They made quilts to keep the cold at bay. And their bold creations ended up being hailed as masterpieces – the visual equivalent of jazz and blues, tokens of solace and defiance in tragic times
Loretta Pettway Bennett remembers well the moment everything changed for her tight-knit, rural community. The 20th century was drawing to a close. She was in her late 30s, living with her husband and sons on the site of an old cotton plantation on a deep bend in the Alabama River. Any spare time she could muster was spent stitching quilts alongside her grandmother, mother and aunt, to pile on beds or hang on walls to stop the damp river air from snaking in between the logs of their cabin walls.
Then, in 1997, along came a collector who started to snap up the quilts for crazy money, and talked them up as works of art worthy of being shown in museums. “It seemed like a good idea, but at the time we didn’t believe it. Who would want to see these raggedy old quilts?” says Pettway Bennett. Up until then, the quilts might sell for a few dollars apiece, a handy enough boost to the economy of the 200-strong hamlet, which had been identified decades earlier as part of the poorest region in the US. Renamed Boykin in the 1940s, it was still known locally by its slave-era name of Gee’s Bend.
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