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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