Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee's Bend Quilt

In 2000, nearly six decades after her father's death, Arlonzia Pettway remembered vividly how, in 1942, her mother, newly suffering the loss of her husband and the father of their children, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Approaching eighty at the time and a seasoned quilt maker herself, Arlonzia Pettway readily recalled this quilt made by her grieving mother--and involving her own bereaved assistance. In Love Lies Here, Collins examines the small African American farming community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, through a quilt made by Arlonzia's mother, Missouri Pettway, to argue that this woman's quilt and her daughter's remembrance of it shine light on essential questions of living, dying, and grieving.