I can sew on a button, but it’s not pretty. That’s about the extent of my needle-and-thread experience. Even so, I’ve long admired the women of Gee’s Bend—their quilts, their artistry, their legacy. Their work has been shown at the Smithsonian, collected by the Met, and studied by fashion houses and fine art scholars alike. I’ve read about them in Garden & Gun. But I never imagined I’d see them in person—certainly not five minutes from my house.
When I found out they’d be leading a quilting workshop at Trussville Public Library, I headed straight there and slipped quietly into the back of the room to observe. The soft hum of sewing machines filled the space. Some quilters moved between tables, laying out swatches and comparing colors. In the center of the room, a group gathered around an 1886 quilt someone had found at a thrift store. They took pictures, asked questions, and swapped quiet awe.
I spotted an open seat beside Mary Ann Pettway of Gee’s Bend and couldn’t help myself. I sat down and struck up a conversation as she stitched. She didn’t seem to mind.
“I was seven when my mama taught me the nine-patch,” she says. “Said if I could sew a straight line, I could make something warm.” She smiles at the memory.
Mary Ann does most of the talking, though China Pettway sits beside her, steady and focused. They’re not related, though they share a last name. “We got the name from the plantation owner,” Mary Ann says. “That’s where it came from—old man Pettway. So you’ve got Pettway, Pittway, Petway—some of everything. But we’re not blood kin.”
It’s clear that quilting, for them, isn’t just a skill—it’s a language. One passed down for generations, now offered freely to anyone willing to sit still and listen.
“Solid fabrics are my favorite,” Mary Ann says, running her fingers across a square of deep blue. “I like how they speak.” I ask how she chooses her colors. “I don’t plan it,” she shrugs. “I just look around. If something’s laying there and I think it’d make a good quilt, I use it. I just love creating.”
She tells me about her grandsons—how one started quilting at age four and still carries his first quilt everywhere. “Like Linus from Charlie Brown,” she chuckles. “Everywhere he goes, that little quilt goes with him.” Another has taken to cooking instead. “That boy’s a cook now,” she says. “And that’s okay.”
She gestures toward a quilt at the front of the room. “That orange one up there? My son-in-law made it,” she says. “He’s a self-taught artist. He’s a good quilter.”
She pauses, hands resting for a moment. “If I had to choose between designing and quilting, I’d choose quilting. Because when I come back to it, it’s already laid out. All I gotta do is sit down and sew.”
As we talk, Mary Ann mentions a hymn she loves: Give Me My Flowers While I Yet Live. “Do you know that one?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I admit.
She doesn’t lift her head, just looks at me over her glasses. “Would you like to hear a little bit of it?”
“Sure.” I nod.
Mary Ann turns and calls over, “China.”
And just like that, they begin to sing, their low, rich voices swelling:
I don’t want nobody to praise me when I’m gone, Lord,
Give me my flowers while I yet live.
The flowers that you give me, I can’t see the beauty—
Oh, give me my flowers while I yet live.
One woman wipes her eyes. Another leans back and closes hers. They sing it again and again, stitching all the while.
“This isn’t about me,” Mary Ann tells me as the last note fades. “It’s all about Jesus. He gave us the gift, the strength to get up and go tell people about Him. That’s what this is. Not just quilts. It’s ministry.”
Their ministry has taken them all over the country. They’ve sung at the Vice President’s residence for Kamala Harris. “She said she was a fan of our work,” Mary Ann tells me, reaching for a purple swatch. “Said she had some of our quilts at her place.” When Barack Obama was first elected President, they sent him a quilt, too.
And yet, there they were—in a small library in Trussville, Alabama.
I later learned there’s a deeper reason they came. Turns out, Trussville and Gee’s Bend are linked in ways most people—even locals—don’t know. Both were part of a sweeping New Deal experiment: nearly 100 planned communities were built across the country during the Great Depression. Eight of them were in Alabama—including the Cahaba Project in Trussville and the homestead at Gee’s Bend.
Amy Peterson O’Brien, president of the Cahaba Homestead Heritage Foundation, made the connection while standing in the quilters’ collective in Boykin.
“I was taking a group of students on an art trip when I realized the link between the Trussville Cahaba Project and Gee’s Bend,” she says. “I was still deep in research, learning how our local story was woven into the national one. But it didn’t truly click until that day—standing in the bend of the Alabama River, looking at framed photographs of FDR and old quilts.”
The Cahaba Project, built from 1936 to 1938, was one of four New Deal towns in Jefferson County alone—proof of just how hard Birmingham had been hit by the Depression. Trussville’s version was originally called “Slagheap Village” for the blast furnace waste that still litters the soil. “You can still find pieces of slag on the ground,” Amy says. “Some of it was used to pave the streets.”
Farming never took hold here because of the slag, but the neighborhood’s layout endured. Each home was built with a shed in back—for coal, chickens, a cow, and a car—and many of those sheds are still standing. Unlike the other more rural homestead communities, the Cahaba Project was designed as a modern suburban village: sidewalks, electricity, streetlights, indoor plumbing. “Most people are surprised to learn Trussville has a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places,” Amy says. “And it still looks very much like it did in the 1930s.”
In 2023, she invited Mary Ann and China Pettway to Trussville for the first Heritage Days celebration. They’ve returned every April since.
Watching them quilt feels like watching someone mend something you didn’t know was torn. They move slow. They pay attention. They make it okay to take your time.
“What else do you sing when you quilt?” I ask.
Mary Ann names a few: A Hard Working Soldier, Steal Away, Swing Low.
“My kids love Swing Low,” I say.
I should have seen it coming.
She glances at China, who starts to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot—slow and steady, with a depth of soul I’ve never experienced.
They harmonize all the way through, five times, each one a little different from the last.
When the final note fades, a sacred silence fills the room. Then, softly, the sewing machines begin again—picking up where the voices left off.
And so the song carries on—woven into fabric, passed down in patches, with history humming through every seam.