Quilts, Poverty, and Gees Bend - Part 1

For the second time, I am reading a book called The Quilts of Gee's Bend by Susan Goldman Rubin. A;though it is a book written for youth, it is a billiant and beautiful book for any age.

In a nutshell, After theCivil War the Pettway plantation owners left. They had enslaved 100 people whom they simply abandoned in the slave cabins. Of course, enslaved people had always had to spplement their sparse rations to survive, so the people of Gees Bend fished and farmed and stayed alive. Then another owner bought the plantation and turned their slave cabins into tenant farms which meant they did all the work and he took a portion of the profits. By then the slave cabins had become a small village. They had to live with a cycle of credit with the local store for seeds each year and paid off the debt with the money from the harvest.

The storekeeper died and according to the story, left no records of the debts so the widow sent a gang of white men who took everything the Gees Bend folks had, tools, pigs, chickens, stored sweet potatos, everything, and they were left to starve.

A local journalist got wind of the situation and wrote about it and sent the article to the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had begun the Works Project Administration by then. The WPA arranged to send flour and corn meal to save the people from starvation in the short term and then set them up with small farm loans to buy tools and animals for the long term.

The cabins were so quickly and poorly made that the wind came right up through the floors and the walls so the women had taken to sewing quilts from fabric scraps from worn out clothes, and feed sacks. They used the scraps of cotton that fell to the floor in the cottin gin for batting. These quilts were layered under the children, on top of the children and on the walls to keep out the chill. Every year in the summer, the women would hang out their quilts to air and it wa like an art show.

The quilts were discovered and sold in the New York market where celebrities and folk art enthusiasts gave them the attention and honor they deserved and the quilt makers began to see some profit from their work.

Sadly, a collector bought the quilts and turned them into expensive art works sold at high prices, cards, accessories, and even postal stamps, but the Quilters of Gees Bend had no royalties or a fair share of this bounty until someone came to their aid and they had a law suit.

I am leaving now, but I will write more when I return.