Stitching souls

Deep in Alabama’s Black Belt, the village of Gee’s Bend is almost an island, cut off by a loop in the Alabama River. The ferry that linked the Bend to Camden, the local county seat, was stopped by white segregationists in 1962, and not reinstated until 2006. Once enslaved plantation workers, then sharecroppers, then struggling New Deal farmers, the people of the Bend remained largely unnoticed by mainstream history, despite Martin Luther King’s visit in 1965 a few weeks before the civil rights march on Selma.

But the women of Gee’s Bend have held on to their creative traditions, passed down from mother to daughter: spine-tingling gospel singing, and a unique style of bold, improvised quilting. Made from old clothes out of necessity for generations, used for insulation and burned to keep off mosquitoes, the quilts brought Gee’s Bend fame after they were “discovered” by an art collector in the 1990s and shown in major museums in Houston and New York.

Maria Margaronis hears the voices of this small community and takes part with her daughter in a three-day quilting workshop led by two Gee’s Bend ladies—a space of radical trust where Black and white women of all backgrounds and all ages come together to sew, laugh, sing, tell their stories and confront their challenges and griefs.