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.
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