folkartwork

SUE WILLIE SELTZER “Housetop”—Nine-Block “Half-Log Cabin” Variation (c. 1955) // Cotton and synthetic blends; 80 x 76 inches

via Souls Grown Deep Foundation

“I was born down there in Jones’s, way down there further, toward Gee’s Bend. I come up the hard way. I worked in the fields and didn’t get nothing. There’s a white man way up there in Orrville, and us used to walk to pick his cotton, and didn’t get nothing. I come up the hard way. Not easy. Hard. Us stayed up there till we got through picking cotton, and then us came back home.”

sue willie seltzer

The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors. Unlike the residents of other tenant com­munities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural tradi­tions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.

Souls Grown Deep Foundation