A quilt of tattered patches
In Alabama’s Black Belt, art, like life, can drift from a seeming unattractiveness, into chaos and back toward normalcy, to arrive at something close to heartbreaking beauty. You see it within a quilt made at a place called Gee’s Bend, a spit of land rammed out into the Alabama River, deep in the heart of the Black Belt, far off at the end of a lonely road. Its maker, its author, a woman named Lucy T. Pettway, assembled a mishmash of triangles, colors and sizes, disorienting and structure-less in its scheme. Yet, even before you realize it has the name, “Birds in the Air,” figures — the imagination may suggest starlings fading South, robins snared in a counter-current — unfold across the fabric, forging an order that springs forth a rich and exquisite design. The Black Belt, a region across Alabama’s middle, is as poor as it is beautiful, a place full of heartbreak, rich in history and brimming with potential. There’s the potential to better itself, but also a potential to better Alabama, its advocates say. Lift up the Black Belt, they urge, make it a more prosperous place, and you’ll put Alabama in the middle ranks of the states of the Union. Sen. Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, urged the Legislature to heed that call when he entreated recently, “Please don’t forget the Black Belt, because we’re too poor to be quiet.” Improvement, the advocates add, will take a major push. Legislators from the region say it will come only with statewide awareness of that region, the folds in the quilt, so to speak: As the poorest region profits and flourishes, so too will the rest of Alabama. Do not discard what can become vital, what can be transformed into essential. A gourd, too, is at first an ugly thing, cast aside to turn into a husk. Hold it. Run your palms over the rises and dimples. Feel that it is marred by the blemishes of life but at the same time is lifeless, full of emptiness, drained of its structural heart, yet stiffened like a goat bladder left to dry in the sun. People love gourds in the rural South, including this part of the western Black Belt. They paint them, fashion holes in them, string them up and stretch dozens of them in a line above a dirt yard, from the eave of the house to the apex of the barn. It won’t take long before a flight of martins takes up residence, swift birds that nibble on the mosquitoes and bring joy and chatter to the quiet countryside. The rural scenes of chaos tamed ebb as many have moved off the land of the Black Belt, once the agricultural powerhouse of the South. Cotton fields, cattle ranches and, today, catfish ponds are still abundant, but the bulk of the people have stopped working the land. They’ve moved away or to town, where more urban examples of the quilt and the gourd and the transformation of the ugly and the chaotic to the dear-to-heart now live. In a predominantly black neighborhood of Selma, in the midst of the Black Belt, is Charlie Lucas’ backyard, a place strewn with the artifacts of the risen and failed New South. Fenders, bow saws, mufflers, radiators, ancient and rusting lawn chairs scatter about like folks who’ve lingered at a family reunion. They play the role of the living, of people, animals, fish, art. They call him the Tin Man. He takes the physical wreckage of the Black Belt and bends it to societal yearnings, and shortcomings, transforming it into statement, comment, something worthwhile, something approaching beauty and hope. Scatter-designed quilts, bumpy gourds and rusty mufflers are, upon first glimpse, items bound for the trash heap. They are not kind to the eye. It is much the same with the society that dwells in a string of counties across Alabama’s middle. On first appearances, the Black Belt is lost, so beset by poverty, isolation and neglect that some outside experts contend that total abandonment by its people would the best for its eventual redemption. |
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A statistical quagmire But those who live here, those who know the beauty of its isolation, its rolling hills, graceful trees, easy rivers, small towns, those who see the strength of the people reflected in their art and their way, understand the day will come when a backwater will become a destination. This is the attitude you must have when you stare into the barrel of the statistics. A positive attitude is a powerful — sometimes lone —ally in the Black Belt. The chaotic design covers each county like a quilt unfurled from a hope chest and impressed with wrinkles: • Blacks are the overwhelming majority of the population in Alabama’s Black Belt. They are also some of the poorest people in the nation. • U.S. Census figures show that in Wilcox County, home to Gee’s Bend, some 50 percent of blacks live below the poverty line. The per capita income in 2004 in Wilcox was $10,903; about half of what it is nationwide. • Thirty-five percent of all residents and 45 percent of blacks in Perry County live in poverty. Some 43 percent of blacks in Dallas County, where Selma is located, are in poverty. A quarter of all Black Belt families earn less than $15,000 a year. The 12 counties of the Black Belt are among the most impoverished 13 percent of counties in the country. • The Bureau of Economic Analysis says that since 1994, earnings for residents in Perry County have grown at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent. In Dallas, it has been 2.7 percent, while in nearby Hale, it is 4.3 percent. Nationwide earnings have grown during the same period at a rate of 5.5 percent. • The region’s unemployment rate hovered just below 11 percent, says Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s Black Belt Action Commission. Nationwide it is 5.6 percent, a figure mirrored in the Calhoun County area. • The Black Belt Community Foundation says the 10 counties in the state with the highest unemployment rate are in the region. • Riley’s Black Belt Action Commission states that in the last 50 years the overall population of the 12 Black Belt counties has dropped by 25 percent. • The infant mortality rate, the number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births, in the United States is 6.8. Among blacks in Hale County it is nearly three times the national rate. In Lowndes it is 15.6; in Dallas it is 12.3; and in Perry, 8.6. The average across the 12 counties of Alabama’s Black Belt, is 10.3, according to Alabama’s Center for Health Statistics. • The governor’s commission also says 59 percent of all births in the region are to unwed mothers. In the western Black Belt, in the counties of Lowndes, Dallas, Perry and Hale where most of the work for this research was carried out, the life expectancy is a little more than 70 years, close to that of some developing nations. Residents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic are expected to live longer. The western Black Belt has few industries. Auto plants, including Mercedes near Tuscaloosa and Hyundai in Montgomery, draw from a labor pool in the area. Lowndes County has managed to land a number of parts suppliers, and Dallas County, mainly Selma, has made progress in populating its industrial park. But the economy of the area still can best be described as anemic. Before 1965, the watershed year of the civil rights movement, Uniontown in Perry County, for example, had no fewer than five industries. Today, one small cheese plant and a catfish meal factory remain. Some who call themselves realists about this part of the Black Belt put it like this: The Black Belt is isolated. It has no infrastructure. There is no interstate. A major industry takes one look, sees this and a weak public education system, and turns its eyes away. The quilt does not emerge kindly in their vision. But the local realists, the ones who know the place, also believe in resurrection, that renewal can rise from this chaos. Part 2: Rebirth from within focuses on outside efforts to stir up interest in economic renewal of the Black Belt. John Fleming’s work in the Black Belt in 2006 was made possible by funding from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. |
