Rita Mae Pettway was born in Boykin, Alabama in 1941 into a family of quiltmakers. She was raised by her grandmother, the quiltmaker Annie E. Pettway. Part of a sharecropping community, she recalls that she started working in the fields at seven years of age, hoeing, chopping, and picking cotton. “It was the only kind of work I had to do, and I loved to do it,” she has said. “It didn’t bother me none. I would pick two-hundred-and-something pounds of cotton every day. I felt pretty good at the end of the day. I still had to come back and clean up and cook—whatever part I didn’t finish when I went in the field in the morning.”

After church on Sundays, Pettway recalls sitting by the fireplace in the wintertime and piecing quilts with her grandmother Annie. “She didn’t have no pattern to go by; she just cut them by the way she know how to make them. We did it by kerosene lamp. The way we used to quilt them, it ain’t the way we do it now. I have horses now, but we had the frame; we had four frames, one on each side of the room; tied it up to the rafters. When we got ready to use the frames, we untied them and eased them down to the level we going to sit down to quilt at. When you done for the day, you hash it back up to the rafters. Nellie and Mary Lisa, they quilted with us, too, right in the same room. Piecing them up, you do that by yourself; but quilting, we all did it together. The first quilt I made on my own, I was fourteen. It was a "Nine Patch" quilt. I been kept making quilts ever since then.

I graduated from high school when I was nineteen. I couldn’t go to school that regular ’cause I had to work in the field. We went on days when it rained.

I take care of grandchildren and cows now, and that’s about it. I work in my garden. I feel good about living where I live and about putting my children through school, hard as that was, living on a farm. Without welfare we couldn’t have got by, but we made it. I am happy the way it is. It’s been a pretty good life.”

-Souls Grown Deep Foundation website