The Bend in the River

Adaptation and evolution have been on my mind for weeks, ever since a trip to Gee’s Bend, Alabama. If you don’t know the story, it is one of survival and creativity, and also of racism and isolation. Gee’s Bend sits in a bend of the Alabama River. The closest town, Camden, is a 15-minute ferry ride away. The ferry had run since the 1800s. It allowed residents to shop, seek care, take part in public life and vote. The only other route is an 80-mile drive through rural Alabama.

In 1962, after the community organized to vote, the sheriff and local officials shut the ferry down. They kept it shut for 44 years. The reason was obvious: to deny people the vote, and a great deal more. The ferry was restored in 2006 and seven years ago it became the first electric-powered ferry in the United States.

I first learned about the quilts of Gee’s Bend while living in Mexico. Roland Freeman, the cultural anthropologist and quilt documentarian, came to meet a group of women on a small rancho. They were making retablos, the painted tin devotional pieces that had long been the work of men, but the women made theirs from fabric. It was a new way of seeing the inner lives of women and their families.

Going to Gee’s Bend was a journey I had long hoped to make. I drove there with great anticipation for “The Airing of the Quilts,” the town’s annual celebration. What I found was a complicated piece of art history. The art world “discovered” an abstract form made from worn clothing and scraps, and the community is honored for it. But I did not see the form evolving, at least not in what was in front of me.

That left me with questions I couldn’t put down:

Why make a quilt that takes many hours when a cheaper one is sold at Walmart?
Why save old clothing to do it?
How does a community go from creative obscurity to art world stardom? 
And what does it owe to that tradition afterward?
I am facing a new cancer diagnosis, so for me these questions are not abstract. Cancer survives on mutation, change, and mystery. It is an act of simultaneous adaptation and destruction. Tradition is fragile, and so are bodies. I keep wondering how much of a thing must be preserved for it to stay itself, and how much must change for it to survive.

That brings me to the work I have done for nearly 20 years. When we began, nonprofit news was a handful of outlets. There were fewer than 30 of us. The Lens started as a blog, then became a website. Today the Institute for Nonprofit News counts more than 500 members. Growth like that brings a mandate to evolve, but nobody agrees on how.

Gee’s Bend suggests a few things to me:

Access is the foundation. The ferry was never just a boat. It was a route to the ballot box, and cutting it off was a way to silence a community. Local news is also infrastructure. It connects people to public life, and we should ask who still can’t reach us.

Being honored is not the same as evolving. Praise can freeze a tradition in place. We should ask whether we’re growing because the community needs us, or because we’re good at being admired.

Sometimes the old thing comes back in a new form. The ferry returned after 44 years, and now it runs on electricity. It still crosses the same water and carries people to the same place. Maybe that is the model for us: keep the purpose, change the engine.

As for the Walmart quilt, I think the answer is that the handmade one carries something the cheap, factory-made one can’t. It holds memory, time, labor and a particular way of seeing. Our version of that is trust and local knowledge, the proof that someone was in the room. We will have to decide how to keep that while the rest of the industry changes around us.

I don’t have the answer yet. The question is still under discussion at The Lens and across the nonprofit news community. For now I am staying with it, the way I stayed on that road and ferry to Gee’s Bend.