THE FABRIC OF LIFE

She is small — small enough to make a playhouse of a quilt draping over a quilting frame. Webb, her constant companion, huddles with her, fenced in by the legs of the stitching ladies. The children play jacks. Little rocks stand in for the jacks, and a bigger rock for the ball. Webb, six months her junior, is Mozell’s nephew. Sometimes he thinks they’re twins. They might as well be. They share twins’ conspiracies, secrets, and hiding places. Every once in awhile, Mozell’s mother interrupts their play, handing needles and thread to the two little ones beneath the quilt. The sharp-eyed pair threads them and hand them back up.

Mozell says the needle threading was her first step to quilting, safe in her tent with ladies singing and praying and gossiping overhead. But look, instead, at the jacks. Here is the heart, the making of the woman to come, the child who knows the possibilities in a pile of pebbles.
A ceiling fan turns lazily over the small group on the front porch of Mozell Benson’s quilting studio on a birdsong-filled plot on Lee Road 72. Two dogs snore beneath a bench, noses twitching at intervals, critiquing stray aromas mid-doze. The sky is soft, like a fuzzy blue blanket.
Benson, seventy-four, is the natural center of this or any circle.
“They call you an artist. Do you think of yourself as an artist?”
“Noo-oo,” she says, drawing the word into two notes. “I’m a quilter! And I was struggling hard to get those quilts made for my kids to keep warm.”
But she acknowledges, “That’s what they call me. They call you names too, don’t they?”
She’s all bone and sinew these days, a body hewn by work, a mind honed by continual ingenious invention necessitated by ten children and constant lack. Her memory has been polished, too, by time and use, focusing more sharply and often on the scenes of her childhood, skittering over more recent details.

The youngest of ten children, she is the daughter of sharecropper Isaiah Stephens, a man who could do anything with anything, and make anything from anything. When his house burned down while the family worked in the field, he found another house somewhere, took it apart board by board, and built a new home on his land. On 365 rented acres he grew cotton, corn and peanuts, and raised cows and goats, chickens and hogs. He butchered, he made baskets to bring the cotton from the fields, he blacksmithed, he plowed.
Improvisation made life possible. It’s how they survived. It’s why Mozell knew, when she raised ten children on nothing or its nearest relative, that when the canned fruit jar was empty, you make jelly from the leftover juice. That’s why she turned the story of the only job she ever lost into a life lesson for her children. That’s why her youngest children rode the school bus when they were too young for school. That way, she could remain a bus driver.
That’s why, when her two oldest were still babies, she took her husband’s worn work clothes, tore them into strips, and made a quilt.

Today, Benson’s quilts are insured for about $3,000 each when they are on exhibit; and somewhere or another, Mozell’s quilts are almost always on exhibit. The National Endowment for the Arts recognized her work and named her a Heritage Fellow in 2001. Her quilts have been seen at both the Smithsonian and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A Benson quilt hangs in the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. A New York Times reviewer said her quilt, “Strip Variation,” was “like a tactile map. Each piece of fabric in red, green, or black-and-white checks could be an imaginary country. Two sides are framed by floral print material, as though Liberty of London had found its way to Waverly, Alabama.”
In the 1980s, the U.S. State Department sent Benson, who had never flown in an airplane, to four African countries to demonstrate her quilting techniques and lecture.
“She was a star all over Africa. She was a star. They loved her,” said Maude Wahlman, the professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who helped discover Mozell and has written extensively on African-American quilts and their meaning.
Mozell Benson is a master of improvisation, with her father’s genius for making anything from anything. The post of her mailbox is a plow handle. Grass clippings from other people’s fertilized lawns are the mulch in the big, productive, butterfly enchanted garden that encircles her house. There are peanuts and scallions and sweet potatoes, sugar cane, fig trees, persimmon trees, plum trees, and pecan trees. When the blackbirds came for peanuts, they left blackberries behind. She didn’t tug out the briars; she harvested the fruit.

The little improvisations of her life accumulated in astonishing ways for this daughter of a sharecropper. The evidence travels the country in a collection of quilts made by one of America’s best-known and highly regarded African-American artists.
You may need to rethink your notion of quilts.
“In another generation, Mozell would have been a painter, an abstract expressionist painter. She has this ability to combine color and shapes in very dynamic ways,” Wahlman says. “Her quilts are especially strong and bold.”

In these quilts Wahlman and other scholars unravel a thread that leads back to Africa, where men sew narrow woven strips into cloth of bright, contrasting colors, and the best fabrics display asymmetrical design and more than one pattern — the hallmarks of many African-American quilts. Wed to these traditions is an improvisational style that borrows patterns and plays with them, alters them, repeats them, and morphs them into something all together unexpected. The inevitable comparison is to American jazz.
“African-American quilts are the visual expression of that improvisation. The reason that African-American quilts are exciting and dynamic is because they’re improvisational, just like jazz,” Wahlman says. “They’re not predictable. Mozell is particularly good at that.”

Benson wasn’t yet twenty when she made her first quilt from her husband’s work clothes. She, her husband, Curtis Murph, and their two babies had just moved to a one-room shack not far from Waverly.
That shack felt like a homecoming. “I thought I was smart. I was taking care of a house, doing cooking, washing, helping (Curtis’) grandfather farm. I had my own little house. I loved it because I was the boss.” For the first few years of her marriage (she was sixteen when she put on a freshly starched and ironed dress and went to the courthouse in Opelika to be wed), the couple had shared a three-room home with two families of Murph relations. When yet another person joined the crowd, Mozell leapt at the chance to occupy the newly vacated shack.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that quilts were recognized as anything other than women’s craft. Even when the highly symmetrically and meticulously stitched Amish quilts and other traditional forms gained acceptance, African-American quilts remained outside the circle with their wild variations of traditional quilt patterns — that is, when they followed a pattern at all. The use of bold, contrasting colors, and oft-displayed indifference to uniform stitch size or acute angles — the fussy essentials of many a traditional quilt show — seemed foreign. The fact that the quilts were a collection of leftover scraps, old clothing, or whatever was on hand, created a barrier for some viewers.

But the eventual embrace of these quilts proved a quantum leap, an elevation of quilting beyond craft and into art.
One New York Times reviewer called a display of African-American quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves.”
Quilting had finally arrived, carried in the work-gnarled hands of African-American women.

On Mozell’s porch on this blue-blanket-sky day is Sylvia Stephens, Mozell’s oldest child. Sylvia holds a tape recorder to capture her mother’s stories, but what she really needs is a crow bar, or a mind-reading device, or a Wayback Machine: some way to get inside her mother’s head to understand her quilts.
Sylvia didn’t always care about quilts. She barely noticed them. They were a fact of life when she was a little girl, no more mysterious or puzzling than the food in the garden. While the children slept, their mother sewed. So routine was her mother’s quilt production, Sylvia doesn’t remember seeing her mother make them. But they were there by the dozens and dozens.

Mozell first taught Sylvia to use her pedal sewing machine. But when Sylvia’s home economics teacher introduced sewing, “she was through with me,” Mozell says. Her daughter became an accomplished seamstress, making her own clothes with bargain-bin fabrics purchased with the money she earned at a job in Opelika. She wouldn’t return to her mother’s tutelage until she was in her fifties, with two grown daughters and a trio of granddaughters.
It wasn’t until the presentation for Mozell’s National Heritage Fellowship in 2001 that Sylvia, an Air Force officer, realized she’d been missing something.

“When my mom was on stage they asked her, ‘Have any of your children made quilts?’ And I thought, I’ve never made a quilt.”
Her mother told the interviewer that none of her daughters quilted. “I thought, ‘Well, that has to change.’”
Shortly after, the Air Force offered retirement to people with fifteen years service. Sylvia, a major, took them up on it and moved home to Lee County, settling in Opelika. Last year the Alabama State Council on the Arts approved Sylvia as her mother’s apprentice.

It’s at the intersection of Sylvia and Mozell where the improvisation, the abstract expressionism of Mozell’s work, hits home. As much as Sylvia grew up in the “wear it out, make it work, use it up,” school of survival, her education held a further refinement: a seamstress’s approach to sewing — the classical counterpoint to Mozell’s textile scatting.
“I was used to … making sure your seams line up in a shirt or dress or jacket, and Mom’s technique for making quilts is at the opposite end of the continuum. It’s mostly about economy and being efficient and saving time.
“It wasn’t comfortable to me,” Sylvia said.
Mozell’s lifelong need to make quilts quickly and cheaply from material at hand evolved alongside her sense of what color can go beside another, what shape can complement another shape. But it’s unspoken, unexamined. So getting an explanation out of Mozell about the choices she makes is both very difficult and way too easy.

How does Mozell decide what piece of
fabric goes where?
“The fabric tells you what to do,” she said.
One morning this summer, Sylvia brought a quilt she was working on to her mother for consultation.
“Tell me what your concerns are,” she said.
“You can do whatever you want,” Mozell answered. She wasn’t being obstinate, just stating a basic fact of her quilting ethic.
“Tell me what you would do,” Sylvia persisted.
“I don’t know what I would do until I do it.”
A few years back, the owners of an art gallery in Tennessee offered to represent Mozell and sell her quilts. She’d share the profits with the gallery, which could put her quilts before the buying public in a way that hadn’t occurred before. But there were problems, not the least of which was the gallery’s desire for the right of first-refusal for all Mozell’s quilts — standard art-world stuff. It meant that before Mozell could sell, or even give away, any quilt she made, the gallery got first crack.

Mozell turned the gallery down, partly because the document — the usual daunting tangle of legalese and technical provisions — made her uncomfortable, but also because giving is what she does. Giving is who she is.
“That’s part of her ethical being,” Wahlman said. “It is part of her very being to give quilts away.
When one of her quilts was stolen during a show in Miami, Benson’s response was typical. “I can make another one,” she told Wahlman. “That man must have needed it more than I did.” And that was before she realized insurance would cover her loss.
“If you be kind to me, if I got something and you like it, you can have it,” she said. “I don’t need the money. I need the friendship and the kindness and all the other good things that come from being just nice to people.”
It’s an attitude that has gained returns in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.

The story of just how she was discovered by the art world is now a bit confused. Each participant remembers the details differently. But at the center of the story are the quilts she gave to people who came into her life. One of those people was a volunteer for the service organization Vista in 1973-74. He also happened to have an understanding of art, knowledge about quilts, and an interest in them that probably only a handful of people shared in that decade.
His name is John Scully.
Scully’s father is the famous Yale art historian, Vincent Scully. John Scully is also an artist, these days mostly a printmaker, but a basket maker and painter as well. Shortly before he came to Lee County in his twenties, he had attended the lectures of another Yale art expert, Robert Ferris Thompson, a trailblazer in the recognition of African-American quilts.

The way Mozell tells it, she gave Scully a quilt during his stay in Lee County. “He was always cold,” she said. Scully remembers the quilts coming later. But in any case, when Maude Wahlman was a young graduate student a few years later, working on a doctoral dissertation about African-American quilts, it was Scully who brought her to Alabama and introduced her to quilters, including Mozell Benson.
Mozell offered to show the student a few quilts.
“She started getting quilts out of all these places around her house,” Wahlman said. “She had sheds out in the yard where she had tons of them stored.”
Neither Wahlman nor Scully had expected anything like it.
“I thought they were fabulous, marvelous,” Wahlman said, and she spent the day taking pictures of quilt after quilt while Scully, Mozell, or one of Mozell’s children, stood on the porch and held the quilts for the photos, the warm colors glowing in the shimmering heat.
“I can’t follow song,” Scully says, “but I can follow what the colors do, and in all the best quilts you see several things going on at the same time. The same color spread across the quilt in different ways. You see the general and the variations at the same time. So it’s a powerful thing.

“They reminded me of paintings in a way. And they drew me to them, and they reminded me of attending a black church, and the call and response. … You take a traditional gospel song, take a phrase of it, and that verse of a gospel song can go for a half-hour.”
From this meeting, attention to Mozell’s work grew.
Eventually, Wahlman put together a couple of touring quilt shows, one with the quilts of many women, including Mozell, and a second show made up entirely of Mozell Benson originals. They split any profits the shows earn.
Mozell and Sylvia sit in Mozell’s cool studio one morning in August. The studio is a gift from the Design-Build Master’s Program at Auburn University, inspired by her quilting and created in 2006-2007 by students in the program. And it is a quilter’s dream. An entire wall is lined with storage space like fat pockets, each overflowing with donated fabric of every imaginable color, texture, and quality. The ceiling is a patchwork of white and green boards from her old house, arranged like quilt made of fabric strips. In the house next door — also a gift from the Design-Build program — stands a bed stacked with three mattresses so Mozell can use it as a work surface to tack her quilts. Like many hallmarks of her work, tacking is a timesaving measure. Rather than quilting the top, batting, and bottom together, tacking uses a constellation of individual stitches placed at regular intervals across the quilt to connect the three layers. Using tacking, Mozell said, she can finish a quilt in a day. Those who prefer the fine-stitches of quilting will still be working a week later.

Another timesaving technique: When the fabric allows it, she tears; she doesn’t cut. She also has a clever way to make a pseudo-binding around her quilts using the quilt back. And she doesn’t use batting. She’d rather go to Goodwill and find a nice, worn blanket, or even a soft sheet.
The house, too, is inspired by quilting, with a ceiling upholstered like a tacked and varied quilt top. Even the windows repeat the quilt motif, as does the big front door.
“I say God give (the house) to me. God give it to me because I wouldn’t have waited that long,” Mozell laughs.
In her studio she pulls out some fabric, evaluating how she might use the small and odd pieces people bring her: quilt pieces from abandoned projects, children’s clothing, crocheted lace collars.
“I don’t get much stuff I can’t do something with,” she said. “It may take me awhile. (But) I don’t throw away much. When I throw it away, it ain’t fit for nothing.”

It’s as though the young woman who lived in that one-room shack, the child who watched her home burn down while her older sister ran screaming into the house to rescue her youngster, the clever girl who helped make breakfast for her parents and siblings and then went ahead to make dinner while she was at it to save time — is never far away.
Eventually, Mozell’s husband moved to Chicago. She and her children — four at the time — followed him there. A few months later, he was still out of work, and the couple decided to come home. Mozell and the kids came first. He was to follow.
She never saw Curtis Murph again. He died years later in Chicago. She married Grady Benson. He died in the late 1970s.
Had she never been “discovered,” she would still have ten successful adult children to show for her efforts. Most of them are college graduates and they’re spread all over. She has a daughter just across the road and another daughter in Las Vegas, a son in Birmingham, and one in Atlanta. And there are a few score grandchildren and great-grandchildren, too, many of whom cannot begin to fathom the need in which Mozell’s genius flourished.
Sylvia, though, has a clear idea.

Like her mother in the 1930s and 1940s, Sylvia hauled water from the spring, rubbed clothing on a washboard until her knuckles were raw, brought in wood for the fire, chopped cotton, and picked cotton until her fingernails looked like battered claws.

“We never had fingernails, and if you did, they were always dirty. You were always working in the soil and with the plants and feeding horses and cows and pigs.”
But there were differences: While Mozell’s sewing was a necessity of life, Sylvia’s dressmaking was an open door. From the time Sylvia made a flour sack into a skirt, she was fashioning a new woman, a woman who found a way to go to college, who sent her children to college, and who expects to see her children’s children go to college.
“I think I kind of take it for granted,” says Sylvia’s oldest daughter, Kori Majeed. “I grew up middle class because my mother went into the Air Force. I was on autopilot: You graduate from high school, go to college. You graduate from college, OK you get some student loans and get a graduate degree. That was kind of expected.”

Even with Sylvia’s hardscrabble past, she is a different woman than her mother. She’s analytical. Her mother intuitive. She likes to take the measure of things, whether it’s her words, or a piece of cloth. Her mother goes with the flow. So Sylvia struggles to quantify her mother’s art, to find the method of it. She has it down to a list of seven steps that summarize her mother’s procedure. Still, it’s not enough. She can’t yet see inside her mother’s brain.
Yet on the last of the seven steps, they are of one mind: “Mom says you’ve got to sleep under it. You don’t just put it away. That gives it life. That gives it air. That allows it to breathe.”
“I send up a prayer,” Mozell adds. “And I say a prayer with each (tacking) knot that whoever gets it will be the one who needs it the most.”