¹ In February 1937, Arthur Rothstein was in north-central Alabama photographing Birmingham's steel industry and some nearby resettlement housing projects when he received new instructions from Stryker. "The other day, while getting out a set of pictures for the Administrator to take to Congress," Stryker wrote on February 5, "I realized how lean our file is on good southern tenancy pictures. [We must] find families that are fairly representative of the conditions in the tenancy areas, then take quite a series of pictures on each of these families, showing the house, the people, the children, the farm, the buildings and fences, etc."²

Cabins and outbuildings on the former Pettway plantation. LC-USF34T01-25226-D

Artelia Bendolph. LC-USF34T01-25359-D

Cabin. LC-USF334T01-25386-D

The photographs made during Rothstein's five-year stint with the photographic section form a catalog of the agency's initiatives. His first assigment was to document the lives of some Virginia farmers who were being evicted to make way for the Shenandoah National Park and about to be relocated by the Resettlement Administration, and subsequent trips took him to the Dust Bowl and to cattle ranches in Montana. The immediate incentive for his February 1937 assignment came from the interest generated by congressional consideration of farm tenant legislation sponsored in the Senate by John H. Bankhead, a moderate Democrat from Alabama with a strong interest in agriculture. Enacted in July, the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act gave the agency its new lease on life as the Farm Security Administration.

On February 18, Stryker wrote Rothstein that the journalist Beverly Smith had told him about a tenant community at Gee's Bend, Alabama, "the most primitive set-up he has ever heard of. Their houses are of mud and stakes which they hew themselves." Smith was preparing an article on tenancy for the July issue of the American Magazine, but Stryker sensed bigger possibilities, telling Rothstein, "We could do a swell story; one that LIFE will grab."³ Stryker planned to visit Alabama and asked Rothstein to wait for him, but he was never able to make the trip and Rothstein went to Gee's Bend alone.

Houston or Erick Kennedy plowing. LC-USF33-T01-002409-M4

Jennie Pettway and another girl with the quilter Jorena Pettway. LC-USF34T01-25363-D

The former home of the Pettways. LC-USF334T01-25380-D

The residents of Gee's Bend symbolized two different things to the Resettlement Administration. On the one hand, reports about the community prepared by the agency describe the residents as isolated and primitive, people whose speech, habits, and material culture partook of an African origin and an older way of life. On the other hand, the agency's agenda for rehabilitation implied a view of the residents as the victims of slavery and the farm-tenant system on a former plantation. The two perceptions may be seen as related: if these tenants--despite their primitive culture--could benefit from training and financial assistance, their success would demonstrate the efficacy of the programs.

Lying at the edge of the Black Belt in Wilcox County, about thirty miles southwest of Selma, Gee's Bend is a block of land enclosed on three sides by a massive turn in the Alabama River. The Resettlement Administration reports emphasize its isolation, describing the unreliable ferry that approached from the east and the poor muddy road that entered from the west. Founded by the Gee family early in the 1800s, the plantation was sold to Mark Pettway in 1845. Many of the black tenants Arthur Rothstein photographed were named Pettway. The white Pettways had sold the plantation in the early years of this century, and the seven hundred or so blacks had since rented or sharecropped the land from its successive owners.

The reports also stress the group's unique customs and language, sometimes in patronizing terms. "Truly these are primitive people," a 1937 report states, "living together in this tribal like settlement far away from civilization in their habits and manner of living."⁴ Quoting from an article by Renwick C. Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister from nearby Camden, the report emphasizes the distinctive culture of the residents of Gee's Bend, reporting that other blacks in the region called them Africans.⁵

Interior of the old Pettway home occupied by the foreman John Miller and his family. Melvine Miller is at the extreme left, and Cherokee Parker Pettway is the adult seated at the right. LC-USF34T01-25365-D

On the Pettway plantation. Probably Adell Pettway. LC-USF34T01-25374-D

Willie S. Pettway. LC-USF334T01-25393-D

The community had received public assistance from the Red Cross in 1932 and federal and state aid in 1933 and 1934. Beginning in 1935, the Resettlement Administration made agricultural loans and offered farm and home management advice. In 1937, the average rural rehabilitation loan to Gee's Bend families was $353.41, and the agency reports speak of possible cooperative undertakings--a building campaign for houses, barns, a schoolhouse, and a sawmill. Residents were also encouraged to replace oxen with more efficient mules. One report concludes with the hope that "a few years will change this primitive settlement to a modern rural community."⁶

Rothstein's photographs, made as these activities were getting under way, may be read as the "before" in a before-and-after pair. The fifty-one photographs selected for the file mostly illustrate the "primitive" mood of the place, concentrating on the gourd water dipper, meat curing in trees, hand-hewn fence palings, and unglazed cabin windows. The pictures of relatively new, or at least "less primitive," items are limited to the Pettway family's former home, the steel plow pulled by a mule, and the frame church that also served as a school. The killed negatives include one view of a new house under construction.

Unlike the subjects of many Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration photographs, the people of Gee's Bend are not portrayed as victims. The photographs do not show the back-breaking work of cultivation and harvest, but only offer a glimpse of spring plowing. At home, the residents do not merely inhabit substandard housing but are engaged in a variety of domestic activities. The dwellings at Gee's Bend must have been as uncomfortable as the frame shacks thrown up for farm workers everywhere, but Rothstein's photographs emphasize the log cabins' picturesque qualities. This affirming image of life in Gee's Bend is reinforced by Rothstein's deliberate, balanced compositions which lend dignity to the people being pictured.

At the end of the school day. LC-USF34T01-25378-D

Curing meat. LC-USF34T01-25229-D

There does not seem to have been a Life magazine story about Gee's Bend, but a long article ran in the New York Times Magazine of 27 August 1937. It is illustrated by eleven of Rothstein's pictures, with a text that draws heavily upon a Resettlement Administration report dated in May. The story extols the agency's regional director as intelligent and sympathetic and describes the Gee's Bend project in glowing terms. Reporter John Temple Graves II perceived the project as retaining agrarian--and African--values. "No one can visit Gee's Bend without an appreciation of racial virtues preserved there," he wrote, "which tend to disappear in more civilized quarters where the ambition of the Negro is to become only a carbon copy of the white man."⁷

The agency's programs at Gee's Bend continued after Rothstein's visit. During 1937, the agency purchased the old Pettway plantation and two adjacent farms, divided the land, and rented it to the tenants. The following year, a nurse began working in the community, and construction began for a school, store, blacksmith shop, and cooperative cotton gin. By 1939 enough visible change had occurred for Stryker to send Marion Post Wolcott to the community to photograph the signs of progress--to get the "after" pictures.⁸ During the forties, many families at Gee's Bend bought their farms from the government for an average of $1,400 each. This was about $2,600 less per farm than the eighty-eight units had cost the government, a subsidy that seems to have been fairly typical for Farm Security Administration projects of this type.⁹

Annie Pettway Bendolph. LC-USF34T01-25354-D

Bucket and gourd. LC-USF34T01-25379-D

Mr. Hale from Snow Hill conducting school in the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church building. LC-USF334T01-25348-D

Gee's Bend is a place that has continued to fascinate outsiders. In 1941, New York City speech professor and folklore collector Robert Sonkin recorded music, recitations, discussion, and a Fourth of July program at Gee's Bend.¹⁰ A 1962 biography of Will Alexander--Tugwell's successor as head of the Farm Security Administration--concludes with a paean of praise woven around the story of the community's successful development.¹¹ Gee's Bend became an important part of the mid-1960s Freedom Quilting Bee, an offshoot of the Civil Rights movement designed to boost family income and foster community development by selling handcrafts to outsiders.¹² Calvin Trillin devoted a 1969 New Yorker piece to the opening of the community's new sewing center, paid for with quilting bee revenues.¹³ The University of Alabama's 1982 tour guide Seeing Historic Alabama cited the Farm Security Administration project and the quilting bee at Gee's Bend.¹⁴ In 1983, an exhibit in Birmingham sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Foundation included several of Rothstein's photographs of Gee's Bend, and an oral history project at the the Birmingham public library sent new researchers and a photographer to document a new generation of residents.¹⁵ Nevertheless the residents themselves have expressed some doubt that the attention they have received has improved their lot in life. In 1985, local historian Katherine Tucker Windham reported: "They say, 'Ain't nothing ever happened.'"