June 2017
I was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. After 30+ years in Kansas City, I still miss the ocean, but love the writing community I’ve found through The Writers Place. To see my books and sample poems, please visit me at www.alariepoet.com.
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Author's Note: My husband and I were fortunate to be in Atlanta at the right time to see a large exhibit of the Gee’s Bend quilts at the High Museum. We were spellbound and spent a long time looking. These are not your standard, Colonial Williamsburg quilts full of pretty birds and flowers. They're hard-working quilts, asymmetrical, not even squared up: graphic, modern, and bold. Even more exciting were the video monitors placed throughout the gallery showing interviews with the quilters. They sang hymns almost as much as they sewed. We couldn’t help but notice that most of them were named Pettway. Their community was cut off from the rest of the world by lack of roads and a river with an infrequently running ferry. The residents in many ways remained enslaved after the Civil War.
The exhibit was our main souvenir memory of that trip. It was about a year later that I was able to see a screening of the PBS documentary about the quilters. I decided before watching that I was going to write this poem, so I took a lot of notes. It was several more months before I finished, since the opening line eluded me. |
The Quilters of Gee’s Bend
Seems like that old river tied
itself in a knot just to keep
black folks there at Gee’s
Bend while time and fortune
swept on by.
And Master Pettway gave
those folks his name,
but stripped everything else
he could. Left just scraps,
but they were used to that.
So those hands that hardly
needed something else to do
unraveled their worn-out
world. Pieced together
remnants of Africa
and raggedy dreams
to make something new.
Let dress tails dance
with britches – heat from
the cotton fields pressed
deep in their seams.
So tired of plowed furrows,
they let their stitches bend
now and then just like
that river. Nothing perfect,
yet God was in the details.
And the quilters called that
making do and visiting
and keeping warm and pulling
up memories each night,
till one day they were told --
we call that art.
“The Quilters of Gee’s Bend” was first published in Poetry East (Fall 2008).
© 2017 Alarie Tennille
© 2017 Alarie Tennille
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