Patchworks of Memory: Quilting Remembrance and Healing

Nearly six decades after her father’s death, Arlonzia Pettway remembered vividly how in late 1941 or 1942 her mother, Missouri Pettway, 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 readily recalled this quilt made by her grieving mother—and involving her own bereaved assistance—within the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Her telling testimony went like this: “It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, ‘I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.’ She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt, and I helped her tore them up. Bottom of the pants is narrow, top is wide, and she had me to cutting the top part out and to shape them up in even strips.”

The way Arlonzia remembered this delicate time and this decisive act at the turn of the twenty-first century, the living, moving force behind her mother’s creation of this pieced-together quilt, was the early death of her husband, Nathaniel Pettway, at the age of forty-three, following months of sickness and suffering.

Arlonzia recalled her mother’s expressed aims and intentions in making her pieced, or patchwork, quilt—including her choice of quilting materials and design and her desire for the covering’s creation and use—had been deeply laden with love, loss, and longing.

Her mother’s hands, the daughter remembered, had worked to express and tend her aching heart. This tender textile and the powerful memory of its making provide a path to dwell in some of the lifeways and lifeworlds of Missouri and Nathaniel Pettway’s homeplace of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a community well accustomed to living with and through quilts.

This handmade cotton quilt and the way it was remembered by an eldest daughter of a recently widowed mother call us to contemplate vital life stories as well as core aspects of the staggering history and striking creativity of this rural Black Belt community located on former cotton plantation land and intimately familiar with grief.

Considered together, the textile and Arlonzia’s testimony bring attention to human suffering, resilience, creativity, and grace both within and beyond Gee’s Bend. The pieced-together quilt’s inspiration, construction, and desired use touch on enduring questions, simultaneously singular and shared: How do we tend the loss of a loved one? What are things people in mourning need and feel moved to do? What supports people during this extraordinarily difficult time? What are the roles for creativity in grief—this fundamental human emotion and experience of profound distress propelled by loss? And more specifically, how might a closely crafted material object—a handmade pieced cotton quilt—in its conception, making, and use serve the excruciating work of grieving a loved one?

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Gee’s Bend, Alabama, as a place and the bold and compelling quilts created by its residents first captured my imagination in 2003, when I witnessed, along with over two hundred thousand others, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This widely popular and highly celebrated exhibition showcased some seventy quilts, dating from the 1930s to 2000, created by both living and deceased quilt makers.

An ambitious large-scale exhibition, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend shared with a broad museum-going public, the art, artists, and history of this predominantly African American community located in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, this storied region historically tied to a cotton economy and originally named for its dark fertile soil.

Missouri Pettway’s pieced cotton quilt made in mourning was prominently displayed. Flanked by other gently geometric quilts created from readied and repurposed pieces of old field clothes—overalls, pants, shirts, skirts, and socks—this then sixty-plus-year-old cotton covering was accompanied by her daughter Arlonzia Pettway’s testimony, in which Arlonzia recalled the circumstances surrounding its creation.

I was in the company of a favorite museum companion—a social historian friend who magically seems to share my desired but unstated rhythm for talk and silence, movement and stillness, while in the presence of art. Sheer delight is the feeling I recall as we experienced this stunning show of quilts within arm’s reach of each other on that winter day.

Newly pregnant with my first child, I was also brimming with anticipation at the prospect of soon sharing my rapidly growing secret with my good friend. And in this way, I was flush with the prospect of birth when I first experienced this quilt—with its implicit love story at its core—made by a woman in the thick grip of grief.

On that day, Missouri Pettway’s quilt captivated me for its quiet power and the raw anguish of its creation. Imagining mother and daughter, together, tearing up the worn clothes of their loved one so the newly widowed mother could create a covering out of the familiar fabric gave me pause nearly twenty years ago, when I was quietly drawn in close to her quilt and its story.

This familial image of shared sorrow, intimate yearning, creative sustenance, and healing love remained with me. Fully drenched and drowning in my own excruciating loss five years after first beholding her quilt, Missouri Pettway’s quilt drew me in, once again, close and still.

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While recovering from the birth of my second child, I was called home. My father was dying, and he wanted me at his side. His call did not come as a surprise. The last time he had visited, we napped. Seeking comfort and protection for a weak and weary body riddled with cancer, he had finally found a somewhat possible position stretched out on my long brown couch.

I lay a soft blanket on him and made tea. As he slept—hopefully finding some ease and escape from the sheer physical and emotional pain of dying of a quickly spreading cancer—I stretched out on the couch opposite him. Hearing rain and lying still on my side with my head turned toward him, I knew then and there that I needed to begin holding my beloved father in my memory. For while he was wholly striving to live, his body had borne just about all it could bear. He was suffering and seeking a path to peace, relief, and release.

My father’s clear and courageous call a few months later did not come as a surprise; I had been living in fear of the phone. Responding to his call, I returned home to Cleveland, Ohio, where I accompanied my Birmingham, Alabama-born and raised father on his final journey from this earth by holding his impossibly thin and startlingly soft hand while his newborn grandson lay at my chest. My second son just coming to be while my father was passing away.

“You were gifted,” a renowned sociologist later said to me, referring to how my father had sought and secured my presence at his bedside as he made his difficult transition from life on earth. But of course, it did not feel anything like a gift at the time. Someone entirely precious to me had just taken their final breath, and it felt like the absolute end of all light, warmth, and air.

In the thick grip of my own grief exactly five years after first encountering Missouri Pettway’s handmade quilt made in mourning, her tender quiet quilt once again captured my imagination. Compelled this time by raw inner necessity and driven by both desire and despair, I sought to learn some of the lessons of her faded cotton covering, her lovingly stitched lament, and the histories and memories surrounding it.

Now, having dwelled on Missouri Pettway’s quilt for over a decade and having lived intimately with loss for most of this time, I am increasingly aware that my near daily, nearly devotional, practice of holding her cotton covering in my head and heart, coupled by the healing grace of time, has served to soothe my soul and soften my sorrow. Her extraordinary, exemplary quilt continues to guide me on.

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From Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt by Lisa Gail Collins. Copyright © 2025. Available from University of Washington Press.