October 19, 2006 Issue                                       

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©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Quilt stamps recall terrifying civil rights days
by LINDA HUNT BECKMAN

Mt. Airy resident Linda Hunt Beckman (left), seen here as a civil rights worker in Alabama in 1968 with her friend, Nancy Scheper, from Queens, New York (she is now Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a rather famous anthropologist), and Robert Rembert. “When I last heard from Robert long ago,” said Linda, “he was working as a security guard in Buffalo, married and doing well.”

At the post office the other day I saw that they were selling “Gee’s Bend” stamps. Each has an innovative, abstract quilt design on it in bold colors. The originals were made at a 10,000-acre farm community that dead-ends at a bend in the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. Some of you may know about the Gee’s Bend quilts since there was an exhibit that toured various museums around the country, winning media attention. The exhibit explains that this community had long made unusual quilts, remarkable because their colors were so bright and their designs so modernist that they reminded the curator of painters like Frank Stella.

To me these stamps bring a flood of memories because I lived in a cabin in Gee’s Bend with my then-husband and Nancy Scheper, my friend (who is still my friend today), in the summer of 1968. All three of us were in our mid-20s, and were working with a civil rights group called the Southern Rural Research Project (SRRP) by researching and writing about protein deprivation and hunger among black farmer families and about the inadequacy of the Department of Agriculture’s surplus food program for these families.

Gee’s Bend had been a cotton plantation, but during the New Deal it became a Works Project Administration (WPA) project, where farmers were enabled to buy their own land slowly at low interests rates; WPA workers helped build the houses that I will call cabins to distinguish them from the unpainted shacks that other poor rural blacks in Alabama and Mississippi, almost all of them tenant farmers, lived in at that time. Unlike those shacks, the cabins had real windows and were often built with siding, so they did not have the cracks between boards that must have made those shacks so cold in bitter weather. The people were descended from slaves owned first by Joseph Gee, who established the plantation in 1816, and finally by Mark Pettway and his heirs.

Elijah Green and his family in Alabama, 1969, were helped by the civil rights workers, although everyone involved was literally putting his/her life on the line.

In Wilcox County the Civil Rights Movement had, among other things, registered voters, helped to set up an agricultural cooperative that encouraged farmers to shift from cotton to products like soybeans, and established the Freedom Quilting Bee, which encouraged the making of quilts that could be sold for income. The head of SRRP was Don Jelinek, a lawyer, who had lived in the Deep South since what was called Freedom Summer in 1964, when volunteers flocked to participate in the Movement.

He filed suits against the U. S. Department of Agriculture, charging that they were violating the law by not helping poor black farmers with access to farm subsidies, cotton allotments and small loans. He also charged, in a suit related to our work, that despite surplus food from the USDA, there was a serious lack of protein, which the agency refused to address. The food stamp program was just starting, and the plan was for these to be purchased at low cost, but, he argued, the farmers were outside the cash economy. Our article appeared in Ramparts, a national magazine, the following year, but Jelinek didn’t win this case.

The local Movement had drawn African-American students from Southern colleges, young black men from the area and both blacks and whites from up North. Robert, the 18-year old son of tenant farmers, could not read, and had never been out of southwest Alabama before; he drove north with us at summer’s end. Chris, a white Harvard student with a desperate desire to be cool, spent all of the time he had free from his work hanging out with the older male teenagers in front of a store.

Dondra, a black woman with a dramatic and imperious manner, had gone to the High School of Performing Arts (later made famous by “Fame”). She administered with aplomb the ramshackle Freedom House in Selma, the center for civil rights activity in the region, where the three of us went to meetings and took showers. We didn’t do more there because Dondra was not friendly.

When we arrived, Nancy met us in Selma, a city that was still segregated, and explained that we would be living out in “the rurals,” and that Roman Pettway, the owner of Gee’s Bend’s store, had offered to let us live in a cabin he owned. (The white Pettways were gone, but nearly all of the black residents were named Pettway.)

It turned out that a civil rights worker had gone insane in that house. Despite his ghost, residing in that farm community was like stepping back in time, and I, still a romantic, was in a state of enchantment. That we were living in an all-black community increased our safety when we were “at home,” though fear of the kind of hatred that had resulted in assaults on civil rights workers in previous years — and even murders — was nearly always on our mind.

One midnight a friend came to visit us; at the knock on the door Nancy and I fell into each other’s arms, shrieking. In Selma we had to stay out of “white” restaurants for fear that we would be recognized as civil rights workers, and when Nancy had to see a doctor we drove to Birmingham for the same reason, yet we were not always welcome in black-owned establishments because of Black Power attitudes on the part of some African-American civil rights workers. By 1968 Black Power had hit, and the movement in the South was almost over. Dondra and many of the black workers who remained felt whites didn’t belong anymore. The local people didn’t feel that way, and we felt that while it was no longer appropriate for white to organize blacks, as writers we had a special skill, and that made it all right for us to be there. Moreover, Nancy and Dondra were competing over Ulysses, a black man from Mississippi, who was the Coordinator of Volunteers.

The tensions within the movement certainly made for discomfort. Despite those tensions -— and sometimes downright unpleasantness from both races -— when I think of the people I met that summer, it occurs to me our society must not forget that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t made up only of Martin Luther King and other nationally-famous leaders; it was a social movement made up of people who, despite remarkable idealism, courage and desire for adventure, had ordinary human quirkiness and could behave in ways that were far from saintly.

In Gee’s Bend, farmers got around on its dirt roads in mule-driven wagons. Pigs and chickens wandered about. Every morning we heard a rooster at dawn. Of course we had some trouble adjusting to the fact that there was no indoor plumbing in our cabin, but we got used to the chamber pots if not to the outhouse. The 100+ degree, humid Alabama weather was another matter. In the photograph of us sitting at our kitchen table, we look stunned, as though we are about to pass out, but when we could no longer endure the heat, we could stick our heads under the pump in the backyard.

We interviewed people who lived in one or two-room shacks in remote parts of the countryside, often 10 or 12 people in a family. They showed us their photos of John F. Kennedy, whom they regarded as a martyr to their cause, and Martin Luther King, “the Freedom Man,” who had been shot that spring. We asked invasive questions -— what did they eat? (Grits. peanut butter, biscuits, fried baloney, corn bread, fatback, greens and in the right seasons, squirrel and possum that they hunted. The USDA surplus food packages added some beans and cheese, but we felt, not enough protein.)

What was it like in the winter? (The shacks had only layers of newspapers as insulation and were heated by a wood stove, with windows covered by cardboard against the cold.) Who owned the rented land, and how much profit did the farm families make at harvest time for their labors? (White businessmen from the town of Camden across the river. In bad years the black farmers made no money at all, in good ones, a few hundred dollars.) We didn’t interview families in Gee’s Bend because their conditions were not representative, though they too lived lean lives and lacked indoor plumbing.

Many of the adults we interviewed are seared in my brain: Mrs. Green, for example, who said with a wry grin, “Why did I go and have 17 head of chi’ren when they was goin’ to go an’ invent a mechanical cotton picker?” Mr. Lee, one of whose sons had been blinded by a white farmer’s pesticide spray, talked with little bitterness of his hope that he could move north with his family and build a better life. And Allie Burns, sitting in front of her isolated shack surrounded by her children, sang into our tape recorder: “I’m down here, Lord, down here by myself. And I can’t do nothin’ till you come.”

As for the quilts, we found a musty pile in a shed near our cabin. These were patched together from remnants of old clothes probably faded by the time they were made into bedcovers, and it appeared that little thought had gone into their design. In contrast, the quilts that I saw being made and readied for sale at the workshop of the Freedom Quilting Bee were patterned, and while lovely, there was nothing modernist about them.

Not mentioned by recent curators is that just as so many had come to help, so did artists when they heard of the Quilting Bee. Among those who visited was Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock and herself an important painter, who came to the Bend in 1967; she brought the quilts to the attention of the curator of 20th century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who ordered several. In The Freedom Quilting Bee (1987), author Nancy Callahan says there was a quilting tradition in the Bend and nearby that used gaily colored materials and “bold, inventive op art designs,” but Callahan also discusses and shows photographs of quilts that are not particularly unusual and one or two that are.

The most gifted local quilters, working in the audacious manner that was evidently a minor tradition in the area, must have melded older bright, asymmetrical styles that had long been their own with modern design ideas. This marriage of disparate conventions, intrinsic to the making of original art, should be seen as an additional achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Think about some of this if you buy Gee’s Bend stamps.

(Linda Hunt Beckman is a Mt. Airy resident, published author and adjunct English professor at Arcadia University.)