Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Artelia Bendolph: The Girl in the Window

Artelia Bendolph THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW A photograph taken in 1937 in rural Alabama became an icon of the Depressionera South. I tracked down Artelia Bendolph, the subject of that photo, in Prichard in 2002, blind but filled with vivid recollections. She has since passed away, but her words remain. Prichard H er crisp hair plaited, her large hands folded in her lap, Artelia Bendolph sits in a wheelchair in front of her red-brick house in Prichard , Alabama, telling a long-ago story. Gone blind in recent years from diabetes—“I got a little grandbaby going on two years old, and I can feel her, but I can’t see her”—she peers into the past. In her broad, high-cheekboned face is a trace of that past—the 10-year-old girl who once sat in the window of a clay-and-log cabin in Gee’s Bend, a village on the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. “She ain’t a girl no more,” Bendolph says, “she’s a seventy-four-year-old woman now.” It was in 1937 that Bendolph, as that 10-year-old, entered the annals of American history as the girl in the window. A New York photographer, Arthur Rothstein , 22 at the time, had been commissioned by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration to chronicle the hard times and effects of displacement of American workers. Rothstein had already photographed the plight of farmworkers in Virginia and cattle hands in Montana. In 1937 the WPA photographer Arthur Rothstein took this famous Depression-era photo of a 10-year-old girl, Artelia Bendolph, in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the window of a shack. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Artelia Bendolph in 2002 at the age of 74 at her home in Prichard, Alabama. Photo by Mike Kittrell, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register ARTELIA BENDOLPH 69 According to “American Memory,” a website maintained by the Library of Congress, Rothstein had been in Birmingham photographing the steel industry when his boss at the FSA, Roy Stryker, asked him to head to a hamlet about thirty miles southwest of Selma. Stryker, in assembling a report to Congress, wrote, “I realized how lean our file is on good Southern tenancy pictures. We must find families that are fairly representative of the conditions in the tenancy areas.” Stryker had explained to Rothstein that one journalist had reported that the community at Gee’s Bend was “the most primitive set-up he has ever heard of.” According to “American Memory,” another report spoke of the people of Gee’s Bend as “living together in this tribal-like settlement, far away from civilization in their habits and manner of living.” In searching for artful images of despair—and in fulfilling Stryker’s mission to “show the city people what it’s like to live on the farm”—Rothstein found Bendolph, a young black girl looking out from a crude dwelling, next to her the wooden shutter covered with a couple of sheets of newspaper. On the newspaper was an advertisement of a cheerful white woman holding a bountiful plate of food. That photograph, to the nation, became an icon of the South’s Depressionera poverty and the legacy of inequality. Bendolph says she does not remember the day that photograph was taken, nor was she ever told about it by Rothstein; indeed, she says she did not know of it until the 1980s, when a friend from Connecticut contacted her. Since then, she says, she has been approached to offer commentaries for books and articles. The photograph hangs in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Countless people, surely, have paused before the melancholy gaze of the girl in the window , wondering what might have become of her. Bendolph figures that while others have “made money off of me,” she has made not a penny. “Don’t have none and didn’t got nothing,” she says. “Well, ain’t no need of worrying over it.” $ On a summer’s day in Prichard, beneath the pecan tree she planted decades ago, Bendolph seems to worry over little. While the childhood she describes 70 THE TELLERS was full of hardship—“It was rough comin’ up in the country,” she admits— she looks back on those days with fondness, too. Daily she rises at 5 a.m., listens to gospel music on WGOK and keeps tabs on...