Sweet Lord, Sweet Chariot - Women of the Gee's Bend  Quilter's Collective singing
Channel: GLIDE sf
Date: 18/07/2023

Ms. Mary Anne Pettway and Ms. China Pettway of the Gee's Bend Quilter's Collective in Gee's Bend, Alabama.

Gee’s Bend is a small community made up of resilient, soulful, and brilliant African American people. After the Civil war,  formerly enslaved people were moved from around the Black Belt (region of Alabama) across the river into Gee’s Bend as a way to continue to disenfranchise the people.

For travelers interested in leaving Gee’s Bend, there are two ways to escape/leave. One can either drive an hour plus or one can take a commuter ferry across the river. On normal days, this ferry runs many times a day. GLIDE has learned in our multiple visits, and witnessed first-hand that on election days, the ferry that would other-wise shuttle people from Gee’s Bend to polling places on the other side of the river shuts down…as a way to systematically disenfranchise African-American voters. As one of our teachers on the ground in Wilcox County said to us, ‘Brown vs. Board of Education never made it here to Alabama.'

The organized oppression that the people of Gee’s Bend have experience for generations continues, virtually unabated. One of the astonishing gifts of visiting Ms. Mary Anne Pettway and Ms. China Pettway is to see how their souls continue not only to live, but somehow bubble with life, even in the face of such doggedly determined and brutally systemic racial terrorism.

The other-worldly welcome they give us each year, the heavenly songs that that bathe us in, the luminous quilts they fashion in front of our eyes are all a testament to the souls' capacity to make it through seemingly impossible situations. The brilliance, the strength, the resilience of these Black women that we witness on the ground in Gee’s Bend, and in so many other places in Alabama is an indispensable ingredient on and needed soul-fuel for GLIDE’s Alabama Justice Pilgrimage.