La Maison Creole

The trip back to St. Lucia was remarkably and thankfully uneventful, but as ever delightful in its own Caribbean way. I had a few hours to fill before leaving Barbados so I spent it in my wonderful crummy car getting happily lost and unlost on rural back roads, hunting down unmarked heritage sites like Drax Hall, a spectacular plantation house that has been the site for in-depth archeological studies that I know I have read about at some point in the past. My LIAT flight left the usual 30 minutes or so late for the hop across to St. Vincent where we left off people and picked up some more and then made the even shorter hop across the 26 miles to St. Lucia. I hooked up again with Drive-A-Matic car rental (more on that later), and went zooming up island to Cap Estate and the home of my longtime close friend and craft compatriot Finola.

I believe that this lovely house – that would be ‘maison’ in French – is the first private home I ever stayed in in St. Lucia, way back in April of 1994 when I came down after hearing that I definitely got the Fulbright grant and would be moving to St. Lucia the following July. I had met Finola on my previous trip to the island in October of ’93, and then, as now, we had a lot to say to each other. At the time she was the Craft Development Officer for St. Lucia and was getting ready for a substantial ceramics study and training trip to Japan but then, as now, she made all sorts of things happen and all sorts of doors open and I would never be here doing what I am doing right now without her help and support. 

The house is a classic Caribbean house, low slung and rooted into the landscape, small bedrooms, large living rooms, and a big wide open porch that was filled with good food and good friends shortly after I arrived early on Saturday evening. As we looked out across Rodney Bay from the high perspective of the house the sun set and the sky blurred from blue to color to dark and the lights came up in the hills and valleys in the north of the island. 

Finola has a thing about clouds and skies and sunsets – something about the view from the porch perhaps ? - and since she is a really terrific photographer we get to see what she sees. The picture above is hers, as are the two below and I was sitting right there on the beach when she shot the image of the boats and I swear I never saw it, never noticed, would have missed it. 

Sunday I took advantage of the fact that she has an amazing jewelry workshop at home and made necklaces with the handmade clay beads I got from Choiseul potter Irena Alphonse last year, and then went off to the new S&S megastore to solve my burgeoning luggage problem (I seem to have acquired a few things too many in Barbados). S&S is like a giant dollar store; the business was established by Indian immigrants 30 or so years ago, always seems to stock exactly what you need at a price you can pay, and has been fabulously successful in St. Lucia. I got a really cheap 18” rolling carryon that will likely only last this trip but that’s okay cause that’s all I need it to do. Then of course, we went to the beach. Because its Sunday.

Renting a car in St. Lucia has become….problematic, because Drive-A-Matic is now the only agency that takes American Express and they are absolutely committed to having very new, very shiny, and very easily damaged cars that do an excellent job of taking tourists from the hotel to the restaurant and back. I, however, am heading south where the roads are rather more compromised and opportunities abound for scrapes and scratches and loud thumps on the underside of the vehicle. So on Monday morning, before I headed out for the southern wilds of Choiseul, I traded in my shiny sporty lime green touristmobile with its maximum 2” clearance for a far more sensible (but of course somewhat more expensive) two door jeep that already has its fair share of scratches and will be capable of climbing in and out of the potholes that I know are coming.

So off I went, down to Castries and over the Morne, into Bexon and up the long rainforest climb across the Barre de L’Isle, through the Mabouya Valley and I was sticking my camera out the window snapping pictures to try and visually describe what its like to drive these roads but somehow the images just don’t do it, don’t transmit that sense of acute hyperawareness that takes over when you drive on the left through the Caribbean landscape. Oh well – I tried. Anyway, when I passed the sign for the Fond D’Or plantation I got a little ways down the road before my brain said Wait A Minute and I turned around and went back to revisit this site that I saw with local historian and old friend Gregor Williams some many years ago when I was here for the 25^th anniversary conference of the St. Lucia Archaeological and Historical Association.

Driving in I was immediately greeted by guide extraordinaire Paul who has been working at Fond D’Or for 20 years, and as you always do on this island various details of life, family, and occupation were exchanged between us because its good to know who you are talking to. When I told him where I was from Paul told me that his father went to Jacksonville, Florida to cut sugar cane and never came back and had seven kids here and nine in Florida. Goodness. So we chatted about our mutual friend Gregor and Paul told me all sorts of details about the site and off I went to walk through the remnants of wind, cattle, and steam-powered cane crushing equipment and bits of the buildings that housed them. The site is primarily used now for outdoor performances during the annual St. Lucia Jazz Festival in May, and what’s left of the plantation buildings are perpetually under threat by the persistence of fig trees.

The walls of the sugar boiling house are intact, and the huge copper boiling pans rest characteristically and decoratively alongside, but as at other sites like this I cannot escape imagining what it might have been like to work in such a hell hole. It’s hot today, it will be hot tomorrow, hot and damp and sweaty and what must it have been like to be a slave to those boiling pans in a long room with a low ceiling and hot hot wood fires burning continuously during the cane cutting season, pouring the hot hot sugar syrup from one pan to the next as it slowly thickened, day after day and night after night until all the cane in the fields had been cut and crushed….

Back on the road, lunch is starting to sound like a good idea so I head for my very favorite scenic highway “snackette” on the heights above the eastern town of Dennery. The view is truly spectacular, and while they really outdo themselves with food on the weekends, at lunchtime most days you can get nice fresh local food – today it was a grilled tuna kebab with garlic sauce, a roasted bake (sort of a dense round bread roll cooked on the barbecue) and lo and behold a Coke Zero. Could be a perfect lunch.

From there you follow the two lane highway that rings the island, rolling through Praslin and Micoud as you close in on St. Lucia’s second largest town, Vieux Fort, its name pronounced as an interesting amalgam of the French and English history of the island (vieux = old in French). First you pass the giant stadium that was built for the Cricket World Cup several years ago but is now serving as the temporary site for the major medical facilities in the south; the old buildings of St. Jude’s Hospital down the road are being completely renovated. Then you go round the bend onto the four lane concrete road that was part of the World War 2 American construction of what is now Hewanorra International Airport, along the Vieux Fort ‘bypass road’, past the KFC, the bank, and the supermarket and you’re headed back into the agricultural south. 

Balenbouche is as always a welcome sight; the Lawaetz family live in the main plantation house and guests stay in cottages scattered about the surrounding yard intermixed with breathtaking landscaping. The history of this maison creole dates back to the 18^th century and the longterm French occupation particularly in the south of St. Lucia – the north is far more British in character – and Uta has filled Balenbouche with amazing European antiques and linens, spectacular tropical flower arrangements, and beautifully integrated local materials and artifacts. This time I’m staying in the Calabash Cottage, a new one for me and very delightful but of course you must make your peace first with the ever vigilant dog pack – Garcon, Zoe, Moose Boy, Yuna, Sean Sean, and darling Chai who was just a puppy when I was here with the students in 2010 (that’s her on her back). The first night I went a little too quietly up the back stairs into the main house and the dogs came boiling out of the kitchen barking as tho the apocalypse was in process.  

Dinner with the family was just lovely - vegetable soup with Lucian pepper sauce, organic greens grown by a farmer’s cooperative on Balenbouche land next door (wonderfully sharp arugula and finely shaved red cabbage), lightly fried and salted breadfruit from the tree in the yard, and a half frozen local Piton beer. And strawberry cheesecake. Yeah. And a lovely night’s sleep in my beautiful cottage listening to the rain fall now and then and wondering if the clothes I’d washed and hung on the line would dry…zzzzzz….And while I won’t go into too much detail this sure is a far cry from the wacky studio apartment where I stayed in Barbados run by She Who Must Not Be Named and her five dogs for whom you must very very carefully open and close the wonky double gate every time you drive through but no matter how hard you try you’ll get blamed in rather graphic terms for their escape in the middle of the night and her subsequent violent awakening at 5:00 in the morning. Needless to say, the vegetarian restaurant and onsite yoga classes promised online were not exactly available, and the interior décor ran to plywood cupboards and plastic lawn furniture.

Tuesday morning I headed once more up into the hills of Choiseul below the Gros Piton to find Irena Alphonse at her house, making pots as always, this time an order of small canawi (cooking pots) to be used as sauce servers for the very exclusive Dasheen restaurant at the spectacularly sited Ladera Resort – it was built up high on the ridge between the two Pitons and has the most astonishing view. Irena’s house and workshop, like most of the homes here, has been a progressive affair; what is now the bottom floor was once the whole house and she has just kept building.

After a while we jumped in the car and went to find Catty Osman but she was in Castries for a special celebration for her cousin Bernadette, who is a Catholic nun and was being honored for 25 years of service. The one time I met Bernadette it was  completely unexpected while I was searching the archives at the Folk Research Centre in Castries for old images of potters and she just happened to be in the building for an unrelated function. Delightful lady. As we were leaving Irena noticed that Catty’s sister and next door neighbor Agnes was making pots in her workshop so we went over to say hello and while they got caught up in the local creole language that I am deeply ashamed to never have learned I watched Agnes, mesmerized as always, while she worked on an order for two very large flower pots, assisted by her daughter Trudy who picks the rocks from the clay.

From there we took the winding roads down the hill to Choiseul village to visit an extraordinarily personal museum project called La Maison Creole in the home of Mary Theresa Paschal, a St. Lucian woman who lived in Paris for 32 years and worked in the Victor Hugo Museum, the Petit Palais, and the Pavilion des Arts and vowed to make her own museum when she returned to Choiseul to build her house (which is what many many St. Lucians do at the end of their working lives abroad)

I had seen the hand-lettered signs on the road last year and tried to visit but no one seemed to be home so since Irena knows absolutely everyone I figured I’d take her with me and sure enough even though it was all closed up it was, in short order, all opened up for me and Irena. Mary Theresa has been obsessively collecting artifacts of pre-tourist St. Lucia for many years, as well as African furniture and sculptures, local folk art, and, of course, pottery, lots of pottery.

Even I can’t summon up adequate adjectives for this one; it was just…amazing. And she had quite a few examples of something I’ve wanted to see for quite some time, whenever I stumble over it again in my research materials. Once upon a time there was a man making wheelthrown and kiln fired ‘goblets’ right in LaFargue next to where the Choiseul Secondary School is and the government-funded Arts and Crafts Centre. It’s been long gone in living memory, but people can still remember using these vessels to offer water to guests and visitors in homes and businesses. Since this is the only historical example I know of that involves wheelthrown pottery made in St. Lucia I have a million questions about it but it was great to finally see these marvelous little pots .

Back to Irena’s; she recently acquired an electric potter’s wheel that a friend saw and salvaged from an abandoned pottery project in Soufriere and she was able to find someone to get the motor working again but hadn’t yet tried it out. With a voltage transformer and very long extension cord running over to the house we got it running, and it seemed only fitting that the first pot I should throw on Irena’s wheel would be a goblet, the symbol of hospitality in a maison creole.

I am GOING to post this blog entry tonite so I won’t go into any detail about today but Irena and I went off to Mamiku Plantation to dig clay – its particularly nice clay, we got some last year when we were excavating the suspected old plantation kiln. We brought it back and I chopped some up with a machete, slaked it down in water rather quickly and shoved it through a makeshift screen (wire mesh and an old metal wash basin ) and set it out to dry. Came back to Balenbouche filthy dirty and headed straight down to the beach with Verena, Tanja, Colin, and a pack of happy dogs. I’m really looking forward to throwing more pots, and tomorrow I hope to interview Irena’s mother who was of course a potter and STOP ! STOP WRITING AND GET THIS POSTED !

Amazing Barbados

So this is it – one year from yesterday this book thing is due, the book clock is now officially ticking and boy do I have work to do but WOW what an interesting week it has been. I’ve been in the Caribbean for seven days and my brain is exploding (did I say that already in an email ??) well not really but maybe overflowing with so many interesting stories. Just follow the pots.

On Monday I arrived in Barbados at the Grantley Adams Airport only a half an hour or so late which is shockingly good for LIAT considering I’ve been hearing stories of delays lasting from three hours to three days. Immigration and customs a breeze, and I headed for the car rental office where the fun began when I set my glasses case down on the counter while tearing my bag apart trying to find the American Express card that I carefully hid in the knapsack that I left in St. Lucia with Finola (don’t worry Mom – it is definitely still there). It all worked out anyway because I had my last receipts with the number on it and off I went in my wonderfully slow, crappy car that was exactly what I wanted, Barbados map in hand, navigating one roundabout after another and only getting lost a couple of times on my way to the Barbados Museum. I had an appointment with Deputy Director Kevin Farmer, who was kind enough to write an excellent article about 18^th century documentation of plantation slave potters and even kinder to spend a couple of hours with me and my hopeless obsession with Caribbean ceramics. He gave me many excellent references to pursue, and I’m going back today to look at all the pottery images in their archives that he has been really exceptionally kind in agreeing to lend for publication. Then I ricocheted around Bridgetown in my wonderful awful car, made it to the other side and headed up the West Coast Road to track down my accommodations. I’m going to dedicate a later post to this establishment (later as in after I leave) but let’s just say that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. And it was just about at that point that I realized that my glasses were missing. Didn’t sleep much.

The Sunbury Plantation dining room

After a spectacularly reassuring phone call to DriveAMatic first thing Tuesday morning I headed straight back to the airport, picked up my glasses, and continued on to Sunbury Plantation. I was here um…18 years ago ? and I know they have a coalpot in the basement or something and I wanted to see it again. Sunbury is the only plantation house where all the rooms are accessible to visitors, and all are fantastically set up with period furniture, clothing, and pottery – LOTS of pottery, vases, lamps, decorative ceramic doodads, chamber pots, portable toilets, and other forms of sanitary ware. What fun. Then I headed for the cellars.

a Sunbury bathroom

just what you think they are

coalpots in the cellar

There was a huge tour group upstairs and the electricity was out so the very distracted guides just waved me through and said be careful so I had the gloomy, wonderful, tool and pottery-filled basements to myself. It was fabulous - not one, but five clay coalpots that are all clearly and bewilderingly originally from St. Lucia, as well as iron coalpots and cooking pots and many many old Barbadian traditional pots. Lots of flash photographs later I headed back upstairs for the truly excellent plantation buffet lunch and then it was off into the Bajan countryside, steering wheel in one hand and map in the other, past cane fields and parish churches and very tall old chimneys and having a wonderful time until I realized that what I thought was my gas gauge was actually my temperature gauge and that I was very nearly out of gas. Several helpful roadside conversations later I pulled into the gas station in Belleplaine, which is the only gas station anywhere near the east coast and I very nice lady set me up (they pump the gas for you) and on I went.

Anglican parish church

repurposed chimney

I made my way right back across the island, scoping out the places I needed to be the next day, and when I got back to the west coast I went in search of Red Clay Pottery and the amazing father and daughter team of Dennis and Maggie Bell. They were there, they were willing to drop everything and show me around, and they are two of the most interesting people I honestly have ever met. They can fabricate any and all mechanical equipment needed for production pottery studios, and are constantly inventing more. Dennis has mixed clay and built kilns for virtually every potter on the island, and Maggie has designed an amazing line of beautifully painted clay tableware, intricately carved sculptures, and decorative tourist souvenirs that have been incredibly successful. She has these two kittens that will let her do absolutely anything to them, and while we were talking a wild vervet monkey with a long golden tail came into the workshop to try and get at a little chicken that she is nursing back to health in a cage. Did you know that there are 30,000 wild monkeys in Barbados ?? Neither did I.

Maggie and Dennis Bell

Wednesday was wonderful – I started out at the very well known Earthworks Pottery to interview 82 year old Goldie Spieler, an extraordinary woman who found her way to Barbados in her twenties and gradually, inexorably, built a successful business based on art and luck and sheer commitment. From there I headed up into the hills to find Hamilton Wiltshire, a terrific potter who was at the heart of the ceramic revival in the 80s and 90s, and now has built his own studio on family land where he makes both traditional and contemporary forms using gorgeous local clays that he has discovered through many years of prospecting and testing. I wanted this huge ‘monkey jar’ so very badly but I knew I’d never be able to get it through all the airports and airplanes I have left on this trip so some day I’m going to have to come to Barbados without my cameras and computers and just buy pots to take home. (Note – a ‘monkey’ is a traditional water cooling pot, very distinctive to Barbados). Hammy is one of the nicest men I have honestly ever met, and he took the rest of the day off to travel up to Chalky Mount with me and we had a blast.

Goldie Spieler

Hamilton Wiltshire

Chalky Mount is the home of traditional pottery in Barbados – look at any map and it will identify this mountainous corner of St. Andrew parish as the site of the potteries. Wheel throwing and kiln firing was introduced into Barbados with the white indentured laborers (who later trained the slave potters) in the 17^th century to support the burgeoning sugar industry – cone-shaped clay pots are an essential part of the process of draining the molasses from the wet sugar after the cane juice is boiled down. And, of course, bricks and tiles were constantly in demand for construction, and as a result there were 23 documented plantation potteries, most of which were grouped in or near St. Andrew because this is where the clay is – beautifully rich colored earthenware and midrange red stonewares that have been fashioned into useful objects from the Amerindian period to the present. In Chalky Mount we met one great potter after another, and I became increasingly irritated that I couldn’t buy all the pots that I wanted. Sigh. So many nice pots, so little room in the luggage. Hammy and I ended our day with a trip to his most recent clay site, where we made our way past a host of black-bellied Barbadian sheep, through a gully and across a field at the base of the Chalky Mount ridge to a hole in ground that is in its own way a gold mine. The clay here is close to the surface and quite free from rocks and roots, and once it is slaked down, mixed to a liquid, and dried out in the sun it is wonderfully plastic, fantastic to throw, and fires to a gorgeous terra cotta color. I was awed by this most fundamental of the skills of a potter – the capacity to find within the landscape the raw material that makes it all possible.

I-Seph

Winston Jn Paul

goat

Hammy and clay pit

Yesterday I headed back to Maggie Bell’s with my video camera, listened to her story told straight through in an hour and fifteen minutes, and it was fascinating. What is even more interesting is how all of these stories of pottery in Barbados are interconnected, kind of like a big, messy, extended family where everyone knows everyone and there’s highs and lows and famous collaborations and equally famous disagreements and in the end they’ve all pushed each other further than they might have gone on their own. The production levels are incredible – I believe that there are definitely far more pots made here than anywhere else in the Caribbean, not just because of that great clay in St. Andrew but because of the hard work and incredible talents of potters who have taken on the tourist industry and made it work for them, and for the island.

stole these from the internet but this is what the snake eel and the turtle look like

Swinging back to my ‘hotel’ I stopped at a gas station for food – Thursday was Emancipation Day, a national holiday, everything else was closed and the hot food section was doing brisk business so I bought two slices of freshly made vegetarian pizza – corn, pineapple, and mushrooms – which sounds a bit odd but was really delicious. And finally, I spent the late afternoon at the beach, mask and fins taking me back to where my whole Caribbean adventure started – underwater in 1993. Barbados is a coral island, and the snorkeling and diving here is terrific and today was no exception. I saw herds of doctor fish and goatfish with bright yellow forked tails grazing through the brown algae that covers the limestone, and red-lipped blennies standing guard over the entrances of their coral condos. There were blue-headed wrasses and little pink-red squirrel fish, and two gorgeous juvenile angelfish with bold yellow stripes across black bodies that would later change color completely. I saw not one but two spotted snake eels swimming freely, and the second one was so docile I could slide its long silky body through my fingers. Then I looked over to find a big hawksbill turtle right next to me, the shell about two feet across and floating/flying through the water with the peculiar grace of a four legged winged submarine. I swam with the turtle for maybe ten minutes, touching its shell when it came up for air. Nice day.

Today I’m headed back to the Barbados Museum to look at images, then to meet up with art historian Allison Thompson for a tour of the art program at the Barbados Community College, then finish up with the galleries and craft stores at Pelican Village. Tomorrow I’m headed back to St. Lucia, with a ton of notes and pictures and videos and books and articles and stories, lots of stories to weave together for the section on Barbados. Sounds like a good place to start the book.