these quilts just became history

Dinah Miller and the women of Gee’s Bend

Avis Collins Robinson, Mensie Lee Pettway and Andrea Pettway Williams titled this quilt “Sharecropper’s Masterpiece” (image via The National Museum of African American History & Culture)

Rainbow-colored diamonds on a turquoise background. Zigzags of plaid flannel, repurposed from old work shirts. Hot pink pinwheels swirling about a “Texas Star” design.

I’m describing just three of the hundreds of quilts made in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The community is tiny — just 305 people lived there as of 2022 — but the legend of its quilters looms large. Multiple generations of Gee’s Bend women have seen their works sold to millionaires, displayed in museums and showcased around the world. 

Lucy Marie Mingo patterned this pieced quilt with a design of strips and squares (image via Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s quilters credit their tradition to Dinah Miller, an African woman enslaved by a descendant of Joseph Gee, the man who named the town. Dinah arrived in Alabama in 1859, and once there, she began teaching other Black women on the Pettway plantation how to dream up designs and piece patterns. By the time she died at 102, she’d passed on her lessons to dozens of quilters in Gee’s Bend. As they sewed, she told them her story: 

Grandmama Dinah Miller, a slave who died at age 102 in the 1930s, would lay down the quilt, the single material legacy of her mother, on the gaping floorboards as protection from the wind, cold and dust. Then the stories unfolded: of slave ships cruelly decorated with red ribbons to lure people on board; of Grandmama Dinah Miller’s baby boy who was fathered by a white man and then taken away; of the terrifying click-clicking sound the horses’ teeth made when the slave masters came. 

“Girl at Gee’s Bend,” a 1937 photograph (image via The Library of Congress)

By the 1930s, Alabamans knew Gee’s Bend as a poor, isolated community dependent on sharecropping cotton and sweet potato farming. But the Gee’s Bend quilts told stories of a vibrant culture and rich community tradition. Multiple generations passed on Dinah’s quilt lessons, showing new sewers how to upcycle worn cloth and tattered materials into bright, joyous designs (one of my personal favorites even features a salvaged pocket from a pair of denim overalls).

Loretta Pettway described her quilting process to the Smithsonian: 

My quilts looked beautiful to me, because I made what I could make from my head. When I start I don’t want to stop until I finish, because if I stop, the ideas are going to go one way and my mind another way, so I just try to do it while I have ideas in my mind.

Jorena Pettway quilting with some young helpers in 1937 (image via The Library of Congress)

By the 1960s, word of these master quilters and their artistry reached well beyond Gee’s Bend. Tourists traveled from all over the country to see the works up close, riding the ferry to the tiny town and taking photos of the framed roadside quilts. 

In 1965, just three weeks before the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Gee’s Bend. “I come over here to Gee’s Bend,” he said, “to tell you: You are somebody.” White authorities shut down the ferry and barred tourists from visiting the quilters — and the quilters from traveling to the greater state.

But Dr. King’s visit inspired the multi-generational quilters to find other ways of involvement. With the help of civil rights workers, a group of them started the Freedom Quilting Bee in 1966. The worker’s collective enabled them to sell their quilts at auction and then invest the earnings in the Gee’s Bend community. The success skyrocketed overnight — the quilters saw their work featured in Vogue and sold in Fifth Avenue department stores. Today, art collectors and museums around the world prize the Gee’s Bend quilts as icons of American craft. 

As quilter Lucy Marie Mingo said: 

Quilts have been here all the time. But in another way, these quilts just became history because before they were hidden in the closets and on the bed mattresses. When you take them out, they become history. 

More on 🪡: 

• You have to explore more of the Gee’s Bend archive at Souls Grown Deep, the foundation supporting the quilters of today. The colors! The lines! The patterns! A visual feast, all of it. 

• Fabric of Their Lives, Smithsonian Magazine

• From slavery to national fame: the Gee’s Bend quilts that changed modern art, Alabama News 

• Quilts that embody the legacy of Black America, The National Gallery of Art

• The PBS documentary series “Craft in America” visited Gee’s Bend for a 2019 special on the quilters and their creations. 

More from me: 

• I make quilts myself! I started in the pandemic, inspired by my grandmother (she used to win awards for her handmade quilts) and desperate for something to keep my hands (and mind) busy. This is the latest one I’m working on — a style inspired by the classic “Log Cabin” pattern.

  

• Do you remember the Dear America series? Follow me on TikTok — I’m reviewing them as I reread them!

@juliaccarpenterdidnt have enough time to discuss Oda Lee but 😭 #booknostalgia #booktok #yabooks #dearamericabookseries #newyorkcity #royaldiaries

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•  This week is Prison Banned Books Week. Read more about the mission here. This summer I wrote for Esquire about the challenges incarcerated people face in trying to access books of all kinds. Writing that story made every trip to my local library even more meaningful and important. 

I want to hear from you! Get in touch with possible story assignments, share opportunities to collaborate or send your own recommendations for women to know. All you have to do is reply to this newsletter to get the convo started. 💌