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Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir
Allison Glock


A beautiful and touching memoir of Allison Glock’s grandmother, this is both an extraordinary portrait of a truly remarkable woman and a engaging history of 20th century Appalachia.'"Beauty before comfort," she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace.'So writes Allison Glock at the start of her remarkable memoir, the story of her maternal grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair, and the extraordinary life she led growing up in Chester, West Virginia, a sooty factory town wedged between the unforgiving Appalachians and the Ohio River. As a girl, a young woman, and even late in life as a grandmother, Aneita Jean had a magnetism that attracted and enchanted all she came into contact with. Allison Glock takes us through the stages of her life, capturing not only the irrepressible vitality of a woman born ahead of her time, but also the eccentricities of a small-town, working-class West Virginia family, trying to survive the Great Depression and the Second World War.Aneita, blessed with 'the body of Miss America' was determined that she would escape the town that was holding her back. That she never made it, and the pattern that her life ended up taking, is just another small-town tragedy of the vanished dreams of one extraordinary person. Allison Glock writes with humour, lyricism and beauty to create a truly unforgettable portrait of a remarkable person.







Beauty Before Comfort







A MEMOIR







Allison Glock













For Dixie Jean and Matilda Mercy Law


There’s something about the pottery. You build up quite a companionship, a comradeship, whatever you call it. You take a little bit of clay and mix it up with water and fire it and make something out of it—there’s romance in that. It just gets in your blood.

—ED CARSON, POTTER, 1985

No potter that ever lived can be overlooked, no ware, however humble, can be despised.

—SATURDAY REVIEW, 1879


Everyone has a story to tell. This is the story of my grandmother as she chooses to remember it.




Contents


Cover (#u23c1eac6-199d-586d-9c89-369e4b6a63cb)

Title Page (#ubacdb748-9eec-5540-9d42-0d38746516a7)

Dedication (#ub62ac7b5-be04-547c-bc36-730b65ffd892)

Epigraph (a) (#u1b70e82b-aa45-5df1-855d-dad02a9b11c7)

Epigraph (b) (#u4c7ae2a8-8946-5e70-a725-f3842511a151)

CHAPTER ONE (#ucb3b7631-9dc8-5df1-923f-deba00a540df)

CHAPTER TWO (#ue99d1c4a-2b16-569f-81c4-e398864aabdd)

CHAPTER THREE (#uf9000d70-4246-5ab9-b840-ac04485b3acf)

CHAPTER FOUR (#ub73c45b0-d4ba-528f-a379-53377f110b92)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_fc5c3027-d9b2-5bf3-8b31-2c1ea4bea6fb)


Bless her heart.

That’s what we say. It’s a catchall.

“Aunt Sue’s getting divorced.” Bless her heart.

“Velma lost her job at the bank.” Bless her heart.

“Crystal backed over the cat with her Cadillac.”

Bless her heart. Bless the cat’s heart.

And so that is what we say when we are told, “Your grandmother is getting worse.”

Bless her heart, we say, although really her heart has never been better. The problem is, as always, in her head.



CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, 2000

The tiny nursing home bedroom is crowded with family. It is my grandmother’s eightieth birthday and we are trying to get her dressed. Though old, my grandmother is an able woman, so that is not the problem. The problem is style. We are dressing her for a party, her party, and so she wishes to appear festive, and the beige sweater, slacks, and boots her three daughters have selected for her are not cutting it.

“I don’t think that will do at all,” she says, tossing the sweater off the bed. “And no one is wearing those anymore,” she says, squinting and pointing a crumpled arthritic finger at the ankle boots.

She is right, of course. No one wears ankle boots anymore, but her insistence on looking in vogue draws eye rolls and heavy sighs from her girls.

“How about a nice skirt and sweater set?” she suggests. “Something in a yellow, my yellow.” Dutifully, her oldest daughter leaves to go fetch a new ensemble from the mall. Grandmother relaxes and leans back onto her bed. She eyes the group gathered around her, her daughters and their children and various boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, and wives, and wrinkles her forehead.

“Where’s Glen?”

Glen is her second daughter Jody’s husband, an ex–pro football player prone to complaining.

“He’s at the doctor’s office,” says Jody. “Something’s wrong with his private area.”

“Bless his heart,” says Grandmother.

“He has bad balls,” says Jill, her youngest daughter, cutting right to it.

“Well.” Grandmother laughs. “That’s the saddest story I’ve heard all day.” And then: “Don’t you all have anything better to do today than sit around staring at me? Stay any longer and I’m going to start charging rent.”



Let it be said that there is nothing on God’s green earth my grandmother would consider better than an opportunity to stare at her. She has spent at least seventy of her eighty-two years cultivating stares and making damn sure she has warranted the attention. To gaze at my grandmother is not a passive exercise. She’s no Vermeer. She gives you bang for your buck—be it by making faces, cracking jokes, offering a peek at her undies, or any other shtick she can whip up for your amusement. She’s beyond a pro. To look at my grandmother is to be made to feel special. It’s an actress’s trick, but my grandmother was never an actress, just the daughter of a factory worker born and raised in hillbilly West Virginia (“West-by-God-Virginia,” she calls it), the proverbial coal miner’s daughter, minus the coal and the redemptive sparkly career in Nashville.

“I was born depressed,” she often says, only half-joking. Depression isn’t exactly rare these days in West-by-God-Virginia, as a quick drive through Grandmother’s old neighborhood confirms. Nearly everyone you see is overweight, stuffed full of triple burgers and seasoned fries, living on junk because junk is cheaper than a head of lettuce in most of West Virginia, and when you make shit money at the factory or the mine, you stretch your dollar as much as you can. Besides, a triple burger sure feels better in the belly than a head of lettuce, and most rural West Virginians take what comfort they can get.

Which is why they drink. And smoke. And sit very still on their porches, rickety slices of wood so worn, the nails snag your feet as you shuffle across. They sit very still in their folding chairs, the kind with the itchy plastic-fabric seat you buy at Wal-Mart for $1.99. They sit and they smoke and they pop beers with one hand, pushing down the tab with an index finger so the beer drains quicker from the hole and the cigarette butts drop in more easily once the beer is gone. They sit and wait until they forget what they’re waiting for, and more often than not, they fall asleep in those itchy chairs, the plastic pressing into their doughy legs and arms like cookie cutters.

Sometimes they sing:



Oh, the West Virginia hills, the West Virginia hills, Tho other scenes and other joys may come, I can ne’er forget the love that now my bosom thrills, Within my humble mountain home.

It wasn’t always so bad as now, but West Virginia has never really had it good. It is a hard place, founded on hard land—“The only thing it’s good for is to hold the world together,” goes the joke—and the folks who live there don’t expect any different. Those who do enter into a losing battle with Providence and go mad with the trying, as surely as rocks roll down the mountain.

“I ended up with my nerves,” says Grandmother, describing how her home state shaped her. My grandmother’s nerves are legendary, like Judy Garland’s.

“Bring me a Xanax, would you, dear? Bring me a couple.”



Time was, no one worked a room like my grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair. A slinky redhead with a knowing smile, she sailed through every doorway as if on a wave, ruffling each man and sending them sniffing after her like hounds in heat. In seconds, she would be surrounded. Drinks were brought to her. Cigarettes were lighted by a convoy of matches. She was fanned or draped with sweaters as the climate required. When she rose, all eyes stretched to watch her walk away, hypnotized by the tick-tock swing of her hips. My grandmother always found a reason to look back, and it filled her with a torrid joy to discover the men’s eyes focused on places they shouldn’t have been.

As a child, I lived with my grandmother now and again when my mother needed a break, which was often, being as she was in college and broke and rearing me alone in an attic apartment short on lightbulbs and food. A few hours’ drive through the mountains brought me to my grandmother’s house, a small white vinyl-sided two-story with a cement front porch big enough for a glider and a backyard big enough for a game of horseshoes, but not much else. I would run inside to see her, and she would grab my chin, tell me to stand up straight, then push me into the kitchen, where she’d prepared graham crackers and honey on a heavy white plate that felt cool when I licked up the crumbs.

“That’s low-rent, little girl,” she’d say as I tongued the plate.

“But I’m hungry,” I’d whine.

“Fine to be hungry. Not fine to act like it.”

I must have been around ten years old when I realized that my grandmother was not like other grandmothers. Men would call—plumbers, pastors, Boy Scouts—and she would work them into a lather. “Oh my! My robe seems to have fallen open. How embarrassing.”

When the other town ladies dropped by the house in their elastic-waist pants and plastic shoes, my grandmother greeted them in suede go-go boots and a miniskirt.

“Great color on you, Dottie,” she’d say as her neighbors stood speechless, eyeing her naked legs and chunky turquoise pendant, no doubt wondering why in heaven’s name she’d bought that.

“I swanee,” they’d cluck as they left the house.

“Bless their hearts,” Grandmother would say as the screen door slammed.

Her golden years changed her little. Grandmother stayed chic. She did not wear her hair in a bun (she preferred to cut hers in the impish style of a French ingenue). She did not coo at babies. She did not dress in housecoats and slippers. She did not fatten up and sit in a rocker, patting her ample lap, and rasp in a warm, creaky voice, “Come up here and let Grandma read you a story.” She did not, in fact, allow us to call her “Grandma” or “Granny” or anything as pedestrian as “Memaw.” She permitted “Grandmother” and only that, and that is about where her grandmotherly qualities started and stopped. That’s not entirely true. She baked.

She was an expert baker, and she swore that the day she used a box mix for a cake was the day they might as well put her away. She also baked pies, splicing the butter into the flour with two knives, instead of using a mixer. While she baked, my grandmother sang. Her voice was lilting and sweet, which nearly overcame the raunch of the lyrics, songs of her own creation, which inevitably referenced the scatological.

“Ah lasagne, piss on ya, shit on ya,” she’d wail in full-on opera mode. I was young, but I was pretty certain that the other grandmothers I knew never sang phony arias about elimination while kneading pie dough.

No, my grandmother was different, had always been different, and, though she had paid dearly for it, had chosen to remain different, if one can choose those things.

Aneita Jean Blair was born and raised in Hancock County, West Virginia, same as me, until my mother found herself a decent fellow (from Kentucky), remarried, and moved us to North Florida, a dog’s piss away from the Georgia border. (In predictable hillbilly fashion, my birth father flew the coop when I was a toddler, leaving my mother and me to scrap for ourselves.) Although Florida offered more amusement for a child—The beach! Orange trees! Alligators!—I preferred West Virginia, in no small part because my grandmother lived there and she was amusing enough for anyone.

I begged to go back, and my mother was happy to comply, shipping me off every summer until I was in high school and the lure of West Virginia gave way to other, more hormonal yens.

I remember the drive to West Virginia from the Pittsburgh airport, the impossible corkscrew of the roads and the dented iron railings that lined them. I remember how dense the leaves of August were, how dark it could look in the holler even at noon. I remember the metallic scent of land raped by industry and how it rattled your teeth. I remember bony dogs running free down the highway, clotheslines strung heavy with overalls, the sound of gravel under the tires, the cool of the air, the supple dapple of the light, and how my grandmother’s voice rose and rang like a bell above it all as she sang on the drive home, the piercing white clarity of her song lending the whole worn scene a delicious flavor, a purpose.

“What’ll I do with just a memory to tell my secrets to?” she’d sing as the road rumbled by. “What’ll I do?”

Her voice sailed out the window, a stream of silk. Ka-chump, ka-chump went the road, and I would feel my body loosen with each mile, stretched open by her song and the exquisite melt of coming home.

As a child, West Virginia was my world. More specifically, Newell, West Virginia, a sad hump of a town paralyzed by poverty. I loved Newell with an inexplicable ferocity, the way a mother loves a screaming baby.

“You want to go where?”

Well, I wanted to go anywhere my grandmother was, because my grandmother sang songs and made men blush and fed me graham crackers with honey and showed me how to walk in heels and how to braid my hair and how to be more than I thought I was in the world.

“Grandmother, my braid is uneven!”

“A man on a flying horse wouldn’t see that.”

From her, I learned how to tell when a cake is cooked, how to cock my head to appear interested in someone else even when I wasn’t, how to make macramé plant holders, how to tell a joke, and, during one brash moment in a truck stop ladies’ room, how to smoke gracefully.

“Exhale like you’re bored. And look up. Always look up.”

The first lesson she ever taught me was that dancing matters. Grandmother felt that a person, especially a gentleman, who did not dance was not a person with whom one wanted to spend much time. When she did come across men she fancied who didn’t dance, she sent them away until they did. They always learned, because my grandmother was bitingly beautiful, and that is the second lesson she taught me—that beauty inspires, all of God’s beauty, but especially hers.

I can still see my grandmother sitting at her dressing table, looking into the mirror. It wasn’t much of a mirror, just a round fist-sized lens screwed atop a metal base painted to resemble gold. The base was wobbly, and to get an accurate reflection, she had to duck and bob around a crack in the lens. Still, it had the necessities: You could, with effort, still see yourself, there was a magnifying side (for plucking concerns), and it was portable, so should the house catch fire from some act of God, the mirror could be snatched up and carried to safety along with, should there be time, a handful of lipsticks and an eyeliner pencil. Children like myself, it was assumed, would fend for themselves.

Grandmother probably spent more hours in front of this mirror than she did the television. She didn’t gaze into it willy-nilly, but she believed in presenting herself well, and that required a healthy time commitment. It required devotion. It required ritual.

Every morning, Grandmother would don her robe and sit at the dressing table, her makeup brushes laid out beside her like surgical instruments. She started with moisturizer, a thick yellow cream she applied generously from scalp to neck. Then she dabbed on concealer, under the eyes and around the nostrils. On top of that came liquid base to even out the skin. She shook the bottle as if making a martini and then smudged the pale beige goo down to her throat, taking care to prevent a tide line at the collar. Then she brushed on blush, a dusting on both cheeks and the nose. Then eye shadow, two shades, and eyeliner, one shade. Then mascara, top and bottom lashes. Then lip liner, around the edges and then coated over the entire lip. Then lipstick. Then blot, on a tissue. Then more lipstick. Then blot, on a second tissue. Then more lipstick. Then a once-over of loose powder to “set” the face. She finished with a self-administered pinch on each cheek for color.

This routine did not change for sixty years. The shades and the products stayed the same, and when fads like contouring and brow thickening happened along, my grandmother was not tempted. As a child in West Virginia, I watched my grandmother do her face almost every morning. I sat on the floor, silent, while she executed the same movements, brushed the same strokes, never skipping a day, never rushing through it, never, ever smudging lipstick on her teeth. To Grandmother, a woman who didn’t bother to make the most of what God gave her was displaying a lack of fortitude. As far as she could tell, the only women who didn’t make themselves up were lesbians and lunatics, and while she had nothing against either group, she certainly strove to differentiate herself.

“Beauty before comfort,” she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful that she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace. Even now, at the age of eighty-one, she has her hair colored weekly and doesn’t descend the stairs without full makeup. If an opera spontaneously broke out at her nursing home, Grandmother would be appropriately dressed.

It is a legacy she has passed down to her own daughters, and they to theirs. Generations of women painting themselves to perfection, ramming their feet into tiny shoes, sucking in their bellies, dousing their hair with enough spray to gag a horse, girl after girl learning the value of being “as pretty as you can be.”

As family legacies go, beauty before comfort is a particularly cumbersome inheritance. For my mother, it necessitates a minimum full hour of prep time every morning, time that lengthens as she grows older. For my youngest sister, it requires an arsenal of beauty products—enough to fill a second suitcase when she travels. For me, it meant coming to terms with the fact that in a long line of great beauties, I was not a great beauty, and that I’d better start honing my sense of humor.

For all of us, it means living with a low-grade anxiety, a murmur in our brains fueled by our collective self-consciousness and our compulsive sizing up of our place in any room—Who’s prettier? Who am I prettier than?—as if our very survival depends on our ability to seduce.

For Grandmother, the pursuit of beauty meant something deeper. Born as she was in a factory town, tiny and blinkered and perched precariously on the banks of the Ohio River, beauty meant nothing less than freedom. Ugly girls didn’t escape to Hollywood and sit by the pool in leather mules. Ugly girls didn’t marry up and fly away on airplanes. Ugly girls got left behind and never knew any better.

Grandmother believed that there are people who tell stories and people who inspire the telling, and she intended to be the latter. “A pig’s ass is pork,” she would say when the local men pecked after her, wanting to know her heart’s intentions. Or maybe, “It ain’t lying if it’s true.” When the boys would confess their desires, daisies in trembling hand, Grandmother would smile and weave the flowers into a halo for her hair. Before it was all over, she would have seven marriage proposals and a body like Miss America and her share of the tragedies that befall small-town girls with bushels of suitors and bodies like Miss America, girls who dare to see past the dusty perimeters of their lives.

She keeps a memory book from this time, her youth, before she was tired and widowed and old, when she was cream-fresh and believed her life was as open as the road. All women kept scrapbooks back then, hoping somehow that their history would mean more than most. My grandmother’s is a three-ring brown plastic binder with black construction-paper pages holed out at the edges and snapped inside. The pages have worn through the years and many have Scotch tape bonded to the seams. In the book are newspaper clippings and birth announcements, ticket stubs and good-natured platitudes cribbed from local papers, bromides along the lines of “Though you have but little or a lot to give, all that God considers is how you live.” (I can only figure she found these snippets ironic, as my grandmother has never shown the least bit of interest in God or any of his considerations.)

For the most part, there are photographs. Black-and-white images of her and her boyfriends, sitting on cars, standing on fences, the men smoking cigarettes in World War II uniforms, Grandmother fanning out her dresses to best advantage. On many of the shots of the men, there are love notes penned in the corners, hungry scrawlings declaring their affection for the girl behind the camera.

There must be more than one hundred of these pictures, I know because Grandmother and I have often looked at them. Every Christmas or Fourth of July, out comes the memory book and the stories.

“Now, that boy sent me a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from boot camp, I saved the bottle. And that boy took me to the Kentucky Derby; I had a mint julep. And that boy raised greenhouse roses. And that boy took me roller-skating. And that boy died in the war.”

She tells me which boys she loved and which loved her. She tells me about her brothers and her sister and her mother and father. She tells me about her house and what went on there and how it was to be young in West Virginia, to be a skinny, eager child with disobedient hair and bottomless longing. Certain pictures are like songs, making her cry no matter how many times she sees them. Almost every snapshot is labeled neatly with the subject’s name—including each photograph of my grandmother: “Aneita Jean Blair” tightly jotted in the white border at the top, a nod to the future she dreamed she’d have, one where strangers knowing who she was would matter.




CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_d1e4983f-4a42-5684-99aa-47076756e2f5)


The state of West Virginia was born in conflict and has retained lo these many years a mulish attitude problem. The people born there are chippy. It’s a birthright.

The state came to be in an act of war, when the western half of the state broke off from its eastern parent, Virginia, in 1863. The two sides disliked each other with familial intensity. The western half envied the wealthy eastern half. The eastern half was ashamed of the western half. The westerners saw the easterners as idle slave owners. The easterners saw the westerners as boorish rednecks.

“What real share insofar as the mind is concerned could the peasantry of the west be supposed to take in the affairs of the state?” said easterner senator Benjamin Watkins Leigh on the floor of the 1829 Virginia legislature.

“Screw you,” said the peasantry of the west.

Western Virginians were sick of the ridicule, of being overlooked when it came to building schools, of being dismissed as “woolcaps” by the richies who lived in the pampered south of the state. Then, around 1850, the state of Virginia borrowed $50 million for improvements and the construction of roads, canals, and railways. The only money spent in what would become West Virginia was $25,000to build the “Lunatic Asylum West of the Allegheny.”

It was not a promising precedent, and the two regions formally went at each other’s throats. The rivalry played out in the legislature for years, until finally President Lincoln stepped in and pressured Congress to push Western Virginia’s independence through. This decision “turns so much slave soil to free,” he said. It was “a certain and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion.”

Thus was born a state and the lasting tradition among its people of giving whomever they please the finger. “Mountaineers are always free,” declares the state motto. This history was not lost on my grandmother.



Aneita Jean Blair was born at the foot of her mother’s bed on September 30, 1920.

“I was born ugly,” my grandmother says. This is a lie, but it is a lie she believes.

In the album, there is only one photograph of the infant Aneita Jean. It was taken on the Fourth of July and she is roosting on her father’s knee, a lump in white cotton, with a black wick of hair falling down her forehead. Beside her, her two-year-old brother, Petey Dink, rests an American flag on his shoulder, his free arm raised to shield his eyes from the sun. A horse and buggy is parked behind them. It is impossible to tell if she was in fact ugly, but, given the gene pool, it seems unlikely.

On the day my grandmother entered the world, it was storming, and because her mother always kept the windows open, Aneita Jean Blair was not only ugly but in the rain. When her father rushed into the bedroom, Grandmother was already there, pinned down by her mother’s foot, wailing and kicking in a runnel of wet. It is because of this that she says she is crazy.

“I’m crazy, you know,” she’ll tell you soon after you meet her. She is indiscreet. She tells the grocery clerk she’s crazy, the bank teller, the librarian. She once met a boyfriend of mine, grabbed his arm, told him she was crazy, then suggested the two of them climb into a dog crate and “see what happens.”

Aneita Jean weighed seven pounds at birth, a weight she would more or less carry until the first grade. She was a colicky baby, a crier. She spent the first years of her life in a foul mood, believing even then that a life without beauty is a pile of slop.

In a photo of her as a toddler, Aneita Jean is standing outside, her mouth screwed into a knot of agony, her hair sticking up like a pitched tent. When she was two, her older brother, Petey, had given her a doll that frowned, which made everyone laugh, but which she despised and pinched when no one was looking.

“Everybody thought it was funny,” she says. “I didn’t think it was so damn funny.” And then: “Buster Keaton never smiled, either, and everybody was mad for him. Ah, horseshit feathers.”

In public, Aneita Jean would stand eyes forward, lips flattened, hair chopped close to her neck, reeking of defiance and looking lifetimes older than the little girls next to her, with their eager smiles and shy eyes. Family lore has it that it would be a full three years before she ever smiled. Three years, never so much as revealing a tooth.



I’m going to leave here one day,” she’d say to her mother years later, her head nestled in her lap.

“Why would you go and do a thing like that?”

“Because.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, but then, as a little girl, she hadn’t really thought it out. It was an instinct. She was going to leave, become a painter or a singer; she was going to wear dresses with sequins and make art and meet dark men in suits who smoked pipes and nodded their heads in approval.

“No one leaves here, Jeannie,” her mother, Edna, would chide, tucking a curl of hair behind her daughter’s ear. Edna herself had moved only twice, arriving at the new spot within a few hours of the last.

That few people escaped West Virginia was true, but an irrelevancy to Aneita Jean. Ugly or not, she decided that by the time she was sixteen, she’d find a man who would carry her over the mountains to a place where all the women lolled about, resplendent in chiffon and diamonds, and all the men looked like Errol Flynn before he started drinking so much. Someplace glamorous. Like Pittsburgh.




CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a3a18ece-756e-5345-bf1c-72c7b1dc4807)


“I couldn’t stand the dirt. The alleys. The ignorance. You know how you drive through towns and wonder, Why would anyone live here? That’s how I felt. But we lived there. We lived there our whole dingdong lives.”

Aneita Jean Blair was the second child born to Edna Virginia McHenry Blair and Andrew Charles Blair. Edna was a natural flirt. She was Irish, bosomy, and spirited, with jowly cheeks that vibrated when she laughed. Andrew, a Scotsman, was not a jovial person and seemed in a constant state of mystification as to how he’d ended up married to one.

The year my grandmother was born, West Virginia was in the throes of a moonshining epidemic. Every month, more forbidden stills were discovered, and in a raid just weeks before Aneita Jean’s birth, state officials found a still in a nearby church, news that sent Edna into hysterical laughter. Andrew didn’t cotton to irony, so a month later, when the Ceramic Theater showed The Family Honor, “a picture that sharply contrasts right thinking and right living with false pride and evil deeds,” Andrew Blair made sure his wife saw the show.

Andrew and Edna would have five kids altogether, all spaced roughly two years apart. The first was Andrew junior, whom everyone called Petey Dink, then Aneita Jean, then Forbes, followed by Alan, and, finally, Nancy. The Blairs were an attractive family, but Petey Dink and Aneita Jean were dealt the best genetic hand. Both were tall and lean, with wide eyes that jumped off their pale round faces. Both had small plump mouths, and with their translucent skin and golden red hair, they looked every inch like their Celtic forebears.

Forbes was a blonder, blander version of Petey, more like his father, sturdy and tense, while Alan and Nancy were born with brown curls and longer faces. They looked like mournful cherubs, and they studied intently while Petey and Aneita Jean robbed apple orchards, their laughter trailing behind them like a kite.

They all lived in a brown brick and clapboard Victorian at the corner of 917 Phoenix Avenue, in Chester, West Virginia, just on the cusp of the good neighborhood, where the people didn’t have to stretch sugar or send their kids to the government depot for cans. Just a few blocks away, they could wade into the woods and play amid the dogwoods, rhododendron, wild violets, and long, wispy trees that rustled like bamboo.

Their town was known for two things—pottery factories and not being as pitiable as its downriver neighbor, Newell.

Pity being a relative thing in West Virginia, the distinction boiled down to small details. Newellies still kept chickens in their yards. In Chester, there were fewer chickens and more flower beds, and on occasion, in the nicer homes, wallpaper.

The Blairs had flower beds and hand-sewn curtains cut from heavy cotton bark cloth printed with tropical leaves. They had a porch and a walled yard and a stairwell up the center of the house. There were four bedrooms and one bath. The street out front was gray brick, and in either direction there was a view of the factory smokestacks.

Like Newell, Chester was a blip on the east bank of the Ohio River, part of a cluster of small towns that make up the panhandle, Hancock County, a region of steel and brick, but mostly clay. The clay was unique. Plentiful and unusually malleable, it was perfect for making crocks, jugs, stoneware, and china.

Potters lived there, whole generations of them, growing up in cramped company houses, knowing only the job they were trained to do and the folks around them. Starting as early as 1830, people moved to what is now Hancock County, discovered the clay, became potters, and stayed. It was a marriage of resource and craftsman, and it was a marriage for life. “The second-oldest profession,” they called it.

The clay along the Ohio River had a blue tint and smelled of standing water. Once in your nose, the scent never left, just dug deeper into your pores, so each breath reminded you where you were. It was persistent in other ways, digging into fabrics and under fingernails, like white blood, thick and seeping, growing crusty when it dried. Most potters didn’t even bother trying to eradicate the clay; there was always more carried in their pant cuffs, in their hair, on their toothbrushes. Andrew Blair was a potter. And when his sons grew old enough, they, too, served their time in the factories, until the war called them away to more epic fates.

Throughout Aneita Jean’s life, the Blair family was well known in the valley. The family’s combined good looks and social acumen made them easy to spot. Forbes was an usher at the theater. Petey Dink danced with all the ladies, and danced so well that even the wives among them never refused. The whole family, save Edna, was dapper, but even she transcended her plain frocks aided by her round biscuit cheeks and knowing black eyes. Her husband favored layers of starch, stiff shirts and vests and jackets, so crisp and pointy, he looked to be cut out of cardboard.

In one family picture, Petey, fifteen, wears a floral-print necktie with a rumpled dress shirt and high-waisted pants. Aneita Jean, thirteen, wears a pleated skirt and wide-collared shirt. Forbie, eleven, aping his father, looks strangely adult in a herringbone suit, while Alan, nine, and Nancy, seven, sport fitted sweaters and stovepipe pants. Together, they seem to sing from the page, the clothes incidental trappings rustling around their collective confidence; except Alan.

Alan Blair had the misfortune of being born agreeable in a family of severe stoics and manic charmers. He was neither the oldest boy nor the youngest child. He was not the handsomest or the smartest or the cruelest. He was not a jock, a scholar, or a delinquent. He was just good old Alan Mead, shy and curly-headed, and he kept low to the ground and quiet. (Later, he would become an elementary school science teacher who rarely mentioned how he had piloted a drone plane through the mushroom cloud of the first dummy atomic bomb test, or how, as a full commander in the war, he had nearly died in a hurricane off the coast of Japan when his plane pitched into the ocean like a javelin.)

His older brother Forbes Wesley was quiet, too. But his reticence was a manifestation of control and a touch of snobbery. His father, whom he closely resembled, told him that he was better than everybody else, and Forbie believed it. His haughty air won him few friends in the valley. He didn’t mind. Such was the cost of superiority. In the future, his truculence would make him a significant force in the Republican party, friends with the likes of Hoover and Reagan.

Nancy, the youngest, was a change-of-life baby, born when Edna was in her forties. Aneita Jean thought Nancy’s was the most beautiful face she’d ever seen. It was perfect, with skin as lively as water and hair darker than molasses, and she spent a lot of time pretending Nancy was her baby.

Petey Dink, the eldest child, was the most magnetic of all. Lean and beautiful as a greyhound, he was quick-witted and full of beans. He wasn’t much for schoolwork, believing himself smart enough already. He preferred stealing—candy, comics, cigarettes. His teachers tried reprimanding him, but they found it impossible against the tide of his charm.

“I’m sure I could concentrate better if I wasn’t so distracted,” he’d say with a lewd grin when they confronted him about his failing grades.

An instinctive athlete, Pete mastered football and baseball, then quit sports, finding them less stimulating than the company of women, up to and including his sister, Aneita Jean, a girl he adored, even if she was a little loopy.

“He thought I was nuts,” says Grandmother. “But he loved me to bits.”

The Blair family resembled the others in Hancock County only in that they were large, Scottish, and struggling. “We were never going to be wealthy,” says Grandmother. “But my father wanted us to have class.”

And so Andrew dressed his children like adults, and stressed the value of self-improvement. He made rules forbidding most childhood games like tag and hide-and-seek. And he made rules for conduct. Manners were of the utmost importance, as was grammar. At the Blair house, you stood up straight or were poked in the spine with a stiff finger. If your jaw fell open when you read, it was soon smacked shut from the chin.

“Quit your crying,” Andrew would say whenever his children washed up on his knee with troubles. “There’s a price for being special. You want to be like everybody else?”

“He had a hard life,” Grandmother says in a level voice. “His mother was run over by a train.”



The Blair house sat on a corner lot, right at the Harker pottery trolley stop. Because of this, it was a social hub. As potters waited on the front porch for the trolley, Edna would feed them rich slabs of homemade chocolate cake, fan herself with her napkin, and chortle at the stories they shared about the pottery. She liked hearing about life beyond Phoenix Avenue, what men got up to behind closed doors. She could imagine them there, slapping one another on the back, hauling ware, biting into their apples around that big wooden plank they used as a lunch table. She hadn’t been to the factory herself. Andrew wouldn’t allow her to visit, so she rarely went farther than the porch.

“He wasn’t jealous,” my grandmother explains. “He just thought it looked bad. He found my mother disgraceful because of her weight. He used to take her picture off the mantel and slam it on the floor.”

Still, Edna didn’t want for attention. She had the potters, who never tired of her cake or her company, and who shook with laughter when, indecent or not, she matched them joke for joke. Edna tittered most of all. Aneita Jean would sit at her feet, watching her face crack, anxiously mimicking the pitch of her mother’s laughter.

There are just a few photos of Edna in the memory book. In one, she is old as old gets, standing outside next to a neighbor, smiling in her apron, her hair pinned back in a tousled bun. In another, she is young, sitting beside a window in a ladder-back chair, her hands clasped behind her head in reverie. She is gazing off to the left, her face heavy, her eyes shaded with sadness. She wears a linen dress with lace draped along the collar and sleeves. Her hair is in the same loose bun.

Edna Blair mesmerized her elder daughter. Aneita Jean was in awe of her mother’s size, the way her breasts rose like sacks of flour under her apron, how her rump jutted out like a shelf. She often stared at her mother’s fleshy arms, which shook like hung laundry and were badly seared from the too-small oven. Big as Edna was, the men cared little. “Most men didn’t want any bag of bones back then,” says Grandmother. Besides, Edna had ripe skin and a bow mouth and the endearing idiosyncrasy of not knowing how sexy both were. And so when the men laughed, it was because she was funny, but also because in their hearts they imagined for that moment what it might be like to be wrapped inside those giant arms, buried into the soft folds of her chest.

Sometimes, on her way into the house, Edna would turn suddenly and make a garish face, her eyes yanked down to her cheeks, her lips bulged from underneath by her tongue. This would send the potters roaring. Aneita Jean watched her mother and learned without trying how easy it was to please a man. Food and laughter and willing eyes. Everything else blanched to nothingness with time. At least that is what she believed then, as a child cushioned in the shadow of her mother, cake crumbs on her chin, the sweet of it still packed in her teeth.

Aneita Jean knew of no other mothers who made faces. Nor any who made men laugh. The other mothers she knew were sour and tired and barely smiled at all. Sometimes, these women would talk about Edna Blair.

“Sure seems your mama has a lot of time on her hands. What does she get to all day?”

“Well, we know it’s not housecleaning.”

The truth was, Edna Blair was sick. Diabetes. The disease made her fat and blind and ambivalent to housework, neighborhood gossip, and rules of decorum. Aneita Jean tried to curry her mother’s favor by cleaning feverishly. She scrubbed the floors and sills, scrubbed everything really, until you could lick it and taste nothing but wood. But Edna didn’t care about dirt or stains or having floors clean enough to lick. She didn’t mind much in fact, not rain, or owning only one dress, or a hole in a boot. She was content to lounge on the porch in her colossal wicker love seat, eating cake and sucking the icing off her fingers.

Edna told no one about her illness because she knew how pity hollowed a person out. She had felt it from her own mother, Mewey, who had unloaded her like bruised fruit on the first willing taker, love being a luxury someone as damaged as her unhealthy daughter couldn’t afford.

Edna had been working as a court typist when she met her future husband. He was selling shoes. Mewey took one look at Andrew in his sharp wool suit and decided here was the man for her baby girl. Andrew married Edna because, sickly or not, she was beautiful, with loosely pinned hair that curled around her ears like ivy. Besides, dating was not his priority. Edna had other ideas, but she knew she could not disappoint her mother. It didn’t matter that adoring Andrew Blair was about as easy as falling up a well.

“You’re sick, girl. Who else is going to marry you?” Mewey said.

And so, married off, Edna headed upriver to join a new class of people. She and Andrew were wed in Columbiana County on August 26, 1913. After the wedding, Edna did her best, but Andrew Blair was not one for pleasure. He was temperamental, moody, and prone to meanness. He was also exceptionally handsome—tall and svelte, with a thin nose, wide-set eyes, and blond hair, which he slicked back with vigor. He had a plump bee-stung mouth, which shamed him. As soon as he was able, he grew a mustache to cloak his lips, and any remaining trace of carnality. He shaved it once, and it made my grandmother cry, so shocking was it to see his beautiful lips.

The Blairs’ first apartment was in Wheeling, West Virginia, a flat in a line of brick row houses, two stories high, with cement porches and shuttered windows. Each floor held one apartment, as did the basements. Because the interiors were cramped and dark, people kept outside as much as possible, congregating on the porches, legs swung over the ledges, or sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the stoop. The tight quarters left no room for privacy, an irritation to Andrew, so the Blairs moved to Chester as soon as they could afford to.

There, people quickly learned that Andrew Blair was a stern whip of a man, a taciturn Scot purged of any inclination toward revelry by that train that had flattened his mother and knocked his father into a lifelong wall of silence. The only things that brought Andrew to life were music and his garden. He was known for growing the tallest peas in the valley and for his skits in the pottery minstrel shows, where, behind his blackened face and floured lips, he felt safe enough to sing, dance, and run his body hobnobby-wild across the stage.

There are two photographs that capture Andrew best. In the first, he is sitting cross-legged on a tree stump. The trees behind him are leafy with the outgrowth of late summer, their wilting shadows dense and far-reaching. Despite the season, Andrew is dressed in a long-sleeved dress shirt, cuffs ironed and buttoned. His trousers are wool, also with ironed cuffs. His boots are snugly laced to the ankles and his tie is knotted up around his throat. On his head rests a wool cap.

His hands are loosely folded in his lap, arranged like flowers. His face is stiff and marked by measured boredom. The net effect is prim sophistication, a look wildly out of place in the rural West Virginia summer heat, or in West Virginia at all, for that matter. Here is a man who has forgotten, or is trying his damnedest to forget, that he is perched atop a stump in the middle of a disregarded nowhere.

The second photo was taken in the fall. Andrew is again in formal attire, this time a wool suit. He has been photographed from the feet up as he lies prostrate atop a stone wall. It’s a silly angle, one obviously contrived in the fun of an afternoon at the park, a horsing-around sort of snapshot, except that Andrew is not smiling. He has assumed the position of a goofy young man, but his face will not relent. It remains a tight mask of thinly veiled annoyance. The soles of his shoes appear to have been, God love him, scrubbed.

When Aneita Jean was born, her father held her at arm’s length.

“Well,” he said after a time. “She’ll do.”

It was Andrew who decided to name my grandmother Aneita Jean after his sister Jean, whom everybody called “Jean Jean the Beauty Queen.” In retrospect, this may have been a mistake, but that did not stop Aneita Jean from later naming her own daughter Jody Jean, nor did it stop Jody and her sister Jennifer from naming their daughters Jean. Names are history, constant and resonant, and so what if the first Jean turned out to be a loon.

Jean Jean the Beauty Queen was married to Robert Woods, a navy captain of some note in Pittsburgh high society. She had a daughter, Dorothy Jean, seven years old, who had flashing green eyes and auburn ringlets that bounced beside her cheeks. They were an abundantly happy family, and so it was a full-on tragedy when Robert’s fighter-bomber went down in the ocean, leaving them alone. They managed for a few months, but things were never quite square. Jean Jean took to her bed or to walking around the house, circling like a ghost, nodding her head to no one. Dorothy was left alone, and she, too, grew quiet. Then spring arrived. The sun shone hot and clear and Jean Jean decided she would drive her daughter to the beach in Maryland. There, they dug sand castles and played guess which hand has the button. Dorothy ran along the shore and Jean Jean chased her, scooping her up from behind, making Dorothy squeal. For lunch, they ate bologna sandwiches and oranges. Then, after a rest, Jean Jean the Beauty Queen took her daughter’s hand and walked into the ocean.

“We’re going to see Daddy,” she said.

By all accounts, it was ponderous going, but she persisted. Dorothy Jean struggled and broke free, making it to shore and into the arms of bewildered strangers. Her mother kept on. Never looking back to her child, she pressed farther and farther into the sea, her body bobbing in and out of view like a buoyed cork. The last thing Dorothy Jean saw was a froth of white sliding over her mother’s hair, as if she were removing a slip.

After the funeral, seven-year-old Dorothy was sent to live in Indiana with her uncle Rob and his wife, Mildred. No one mentioned her mother until a generation later, when time had made it safe to talk about.

“Crazy, she was,” says my grandmother. “Like me.”

Grandmother had met Uncle Rob and Aunt Mildred in Indianapolis the summer before she turned ten, a year before cousin Dorothy would move there.

“I’m not saying they were dull people, just that they were dull people,” Grandmother joked.

Aneita Jean and her father drove the Nash Ambassador to Indiana. Not many people in Chester, West Virginia, had cars, and the Nash, a blue-and-orange beauty, wasn’t driven all that much. Usually, it sat idle in the shed, a monument to Andrew Blair’s hard work. The car was intended for special occasions, like the Fourth of July parade, or hauling ware to sell on the road. So when her father announced that the two of them would be taking the Nash to another state, Aneita Jean nearly fainted.

It was strangely humid the weekend the two of them set off for their visit. They were sweating before they left Phoenix Avenue.

“Daddy …”

“Too warm to talk, Jeannie,” her father snapped, sitting tall as corn in his suit and tie, even though it was hot enough to make the pavement bubble.

They drove in silence. Aneita Jean wore a starchy dress, which clung to the backs of her knees. She tried to peek underneath to see if it was staining, but she didn’t want her father to notice, so mostly she sat very still and counted farm silos. These were the safe years, the comfortable years between father and daughter. Before the girl starts looking too much like her mama and dragging boys home like baggage. Before the father sees her growth and feels his age and his helplessness and it roils in his stomach like a beehive. No, those times would come later, replete with whippings and restrictions and all the other futile gasps of a parent losing control of his child.

Rob and Mildred had just married, and the two wanted to celebrate with Andrew. On the drive, Aneita Jean imagined all sorts of revelry—fancy dinners and grown-ups sipping wine. As it turned out, Mildred and Rob were as festive as her father, and the celebration consisted of apple juice and chewy pork chops eaten at home.

Mildred barely talked, just a word here and there, followed by a dry sniff to show her disapproval. Upon meeting Aneita Jean, she sniffed quite a bit, first at her dress (which was sodden), then at her hair (curls steamed to the back of her neck), then at her manner (inquisitive), which she found inappropriate for a child. The sniffing was particularly effective, as Mildred’s nose was as pointy as a pencil.

Anteater, thought Aneita Jean.

After dinner, they all took a walk around the neighborhood. The houses seemed so big to Aneita Jean, if only because you could see for miles in every direction. There were no hollers or cricks in Indiana. The world was smooth and endless.

As they strolled, Aneita Jean began to limp. Something was hobbling her foot. She tried to hide her pain, but her father noticed.

“Stand up straight,” he said.

“It’s my foot, Daddy.”

“Take off your shoes,” he commanded. He examined her small pale feet and sighed. It was a seed wart, a kumquat-size growth on the arch. “Looks like we’re going to the hospital.”

Mildred began sniffing like a locomotive, but Andrew shot her a look and she stopped.

At the hospital, they scooped the wart out like ice cream. Aneita Jean held her father’s hand and stared at Mildred’s nose as the doctors worked, wondering if it would be possible to stick a grape on the end, and wondering if Mildred had ever tried.

When they left on Sunday, Mildred stayed inside the house while Rob waved good-bye from the stoop. Andrew waved back, a curt to-and-fro movement.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Jeannie.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her father said nothing.

“I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“Too hot to talk, Aneita Jean.” And so they didn’t; they just sat still, staring ahead, the heat flattening their heads like dropped bricks.




CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_f5570f14-bbfe-5cad-b532-d0771fb70cf0)


Blame the clay. As an 1879 history of Hancock County explains, “The traveler who journeys in the cars upon the Ohio shore or upon one of the numberless steamers that float upon our beautiful river will no doubt observe quite a number of huge piles of clay of a bluish gray color, that lies at the foot of the hills along the West Virginia shore. Such a settlement upon the Rhine in Germany or upon the Tyne in England would have a history of a thousand years or more, made interesting by a hundred legends of love and war; while here, fifty years will antedate all this industry and nineteen twentieths of all this population.”

William Thompson built the first true pottery in West Virginia during the 1850s. The pottery sat three hundred yards below what would one day become the Newell Bridge. Thompson and his hires made yellow ware—thick, sturdy tableware colored yellow and striped with blue or cream. They used water from the hills and clay from the riverbed. The clay was clean and had a nice hand.

This was not news. A mile across the river in East Liverpool, Ohio, potteries had been operating since the 1840s. Entrepreneurs smelled opportunity in the clay and the river, no one more so than English-born James Bennet, who built the first regional pottery in 1839. More immigrants followed, mostly from Staffordshire. In no time, potteries dotted the river like moored barges, their beehive kiln chimneys squatting and sputtering smoke at regular intervals, as if they were giant towering pipes sucked from below.

A gold rush followed. Towns that were once described by visitors as “forlorn” became hot spots. “East Liverpool is full of clay and coal and contains about 700 inhabitants,” wrote one potter in an 1849 letter home to England. “There are markets open to receive every cup of ware that is made. It is impossible for you to starve.”

As industry grew, social programs lagged. In a rush to capitalize on the clay, schools and city services fell behind. In 1881, only 800 of the eligible 2,200 children attended school. The rest were working with their families in the potteries, where wages were $13.96 a week in 1887, two and a half times what the same potters earned in England and about $4.00 more than other tradesmen. Children were essential to the success of a pottery. Making china is labor-intensive. Jigger crews, groups who took clay from its raw form to the mold, were often made up of three people from the same family, who were paid as a team. A child was a cheap way to get the light labor done without squandering a third of the take. In 1880, 12 percent of all pottery workers were women. Fifty-two percent were children, half of them under age sixteen.

As railroad expansion continued along the Ohio River, materials and additional labor became easier to import. China lines expanded and potteries converted to more mass production. By 1900, East Liverpool, Ohio, was known as “America’s Crockery City,” and the population of the valley swelled tenfold. From 1870 to 1910, the numbers grew from two thousand to twenty thousand in East Liverpool alone. Ninety percent of the population worked in the ceramics industry.

It was an unusual scenario. Nowhere else in the country did one trade so completely dominate the daily life of a community. The potteries provided more than jobs: They functioned as social hubs, sponsoring baseball teams, dances, picnics. They brought in circuses and parades and shows at the Ceramic Theater. Conversation was about potteries and pottery technology. The newspapers ran a daily column called “Pottery News,” which included reports on accidents (fires usually), kiln repair, and the ever-threatening competition from the Far East.

Hardships were rarely mentioned. Potters liked their work and complained little, even though each position had its extreme drawbacks. A jiggerman threw clay onto a mold and pressed it into shape. He was assisted by a mold runner, who carried the pressed clay from point A to point B, and a finisher, often a woman or child, who rounded edges and sponged the faces of the clay for blemishes. A good jigger team produced about 2,760plates a day, the mold runner walking about fifteen miles before his nine-hour shift ended, carrying over 34,000 pounds of clay.

The clay itself had to be bubble-free before use, and so workers had to be capable of lifting one hundred pounds of raw clay, which they would cut in half with brass wire and then smack together to force out the air. The clay started as tubes thick as watermelons and long as a man’s torso. These sat like weeping tree stumps, two by two, on tables until the flattener snatched one up and smacked out the air, burping it into submission.

After pressing, a kiln placer would put the uncooked ware into protective containers, called “saggers,” and then stack the saggers as high as eighteen feet in a kiln. Saggers were carried atop a kiln placer’s head to make the process of loading the kiln faster. To keep the weight from crushing their skulls, they rolled up cloth and wore it headband-style, calling them “kilnman’s doughnuts.” After firing, kiln drawers emptied the saggers, spending their whole shift hoisting burning-hot ware from kilns, their hands wrapped only loosely with cheesecloth.

There were also cup turners, who added feet and pedestals to china, and casters, who made sugars, sauce-boats, and other types of hollowware. Mold makers did just that, peaking production at one hundred pieces, because if used beyond that, a plaster of Paris mold would have sucked up so much moisture from the clay that it would begin to dissolve. Handlers stuck handles on cups, brushers smoothed clay, and dippers glazed baked ware. And then there were packers, coal haulers, and myriad specialty positions, all of which required strength and speed to make items that, once done, would shatter at the slightest impact.

As the years passed, a new generation of potters was born in the valley. Time didn’t diminish the potteries’ magnetism. Men from Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Tennessee continued to come, lean and grasping, riding the rails or hiking the banks of the Ohio River. They were coming to a place thick with fable. A place they’d heard about, like California.

Soon, mass production had replaced fine craftsmanship, and the newer, more efficient potteries subsumed the antiquated boutique potteries, which relied exclusively on manual labor. Crockery City was crowded. Across the river, Newell and Chester were becoming the brave new pottery worlds. Unlike East Liverpool, which had grown to its limits between the twin barriers of hillside and river, Chester and Newell offered fresh possibilities. They had the same clay. And in West Virginia, the hill slopes were largely empty, the riverbank land primed for habitation.

What was needed was a bridge. In 1897, the first bridge to connect East Liverpool with Chester was built. Streetcars ran over it, carrying developers to West Virginia and potters to Crockery City. In 1900, Taylor, Smith and Taylor opened a pottery in Chester. The Edwin Knowles and Harker Pottery Companies would follow them.

Not to be outdone, the Homer Laughlin China Company began construction on the Newell Bridge on June 2, 1904. It would cost $250,000, and was erected just a quarter of a mile from the Chester Bridge. It opened a year later, on July 4, with a celebratory first crossing. HLC bought acres of land in Newell. They also bought a pottery site large enough to house a thirty-six-kiln factory, what would be the largest pottery built to date.

Other potteries saw HLC as foolish; it was hubris to build so large a factory on the whiff of a promise. Barely anyone lived in Newell. Certainly not enough people to staff a thirty-six-kiln factory. But it was HLC that prospered, while its competitors, hobbled by inadequate factory designs and outdated equipment, began shutting down their kilns. The bridge and HLC’s promise of steady work brought intense expansion to Newell and Chester. In 1906, only a few houses stood in Newell. By 1907, there were more than 130. HLC not only constructed the bridge and the plants but laid down streets, erected more houses, and created ball fields. HLC either built or bought everything in Newell, down to the streetcars, the waterworks, and the schools. In 1917, the company even produced a car, the Homer Laughlin, a stretch convertible sports car with stitched leather seats and gleaming running boards.

The Blairs settled in Hancock County the same year. Andrew became a potter as soon as he could and quickly rose through the factory ranks to become a decorator, the most sought-after position in the factories. Decorators, also known as hand painters and liners, didn’t have to hoist crates or sweat over kilns, and they were the most highly paid clay shop workers. Andrew spent his days trimming plates, cups, bowls, platters, goblets, and gravy boats with liquid gold. He’d take a tiny brush, no thicker than a rose thorn, and hand-line the edges, one after another, precisely and neatly, allowing no margin for error. Liners had prestige, and a staff of decal girls, women who would add flowers and garlands to the plates and cups before firing.

The decorator’s kiln was the smallest. It measured only six feet high and burned at a lower temperature, just hot enough to set the colors and decals, but not so hot that it cracked the glaze. Different colors required different temperatures, so pottery was loaded on shelves and separated by ceramic stilts. After firing, the ware would cool and kiln-men would draw the pieces out, now baked to a brilliant shine.

Andrew recognized his good fortune and worked tirelessly to preserve it, often logging double shifts for weeks at a time, never stopping even to read the newspaper. While he may have settled for a common wife, Andrew Blair refused to succumb to the conspiracy of circumstance that had brought them together. He pined for culture. He taught himself how to play the ukulele and the mandolin. Then he taught others, for a price. He shied away from what he saw as low-rent habits, such as gambling and public affection. He did spit tobacco, but only in private and into a tureen he’d painted with deer and hunters in jaunty red caps.

He was not one of those other people, the men who soaked their shirts through with sweat and had clay packed under their fingernails even on Sundays—sour-smelling men in ill-fitting pants, spitting as they laughed. Andrew knew he was different. He never wore anything that didn’t fit, never left the house looking less than altogether dandy, his trousers cutting a sharp line down his thigh, his coats free of pottery dust. When he trimmed his prize peonies, he donned a tie. He walked ramrod-straight, and he valued vertical posture in others. It bothered him to no end that his wife was stooped, burdened by her diabetes and her immense weight. Lazy, he thought.

When he wasn’t at the pottery, he was in his backyard studio, making china dogs with gold eyelashes or bunnies with silver bows to sell on his own. Blairware, he called it. He had a hand-cranked wheel, a circle of marble that sat on top of a cast-iron stand. It was on this wheel that he spun plates painted with gurgling babies, ballerinas with lace skirts, and mewing kitty cats, their claws tipped with purple dye. He stamped “A. C. Blair” in liquid gold on the bottom of each frilly little plate and china novelty.

In time, he created other lines. Although Andrew Blair was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he liked their business, so he founded the A. C. Blair Klan Plate Company by snatching up blank plates from Harker and HLC and painting them with Klan motifs. The best-selling items were the platters that were painted red and yellow, with a fiery cross in the center, and those with a masked Klansman on horseback, the cross ablaze in the background. They are collector’s items now, these plates. Prized by the same type of men who covet Nazi helmets and Civil War medical kits.

Hancock County was a hotbed for the KKK, especially during my grandmother’s youth, when they focused their rage on the east end of the panhandle, where many of the area’s black and Italian potters lived. The Klansmen operated under the dubious motive of enforcing blue laws, and they broke into homes, ostensibly searching for liquor. They also marched through the potteries, hooded and draped in white, demanding that the bosses fire any Italian workers. The police did little to stop them, as those who weren’t intimidated by the Klan were generally members.




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