Hi, my name is Doris Pettway Hacketts. I was born in Gee’s Bend and now live in Jackson, Alabama, with my husband Mims Hacketts. My mother and father were Marie Pettway and John Perkins Pettway. They had thirteen children, and I was the middle child, the seventh. So half of the children I was raised with, and the other half had grown up and left home. It was good. Growing up, I worked in the cotton fields and helped around the house. Matter-of-fact, I left the cotton fields to go to college. I’ve always been determined; I was a good student, and friendly too!

I started quilting by watching my mom–she made quilts out of necessity, to keep warm in the winter. I came back home after college and got a job at the local elementary school. which afforded me a lot of time to spend with my mom making quilts. I was always interested in putting the colors together. When you’re working on a quilt, and you complete it, it means success. You get such joy out of it because you used your hands to make it work. Quilting is like therapy for me. It allows me to escape and create something, and that is fulfilling.

Colors inspire me. Dark colors. Light colors. I think of it in this sense—this is the way life is. Sometimes your life is going to be colorful, and sometimes it’s going to be dark. It’s never the same. So when you’re piecing a quilt together, you are putting something together that exemplifies your life. I find beauty in a quilt when it is complete and I can look at it and say, “job well done.” Or I take it apart. Sometimes you got to take it apart and redo it because it doesn’t fit. Again, it is like life—sometimes it doesn't fit, sometimes it doesn't work. But you don’t throw it away–you redo it. You take it apart and put it back together.

When people look at my quilts, I want them to see my personality. I want my quilts to show my personality, and how colors and patterns can be used to represent life’s many changes.

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History of Gee’s Bend:
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, rural, community in Alabama's Black Belt—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of enslaved Africans who, for generations, worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art.

Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward a proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts, but they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement -- the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places across the country have works been found by three - and sometimes four - generations of women in the same family, nor have many works been discovered that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s heirloom pieces stand out for their flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.