies have a fascinating story about where God has brought them, and they sing his praises every day through their old slave gospel songs. The music they sing, which is what has kept most of them going, also has been passed down from generation to generation.

They are still making their quilts today. Many of these ladies now have real incomes for the first time, and their work and its success has helped to reunite and revive a dying community. Their quilts have sold from anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000.



There's a biography about the story of Gee's Bend on DVD and I have it if anyone would love to watch it. It's amazing where these ladies have been and how they got where they are. Funny how God takes you by surprise over something you've totally never thought twice about.

Have you ever wondered how these people were brought over from Africa, lived as slaves for many, many years (some of these ladies still remember their parents' stories very vividly), have never left the community in which they live, how they came to know and love the Lord? How did they learn about God and how good he is?



They have one church in Gee's Bend, and not much else. As a matter of fact, if you've ever traveled through Alabama, there are some parts that you may travel an hour or two and never see anything. It's a little like that when we travel home to MS. We travel through Montgomery AL., and for at least two hours you see nothing. It's been that way since I was a kid. That's how it is when you leave Selma, AL., headed to Gee's Bend, you drive and drive and never see anything. These people are on a peninsula that you can access by ferry, or drive another hour and a half to get around, if you have a car, or as it were back in the day, horse and buggy. Most of these very poor people do not own a car. Lots of them have never been outside of Gee's Bend.

My sister is in a book club in Birmingham and one of the girls in her book club just wrote her first book called Leaving Gee's Bend ~


Irene Latham has been traveling around to libraries and schools all across the country promoting her book. A great read for middle schoolers, the scene is set in 1932 and inspired by the rich quilting history of Gee's bend, Alabama. LEAVING GEE'S BEND is a heart-touching tale of a young girl's unexpected adventure.

Check the book out at your local library. The book is a compilation of real stories about Gee's Bend (although names have been changed). If you want to check out the biographical DVD (although tissues will be a must have), I just ask that you return it, as the last person I loaned it to kept it for over a year.

See how precious these ladies are!