mozell cover story in lee magazine

THE FABRIC OF LIFE
Improvisations of Mozell Benson
by Jenni Laidman
Photography by Beth Snipes
09.15.2008
http://www.lee-magazine.com/covers/fabric-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.”

read the rest: http://www.lee-magazine.com/covers/fabric-life

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thanks, ms. laidman. it was like reading poetry in prose.