J.R. Moehringer

Gee’s Bend is an arm of land, bordered on three sides by the Alabama River, where the water forms a sort of vast, arcing hairpin bend. To reach the nearest town, the "Benders" must undertake an hour-and-a-half drive or a fifteen-minute ferry ride—had the ferry not been abolished in the 1960s by the county sheriff with the following unassailable reasoning: > we didn’t close the ferry because they were black, (...) we closed it because they forgot they were black . Gee’s Bend is a unique enclave: all its residents are descendants of the sixteen slaves who settled this strip of land in 1816; geographical isolation and the land's meager appeal allowed the small community to remain untainted by the momentous social and political upheavals that marked American history: the Civil War, racial segregation, the Great Depression, Martin Luther King’s freedom movement. Even when the latter drew them in, holding them up as a paradigm of the exploitation of the African American people, the "Benders" went "over the river," as the great Black leader urged them, fought for him, and grieved his death, but then returned to their land, because > for a woman of color, descended from slaves, (...) the river begs to be crossed, and at the same time bars the way . Yet today this small community, now dwindled to a few hundred survivors, risks vanishing. The project of a new ferry will shatter its isolation once and for all. Moehringer deftly captures this moment, narrating it through the eyes and mind of a small woman of Gee’s Bend. > Mary is made entirely of circles. Her body is round, her face is round, her river is round. In Mary Lee’s world everything is round, because only at the end of something, of a century, of a story, of a sentence, does one truly understand its beginning. (...) She has spent her entire life in this timeless place. How did age manage to track her down? Through Mary Lee, Moehringer retraces the history of Gee’s Bend, interweaving social events with episodes from the woman’s life. It is a gentle, melancholic narrative: there are moments of revolt, there is immense endurance, yet the whole is steeped in resigned benevolence; and this not merely because Mary Lee > is a kind person (... if I can’t laugh and joke with you, if I can’t be nice and friendly, we might as well leave it alone) , but because > a lifetime ago Mary Lee counted on the river to protect her from those who were anything but friendly. (...) Her river is a strong brown God, (...) Eternal, Silent, Gives life, and takes it without hesitation. It is the force that shaped Mary Lee’s world. (...) There are people who spend their lives fighting against what limits them. Mary Lee was baptized in the water that limits her. To her it is a gift, and for what she has been given she gives thanks. This long story brings to mind a great Italian novel: *The Mill on the Po*. As in Riccardo Bacchelli’s book, here too the subject is the humble, the victims, and it is approached just as the conservative Catholic Bacchelli approached it: with nostalgia, as if to say life was better then, when one was isolated, schooling was out of reach, poverty reigned, and one suffered the abuses of white people, but at least one lived sheltered by the great river (here the Alabama, there the Po), in a tranquil, timeless existence. But history marches on, my dear Moehringer, and the exploitation of Black people, of peasants, of the "wretched of the earth" cannot simply be a trite occasion for folklore, for winning an undeserved Pulitzer Prize with a Hollywood-style tale. Why not read it? Trite; better *The Mill on the Po*.