PRICHARD, Ala. -- Her crisp hair plaited, her large hands folded in her lap, Artelia Bendolph sits in a wheelchair in front of her red-brick house here telling a long-ago story. Gone blind in recent years from diabetes -- "I got a little grandbaby going on 2 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.

"She ain't a girl no more," Bendolph says, "she's a 74-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 farm workers in Virginia and cattle hands in Montana. [...]

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 a 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 Depression-era 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 is owned by 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." [...]