February 10, 2015

INTRODUCTION

I wanted to write this before February 1, the beginning of Black History month. I didn’t make it. And I still haven’t seen the movie Selma. This is what I experienced in that part of Alabama in 2008. It made a mark.

Woman: “What were they like?”
Me: “I was the they.”

WELCOME TO ALABAMA

I went to the American south as a naïve white woman, thick as a brick. I knew about the marches, the murders, Rosa Parks and I’d heard the words “Bus Boycott” and “Freedom Riders.” But I had no depth of knowledge, just a bit of well-meaning politically correct empathy — until we arrived at Hutchinson Missionary Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.

Hutchinson church was bombed in 1956. The church’s pastor is Rev. G.W.C. Richardson. In his teenage years, the Klan had beaten, stabbed and pushed him, unconscious, into a river to drown. The Klan left him for dead but his belt loop caught on a tree branch and Rev. Richardson survived.

Fifty-two years later, in January 2008, I was in Montgomery working on a TV documentary about Hutchinson church. Just a few years before, a teenage boy had been stabbed and killed on the front steps of the church. The victim was black, the thugs white. The Canadians in our crew where shocked. No, they were scared.

The seniors we’d come to interview were known as the Forgotten Foot Soldiers of the Movement and Voices of the Boycott. The Bus Boycott has ended, The Struggle hasn’t.

Gwen PattonWhen Gwen Patton was nine-years-old, she made her first move against racism. She spent summers with her grandparents in Montgomery, Alabama. One day Gwen was in the local drug store, had just paid three cents for a cup of water, and sat herself down at the counter. The clerk called her a “pickaninny” and ordered her to get up. Gwen looked at the clerk, poured her water on the counter, and left… slowly. “That was my first conscious protest,” Gwen told a local reporter.

Three years later, Rosa Parks was arrested (December, 1955) for not giving up her seat on the bus to a white man. By then, Gwen Patton was 12-years-old, a Child of the Civil Rights Movement — aware and active. Gwen returned to Montgomery to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And then there was The Accident. By the time Gwen was 24-years-old, she’d added Anti-draft Counselor to her activities. She was driving with a young man trying to catch a plane to Canada. (Yes, to avoid being sent to Viet Nam). There was a “mysterious car accident” and that’s all anyone would tell me.

Gwen was left with one leg shorter than the other and she walks with a pronounced limp. But, Gwen has suits made with long-skirts to hide her damaged leg and special shoes. And she drives a huge old Cadillac with fins. I don’t know what made me say that, but that’s what she was driving when I first saw her. I also think the car was a convertible. Gwen is not shy.

During the filming at the church, Gwen explained bits of her life to the children and presented them, and the church, with the book she’d been given years ago by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This tiny lady in pink has a mind like a steel trap and uses it. She is a historian/researcher/writer and will set you straight. “It (the Movement) was always interconnected with the whole human rights struggle, which we called it at the time before the liberals got hold of it and called it “civil rights.”

alabama2From my notes for our video editor: The group-interview in the sanctuary was amazing – they each introduced themselves and my notes call out “Woman in Silver Hat”.

She was 96-year-old lawyer Johnnie Carr. Johnnie Carr is considered an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Mrs. Carr kept good company.

During the taping, Mrs. Carr made perhaps the only mention of whites who’d helped during the Struggle – a Quaker woman came from the north to teach young black girls and they called the school “Miss White’s School”. Its official name was the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. Johnnie Carr and Rosa Parks met at that school.

“You tried to be a law-abiding citizen because you didn’t want to be put in jail,” Carr recently told a reporter.

When Rosa Parks was arrested, Johnnie Carr’s phone rang. Mrs. Carr says she’ll never forget the words of E.D. Nixon when he called her that day, the day the movement shifted: “He told me, ‘Mrs. Carr, they have arrested the wrong woman now.’”

E.D. Nixon, an early Father of the Movement worked as a Pullman porter and by the day of Rosa Parks arrest, Nixon owned a house. He put his house up as a bond and bailed Rosa out of jail.

Here’s E.D. Nixon’s mug shot from his arrest a year later for taking part in the Montgomery Buss Boycott.
E.D. Nixon

I’m glad I noticed Johnnie Carr’s swell hat or I would never have known about E.D. Nixon and the work and planning that went into the Bus Boycott.

Near the church, I kept coming across official historical markers honoring workers in the Boycott. Hutchinson had been a big meeting place and down the street, Georgia Gilmore’s plaque explained how she’d formed the Club from Nowhere. They made sandwiches and baked. The Club sold pies and cakes and raised money for the cause. And they cooked for Dr. King.

HATS: Older white women (often with a penchant for pale pink) usually ask me about the hats African American women wear to church. They don’t care what I answer. They just want a way to deliver a superior look of scorn for what they don’t consider right and proper for a church.

Well ladies, as you know, covering your head for worship is a tradition in many religions. And African American women also want to look their best on church day. No, they want to look Spectacular — a holdover from days of slavery, days of menial work, days of segregation, days of Jim Crow laws.

Mildred is the Hat Lady at Hutchison. She told me about her mother who’s in two photos in the Foot Soldier’s new renovated lounge. While working as a maid, Mildred’s mother stepped on a nail and died of lockjaw two weeks later. Mildred always became emotional when talking about her mother and wouldn’t be interviewed. Good for her. All that I can tell you is Mildred sparkles. Here, Mildred wears a hat that’s like a blue disco ball. She also supplied our co-host Catherine’s hat.

hathat

alabama8

The woman between Mildred and Catherine is Dr. Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, Professor/Actress/Child of the Movement and Motivational Speaker. Tonea was a regular on the TV series In the Heat of The Night and she was our inspiring Point Person for the church. Another mind like a steel trap, this time with a phone attached.

OK, one more hat picture. I don’t know this woman’s name, but I do know she was 90-years-old and told us about going to catch the bus on that first day of the Boycott. There was a note: “Don’t Ride the Bus”. And no one did. “Three hundred and eighty-one days, people walked, walked with joy,” Gwen Patton said.

Nicole Brooks was the co-producer of this show. Here we fall into each other’s arms, all teary-eyed. Pretty mushy stuff for a couple of tough producers. What brought that on?

 

Reverend Richardson (on the left), organized the congregation to re-enact the Civil Rights marches that still take place. The Reverend, his granddaughter and his wife led us all into the church. Not a dry eye.

Reverend Richardson

The program about Hutchinson Church is in fact about the Civil Rights movement, the Forgotten Foot Soldiers of the Movement and the violent racism that continues. Most of the people interviewed had been crippled, left for dead, bombed, threatened, made orphans, damaged…on and on. There was an intense seriousness about the messages being delivered to us. These were people who had survived and were happy to be alive. More of our people shed tears during the taping of this show than any other. We were all uneasy. And that was before Ferguson and “I Can’t Breathe”.

ON TO SELMA & GEE’S BEND

The remarkable ladies of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, were my personal introduction to the Civil Rights Movement.

I’d heard Martin Luther King Jr. preach in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the 1960s. I think I heard him say “I have a dream” but I’ve seen so many film clips of him saying those words, in different places, my mind could have morphed all of them into St. Paul’s. Shallow and callow, that was me. I did mini skirts then, not social justice. I also grew up in white, racist, anti-Semitic, 1950’s Thornhill, Ontario. Mea Culpa.

In the 1990s, my friend Red brought the Gee’s Bend ladies and their quilts from Alabama to the David Mirvish Gallery & Bookstore in Toronto. Until then, to me, quilts meant itty-bitty flowers on symmetrical bits of fabric.

Gee’s Bend quilts were bold and irregular. They knocked your socks off. I became obsessed with Gee’s Bend and everything to do with it – especially the women and their quilts. These African-American women were also survivors and they managed just fine in the heady world of art galleries.

As soon as I arrived in Montgomery, Red put me in touch with the Gee’s Bend Quilt Collective. They told me to just drive on over. My map showed Selma between Montgomery and Gee’s Bend. By this time I’d fessed up to a church elder that I didn’t know the details of Selma and its famous bridge. I would have been offended. If he was, he was a gentleman about it.

Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge was as far as 600 peaceful civil rights marchers got on their first day’s walk from Selma to Montgomery. The Pettus Bridge crosses the Alabama River just six blocks from the center of town. It was March 7, 1965 now called Bloody Sunday. Armed state and city police used billy clubs and tear gas to stop the marchers. And TV cameras caught it all.

It took two more attempts to walk to Montgomery. And by then an estimated 25,000 were marching. The struggle for voting rights turned.

Silent vigils are still held to honor Bloody Sunday. Peaceful marchers carrying candles cross the bridge to official memorials that are on Alabama’s “Must See” tourist maps. Ironic. But not funny.

Gee’s Bend was settled in 1816 by Joseph Gee on a piece of land sticking into a bend of the Alabama River. It didn’t take him much to come up with that name. Joseph Gee arrived with 18 enslaved blacks to work his cotton plantation. Enslaved blacks is the politically correct descriptor. Slaves are the vernacular. But call yourself whatever you want. Eventually they became African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers. “We lived a starvation life,” a quilter said in the video about them. “We worked like slaves…couldn’t have no blankets.”

Kip, our documentary’s Über Producer, drove me to Gee’s Bend – go west on the highway to Selma, turn left. It was supposed to be a two-hour drive to Gee’s Bend. About an hour in, Kip pegged it. “This is a pilgrimage isn’t it?”

We were lost. The highway became a narrow county road and took us deeper into the already Deep South. Bad land and abject poverty – it was the Third World. I know that description is politically incorrect but the area was not an emerging nation. It was dead-end every which way. In 1933-32, the Red Cross kept the starving Gee’s Bend inhabitants alive. In 1937, the famous U.S. Farm Security Administration needed “good Southern Tenancy pictures” to join Dorothea Lange’s dustbowl photos. The Gee’s Bend families were captured as objects for us to gaze upon today.

Women taught little girls to sew and that’s what saved the community. The women did piece work for Sears, Roebuck and Co. and it brought in a bit of extra money. But still, they were poor.

No one in the community let anything go to waste. The sewers took the leftover corduroy from the Sears piecework and made quilts. They took the men’s faded, worn dungarees and made quilts. They quilted empty rough sacks. Clean cotton batting came from cotton ginny lint, and the quilts were hung on walls to cover cracks old newspapers couldn’t fill. And they were used on Gee’s Bend beds.

Some of the Gee’s Bend quilters took part in the Freedom Quilting Bee in a near-by community. It was a collective to raise money for the civil rights movement. Eventually, the ladies of Gee’s Bend formed their own quilting bee. They took to hanging their quilts out on the highway and selling them. The young men in the area went to university on quilt money. And then they left. The same story that’s told all over rural North America.

Back to voting. Gee’s Bend folks could take a short ferry ride to Camden, the county seat, where there were jobs and stores and they could register to vote. Or they could drive two hours by car to the same place. It was that damned bendy river.


No Gee’s Bend African Americans were registered to vote until Martin Luther King visited and told them to take the ferry to Camden and register to vote. “You are somebody,” he told the residents. “Cross the river for Freedom”.

They crossed the river until the county took out the ferry. Then they still managed the day trip to drive and vote. But Gee’s Bend was isolated. Then and now.

Kip and I were driving in circles, only we didn’t know it. We followed a sign that read “Gee’s Bend Ferry’. But no ferry had been to that wretched dock for years. Our GPS stopped working. We had no phone signal. And our paper map was no help because Gee’s Bend wasn’t marked — the government had decided to call the place Boykin.

We found a kind of store with a gas pump and a phone booth. The phone was broken. Nothing but the dusty, scrubby landscape of poverty surrounded us. The saggy store was covered in warped clapboard that may have seen white paint, but now was the gray of a black and white photo. It was surrounded by dead winter fields of rubble and stubble with an occasional bare tree poking out. Altogether the collection of dead phones and useless maps added up to… ominous.

Being the woman in the car, I went into the store and asked for directions. One lady pointed at another lady and said something with a stretched out Southern drawl. I had no idea what she was talking about. The ladies were patient – they didn’t have much to do, or places to go. So they talked until I understood that someone was driving to Gee’s Bend, and we should follow her. Sure.

The ladies in the Gee’s Bend documentary I watched over and over, all loved sewing. It was a passion, a hobby, a way to make money, a way to express themselves. They never stopped quilting. They picked cotton all day in dry hot fields…and inside their head they designed with such intensity, they often “had to sew to two or three in the nighttime”. They had friendship, singing, quilts and God. “We were so thankful.”

And then they were discovered. The ladies of Gee’s Bend thought they made quilts. Turns out, according to the critics, they made “brilliant pieces of modern art”. The fabrics ached of character and humanity. They’d been part of worn-to-threadbare clothing. The compositions were abstract. You can spot odd pockets torn from old jeans. The quilts were scooped up, shown at the Houston Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City.

The ladies traveled. You know how famous they were? The Gee’s Bend story was featured on Oprah. Jane Fonda lived near Gee’s Bend and her daughter, Vanessa, made the video I’d watched so many times. It showed a quilting bee with all the ladies singing work songs and spirituals. One woman kept time on the quilting frame like the drummer in a dragon boat. The quilt bounced under the ladies’ needles. They sang. They spoke of segregation. They laughed.

Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective Building at Gee’s Bend, AL (officially Boykin, AL)

Real life today is different. When we arrived at the quilting collective, finally, Kip and I were led to a stark building where we met a middle-aged lady. She offered to quilt so we could film. The frame held a quilt top of neon bright modern fabrics in a standard quilt pattern. Their store sold new machine-made carpets based on the old quilts. The quilts you can buy are all new and shinny. The charm was gone. And so were the most of the ladies.

Many of the original quilters have died. Six generations of driven, artistic women have dwindled to a few. People from all over the world still come to sign the guest book. We did. Anyone who follows quilting knows about Gee’s Bend and the quilts. It’s become a much-copied style.

York Heritage Quilters Guild, A Celebration of Quilts XII, 2014, samples

And now you can buy a manufactured Gee’s Bend quilt top on sale for $39.99 (U.S.) on the Crate and Barrel website. Their quilt kits turn up on e-bay. And the domain geesbend.org was for sale the last time I looked. There was a lawsuit about the ownership and copyright of the ladies’ work. It was settled out of court and neither side can talk about it.

If you find one of their old Gee’s Bend quilts for sale, expect to pay many-many tens of thousands… of dollars… U.S. dollars.

Gee’s Bend has one more note of fame. During the Atlanta funeral procession for Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., mules pulled the wagon carrying his coffin. The wagon and those mules came from Gee’s Bend. It had been his wish.

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