The Quilters of Alto Pass

Carrie and Gertie and Tempa and Chloie

I wrote this story for The Village Voice. It was published on September 26, 1974.

A walk down Main Street in this Ozark foothill town of 300 takes about 90 seconds.  You start over by the hardware and feed store and walk past closed storefronts with dusty windows, open only on weekends.  Turning west, you cross the railroad tracks and head north on the elevated sidewalk past the town water pump, the drug store, the Farmers Bank, and the post office.  When you get to the crest of the hill and the tin-sided Butler Building, a temporary structure housing the rural equivalent of a deli and souvenir shop, you’ve done it.

Of course, the town’s real main street and in years past its reason for being are the railroad tracks that cut through Alto Pass, the highest point on the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio Railroad.  But these days, all that has changed.  The train doesn’t stop at Alto Pass anymore to pick up fruit and vegetables on its way to market in Chicago.  It just whistles through, chugging slowly up one side of the pass ready for the long, braking run down the other side.

Most of the storefronts in town are closed and locked on weekdays; until a year ago, they were shuttered permanently.  The little Southern Illinois town that in the late 1800’s bustled with a population of over 2,000 seemed to be on its last legs.  Its young had fled the countryside for the industrial cities, leaving behind the old to hang onto scraps of land and memories of better days.  Alto Pass became the kind of place you pass through time and again in the Midwest when you leave the interstates for the county roads that weave through this part of the country like a circulatory system, tying little towns to bigger cities with a never-ending ribbon of two-lane blacktop.

You drive through town, and you wonder:  what would keep anyone in a place like this?  On a hot afternoon in July, there isn’t a single soul on Main Street.  Over by the café, a few pickups are parked, their owners inside sipping iced tea and eating fried chicken behind blue-checked curtains that hold back the sun.  Next to a peeling house with a broad sweep of screen porch, you can see an old couple sitting under the shade tree on a low-slung glider, trying to beat the heat. 

There are thousands of towns like Alto Pass in the rural areas of the Midwest.  You drive through, and there’s no action, scant signs of life, nothing happening there.  It’s easy to imagine, sitting behind the wheel of a moving car, that Alto Pass is a frontier settlement brought forward into the 1970’s almost intact.  Over there alongside Illinois Route 146 is a stooped old woman in a starched bonnet weeding a garden by the side of her farmhouse.  Her beans are up, the tomatoes are turning red, and soon the yellow squash will demand picking.  Out in back is a smoke shed filling the air with thick hickory smoke from the banked fire under hams hanging inside curing in the sweet darkness. 

A small herd of Angus cows graze in the distance; two work horses and a mule stand along the fence swishing the flies off their backs with long sweeps of their tails.  If you close your eyes and let your mind wander, the Midwest stirs from its slumber and does a 100-year sleepwalk, a trip into the past better than any movie you’ve ever seen, any novel you’ve ever read.  The Midwest can stir blood in your veins you never thought you had.

But ah, lovely irony!  A by-product of the urban counterculture of the 1960’s has returned young and middle-aged people to the rural land of their ancestors, to places newly acquired or resurrected from family estates.  This movement is changing the face of Alto Pass and towns like it all over the country.  Today, virtually every storefront in town is full to the ceiling with a motley collection of old oak furniture, pot-belly stoves, and unfinished antiques that are sold to tourists on weekends.  As you drive out of town, truck gardens can be seen out behind farmhouses growing produce destined for farmers markets, thence to dinner tables in the big cities.  Local orchards are flourishing again, and up at the Butler Building overlooking a train station that has seen better days are the people who are going to make this sleepy little old town famous.

Betty Sirles, a husky blonde woman of 32, and Dorothy Greenwell, a middle-aged woman who moved here recently from Wisconsin, are standing around the Coke machine talking about the weather.  There hasn’t been any rain in the Midwest for over a month, and it’s hurting the crops, drying up the land, stunting the growth of everything green.  Betty is taking a break from packing apples, enjoying the air conditioning in the middle of the hot afternoon.  In the back room, Chloie Casey, 72, Gertie Hamilton, 77, and Tempa Freeman, 75, are quilting.

Stretched across a wooden frame before them is an elaborate maze of squares and triangles and diamonds sewn together from bits and scraps of colorfully patterned material.  They are the Alto Pass Quilters, and stitch by stitch, piece by piece, hour after hour they have worked to buy Alto Pass its first fire truck and firehouse.  This week, they made the last payment on a reconditioned 1948 Ford fire truck.  The town council has been pressured by the quilters to ensure that the firehouse, now partially constructed, will be finished with funds from the local government.

More than 40 women are involved in the Alto Pass Quilters, but as Dorothy explains, “there are not too many quilting today because it’s a busy time of the year, with everybody canning and putting up stuff for the winter and everything.”  Still, the quilting seems to go faster than one might expect as the three women, all of them born and raised in Alto Pass, do the final stitching of the quilt they’re working on. 

“You have to keep one finger underneath the quilt to feel the needle comin’ through,” Gertie explains in her slow Southern Illinois drawl.  “You push it through the top, through what we call the batting and on through the backing, or else it don’t hold together, and you haven’t got a quilt.”  As she speaks, Gertie’s fingers push the point of her needle up through the quilt, down again, up again, down again and up once more to be pulled through with one final tug of her fingers.  The painstaking stitching leaves calluses on the tips of the women’s fingers that resemble those on the fingers of guitarists, for it is only by feeling the prick of the needle that they can be sure each quilting stitch is complete.  The women make quilting stitches along the seams in the top fabric and in patterns through the open areas.

“Now you see here, I’m going right down this line here till my thread runs out.  Then I’ll go right next to this seam here, and then I’ll follow this snake trail.  Do you see it here, outlined in pencil?  We call it a snake trail because it twists and turns just like the trail a snake leaves in the dust behind him when he moves.  I’ll just stitch along here, it’s real easy to do.  The quilt we’re working on now is a sawtooth star with dogwood blossoms and leaves for the quilting patterns.  It’s gonna be real nice.”

Gertie smiles to herself as she patiently explains the process to me.  She has the deeply lined face of one who has lived close to the land.  She has been quilting for 71 years, and she seems fascinated that someone would come all the way to Alto Pass from New York City to listen to her talk about something she’s been doing all her life, like eating or getting up in the morning.  Quilting is that natural to her.

At times, she seems to be talking as much to herself as to me; her chin drops against the collar of her dress, and she peers down at her work through reading glasses with metal and plastic frames.  “Now I’m going to thread my needle,” she says, holding it up to the light and jabbing her thread through the tiny eye of the needle with a single, practiced thrust.

Betty Sirles plans each quilt’s pattern, color, and design.  Then she mimeographs instructions and hands them out to all the women involved in the process, and they begin work on one quilt.  It will be six weeks before the quilt is finished, six weeks of hand cutting and sewing, traveling all around Alto Pass from house to house to house until finally the quilt is sewn together and it ends up at the Butler Building where the older women, more experienced at the actual quilting, finish it off.  Betty describes the centuries-old process in detail:

“The cutters get material and instructions.  They cut the fabric, and that’s all they do.  Then the cuttings go to the counters and separators, who follow another set of instructions.  They bundle together all the cutting that goes into one block of the quilt, which we call a piece.  Then the bundles go to the piecers, where they’re sewn together to form one block of the pattern that will eventually be the top of the quilt.  The pieces are then collected and taken to one woman who sews them together.  When it comes here to the Butler Building, it is a completed top, and the batting and backing are picked out, and the quilting begins.”

The Alto Pass Quilters have made 45 quilts and sold them for a total of $4,000 since they began work.  When the fire station is built, the women plan to turn their informal business into a non-profit corporation.  They hope they can pay each of the quilters by the hour for their work.  Today, the women work as volunteers to earn money for the fire truck and station.

“It was a big deal around here when we first started work on the fire station,” says Betty.  “The men used to show up every night around 6 and work until 10, and then one week they had finished the tresses and were ready to put them up for the roof, and we all went down to the school and cooked a bean supper for them and celebrated.  Two weeks later, a big storm came along and blew it down.  Now the town board has decided they can allot some money, and they’re taking bids on finishing the construction.  We still want to have a hand in it, because we want the station built with a kitchen and everything, so we can continue to have our chicken and dumplings suppers, and our bean suppers, and all the things we’ve become fond of here in town since we started.  It will mean $1,000 a year for Alto Pass, too.  A lot of times our suppers were planned right here around the quilt.  Everybody would be sewing away, and we’d get out a list and ask who’d like to make a blackberry pie, who’d like to make the beans and the cornbread.  You wouldn’t believe how isolated everyone in this town used to be.  Before we started, I hardly knew anybody anymore.  Now I can honestly say I know every single person in town.  We’ve involved just about everybody over the months in one way or another, and everybody’s gotten so used to it that I just don’t think we could stop if we wanted to.”

The women don’t seem too surprised at what’s happened to Alto Pass since the quilting began.  They can remember the way things used to be, years and years ago when it was necessary that everyone stick together to get things done.  Late in the afternoon, Carrie Norton, 76, showed up to quilt, and the women began to talk among themselves about Alto Pass when they were young.  Because Carrie was the town midwife, she could tell you about the birth of just about everybody.  All the women had been quilting since they learned from their mothers when they were around six or seven years old.  Back then, as Tempa Freeman explains, things were different.

“The older quilts were quilted in fans about an inch apart because when you washed them by hand and wrung them out, you’d break your thread, and to hold the quilt together, you needed all that close quilting in there.  Now you wash them in an automatic, and they’ll last even longer than 40 years, which was about as long as one of the old ones lasted.”

Gertie: “Years ago, we had to quilt during the day, because you couldn’t see none too good by the kerosene lamps at night.  You ever seen an Aladdin lamp?  When they came along, they made real good light, like today, and we could have quilted at night, except for the space.  Everybody wanted to be in the kitchen or the living room, the only two rooms where it was warm in the winter, and there just wasn’t enough room.  So, we nailed and darned our quilts to a big pole, and when everybody would come home from school and in from the fields, you’d roll your quilt onto the pole and hoist it up to the ceiling with ropes and pulleys out of the way. You needed lots of quilts back then because it was so cold in bedrooms with no heat.  We didn’t see a wool blanket in my house until after the war [World War II].  The little kids played under quilts – little tents they’d make – during the day to keep warm.  Then at night, you’d sleep on a big old featherbed and cover up with five or six quilts.”

Carrie: “You’d freeze yourself to death if you went into the bedroom, and you’d smother yourself to death in the living room from the heat.  Now, I never covered up with a featherbed, but some did.  I slept under quilts.  I guess just about everybody did.  Now, you hear all this stuff about quilting bees and church quiltings.  We didn’t have that around here.  You quilted because you needed quilts, and that was all.  You just made as many as you needed, and you made ‘em look nice because you was proud of what you did.  I guess today they’re makin’ quilts on machines.  We’ve even seen a few of ‘em out here.  But there’s one big difference from a quilt that’s done on a machine and one that’s done by hand.  They don’t look the same.  Them other ones just don’t look right.”

The women talked and talked, quilting perfect dogwood blossoms with reinforced seams as they went along.  It was easy to become transfixed by their stories, and I listened to them for hours.  Carrie said she got her one and only whooping from her daddy on the day she refused to go down to the spring and fetch water with her sister.  “He whooped me a good one, he did,” says Carrie.  “And I never refused to go down to that spring again, winter or summer.  We had one of the best springs in the county back then.  It bubbled up, and daddy made a little tank for it, with a spout coming out of the side.  The spout fed into the spring box, where momma kept her crocks of milk and butter, sitting down there in the water where it was cool.  Then the little spring flowed out to a tank daddy built where we watered the stock, and on down the hill to our farm pond.  The boys dammed up the pond, and at the far end, under the trees, it was deep enough for swimming in the summers.  They had a rope swing, and on hot days, boys would come from all over to swim in our pond.  All of that from one little spring!”

The stories went on through the afternoon, the women telling of the triumphs and tragedies which together make up the history of Alto Pass and their lives.  Gradually, as they opened up, it emerged that the women of Alto Pass were more important to the town than their men, for whenever the normal structure of things broke down, it was the women who stepped in and got the job done.  When a family didn’t have the money for a doctor, it was the midwife and a friend who hitched up a buckboard and rode through driving snow miles into the county to deliver a baby and stay with the mother until she was up and about. 

When Carrie’s husband had a heart attack in 1952 and couldn’t work, she opened a restaurant to support the family.  All the women made clothes, canned fruits and vegetables, worked in the gardens, helped out during planting and harvest.  And when they decided to buy Alto Pass its first fire truck, they just got together and did it.  This what their work will mean to the town:  now when there’s a fire, there will be at least a chance they can save the house or out-buildings; brush fires that might destroy crops can be contained and controlled; when the firehouse is built, fire insurance rates for the whole town will be reduced 10 percent.

In short, the women sitting around quilting at the Butler Building had grown up with a solid fix on their responsibilities to themselves, to their families, and to the town.  They had never questioned their own abilities.  When something needed doing, they did it, individually or collectively.  They had grown up as full partners in the life of Alto Pass, and though they were reluctant to let on, the politics of their lives were not lost on them.

“Young man,” Carrie Norton told me just before I left, pulling me aside from the others.  “When you go back there to New York City, you tell those people that we’ve had women’s lib out here in Alto Pass for better than 100 years.”

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A delicious and ironic coincidence if there ever was one, the same week the Village Voice printed the stories told by the women about their lives in Alto Pass, Molly Haskell reviewed a film by Ingmar Bergman that told the same kind of story.

From Haskell’s review of “Scenes from a Marriage,” directed by Bergman and starring Liv Ullman playing Marianne:

“What Marianne does – and though it may not satisfy those demanding a feminist metamorphosis, it seems perfectly right to me – is simply to survive, and in surviving, discover there was more to her than perhaps she had thought, more fiber, more resiliency, more ego.  In the confidence of this self-discovery, she blossoms.  And in blossoming, she tantalizes Johan with that eternal mystery of woman that so confounds and awes and enrages and intimidates Bergman.”