conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Gee's, Bend, UpA with the genre: Children's Books, Growing Up & Facts of Life?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Quilts of Gee's Bend'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Quilts of Gee's Bend
  When Nettie Young was eleven years old, her mother gave her a pile of cloth strips and told her to make a quilt all by herself. Nettie had always sat with her mother and watched her quilting, picking up the scraps at her feet, but this time her mother walked away. She was testing her daughter to see if she was independent as well as talented. The cotton and corduroy scraps were in different colors and patterns: plaids, checks, dots, even a little yellow animal print. The odds and ends came from old work shirts, dress tails, and aprons. Looking back, at age eighty-nine, Nettie said, "When I was growing up, you threw nothing away.... You found every good spot for a quilt piece, and that's how you made your quilts."
  Nettie arranged the strips to form squares in a brilliant geometric design. She called her finished quilt "Stacked Bricks." From then on, she became known as one of the best quilters in Gee's Bend, Alabama. "I always loved sewing," she said. "Didn't need a pattern... I just draw it out the way I want it."
  Mary L. Bennett also began on her own. "Didn't nobody teach me to make quilts," she said. "I just learned it by myself, about twelve or thirteen. I was seeing my grandmamma piecing it up, and then I start. I just taken me some pieces and put it together, piece them up till they look like I want them to look."
  The women of Gee's Bend have been making quilts for generations. They are descended from the slaves on the Pettway Plantation. In 1845, Mark Pettway moved his family and more than one hundred slaves from North Carolina to Gee's Bend, along the Alabama River. The bulb of land is five miles wide and seven miles long and is surrounded by water on three sides. The place got its name from Joseph Gee, a white planter who had staked his claim there in 1816. After the end of the Civil War, many of the freed slaves took the last name Pettway and stayed in Gee's Bend, forming their own all-black community. The old slave quarter grew into a village. In 1900, a white lawyer named Adrian Van de Graaff bought the plantation, and the Gee's Benders worked the land for him as tenant farmers. "The same Negroes and their descendants are upon it who tilled it as slaves," Van de Graaff wrote to a friend. The Gee's Benders continued to "work like slaves for the white people," said Loretta Pettway.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Irene Williams made several quilts that contain fabric printed with the word "vote." "Housetop" variation, circa 1975.
  Every Sunday, the women attended Pleasant Grove Baptist Church with their families. Weekly sermons included political discussions based on bible lessons. People in Gee's Bend were struggling for civil rights along with African Americans throughout the Deep South. In Alabama, black people had to take an impossibly difficult "literacy test" and pay a poll tax in order to register to vote. Black people who had dared to try to register to vote had lost their jobs as farmers. White farm owners wanted to maintain the rules of segregation. Blacks knew that the key to challenging unjust laws was the vote.
  Irene Williams made quilts that carried an uplifting message. Her red, white, and blue "Housetop" quilt contains bands of fabric printed with the word VOTE. "I remember when Martin Luther King came down here," she said. It was on a rainy night in February 1965. Dr. King was leading a voting rights campaign in Alabama. He had heard about Gee's Bend and stopped to preach at the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.
  When he stepped out of his car, Mary Lee Bendolph was one of the first to greet him. "I opened the door to the church," she said. "I was so glad to see that man.... And when he stood up and talked, I listened.... I didn't miss nothing."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "." "Housetop" variation, circa 1975.
  Every Sunday, the women attended Pleasant Grove Baptist Church with their families. Weekly sermons included political discussions based on bible lessons. People in Gee's Bend were struggling for civil rights along with African Americans throughout the Deep South. In Alabama, black people had to take an impossibly difficult "literacy test" and pay a poll tax in order to register to vote. Black people who had dared to try to register to vote had lost their jobs as farmers. White farm owners wanted to maintain the rules of segregation. Blacks knew that the key to challenging unjust laws was the vote.
  Irene Williams made quilts that carried an uplifting message. Her red, white, and blue "Housetop" quilt contains bands of fabric printed with the word VOTE. "I remember when Martin Luther King came down here," she said. It was on a rainy night in February 1965. Dr. King was leading a voting rights campaign in Alabama. He had heard about Gee's Bend and stopped to preach at the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.
  When he stepped out of his car, Mary Lee Bendolph was one of the first to greet him. "I opened the door to the church," she said. "I was so glad to see that man.... And when he stood up and talked, I listened.... I didn't miss nothing.Irene Williams made several quilts that contain fabric printed with the word "vote.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'The attention given to the Gee's Bend quilts sparked jealousy and controversy'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The attention given to the Gee's Bend quilts sparked jealousy and controversy. Some people in the community and children of the older quilters felt that they weren't fairly compensated for their work. Attorneys for Annie Mae Young and Loretta Pettway filed a suit against the Arnetts in 2007. However, forty quilt makers refused to join the lawsuit. Most of the Gee's Bend women were extremely satisfied and grateful to the Arnetts. In 2008, the case was dismissed.
  Bill went on to establish the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, dedicated to researching, preserving, and exhibiting art by African Americans. Recently, the Foundation gave a gift of fifty-seven works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The gift includes twenty quilts from Gee's Bend.
  Here's a simple way to make your own quilt square that will measure 12" x 12" (30.5 cm x 30.5 cm). A bed quilt will need many squares, but a baby quilt needs only nine squares.
  To make a baby quilt, you'll need a total of nine squares to make a quilt that measures 36" (91 cm). After you have completed the nine individual squares you will sew them together, as described in steps 3 and 4.
  Stephanos, Mary. " Speak Eloquently of Lives Lived." USPS Stamps Blog, February 4, 2012. <http://uspsstamps.com/blog/2012/2/4>.