“I am Ola Mae Auman, and that churn is mine,” I said, and I held the quilt of my mother closer. The woman in the blazer set the four gallon crock gently on the porch step, as if it might break. “Mrs. Auman, my name is Ruth Ann Delacroix. We signed the licensing agreement in March, for thirty pieces, and we paid you four million dollars. I have called your number eleven times.” She looked back at the card table, at the sixty pieces and the cardboard sign. “I do not understand. These pots are going to be sold in home stores across America, and your daughter is selling them for three dollars apiece in her front yard.”
LaDonna stepped forward with a hand pressed to her chest. “It is only a yard sale, Madam. The pots of Mama were taking up room.” “And the wedding quilt of my mother?” I asked. “Made in nineteen thirty eight from flour sacks and her own wedding dress? You put a consignment tag on it for twenty four hundred dollars at an antique shop in Asheboro.” I unfolded one corner and held it in the light. “The pitcher you sold this morning for three dollars was made in nineteen seventy seven. It has my thumbprint on the bottom. I put a thumbprint on every piece because my daddy said that a pot should know who made it.”
Ricky turned red up to his ears. “Mama Ola Mae, we only wanted to help you downsize.” “You wanted to clear me out, Ricky,” I said, kindly but plainly. “You told your neighbors I had a barn full of junk. I have never had a barn. I have a kiln in the woods and a clay bank by the creek.” Ruth Ann cleared her throat. “Mr. Auman, I must tell you that under our contract, every piece of the collection is the property of the company from the date of signature, and we will need every one returned.” A rooster crowed down the road. Somewhere behind us a screen door banged.
A stoneware crock stamped with a thumbprint gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the shop in Seagrove.
I laid out my terms slowly, the way I fire a kiln. “Every pot comes back before dark, and LaDonna refunds each buyer from her own purse. She calls the antique store in Asheboro and takes the quilt off consignment tonight. The cedar chest where she says it was safe goes to the dump, because it was never safe. And I am moving out of this house on Saturday, because I have bought myself a little place with a studio and a wheel, a mile from the shop. I will be a good neighbor. I will not be a doormat.” LaDonna nodded and began to cry.
The surprise came on Monday morning at the shop by the road. When I unlocked the door, there were forty people waiting on the gravel. Potters from all over Seagrove, the Owens and the Coles and the Craven families who had made pots in these hills for two hundred years, had heard what happened. A big old man named Walter Pugh, ninety one years old, leaned on a cane and said, “Ola Mae, your daddy was the finest hand at a groundhog kiln I ever saw. We came to say you are the same.” They held a small kiln firing for me that afternoon, and I did not cry until the pots came out.
The money consequences came quickly. LaDonna had spent half of the yard sale money on a weekend at the beach, and she had to repay it out of her own pocket. The antique store in Asheboro, which had lost two weeks of inventory space, sent her a bill for storage. The employer of Ricky, a furniture company in Asheboro, heard the story from a neighbor and decided not to promote him to the supervisors job he had been counting on. Within a month the couple had cut their budget to the bone. They stopped eating out. They stopped buying new boots. For the first time, they were learning the value of a dollar.
With part of the licensing money, I started a program that I called the Thumbprint Fund. It pays for clay, wheels and kiln time for young people in Randolph County who want to learn the old craft. Each student presses a thumbprint into the bottom of their first piece, just as I do. We held the first class in the old pottery shop on a bright Saturday. Fourteen children covered themselves in slip. A little boy named Dewayne threw his first lopsided jug and held it up and shouted, “It looks like a face!” I told him that was exactly what a face jug is meant to do.
LaDonna came to see me at the new house, in a plain brown dress, carrying the cedar chest key in her palm. She said she was sorry. She said she was ashamed. She said she had thought of me as an old woman who made pots, and not as the woman who made her. I took her into the studio and sat her at the wheel. I put her hands in the clay and held them there, as I had done when she was five, and the wheel turned, and a small bowl rose under her fingers. She wept and laughed at the same time. “Mama,” she said, “I forgot what this felt like.”
The quilt went back on my bed, the double wedding ring pattern, soft as an old shirt. I slept under it that first night in the new house, with the windows open and the whippoorwills calling in the woods. In the morning I carried it out to the porch, shook it in the sun and laid it on the rail to air. LaDonna came up the steps with two mugs of coffee. She touched the faded stitching, and her voice was quiet. “Mama, Granny stitched every one of these by hand, did she not?” I nodded. “Every one,” I said, “and you can learn.”
At the spring pottery festival, the whole town came out. I sat at my table by the road, with my crocks in the sun and my thumbprint on every one. LaDonna sat beside me, wearing an apron, selling pots, her hair tied back with a rag. A woman in a straw hat picked up a blue salt glazed pitcher and turned it over. “Who made this?” she asked. LaDonna lifted her chin. “My mama,” she said, with a pride that made my heart ache. “She has been making them for seventy one years.” I put my thumb against the bottom of the pitcher, and I smiled.
