Patchwork lives revealed

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 17, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Mary Lee Bendolph works on a quilt. She was a major influence in the creation of the lead character in Gee's Bend.

Photo by Stephen Pitkin © Pitkin Studio, Rockford, Ill.

Medallion, 2005, by Loretta P. Bennett, Collection of the Tinwood Alliance.

Playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder

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Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder grew up in Alabama. Her hometown was Mobile, where she was raised on a houseboat. Gee's Bend could have been on another continent.

The one-time plantation, nearly isolated by a bend in the Alabama River, is home to fewer than 1,000 residents, mostly descendants of the plantation owners' slaves. Electricity arrived in the 1960s; plumbing and telephones came a decade later. It's an insular community with accents so thick Wilder couldn't always understand them, but she always felt welcome.

The playwright had been offered a commission by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where Kent Thompson (now at Denver Center Theatre Company) was the artistic director.

Wilder had already spent a year researching the town after seeing the quilts that made it famous. Her entree to the community came through town matriarch Mary Lee Bendolph.

"The first trip I made was on Dec. 26, 2004, and we sat in Mary Lee's living room with about four of the other quilters, and they just were really open about telling me stories," says Wilder.

"When we were leaving, I said, 'I just want to thank you for trusting me with your story,' and Mary Lee said, 'Just write it honest.' "

Wilder felt she had been given permission, despite being a white woman from the city.

"From those people in that community, my race has never been an issue," she says. "The women have been very active throughout the process. When we did our first reading we invited Mary Lee and a woman named Arlonzia Pettway. I wanted their approval and I wanted to know if there was something I was misrepresenting."

The women gave their approval, and have since attended productions of the play.

By now, they're used to the attention. The quilts of Gee's Bend - abstract, geometric, vibrant creations - have been drawing outside eyes since the Depression, when the residents were photographed by Arthur Rothstein.

Wilder's play fictionalizes their stories, setting them into three parts that follow the waves of history that have descended on 20th-century Gee's Bend.

She begins in the Depression, when the overwhelming poverty drew Rothstein to the hamlet.

"In 1932, the town was really devastated by the Depression, by the fall in cotton prices; they had a really horrible winter, they lost all their crops," Wilder says.

"The man who had been furnishing all their seed and supplies for the year died and his wife came to collect on all the debt in the middle of winter. Literally just came to town and took things, all their cows and chickens. One of the women, Nettie Young, talks about picking wild locusts off the trees to eat."

As a result of Rothstein's photos, the Farm Security Administration enabled a community of tenant farmers to buy their land, creating a self-sufficient community run by blacks.

Wilder's story centers on the life of Sadie Pettway, a character in no small part influenced by Mary Lee Bendolph.

Wilder revisits the town in 1965, a period when Gee's Bend returned to prominence. With agricultural work drying up for the men, the women used their quilts for economic independence.

They also became active in the civil rights movement, particularly striving for voting rights.

"Because everyone in Gee's Bend owned their own land, they had this power that most African-Americans in the South didn't have," Wilder says. "They couldn't be threatened to be kicked off of their land. The white community (across the river) in Camden didn't have a whole lot of power over them."

The one power whites did have was to cut off ferry service to Gee's Bend, isolating the community even further. Physically, it worked, but a 1969 Calvin Trillin article in the New Yorker brought more attention.

Once again, the women faded from awareness, until a 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston elevated their work. The show went on to the Whitney Museum of American Art; a related exhibition arrives at the Denver Art Museum in April. And the ferry has been reinstated, putting Gee's Bend closer to the world but also taking away a bit of security.

"The women kept saying, 'Well, if the ferry comes back we'll have to put locks on our doors, because we won't know who the ferry is bringing in,' " Wilder says.

The story of Gee's Bend is a particularly female one, as women make their names with quilts and take hold of their financial futures, forming the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective, through which profits are divided fairly among all the quilters. And they're getting used to a touch of fame.

"They are having so much fun," says Wilder.

"It is so exciting to see these women, especially the older women in the group, 70s and 80s. When you think about what they've seen in their lives, and how now they can get on a plane and fly to an art museum and have people celebrating the work they do, I mean, they're just so remarkable."

Quilts coming to Denver

Several years ago the colorful quilts of the women of Gee's Bend made art history when the first exhibition of the work began to tour.

Now, these inventive black women from Alabama are back in the spotlight, as the second show on this subject, "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," prepares to open April 13 at the Denver Art Museum.

"Architecture of the Quilt" will showcase the strong geometric patterns of the work, made from materials close at hand, such as corduroy and denim. The exhibition also will examine the artists, and use two-sided display techniques to show both sides of the quilts.

"Architecture of the Quilt" will run through July 6 at the DAM, 100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway. Information: 720-865-5000, denverartmuseum.org.

- Mary Voelz Chandler

Gee's Bend

* When and where: 6:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturdays, through April 19, Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex

* Cost: $31 to $48

* Information: 303-893-4000

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

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