Backstory: The freedom ferry

Tall reeds line the banks of the Alabama River, swaying lazily in the dark water's eddies as the wild tenor of crickets and cicadas dips and soars through the October stillness. Fat water moccasins sun themselves on cracked red clay as long-legged egrets snatch greedily from a school of water beetles skimming the surface. A fish jumps once, then twice. A man laughs once, then again as he joins a handful of people boarding the ferry.

All God's creatures are free in Gee's Bend.

After more than four decades without ferry service, the 700 residents of this threadbare community isolated by the river are now free to take the short ride across to nearby Camden and the dentists and drugstores beyond.

The ferry was shut down in the 1960s by white county officials at the height of the civil rights movement, presumably to keep the African- American residents here from going into Camden to vote or protest. But now the ferry has restored their ability to interact more easily with the outside world, and the outside world with them, in what may be one of the South's most poignant and prolonged tales of racial redemption.

The result is likely to be more freedom for the people of Gee's Bend, more notoriety for a now-famous group of local quilters, and some justice for a century of wrongs waged in a state that would like desperately to forget elements of its past. Yet the things that make Gee's Bend special – the strength, grit, and character of the people and the bucolic simplicity of the place – is likely to remain, despite the return of the ferry and the irrepressible march of modern time.

***

Gee's Bend sits on a peninsula in an oxbow in the Alabama River, 90 minutes southwest of Montgomery, deep in the mud of the South's Black Belt. "Roosevelt houses" – tiny clapboard boxes – dot the landscape, a reminder of the president who was so moved by the deplorable conditions here after the Depression that he sent loans, food, and rows of homes.

Gee's Bend is an interwoven community made up largely of former slave descendants. Many of its residents bear the last name (Pettway) of the white plantation owner who marched his indentured servants in by foot from North Carolina in 1847. When civil rights workers came through Gee's Bend in the 1960s, they found a place so far removed from the rest of the world that it was once called "Alabama's Africa."

The trip to Camden was 20 minutes by boat and an hour of hairpin curves and bone-jarring dips by car. Stirred by the promise of freedom, the people of Gee's Bend began making the ferry trip regularly in the '60s, swarming into town to storm the courthouse and demand the right to vote. The ferry disappeared soon afterward under a blanket of suspicion. But the residents continued to march – to Camden, to Selma, to Montgomery – emboldened by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who rode through one night and told them to cross literal and metaphorical rivers always converging in the South.

Stories differ on why the boat, a rickety skiff, was suddenly taken away. But lifelong Gee's Bend resident Tracy Pettway repeats an oft-told reason here, as he helps passengers board the new ferry, where he's worked as a deckhand since it began operation a few weeks ago. "All the older people said the whites didn't want the blacks to come over there [to Camden] to vote," he says.

Page: 1 | 2