HISTORIAN 



COAST 



plain and glorious seem one and the 

 same. 



Finally, look closely at the young 

 black laborer standing in a tobacco field 

 (page 20). You know he has worked in 

 brutally hot, humid weather since 

 sunrise. His fingers ache from cropping 

 tobacco. The leaf nicotine stings his 

 skin. His feet hurt. Notice, though, how 

 he holds himself and wears his tattered 

 trousers: He's the picture of verve and 

 vim. Wootten has captured a strength of 

 will that surpasses the limits of that 

 tobacco field. 

 Hard times will 

 not hold this 

 young fellow 

 down. 



That's what 

 Wootten was 

 ultimately 

 saying: We can 

 rise above the 

 Great Depres- 

 sion and even 

 what author 

 Robertson 

 Davies once 

 called that 

 "underlying, 

 deep grief of 

 things." We can 

 do it right here, 

 in this place, out 

 of our own 

 hearts, with our 

 own two hands. 

 The FSA 

 photographers 

 never saw it, 

 never believed 

 we had it in us. 



They saw merely the hard red clay of Depression-era lives. 

 Wootten saw how North Carolina people turned that clay into the 

 human equivalent of Jugtown's pottery; that is, into lives of quiet 

 grace and, sometimes, iridescent beauty. □ 



David Cecelski is a historian at the University of North 

 Carolina-Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History Program and a 

 regular columnist for Coastwatch. 



Ben Owen turning a pot, Jugtown 



COASTWATCH 21 



