A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



workers who traveled every spring to Chadbourn, in 

 Columbus County, to labor in the strawberry fields. Though 

 no longer the world's largest strawberry market, as it had 

 been from 1895 to 1905, Chadbourn still attracted pickers 

 from all over southeastern North Carolina. 



To say that this photograph ignores the girl's plight 

 because she looks so content — as many defenders of the 

 FSA school of documentary photography might — misses 

 Wootten's point entirely. In fact, you cannot miss the signs 

 of the girl's hard life: her frayed dress full of holes, missing 

 buttons, ragged shawl, work-worn hands. Wootten's home- 

 state audience would also have known that, being in 

 Chadbourn, the girl was from a family in the direst straits. 



A North Carolina tobacco laborer 



A fisherman mending nets, 1930s 



Loading tulips, Pinetown 



But Wootten's photograph shows the 

 girl's shining spirit rising above all that 

 misfortune. 



Look, too, at the photograph of Ben 

 Owen turning a pot in Jugtown, in 

 Moore County, in the 1930s (page 21). 

 For a century, craftsmen and women 

 had been making pottery out of the 

 central piedmont's crude red clay. They 

 lived in a hard, unforgiving region of the 

 state for farming, where the clay soil 

 was more curse than boon. But potters 

 like Owen took what little the land gave 

 them — the clay — and created 

 breathtakingly beautiful shapes and 

 glazes. Wootten's genius was to catch 

 Owen at just that moment when the 



20 HOLIDAY 1998 



