Living Lucian

A week ? It’s just a week since I posted ? Mindboggling. Right now I’m sitting on an excellent couch in a coffee shop (Rituals – the Caribbean Starbuck’s clone complete with chai latte and chocolate croissants, um…and Jamaican meat patties) on the in-transit floor of Piarco Airport in Trinidad but for the past seven days I’ve been living Lucian and having a wonderful time.

(note: a few hours later I traded the excellent couch for airport terminal bucket seats in the hopes of promised internet access that was sadly nowhere to be found. This post was sent via the lickety split connection at my hotel in Paramaribo - more on that very soon!)

Choiseul Village

I left off last week after the trip to Mamiku Estate to collect clay – this site was once the extensive 18^th century plantation of the French Baron de Micoud and his wife Marie Anne Devaux de Micoud who later kept the estate going and was referred to as ‘Ma Micoud’ hence the name ‘Mamiku’ which has been used to name the site for some time.  In 1778, the 460 acre sugar estate was described as including “all the buildings for the manufacture of sugar and the dwelling houses of the whites and the blacks, the plantations of provisions and canes, the canal, the lime kiln, the canoes, the pottery, the carts, all the machinery for the manufacture of sugar, 30 oxen, 27 mules, all the goats and sheep on the Pointe Riviere lands, 100 slaves of all ages and generally all the appurtenances of the said estate” (primary documentation cited in a 1937 history by Thomas Ferguson compiled for the Shingleton-Smith family, the current owners, and copied for me just this week by Veronica S-S – thank you so much !). So there you have it, a specific citation of an 18^th c plantation pottery in St. Lucia rumors of which last year led me to one particular corner of Mamiku bush and to the subsequent excavation of what may or may not be an 18^th c kiln.

 The Mamiku kiln as we found it in 2012

 After excavation in 2012

Of course having now read the historical details I’m wondering if this may be a lime kiln rather than a pottery kiln and since I have only the foggiest notion of what a lime kiln actually is or how it may have been built and operated in the 18^th century I clearly have some research to do. Anyway, once Irena and I filled up six or seven big bags with two or three hundred pounds of grey and red Mamiku clay we went off to visit “our kiln” (Irena was my chief excavation assistant last year) and..well…the bush has clearly taken over once again. 

kiln swallowed once again by 'bush'

 In search of a more recent window into the lives of Lucian potters I visited with Irena’s lovely 79 year old mother, Meridith, and filmed an enlightening video interview largely in Creole patois and translated and commented on by Irena. They told a story of such hard work, long long days of digging and pounding clay, making coalpots by the dozens/hundreds/thousands, and carrying them down to the sea to load onto boats to carry them to market. For the Vieux Fort market in the south the potters would then walk for hours through the night to reach town just as the sun was rising, to unload the pots, carry them to the market, and sell them to customers who had also walked long distances or come by mule or donkey cart. For Castries, the much larger marketplace in the capitol city in the north, the only way to get there 60 years ago was to ride with the pots in wooden rowboats and Meridith spoke of how afraid and cold she was during those long nights and how at times it would get so rough that the pots would have to be thrown in the sea to save the overloaded boats. All week I’ve listened to stories like these and it is such a privilege to learn the lives of these incredible women.

 Meridith Felix

 As for the pots, the seasoning effect of a ‘canawi’ is legendary – best tasting food is always from a traditional cooking pot, I’ve heard this over and over and I can certainly agree with it from my own experience. Meridith brought out the two smallish, well-used, blackened pots below, the wider one for sauce and the rounder one for ‘peas’, and smiled as she held them in her strong hands and talked about good food. 

 The workhorse, however, is the St. Lucian coalpot. Copied in clay from the original cast iron these cookstoves are the hallmark of St. Lucian pottery and as in the Barbados account have also made their way around the region and even the world. In a bookstore today I saw a picture of a coalpot and canawi in a recent cookbook by Caribbean TV celebrity cook Levi Roots– I had heard about this from correspondence with Sylvia Siddans, a self-proclaimed British farmer’s wife who is another St. Lucia lover and several years ago brought in an order of 200 coalpots to sell to English foodies.

    coalpot in action with iron cooking pot               lovely mostly vegetarian lunch

  A portable stove is a very useful thing, especially for foods that take a long time to cook like peas and beans, or ‘ground provisions’ – the root crops that are the staple starches in the Caribbean and the heart of a Lucian meal (see above for dasheen, sweet potato, and plantain which I know is not a root crop but is goes on the list of ground provisions anyway). Irena’s mother has a very cool setup in her little kitchen house with a constructed clay/cement hearth that has multiple “burners” for sliding in coalpots or just burning wood under cooking pots. The kitchen area was always kept a little separate from the house not, as I thought, to keep from burning your house down but to keep the smoke out of the living room.

So I spent my week in Choiseul making pots and talking about pots and visiting with potters and finally got to follow up on my longtime desire to paint images of pottery on Catty Osman’s bar (did I mention she has a bar ? Irena does too), which has been in a continuous state of expansion for many years and has recently been magnificently clothed in very bright shades of orange and green. 

It sits right at the front of her property on the main road and is the hotspot for the Morne Sion area on the weekends with Catty cooking chicken and bakes and her daughter Hilda running the bar and there’s a little convenience store there as well. And despite some wild wind and rain from a tropical wave making its way across St. Lucia I spent two and a half days very happily painting coalpots and flower pots and vases  on the walls plus a soon-to-be installed wooden sign celebrating ‘Catty’s Relaxation Bar’. They wanted me to to paint the name directly on the wall but I do hate standing on ladders especially rickety homemade Lucian ones and very especially in near-storm-force winds. No way.

 Catty Osman and her 'Relaxation Bar'

Monday was a long process of saying goodbye to Choiseul, starting at Balenbouche in the morning with a lively breakfast with loads of family and friends and wonderful hot crunchy traditional woodfired bread from Laborie, a town further up the coast. There was breakfast too for the resident redfooted tortoise and his new girlfriend; I can’t for the life of me remember his name but his fondness for human feet is legendary and led to his banishment from the house to a private residence out in the grounds.

The landscape of Balenbouche is incredibly seductive; flowers and roots and vines and great stands of creaking bamboo and impossibly sculptural tree limbs all of which seem to grab at you as you make your way down the hill to the remains of the sugar mill  - stone walls, copper pans, and iron machinery dominated by the huge intact chimney that I think must have created the draft for the fires boiling down the cane juice. But even bigger than the chimney is a fantastically enormous fig tree growing on top of, through, around and between every nook and cranny in the heart of the old factory. 

Up at Irena’s for the last time; I gave her a refresher course on the wheel and she didn’t have much trouble beyond needing to tone down the incredible strength of her hands for the more subtle movements of throwing. I'm hoping that next April we can both go to Jamaica for the eight day workshop that has been run for many years by Doug Casebeer from Anderson Ranch (Colorado) at David Pinto's fantastic studio in Jamaica - lots of throwing, plus wood and soda firing, plus Irena could meet Jamaican traditional potters.

 And then she got back to work on her orders, only this time building the biggest pots I have seen made in St. Lucia. I don't even know what these giant flower pots weigh - 50 pounds ? 75 pounds ? - but watching her zip one of these out in about 90 minutes was a revelation. What a great potter she is.

 Oh what the heck - can't leave Choiseul without pictures of Catty's kittens and Irena's sheep....

Driving up the coast to Castries I had lots of time to think about all the warm encounters and conversations in Chosieul that I haven't included here - hanging out and talking with Catty's daughters Hilda and Tesa; getting hugged and patted down by tiny Aunty Delia who is still making pots at 77 even though she swears she's going to stop; checking in with Alicia and seeing the kiln we built three years ago still looking and working great; the fascinating performance of the La Rose group at Catty's bar (singing, dancing, 'arresting' people like me for taking pictures so that I would make a contribution in order to get out of jail); hearing Aunty Mary tell me that of all the people who visit and say that they are coming back I was the only one who did....it all matters so much.

 But the clock is ticking and the plane for Surinam will be leaving soon so its time to take care of very mundane things like laundry - I packed reasonably well this time, this is only the second time I've done laundry and it should take me through until I get home. Urmie's house is on a steep hill in Sunny Acres on a beautiful lot looking out across Rat Island and the far Caribbean horizon; her slip-casting studio is built into the open-walled foundation of the house and she has been supplying handpainted ceramic vessels, sculptures, and souvenirs to Lucian hotels and restaurants since she moved here nearly thirty years ago. Her assistant McCrasey came straight out of Urmie's arts and crafts classroom at the Castries Comprehensive School; he has also set up a small studio at home and is selling his own line of clay souvenirs.

We had a blast just kicking back, going to the movies at the Caribbean Cinemas megaplex (Elysium, great fun if gory in spots), and fitting in one more morning in the crystal clear turquoise waters of Rodney Bay. Urmie has been such a great friend for so many years, and having a little time to relax before the Surinam adventure has been wonderful. And then it was time to go....