It was an extraordinary thing for me to see. I think in some ways love is about taking pleasure in the happiness of another, and it was amazing to see the connection between Maria and Delia Pettway Thibodeaux, a descent of Alabama slaves and a well-known Gee’s Bend quilter.

Maria – she once would have been too shy to do this – walked up to Delia and started talking, she told her about her own trip to Gee’s Bend to spend a week with Mary Ann Pettway last year, and Delia invited her to sit down and sew with her in the midst of a mob of people who had come to see the quilters.

The quilters there inspired Maria to be an artist, and their work helped shaped some of her ideas. She sat with Delia for awhile talking and sewing and working with some fabric. Maria looked as at home as I  have ever seen her.

Creativity is a funny thing, it is an internal thing, I think, it comes right out of the heart and the soul, from the inside, not the outside. Who really knows why one artist and their work touches something so deep inside of us? For Maria, the quilters of Gee’s Bend began her long and wondrous journey of liberation. True liberation, of course, is only partly about politics.

Creativity, I think, is about strength and safety, about  identity, about freeing the inner light in ourselves. Llighting the creative spark and letting it glow and burn. That is the connection between Maria and the Gee’s Bend quilters, they are profoundly self-made and self-directed. Because they lived outside the tyrannical system of control and subjugation, especially in the Corporate Nation, they are free in a way few artists are. Because they do not know what they are supposed to think, they are free to think.

I am far outside the circle of quilters and artists I saw last night, I’m not sure any man could really get in there at this time, but I identify with the Gee’s Bend quilters also. I never survived in any school, I never listened to anyone, then or now, tell me what to think or what to write. That’s why I dislike unwanted advice so much. That’s why I love writing so much.

Because I do not ever know what I am supposed to think, because I never let anyone tell me what to think, I can sometimes think. This is a joyous and fearsome thing, something Maria and I share, and that she celebrated last night with the Gee’s Bend quilters. There is a soul connection instantly visible between someone like Delia and someone like Maria, even thought they come from very different places and  live in different worlds. Their paths will almost never cross. It did last night, a very poignant thing to see.