It is just after sunrise, and the quilters of Gee's Bend are getting on another bus, this time to Memphis.
Unknown three years ago, they are celebrities now. Dozens of women from a poor, isolated, almost-forgotten African-American community whose quilting, now recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement, has propelled them to national acclaim.
On this February morning, they're headed to the opening of an exhibition of their quilts at a Memphis art museum. Soon, they'll be on their way to Boston, for the June 1 opening of their show at the Museum of Fine Arts.
When they depart Gee's Bend for Boston, pastor Clinton Pettway from Ye Shall Know the Truth Baptist Church plans to do what he always does when the women get ready to leave: "Pray them off and pray them back."
"Lord been so good to us," Mary Lee Bendolph tells the pastor this morning, as some three dozen of the quilters, ages 43 to 87, climb aboard the bus, many with their hair freshly curled, Bendolph with her Bible, as always.
When everyone is seated, she leads the women in singing a favorite spiritual, and pastor Pettway begins to pray.
"Thank you Lord for waking us up in the morning," he says.
"Thank you Lord," the women respond, and bow their heads.
"Thank you God for another opportunity," he says. "Thank you Lord for what you are doing for this community. Thank you Lord for finally beginning to bless their labors."
"Amen," the quilters say, raising their heads again, their voices lifted together as the bus disappears toward Wilcox County Road 29, away from the place you can't find on a map.
Just a few years ago, the quilts of Gee's Bend were all but forgotten, stashed under beds and in closets, given away, some of them so "raggly," as they say here, they'd been torn up or burned. Most of the women, dispirited and uninspired, didn't even quilt anymore.
Now their quilts have hung in major museums around the country, including New York's Whitney Museum of American Art; the New York Times called them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." They've gone to Washington, and Houston, even Kazakhstan and Armenia. The quilters have been on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and have met Laura Bush and Jane Fonda. A host of retail products is on the market, inspired by their work.
Legions of visitors have flocked to museums to see the quilts, even setting new attendance records. They're lured by their raw, bold beauty, to be sure, but also the story behind them -- how practically every-one in Gee's Bend is descended from slaves; how the quiltmakers are part of an unbroken tradition of generations of quilters there; how their quilts were pieced together from scraps of fertilizer sacks, shirttails, worn-out overalls, tobacco pouches, and stuffed with the cotton they'd picked in the fields.
How somehow, incredibly, the hurried work of their hands turned into hundreds of bold, abstract, idiosyncratic, and joyous quilts that critics have compared to the work of Matisse, Mondrian, and Rothko.
It still seems unreal, no matter how many times Bendolph, 69, is asked to tell the story, no matter how many cities she visits or autographs she signs.
"All we knew was we was making quilts to keep warm," she keeps saying. "We didn't know it was art."
There is many a place you can visit in this country and never get a hint of its past life, its ghosts, its soul. Gee's Bend isn't one of them.
To get here from Atlanta, you pass through Selma, a center of the civil rights struggle. Generations of "Benders" subsisted as sharecroppers and tenant farmers for absentee white landlords, and you constantly bump up against vestiges of the region's history, which is not always pretty.
An area 7km across and 10km deep centered at the town of Boykin, 60km southwest of Selma, Gee's Bend sits at an abrupt U-shaped bend of the meandering Alabama River. It also owes its name to Joseph Gee, the area's first white settler.
The majority of residents bear the surnames of the white people who once owned their forebears -- Pettway, Young, Bendolph. "We all got slave masters' names," quilter Arlonzia Pettway explains. "We all was something else."
About 700 residents live in the community, in a county in which 40 percent of the people live below the federal poverty line and the 16.4 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the state.
The fields alongside the long 20-odd kilometer stretch of road leading into Gee's Bend are littered with empty lots, rusted-out cars, the charred shells of houses on rubble. A ramshackle house trailer, with a hole in its sagging roof, has yet to be patched after a tree fell on it last year during Hurricane Ivan.
Much of the landscape is just emptiness interrupted by homes, and the occasional cow or goat. A lot of the dwellings are the tiny "Roosevelt houses" built after the Depression when Gee's Bend was declared one of the poorest places in the US and singled out for federal relief.
The town center, such as it is, is an intersection with a post office; the only evidence of the quiltmaking here is an unevenly lettered sign, "Gee's Bend Quilt Coll" marking the building that houses the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective, founded in 2003 to represent the quilters and market their work.
Yet Gee's Bend, which has four churches despite its tiny population, is a rich artistic and spiritual universe. You hear it in the music of the morning mockingbirds and the woodpeckers -- or "peckerwoods," to use Bendolph's more lyrical phrase. You hear it in the poetry of the names of the people who live here, or are buried here -- Creola, Mariah, Aolar, Wisdom, Arcola, Revil, Arlonzia.
You see it in the random tableaus you come across in unexpected places. A set of perfectly formed, fresh buzzard tracks embedded in mud. A rusty wash basin on a hook on Bendolph's woodshed, hanging with such precision and simplicity it could be a Walker Evans photograph.
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