Most of the quilts that people are now pulling out to weather Mother Nature’s cooling down are defined simply as coverlets sewn together for a bed.
But that ain’t half of it n if you’re talking about a Gee’s Bend quilt.
And that’s exactly what children’s book writer and St. Louis resident Patricia McKissack writes of in her beautifully woven tale of the tradition of quilts made by black women in a rural locale called Gee’s Bend.
This small community (once a plantation) tucked away in Wilcox, Alabama near a peninsula on the Alabama River is known for its quilts. They’ve been written about before and made their way into museums.
But McKissack brings this important and inspiring story to children n in a way that will surely endear young readers and listeners to the sanctity of familial and communal rites of passage.
Her book, Stitchin’ and Pullin’ a Gee’s Bend Quilt, published by Random House, is vibrant, poetic read with perfectly matched artwork from illustrator Cozbi A. Cabrera, a quilter herself.
“I knew she would bring something special to the book, and she did,” said McKissack, who lives in Chesterfield with her husband and co-writer Fred McKissack.
What Cabrera did that’s so special is take the vignette illustrations from each page and paint them into a quilt. That gathering of individual pieces to make one big piece is the soul of a Gee’s Bend quilt.
McKissack threads this truth in a vignette called Remembering. She writes, “Mama told me, ‘Cloth has a memory.’”
The excited little girl who is finally old enough to sew quilts with the older women gathers her significant pieces and continues, “I hope the black corduroy remembers that it was once the pants…my uncle wore to go vote for the first time, all clean and new.
“I hope the pink and green flowered tablecloth remembers the peach cobbler I spilled on it at the Fourth of July picnic…before my brother went off to school in Boston, when we were still together.
“I hope the dark blue work shirt remembers how hard Daddy has worked…all his life.”
The vignette ends with the young girl saying, “If by chance the cloth forgets, I want to always remember…all of it.”
Aside from young girls getting a chance to learn to make quilts and sew in a circle with elders, they join in the bonding activities of the women.
The girl says she remembers, “The warm brown faces of my mama, grandma and great-gran as they sewed, talked, sang and laughed above my tented playground. All the while, steady fingers pieced together colorful scraps of familiar cloth into something more lovely than anything they had been before.”
Gees Bend had it share of bad times. The quilts weren’t to be hung on walls for decoration, they were to keep people warm n poor, oppressed people who slept on dirt floors. People who grieved of a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed because he wanted to vote. People who took the ferry ride across the river to register to vote in Camden, Alabama only to see the ferry shut down on voting day, leaving a 50-mile trip by car or foot.
This year the ferry was open for the people of Gees Bend to vote in this historic election that gave the White House to a black man for the first time in history.
McKissack first learned of Gee’s Bend and their quilts when she saw them about four years ago at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. Her publisher at Random House had the same idea.
The first thing she did was to visit Gees Bend. She talked with the women. She talked with Mr. Willie Quill, who broke horses for the Alabama State Mounted Patrol.
Quill told McKissack the story of the young man being killed while trying to vote and the ensuing march.
“I was crying when he finished, and he asked me why. And when I told him he said, ‘That’s why I don’t tell my story.’”
When the ferry was opened this year, Quill was among the first to vote.
