Out of Whole Cloth: The Life of Bettye Kimbrell
Whole cloth? I first heard this term from Bettye Kimbrell, the exquisite quilter who is about to tell you her story. To Bettye a whole-cloth quilt is one whose top is made from an entire piece of fabric rather than from scraps and patches. Such quilts, usually single pieces of white or unbleached fabric decorated only with stitches, suggest to me human qualities like strength, honesty, integrity, and straightforwardness. There are no flashy colors, just designs, subtly elaborate, created by needle and thread on a base of solid fabric. I can think of no better way to describe Bettye Kimbrell than to say she is cut out of whole cloth. For the many years I have been working on this book I have wanted to use the phrase as its title. When I researched it, however, I was dismayed to learn that in the mid-nineteenth century the term had taken on a very different meaning from what I had in mind. The first definition of "whole cloth" listed in most dictionaries is "fictitious, untrue, improvised, or fabricated," with examples such as "These incidents were manufactured out of whole cloth; they never occurred." I reluctantly gave up on using the phrase as a title, but continued to think about it. Over time I realized that in one way the negative definition correlated with Bettye's story. She had to fabricate a good life for her family. A motherless child, then a child bride with few good role models and little education, Bettye had to figure out on her own how to create a safe, loving environment for her five children and find satisfaction for herself. In this book she tells us how she did it. As you can see, I have decided to reject the definition of "whole cloth" as "made-up" and use it as the title of an absolutely true story. The idea for this book came into being as Bettye Kimbrell and I drove from Birmingham to Montgomery and back many times in the 1990s. We were working on a series of Alabama Folklife Festivals being held in both of those cities. I directed the festivals and Bettye exhibited her quilts at them and helped in any way she could, such as ironing and folding a hundred festival T-shirts that arrived at the last minute too wrinkled to sell. The trip to planning meetings was one and a half hours each way, but Bettye's stories of her childhood in rural West Alabama in the 1940s made the time fly. I savored them, finding them nostalgic and pastoral, until I heard her say that when she was eight years old her mother left Bettye's father and their five children for another man. To make it worse, she remained with him in the little town where her abandoned family lived. Bettye was no longer talking about the good old days. As a child of the 1950s I well remember the stigma attached to divorce--even to the children of divorce. No child wants to be different. In those times when divorce was uncommon, children in single-parent homes felt very different from their schoolmates. I wondered how Bettye was affected by her mother's scandalous behavior and eventually asked her if I could interview her for a possible book. The answer obviously was yes. Bettye had a store of knowledge and wisdom growing out of her experience that she was eager to share. We began our interviews on March 11, 1996, with a tape recorder sitting on the kitchen table in her Mt. Olive, Alabama, home. By the time we finished, I possessed a drawer full of cassette tapes and a folder full of digital recordings on my computer, all capturing the voice of Bettye Kimbrell as she recalled the details of her life. Now, in 2013, after years of interviews, telephone calls and one long break while this writer was otherwise occupied, we have finished our book about hurdles overcome, a husband loved, children raised, and quilts with thousands of tiny stitches.--Joyce H. Cauthen