During her brief life, Linda Diane Bennett, granddaughter of Delia Bennett, created some of Gee's Bend's most elegant quilts. Her mother, Ella Mae Irby, talks about Linda Diane and her death.
Linda Diane Bennett was my second child. She was a deputy sheriff working at Camden Courthouse. Come home and piece her quilts, lay them across her lap and quilt them. I don't know how she did that. Wasn't a wrinkle in it. Didn't use no horse, that's the way she did it—right across her knee. Come home, you don't even know she there, just back there piecing them quilts. Mama taught her how to do it. That's who taught me, too: Mama. We'd piece us into the night and then go to quilting. Learned to do it without a frame.
Linda was quiet. A hard worker. She was smart. She had to go to the field, too, might have been about ten years old, like all my children did. But it wasn't hard like when we was young. She got to go to school all year round. Finished twelfth grade, she trained for deputy sheriff.
She left home one day—come by here every day before going to the courthouse. Sat in a chair right here in this room. It was 1988. I ask her, "How come you don't got no coffee?" She say she don't want none. She went out and sat in the car, I walk with her, she got to the gate. She always say "I'm gone," but this time she waved her hand, said, "Good-bye."
She looked so sad. The sun was shining, and I started crying, and I said, 'Why she say "Good-bye?" She always just say "I'm gone." I watch her ride off, out of sight just like I'm not see her no more. And I didn't. Somebody call and ask me if I heard the news. They say somebody named Linda Bennett fell dead at the courthouse. I said a lot of folks name Linda Bennett, so I called the courthouse and asked, 'Where Linda?'
"They say, 'At the hospital.'
"I say, 'How come?'
"They say, 'She dead.'"
