Something Else --- Day 6/278

Walk:  PT and other things in the hood
Distance:  2.5 miles, Tons of Flexion exercises, Yoga asanas too

Gees Bend quilt by Arlonzia Pettway

The majority of Gees Bend, Alabama residents bear the surnames of the white people who once owned their forebears -- Pettway, Young, Bendolph.  "We all got slave master's names," quilter Arlonzia Pettway explained. "We all was something else." 

That 'something else" in her her great-grandmother, Dinah Miller's case, was a young African woman who was abducted and brought in bondage in a slave ship.  Miller also brought her knowledge of free style ("My Way") African quilting which was handed down - along with oral recollections of antebellum history - to subsequent generations.

As Pettway explains:  They was in slavery.  They worked all day then they'd go under the pile of brushes, and set the log down to sit on and make a quilt.  The slave masters didn't allow them to piece a quilt.  They didn't want them to do nothing, they didn't want them to learn how to write, they didn't want them to have no beautiful quilts, they didn't want them to have no correct language.  That's what she told me.