The Best Kind of Day

Three more fascinating and illuminating days in Jamaica - all of the research goals I came with have been accomplished through warm, welcoming encounters with potters I met fifteen years ago, and through the generous contributions of time and effort from Jamaican colleagues. I'm headed home tomorrow with a full notebook to transcribe, great pictures and videos, and wonderful memories.

Fern Gully - image courtesy of Google, you better bet I did NOT take my hands off the wheel or my eyes off the road

On Monday morning I followed David Pinto's truly excellent directions all the way from Falmouth across the northern coast to Ocho Rios, through the wild bends and dense jungle of Fern Gully (another absolutely verge-free nowhere to hide road with souvenir vendors and mad drivers) down across the middle of the island and along and over Rio Cobre to Spanish Town and the home of Merline Roden, known by her childhood pet name as 'Munchie' to pretty much everyone. We had such a lovely visit - I met her on my trip here in 1998, and started our conversation with the story of how she had engineered my meeting with now longtime friend Moira Vincentelli, the curator of the ceramics collection at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. I had left Munchie with my card, and when Moira came through not long after on a research trip for her book Women Potters Transforming Traditions Munchie passed along my contact information, she got ahold of me and we have been friends and collaborators ever since.

Munchie, and her mother Lucy 'Ma Lou' Jones (who passed on in 1995) are very well known in Jamaican clay circles as the final practitioners of what was once a booming trade in domestic ceramics that crashed in the 1940s with the introduction of cheap aluminum and enamel cookware. Ma Lou gave it up for a few years, but found herself compelled to continue making her yabbas (cooking pots and bowls) and coal pots and water jars. She gave many demonstrations at home and abroad, and in 1984 she was awarded the National Honour of the Order of Distinction during the Jamaican Independence Anniversary celebrations. Today, her daughter lives and works in very humble circumstances, and yet she is one of the most joyful, friendly, and positive people I have ever met.

We spent three or so amazing hours together, with Munchie patiently demonstrating while I took pictures and shot video, and then she helped me make my way through constructing a pot using her African-based methods (I didn't do too badly, for which I thank my St. Lucian teachers). I showed her lots of images of Caribbean potters who work in a similar fashion, and gave her a picture of Irena Alphonse from St. Lucia who will be joining me in Jamaica next April. It is my fondest wish to watch them make pots together, and compare methods. Several members of Munchie's extended family joined us during the afternoon, and everyone was incredibly nice to me. 

Munchie has quite a few pots accumulated in her storeroom; it's expensive to get them to markets and there's a high likelihood of breakage when they are moved around. But she continues in her absolute commitment to making pots, and says that for her as for her mother, there is 'no other alternative' - not as an act of desperation, but as one of deep joy and powerful connection.

Both hers and her mother's pots are represented in heritage collections in Jamaica - in the National Gallery ceramics collection, at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica (where I saw and photographed Ma Lou's coalpot set below identified by the three small marks on the shoulder of the pot - this was Ma Lou's mark; Munchie uses four small dents), and in the collections of the Institute of Jamaica and its various museums. A marketing program for these pots is sorely needed, one that would emphasize the story of these wonderful women, and the historical contributions the yabbas and coalpots made to the growth of Jamaican society. Maybe one day.

 

After leaving Spanish Town I managed to find my way back to Kingston and the Indies Hotel thanks to  another set of great directions by Munchie's son Ian. Monday was a holiday - National Heroes Day - so happily the traffic was very light. On Tuesday, however, I was not so fortunate and managed to find myself attempting to navigate the wacky, unpredictable, one way streets of congested Kingston during BOTH rush hour periods - morning and night. Ah well. Don't worry Katie - somehow it all worked out. In the morning I bumbled my way downtown to meet up with ceramic artist, teacher, and amazing drummer Phillip Supersad (quite possibly the busiest man in Kingston as far as I can tell) who was kind enough to make room in his day to take me into Trenchtown to find my old acquaintances Blessed Reid and Junior Panton who make huge numbers of garden pots using the Nigerian-derived construction process called the 'walkaround style'.

There is a real divide for most people living in Kingston between the uptown and downtown areas, and Trenchtown is just not a place I can go without an escort. That being said, I was again welcomed incredibly warmly and with no reservations at all. I had brought pictures from fifteen years ago, and they were a huge hit - a bunch of us stood around in the street talking about the people in the images and how they had grown up, especially one lovely young woman who was one of two twin girls in a group picture. It was a delightful experience. 

Walking into the yards behind the fences on Ramsay Road took me right back and Blessed and Junior and I exchanged memories of the earlier visit while acknowledging that yes, we had all gotten a good bit older. Junior was working away as always so I happily hauled out the cameras and tried to solve the problem of shooting both still images and video. 

 

I'm really looking forward to building a companion website for the book; there's just no way to describe the walkaround style - you have to see it to believe it. Junior made the flower pot below in just about ten minutes. Yes, ten minutes, start to finish. I'm not kidding.

I could have stayed all day but Super needed to pick up a friend at the airport who unexpectedly arrived several hours early, so Blessed took us out to see where they gather their clay and fire their pots. This area is part of the huge Liguanea Plains in lower Kingston; the geological history of the place produced what is essentially miles and miles of earthenware clay, and this in an area that is constantly being developed so the clay is becoming increasing inaccessible (hard to dig clay when someone builds a house on top of it). This site is obviously still able to provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply, at least for now.

This is the current incarnation of the circular kiln they use to fire the pots (it's rebuilt every couple of years), with a raised grate of scrap steel in whatever forms they can get. The pots are stacked about twice as high as the walls, and shards and sheets of galvanized are used to close them in and hold the heat. The recently made pots are fired very very slowly for about eight hours, and then very very quickly with lots of wood for another hour or so. Oh how I wish I was going to be around for the next firing.....

After the pots cool, the various specially commissioned pots and local orders are sold and the remaining pots go off to various street side locations in upper Kingston, like the one where I saw them on Constant Spring Road last Saturday.

It really was a magical couple of hours, and Blessed told me I was welcome any time. Junior asked me to send down books with pictures of garden pots - they are always looking for new ideas, and I know just the book - The New Terra Cotta Gardener. So off I went with Super rattling through Kingston in his crazy van talking pots the whole way and he made sure I got where I was going before taking off. Fascinating man, I hope we have lots more ceramic adventures together in some future time. I spent the afternoon at the National Gallery and the Institute of Jamaica looking at shows, and then spent an hour and a half in Kingston traffic getting hopelessly lost about a hundred times until finally some very nice people at an ice cream stand told me how to get back to the hotel which totally worked except that the last half mile took about 30  bumper to bumper minutes which I really didn't mind because I actually knew where I was. Once back at the Indies Hotel a couple of nice cold Jamaican Red Stripe beers fixed me right up.

And today it was back to Spanish Town, this time the old city center which was once the capital of colonial Jamaica. The facades bear witness to a very imposing history but it would take an enormous investment to bring these crumbling buildings back to some version of their former glory. I was told that there has been a proposal to do just that and it would be really good because the folks in Spanish Town don't seem to have much to do and this could be an amazing destination for heritage tourism.

I couldn't resist this marvelous old house; I'm not sure anyone actually lives in it but the 'security fencing' has been enhanced, shall we say, with very contemporary elements courtesy of Red Bull and Arizona Iced Tea cans woven into the metal work.

I'd seen the Red Bull influence already at the Edna Manley College where they had brought in bar tables to better sell their noxious and hyper-caffeinated beverage so I wasn't all that surprised to find the cans in a fence in Spanish Town but its all pretty clear evidence of a marketing onslaught. Yuck.

Amyway, back to what I came to Spanishtown to do - the People's Museum of the Institute of Jamaica houses the kind of everyday historical tools for living that include traditional ceramics, and I was very very very fortunate to be able to meet up with Roderick Ebanks, retired now from the Jamaica National Trust and my teacher in 1999 for a course on Jamaican earthenwares at Port Royal. We had a fascinating conversation about the pots in the collection for a couple of hours - the bottom line is that despite the absolute omnipresence of functional ceramics throughout the history of the Caribbean there is almost nothing written about it, so conversations like this really help in exploring possibilities and connections in the ceramic record.

In talking with museum staff Tyrone Barnett at the People's Museum I learned that there was some critical paperwork I needed to fill out, get signed, and file with the Institute of Jamaica in order to use images of the collection in the book, so I needed to get back to Kingston in a hurry. For efficiency's sake Tyrone sent me off with my new best friend Ramon Downer (I told him to wave for the international blog audience) and he became my afternoon research assistant and saver of my sanity in Kingston traffic. 

We had a great time navigating back to Kingston, everyone at the Institute was very helpful, got the forms filled out and spent some time in their library, and then Ramon and I went off on an adventure to the Barbican area in north Kingston to try and find these little antique shops I had heard about about and while we didn't find them at all we did find Sidney Wilson, the Flower Pots Man on Barbican Road who I had missed when I drove through here last Saturday. He actually works down on Ramsay Road in Trenchtown right near the other potters I visited yesterday and he had already heard about me so introductions were not particularly necessary. We had a great chat, and then Ramon and I went off for Chinese food and navigated back to my hotel while magically avoiding all rush hour traffic. Amazing. 

These have all been the best kind of days - all the planned stuff was great and all the unplanned stuff was just as great and while I'm very ready to get on the plane to Miami tomorrow it has been a fantastic trip to Jamaica. I'm going to try and squish in a short visit to Port Royal in the morning before my flight - fascinating place, once the 'Wickedest City In The World' at the height of its pirate heyday in the late 1600s, but most of it fell into the sea in an apparently justified act of god earthquake on June 7, 1692. The British later built extensive fortifications there so its a cool place to see and right near the airport. Then its home for three days before taking off for Trinidad and the festival of Diwali !