By Susan Evans
The kitchen smelled of Pine-sol and lemon Joy, and the only sound was the
hum of the GE clock on the wall. Afternoon light filtered into the room, illuminating the
white laminate table trimmed in red piping and supported by chrome legs.
Sitting precariously on red vinyl chairs, my big sister and I solemnly watched
our mother’s hand move a pencil over paper, forming perfect rose petals and sepals, elegant
vining lines, and tiny veined leaves. She’d draw daisies, too, and tulips, plump cherries, and
berries in clusters, her dark hair falling over her shoulder. Magic bloomed from Mama’s
fingers on those slow afternoons on our quiet street with the big mimosa spreading its shade
over our front yard. I’d be mesmerized. Sandy, too, brown eyes wide with wonder at
Mama’s paper roses.
Mama’s roses came with a story born from suffering, as is often the case with
beauty. She had a natural artistic flare, but was too poor growing up for such extravagances
as art classes. Born in 1925 in a small, humble hamlet in eastern Tennessee, surrounded by
virgin forest and ancient mountains, she grew up during the Great Depression. Mama was
lucky to have cornbread, pinto beans, or biscuits on the table. Like a little ferret with a head
of hair like nettles and a fiery temperament to go with it, Mama deserved her father’s
nickname “dynamite.”
She didn’t learn fancy drawing at school, either. At five, she and her year-older
sister, Kate trudged to Unicoi Elementary School, an old, converted hotel. Bedecked in
scratchy, flowered feed sack dresses their mother stitched on an old treadle sewing
machine, the girls toted apple butter biscuits packed in oatmeal boxes.
The school burned down when Mama reached sixth grade. From then
on she scrunched on a pew at a local school, and scribbled on a tablet resting in her
lap. No library, few books, no gymnasium, no desks, no music, one small
blackboard, and, certainly, no art.
Sister Kate quit after graduating eighth grade, and Mama continued on
for two years at Erwin High School, walking two miles to catch the bus. When she
reached tenth grade, her father refused to pay for books, so she reluctantly quit.
With no money for school and little money for food, art lessons seemed as likely a
probability as spinning straw into gold.
Mama didn’t learn to draw at her first job, either. She was fourteen years
old, and it was 1939. The United States was finally shaking off the deathlike grip of
the Depression. She and Kate lucked out and found jobs working for the FDR’s
National Youth Administration. At the new Unicoi Elementary school, they graded
papers and washed dishes. They made $17.00 a month. With that money, they
could buy a dress, a pair of shoes, and have change to go to the movies in Johnson
City. They believed themselves rich.
Another of Roosevelt’s recovery programs began only two miles away
near Limestone Cove. There were two camps of four hundred young men, their
average age nineteen.
If Mama didn’t have anyone to sit beside in church, all she had to do was
stroll down the street on the way to church. One of her sister’s beaus only had to
say, “Mayme, pick you out a boy.” She looked around and chose the prettiest one
she could find.
While the young Howell women were occupied with boys from the local CCC,
Great Britain declared war on Germany. And in 1940, the United States military
conscription bill passed. Dark storm clouds loomed below the horizon, threatening to
encompass Tennessee, America, and the world.
In December 1942, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Roosevelt and Churchill
declared war on Japan. Germany declared war on the United States four days later. The
CCC camps closed, much to Mama’s disappointment. One day after Mama turned
seventeen, the first American forces arrived in Britain.
Times grew bleaker and shadows lengthened, especially for the poor like Mama’s
family. President Roosevelt issued ration books to every civilian since so much was needed
to supply and fund the war effort. Food, clothing, gasoline, fuel oil, stoves, firewood and
coal were all rationed. Mama could only get one pair of shoes a year, and she liked shoes.
And, of course, no art supplies – not even a stick of colored clay — much less a crayon. Even
paper was rationed.
But within months, a new prevailing wind funneled through the Unaka Mountains.
aligning circumstances within and without; a heaven-sent convergence of railroads, natural
resources, and hungry humans desperate to survive. The gust gained strength enough to
swing folks in Unicoi County around, as if they were part of an old timey square dance. For
the first time in a long time, something actually came up right. Just like roses.
This spiraling wind first hovered over Southern Pottery in Erwin.
Hot out of the ashes of its beehive coal-fired kilns, the magical Blue Ridge
dinnerware emerged, elevating ho-hum decaled pottery into flowing-petaled and leafy
tendrilled hand-painted, mini-works of folk art. Like fingerprints, no piece was
exactly alike, except that each spoke of a mountain women’s struggle to survive,
and seared her tale onto bisque.
The wind wasn’t done yet. It moved on down the road, picked up speed
and swept past the old Fishery, shaking pine needles off the trees, lowering the
Indian Grass, and kept going until it blew open a new door called Opportunity at
the old post office where the Howells waited by the cold hearth for a fire to ignite.
First, Kate dressed in her Sunday best, clutched her purse, and assumed a
resolute, business expression on her thin face. Slinging her old scarred leather bag
over her shoulder, she shut the big door of the post office, and waited patiently near
the road for the special bus that linked Johnson City to Erwin. She vowed to her
mother she’d keep the wolves away.
Kate’s new job at Southern Pottery and her absence made Mama even
more antsy. She bristled with impatience, floundering around like driftwood on a
barren beach. Tired and bored with sitting around with no money in her pocket,
nowhere to go, and nothing to do, the wind pushed her towards the action.
Gone was the scrappy, nettle-headed little girl of yesterday, and in her
place stood a young woman with a long curtain of dark, curly hair, a set of dancing
chocolate eyes, and a pair of Betty Grable legs.
A pretty face doesn’t put coins in a purse, though, so one hazy blue morning, Mama trailed behind Kate to board that bus to Erwin, wearing a tight
sweater, pleated skirt that barely covered her knees, bobby socks, and saddle shoes.
She slung her own leather handbag over her shoulder.
The hiring boss at Southern Pottery eyed Mama with interest, a ghost of a smile
playing on his lips. Finally, he asked, “What makes your eyes so brown”
Seeing her blush and squirm, he softened and finally said, “Bring a birth certificate
showing you are eighteen.” At only seventeen, she couldn’t fetch a birth certification, but
he put her to work anyway. Mama was paid a starting wage of forty-four cents an hour and,
after ninety days, ten cents more an hour.
When Mama began Southern Pottery, its labor force reached over a thousand, with
approximately one-half painters, mostly women plucked from the side of the mountain.
Many servicemen’s wives flocked to work, waiting anxiously for their boogie woogie bugle
boys to come home.
The business was massive — the size of a football field — operating nine gas-fueled
kilns, twenty-four hours a day, every day, producing twenty-four-hundred dozen plates
daily, and a whopping seventeen million pieces a year during the 1940s.
Over time, two-thousand decorative patterns were underglaze. Pattern names
reflected the romance and whimsy of the era and place: Mountain Rose, Tussie Mussie,
Tutte Fruitti, Shoo Fly, Appalachian Garden, Autumn Laurel, Snippet, Moonstruck, Erwin
Spring, Enchantment, and Daydream.
High fired, this stoneware, hard and durable. Unbreakable, almost. Like Mama, like
Aunt Kate. Like mountain women.
Finally, Mama received the art lessons that fate had in store for her!
On Mama’s first morning, she sat at a table in a straight-backed chair, long hair
pulled back, beside a bespeckled, older woman. Water bowls and painted and unpainted
dinnerware cluttered the surface. Paintbrushes stuck out of glasses like cowlicks.
The room smelled of earthy bisque and paint fumes, and mingled with the
clamor of crockery being stacked and loaded on racks, the clatter of wheels
trundling down the aisles, the not-too-distant trains hissing and blowing their whistles, and
the voices of hundreds of workers.
The artist showed Mama how to form petals and leaves, stems, and vines,
using various brushes and different techniques. Her brown eyes watched closely
as the artist mixed sparkling colors on a wooden palette.
Painters were assigned teams of three to four people. Each morning,
a pattern and a palate of the paint colors was placed in front of them. A lead artist
painted the most prominent part of a design, then passed the piece to another that
might paint a bud, then onto another painter to paint the stem, and another, the
Leaves.
Sitting down was the worst part of the job for Mama, a restless young
spirit, only seventeen, and similar to mountain wind that rises and descends the
slopes endlessly. She shifted in her seat often and moved around, mind faraway and
active as a darting minnow zigzagging in the laurel streams.
My mother was quick as silver and so competitive that she’d outshine the
sun if she could. Her fierce dark eyes focused her attention to her training, and
soon, she easily daubed a paint brush onto her palette and swirled vibrant colors.
Camellias, cyclamen, poinsettias, bluebonnets, and sweet peas flowered from her
brush tip onto bisque teacups, saucers, bowls, and plates.
After painting, Mama stacked pieces on long boards at the end of her work
station. Then “floor boys,” dressed in overalls, loaded them on racks to be dipped in
glaze and baked in kilns. Finished pieces were then carefully packed in wooden barrels,
filled with local farmers’ straw, and driven by truck and loaded onto railroad cars. To
market, newly-made dinnerware rolled out, covering miles and miles of rail from the
southeast coast of the United States to further north, and way out west.
Kate and Mama bought furniture with their paychecks and carried in groceries
for their mother, little sisters, and brother. They bought their mother some dresses, too.
She only had an old blue one since her husband spent his money on moonshine and
other women.
Three long years later, a new, prevailing wind — carried like a great wave
across the Atlantic from Europe — sailed over the rocky ledges of Unaka Mountain,
lingered for a brief spell in the forest laurel, and finally swept down across the small
Tennessee county. Snatches of gossip and heady rumors floated throughout the pottery,
swirling around painting tables and near the kilns and molding rooms, setting workers
abuzz. The air crackled, charged with an electricity alternating between dreadful fear
and fervent hope.
When she first heard the rumor, Mama frowned down at her scuffed shoes under
the painting table, and exhaled a deep breath. She sure hoped the gossip was true. She
wanted the boys back, and she wanted to buy a decent pair of shoes.
On the second of September, the sun glowed atop the sleepy Unaka and Buffalo
Mountains and a delicate breeze wafted warm across Unicoi. Mama and Kate, stifling
yawns and bickering as sisters do, caught the bus to Erwin.
At ten-thirty AM, slumped at her work table, dreamy and distracted, Mama
mixed rosy-pink paint on her palette for the fan-shaped petals of an Irish Rose. But
her mind bloomed elsewhere to a place where soldier boys gazed in adoration, as
she reclined resplendent in her mint-green, ruffled gown under a gnarled oak tree.
Bursting her daydream, the company loudspeaker crackled on, and a voice
announced, “The Japanese and Germans unconditionally surrendered! The war is
Over!
Everyone whooped, “Whee-e-e-e!” and jumped up from workstations.
Mama threw the paintbrush onto her worktable, wiped her hands on her smock,
then yanked it off, and grabbed her purse. With hundreds of workers at the
pottery plant, she marched out and danced around in the autumn sunshine.
People tossed their hats in the air in jubilation. The buses came and Mama and
Kate celebrated at Guy’s Cafe in Johnson City. Hamburgers sizzled and the
jukebox jiggled to patriotic songs and swing music. To Mama, the war had been
nothing but a blame nuisance. Her first thought was: ooh! new shoes! And her
second: the boys are coming home!
The following fall, Mama’s sisters fixed her up on a blind date. On a
picnic at Davis Springs, Mama looked over her slice of watermelon, and decided
Floyd Hopson looked just like a screen idol with his black hair curling around
his collar. And those long-lashed blue and brown eyes were swoon-worthy!
Six months later, Mama married Floyd. She quit her job at Southern
Pottery when she became pregnant. That last day, she lay her paints, palette, and
brushes down, and left her dreamy flowers and girlish colors far behind. For
four years, roses bloomed around her.
Ten years after my mother married, Southern Pottery’s business fractured like
crockery colliding against a stone wall. Weakened by post-war development of plastic
dinnerware and a rise in Japanese import ceramics, the pottery’s magic spell flickered and
sizzled out. No mending charm could restore its glory days of the 1940s. Like irrelevant
paint swiped away with a sponge, even its buildings disappeared.
Only a few old timers survive to tell the Blue Ridge story, and only a few faded
photographs remain. What used to be is almost lost in the white mist of memory.
But time has not tarnished Blue Ridge’s jewel-like colors, many fresh as the day
they were painted, joyful, playful, and magical as forest foxfire. Perhaps a million pieces
remain: Red Nocturnes, Sunshines, Grandmother’s Garden, and Forget-Me-Nots. Some
decorate kitchen walls, some perch in cupboards, some rest on dining room tables, but all —
like the pattern Circle of Roses — connect heart to heart all the ancestors of Southern
Pottery’s painters to each other and to their mothers, their aunts, and their grandmothers.
Before she married, Mama dreamed of being a missionary and traveling overseas.
Aunt Kate wished to be a nurse. In their young hearts, they wanted their lives to mean
something. They did. Like Southern Pottery, time has not tarnished the beauty of their
sacrifice, the power of who there were, and the poignancy of the stories they shared through
their art.
These two women, and many more like them, dedicated their youthful energy, and
their hard labor during years that should have been the best time of their lives; and sent their
gifts on trains rolling out of Erwin and into the heartland of America. They, too, had heart,
and a flaming hope for a brighter tomorrow
I can imagine Mama and Aunt Kate throwing back the covers and rising from
their old iron bed with a straw tick mattress, leaving younger warm bodies behind,
and dressing in the early green-blue light from the windows of the old post office.
They’d eat a biscuit, standing up, and hurriedly apply ruby red lipstick and
Maybelline cake mascara moistened with saliva. Then, before leaving, they’d kiss
their pale thin mother on her soft cheek.
Outside, under a leafy canopy of green, they’d wait for the bus. They’d
giggle, remembering a devilry, like the black cat thrown into the Pentecostal church
window on a girl one Sunday night, and listen to the dawn chorus of mourning
dove, trilling insects, and breathe in the perfume of honeysuckle, pine, and
mountain laurel.
Later, hopping off the bus, purses swinging, brown hair sitting lightly on
their shoulders, eyes bright and cheeks glowing, they’d lift their chins, ready to
tackle life during uncertain times and wrestle it to the ground. Kate, the oldest,
shyest, more tender-hearted and insecure, and Mama, standing firmly in her power,
confident, bold. and steely.
That was eighty-two years ago. It was seventy years ago that my sister and
I watched our mother spiraling rose hearts from her fingertips, curving stem and
vine lines, and adding petals, one by one, in perfect symmetry.
Mama didn’t leave me much materially, but she left me an enduring
memory of a humble kitchen bathed in light from a back window; of the clean scent
of her long, chestnut hair; and of Sandy and me drawing close to her ticking heart,
as magic bloomed from her fingertips.
Long ago, we and our little house drew in deep slow breaths together, but,
somehow, even today, those yesterdays’ scent of roses lingers still.
