Somewhere Along The Catawba River
January 10, 2014
Tom Poland
January 10, 2014
A Traditional Way Of Life Rises From The Earth
The day breaks gray, cold, and wet. Rain and mists swirl and shift like apparitions as winds whip them across the highway. Like twin metronomes, my windshield wipers lay down a steady beat … driving north, driving north, driving north.
I’m driving to Lancaster, South Carolina, to interview a Catawba potter. To get there I drive up I-77 and peel off on SC Highway 200, a two-lane road running through pine-clad hills. It runs through hard times too. Roads like 200 offer a lesson in Life 101. No matter how bare-boned life gets some people will stay in hardscrabble hamlets no matter what. Forsaken homes, abandoned cars, cluttered carports that look as if the bank threw out folks’ possessions, and yards overgrown with weeds and saplings bespeak of hardship.
The shadow of a major metropolis falls across this region. Charlotte is just 33 miles away. Young people find jobs there and never come back. Brings to mind Willie Morris’s opening words in New York Days. I came to the city and it changed my life.
As for those left behind, well, you see evidence of their efforts to make a dollar off the land. Along 200’s shoulders I see all manner of hand-made signs. Deer Corn For Sale. Pecans. Fish Fry Saturday Night. Deer Processed Here. And then there are the empty stores, deserted strip malls, and old service stations rotting away that document failure. The dustbin of history is full here … full of dust. Even the tailrace of Fishing Creek Lake seems forlorn. Gulls sit on the rocks waiting for some hapless fish to come through courtesy of the Catawba River. Lowcountry outcasts, these feathery drifters fly inland from afar. Through the eddying mists the gulls seem out of focus and out of sorts. Their feathers look yellow, not white, not pretty, but that’s okay. Better things wait in Lancaster. This melancholy morning and its dour drive is a prelude to much finer things.
City limits straight ahead … Unlike the sad stretch of Highway 200 that brought me here, Lancaster’s lively. A steady stream of traffic plies South Main Street. Good timing. The rain lets up as I pull over and park at 119 South Main Street. That’s where I find the Native American Studies Center, part of the University of South Carolina Lancaster.
Lancaster and its environs have long been home to the Catawba Indian Nation. The Catawba have a reservation not far away near Rock Hill, the infamous Rocking Hill. And they have something else, something special, something the Catawba have kept secret for hundreds of years, sacred clay holes.
Caroleen Sanders doesn’t have the name I expect of a Catawba potter but then I am stuck in sterotypeville. I still see Tonto when I think of Indians and Broken Arrow’s Cochise. Maybe Lone Watie, the role Chief Dan George played in The Outlaw Josey Wales is more like it. I vow to ask Caroleen if she has an Indian name despite this era’s political correctness that turns journalists into namby-pamby sniveling cowards.
Inside the spacious Native American Studies Center there she is, sitting at a long table working on a communal peace pipe. She’s rubbing it with a small, smooth piece of agate. That, I will learn, gives it sheen. Catawba pottery is never glazed—that’s one of its hallmarks.
Caroleen and I exchange pleasantries and I quickly learn that she’s an energetic woman of 70 with a mission: to restore purity to how the Catawba make pottery.
Some Catawba potters went through a period when they didn’t focus on quality. They churned out volumes of wares. They did so for good reason: survival. Sanders grew up watching potters work, especially her mother, Verdie Harris Sanders and she remembers how her mother made pottery and traded pieces for milk or sold them to buy clothes for the family. Her mother, of course, wasn’t the only potter being pragmatic.
Pottery lost a lot during that period, said Sanders. Thus her mission to restore the pottery tradition. It’s survived 4,000 years. We cannot let it die.
When she’s not styling hair across the border in North Carolina, Caroleen makes Catawba pottery the traditional way. She does not buy clean, commercial clay; she digs it out of clay holes, six to eight feet deep, just as her people did. She does not use a gas-powered kiln; she fires her pieces over coals, just as those before her did.
Don’t Ask
I know better than to ask where the sacred clay holes are. Closely guarded secrets, they are protected. No prying, no photographs, no probing. I know the clay holes lie somewhere along the Catawba River. (Catawba, you should know, means People of the River, and their river is the winding thread of blue that rises in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and flows into Lake Wateree where for all practical purposes it vanishes.)
The potters dig two types of clay: pan clay and pipe clay. Finding a good seam of clay says Caroleen provides a rush like finding a vein of gold. Pure clay is blue and it won’t dissolve, she adds. She hands me a lump of pure clay. It’s soft and satiny smooth. Blue too …. a smoky pale blue.
Caroleen hands me an old Polaroid print of her mother digging clay. Standing in a hole she all but disappears. No photos today though. The hallowed clay holes are not to be seen except by Catawba eyes.
Once they have a goodly amount of clay diggers cover the hole with brush and straw so interlopers can’t easily find it. Several challenges exist as the clay holes or pits go. Snakes for one. A bigger threat however is so cleverly refilling and hiding a hole that it’s location is lost.
Forgetting it’s there is a threat, says Caroleen. The potters face a threat too. Going to the clay holes in the spring and fall carries risk. Turkey hunting takes place in the spring and deer in the fall. And that’s reason enough for the landowners to exercise prudence. It’s for our protection that they don’t allow us to go in there, said Caroleen.
Getting the clay is hard work and it’s hot in the summer, a prime clay-digging time. The clay is heavy and once a potter has enough to work with the next phase begins. The clay has to be cleaned, says Caroleen. And it’s not cleaned once but several times. I pour it through three screens to strain it. In time it clings to my hands like wax.
Next is the making of pieces and all it entails: choosing the subject, conceiving a vision, shaping, preparation for firing, firing, and color manipulation. And then there’s that confusing thing about glaze. Catawba pottery appears to be glazed but it isn’t.
As she worked the communal peace pipe with smooth stones, she talks … The more you rub it, the shinier it gets. Just keep polishing with a rock.
Suddenly she stops and reaches below the table. Out comes a work of art. It’s a cooking pot with a black snake coiled around the top where a lid would sit. A sunflower adorns the pot too. The snake scares away rodents and insects, says Caroleen. She used a sharp stone to crosshatch the snake and a seashell to cut the sunflower into the pot. I’m a person who likes detail, she says.
Getting images onto clay took some doing. Caroleen had to learn how to put designs onto the surface of a piece without disturbing the surface. It took her a long time to learn this seemingly impossible skill, but she mastered it.
What’s the secret, I asked.
The secret’s a secret, she replies. (Secret is a word that applies to
Catawba pottery in more ways than one. Fine with me. Some things deserve a cloak of secrecy.)
She fired the snake pot as she does other pieces, on slats of wood in a hole in the ground filled with coals. She likes to use fallen cedars, for she never cuts trees but prefers red oak. Pine won’t do, she adds, it burns too hot. I take the fire to the pieces, not the piece to the fire. Firing has a lot to do with the colors that result. Catawba pottery is known for its grey-black colors. Caroleen’s mother was a legendary potter. She liked the color black, says Caroleen, who loves cedar for its earth tones.
Night Moon
In a lengthy session we cover many things Catawba and my comfort level grows. It’s time to cross the political correctness border.
Do you prefer being called a Native American?
Caroleen sits upright and stares a hole through me. My nerves tighten.
Tom, she says, and she pronounces each word with deliberation:
I—am—an—American—Indian.
Great. Do you have a tribal name?
Yes, my name is ‘Night Moon.’
And how do you spell that?
I don’t know but it is Nootie Wachowa, (my phonetics.)
Before I left Caroleen told me she is now an elder in the Catawba nation, a position of eminence. My time with her time was done. Time well spent. I thanked her for her time and asked if we could exchange emails as I worked on details for a full-blown magazine feature.
No, she says, I don’t have email. I still use smoke signals.
On the drive back I remembered my work earlier this year on a book project that touched on Catawba pottery. My research turned up a telling passage from the Chief of the Catawba Nation, Chief William Harris. Addressing the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, he said: The tradition of pottery making among the Catawba, unchanged since before recorded history, links the lives of modern Catawba to our ancestors and symbolizes our connection to the earth and to the land and river we love. Caroleen would agree. And she would agree with something else Chief Harris told the Subcommittee.
Like our pottery, the Catawba people have been created from the earth, and have been shaped and fired over time and so have survived many hardships to provide a living testament to our ancestors and to this place we call home. She’d like that too this hairdresser/potter who says her main job as a hairdresser is to listen to her patrons. They want me to be their friend.
So do I.
All Photos by Tom Poland
Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]
Tom Poland is the author of seven books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.
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