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.