The Quilts of Gees Bend: The Soul of the Quilt

I arrive in Houston at six o’clock, scarf down a plate of italian sausage and spaghetti and my parent’s house, and escort mom to the Gees Bend exhibit at the MFAH. We have an hour before the museum closes and I get momenntarily lost navigating my way to the museum’s new addition, through the same corridors I used to browse with a trail of small children in my teaching days at the Glassell School, across the street. It’s embarrassing and I smile to an Asian security guard who doesn’t seem to remember me this time.

The glossy terrazzo floor reflects little observational discussions, the tapping of fancy shoes and the muted cast of each bold, vibrant quilt in this collection. And boy, are they something. If the colors and assymetry of the quilts don’t immediately make you smile, look closer.

If you have a sensitive conscience, then you have questioned the way we live today: the overlooked luxury in each car parked in the driveway and the way you can choose your way each day, the piles of fashion magazines and the excess clothes, garages filled so full of crap because the house is spilling over and space is limited– this is the typical American family way of life (not that I am the exception) and this is a way of life that starves people of happiness and groundedness and peace. I think about this a lot and was brought to tears when I listened to an interview with one of the quilters as I scrutinized a soulful patch of denim in a quilt, a piece taken from a pair of worn-out blue jeans, that included the dark blue ghost of a pocket, the reminder of the fabric’s former life. I wanted to run my hands along the seams, feeling the backbone of handiwork and sweat and conversation that birthed these colorful objects. I cradled the idea of reuse, inspiring the happy purist in me.

I thought about the stiff smell of rows upon rows of fabric bolts, the angst of shopping for the perfect hue, specialty scissors and quilting stores with basketfuls of fat quarters in every imaginable print: cats drinking milk, cats dancing, cats pouring milk, cats stargazing, cats chasing balls of yarn, cats chasing mice, cats napping, cats making me dizzy with a cascade of possibilities, for some reason(pardon me if cats are your thing–and I still think cats are cool). I thought about my own sleeping, shelved monster of a fabric stash. I thought of the closetful of clothes in my bedroom that I will never wear again but refuse to give away, holding them for some special deconstruction but not finding the time just yet. And so they sit there, looking stale. And smelling about the same. I think I vowed right there to boycott the purchase of any more fabric from a store or supplier for a good, long time–at least until I can manage to recruit much of what I already have. You know the old adage, Waste Not, Want Not. I mean, I value the use of new fabric for projects (and man, can some of you SEW!) but for now, I will value myself more if I downsize.

Plummer Pettway 1918-1993 “Roman Stripes, variation (local name: “Crazy” Quilt) cotton twill, denim, cotton/ polyester blend, synthetic knit (pants matieral), 86 x 70 inches.

These isolated women had only the outgrown and worn-out clothes and bolts of local fabric (I think Sears once gave them bolts of the avocado fabric that shows up in nearly one hundred of the collection’s quilts). One of the quilters, in the interview I was listening to, struggled as she tried to convey what it was like not to have much of anything to work with. Work shirts, blue jeans, feed sacks–nothing was wasted. Nothing.

I smiled to read little excerpts about the children, sitting on the front porch beneath the quilting table, watching the needle poke through the underside of the quilt. I told Ford about the way the children (who became the artists of these quilts) picked up scraps of fabric that had fallen to the floor and began making little quilts of their own, right there on the floor. “We didn’t have much, but we was happy” echoed similarly among them. And I still get tears to remember one woman share her surprise in knowing that someone else besides herself appreciates them, not to mention put them up on a wall.

Missouri Pettway, 1902-1981. Blocks and strips work-clothes quilt, 1942, cotton, corduroy, cotton sacking material, 90 x 69 inches. Missouri’s daughter Arlonzia describes the quilt: “It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, ‘I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.’ She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt, ahd I helped her tore them up. Bottom of the pants is narrow, top is wide, and she had me to cutting the top part out and to shape them up in even strips.” –both quilt images from Auburn Universitys: Quilts of Gees Bend in Context’s website.