IRENE WILLIAMS Blocks And Strips (2003) // Cotton and polyester; 87 x 74 inches
via Souls Grown Deep Foundation
“I was born in Wilcox County, in Rehoboth, Alabama. My mother was named Sandy Williams; Tom Williams was my father. … My parents was born in Rehoboth, too. I didn’t know about slaves when we was coming up. My people wasn’t no slaves. My grandparents might have been slaves, as far as I know. … Had to walk to school long way then. Let’s see how far I got in school: I think I got to the eighth or the ninth—somewhere along there.”
IRENE WILLIAMS
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 comÂmunities, 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 tradiÂtions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation
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