The Good Book 3 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Mary Ann Pettway sat reading her Bible as my husband George and I unfolded one quilt after another, trying to decide which of these beautiful creations we might be able to afford to buy. We were in the Deep South, plunk in the middle of Alabama, with a few days to pass between a week’s teaching in Mobile and an interfaith conference at the far north end of Alabama in Huntsville. Never having meandered our way through Alabama, we’d decided to turn these days into a Civil Rights pilgrimage.

Mary Ann is manager of the Gee’s Bend Quilt Collective, an association of descendents of slaves on this former plantation land at a bend in the Alabama River. The plantation owner had the last name of Pettway, which he assigned to all his slaves; still today about half the folks in Gee’s Bend, an entirely African-American community, have the last name of Pettway, though many are not related to one another. The women have done quilting here for generations, as a way to use scrap fabric to keep their families warm.

But about a decade ago, their quilts were “discovered” by art historian Bill Arnett, who has put them on the museum exhibition circuit and on the web (www.quiltsofgeesbend.com).

On the way to Gee’s bend we’d driven from Montgomery to Selma, tracing the route of the 1965 march for voting rights—infamous for the initial brutality of the sheriff’s men, then historic as a living monument to the power of the nonviolent activism shaped by Martin Luther King.

From a commemorative museum halfway along the route, and then from Mr. Sam Walker, a Selma native who acts as docent at the Voting Rights Museum there, we’d had a tactile sense of the marchers’ experience: seeing the shoes they literally walked in and the riot-gear uniforms that confronted them; reading daily accounts from the Selma newspaper of those days in March, 1965; hearing Martin Luther King’s speeches of the time; and hearing tapes of some of the marchers recalling their experience.

They’d met in churches for months and years before the event, strategizing patiently about how to recover their constitutional right to vote, denied them in Alabama. Churches were the only institutions that Negroes could meet in, the only institutions not controlled by whites. And of course it was to a local church that Martin Luther King came at their invitation early in 1965, coming to Selma from the Atlanta church where he was then co-pastor.

All his impassioned, persuasive, profoundly nonviolent rhetoric came from the Bible. He preached from the Hebrew prophets: “Let justice roll down like a river...” (Amos 5:24). He preached Jesus’ love of enemies, insisting that Negroes must act firmly for their civic freedoms while keeping their hearts spiritually free of hatred for their white oppressors.

Driving away from Gee’s Bend with the quilt we’d finally chosen, George and I mused about Mary Ann’s sitting patiently reading her Bible while we made up our minds. In a video that she shows in the small, spare wooden house that serves as the Quilt Collective’s shop, one of the quilters being interviewed beamed about owing all their success “to Jesus”; another shook her head in grateful astonishment, calling “a miracle” their unexpected renown (and the money that quilt sales have brought into a poor community).

Of course we’d known that American slaves took on the religion of their masters and made it their own. But what we experienced in Alabama was something concrete of what “making it their own” has meant—for their descendents’ inner spirits and for American history.

The full-to-bursting trust in Jesus expressed by the Gee’s Bend women made my own trust in God feel weak and wavering, as pallid as my skin always looks to me after I’ve spent time with people of rich brown coloring. And hearing King’s words in the very contexts of the unimaginably difficult strategic decisions he was called on to make day after day, at the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, then again before the Selma march: I was hearing Christian love preached as a force to change history for the better (for a change).

King famously said that the “arc of history...bends toward justice.” Well, that arc doesn’t bend of itself; it won’t bend toward justice without countless folks hanging their very lives onto the end of the arc, some losing their lives as they’re shot down by other folks driven by a deadly fear of what justice will demand of them.

During this 4-week road trip, George and I stayed mostly in motels. Night after night, city after city, there was that Bible in the motel room’s drawer. On the way home after our Alabama sojourn, I’d ease the drawer open cautiously; what power for history-changing good might explode from that book?