Potters Camp

By Billy Hall

This novel takes place in a mining camp near Bessemer, Alabama in the early 1930's. The Author was a pre-teen at the time and lived in the community known as Potters Camp. The houses in the camp belonged to The Company and were rented to the miners. Potters was primitive, even by standards of the day. There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing. These people were very poor. But they were hard working, strong, proud, and for the most part they were God fearing. The miners worked long dangerous hours in the mines for little pay. They traded at the company store and with the few local merchants, most often on credit, and often their pay envelopes failed to cover what they owed on payday. They and their families supplemented their meager wages by raising vegetables, keeping livestock, and the women made most of the families' clothes. At this time there was struggle and conflict over efforts to unionize the miners.
The Author carried her memories of Potters into the early 1960's when she put them on paper in the form of this novel. The manuscript went unseen until the children found it while cleaning out the home place after it had been sold, several years after her death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481726221

Billy Hall

Helen Elizabeth Smith was born on April 4, 1922 at East Armuchee, Georgia, the fifth of seven born to Annie Blackstone and Floyd Smith. The Family settled near Bessemer, Alabama in a mining community known as Potters Camp. She lived through the depression and union organization in Alabama. At the beginning of WWII she traveled to Michigan to work in the burgeoning war industry there. Soon, she joined the Navy, and during the war she served at Pearl Harbor. After the war she returned to the Bessemer area and while enrolling at Birmingham Southern College, on the GI Bill, she met another veteran of the Pacific Theater, William G Hall. They fell in love, married and they had six children. She nurtured her family, she wrote and painted, and she loved God. She died on January 8, 2002 and was buried with full military honors.

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© 2013 by Billy Hall. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/06/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-2621-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-2622-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013904266

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Introduction

Helen Elizabeth Smith Hall was my father’s sister who, within the confines of the Smith Clan, was also known as Pack. Family lore says her father nicknamed her Pack due to her habit of collecting and carting about with her all her worldly possessions, which truth be known, were considered worthless in all eyes except her own. Her treasures consisted of things that had anyone bothered to look, foretold the woman she eventually became. There were her precious books, her budding poetry, her sketches and stories written on scraps of paper and placed lovingly within the dog-eared books that were either in her arms or tucked into a sack. These items were always with her even at bedtime when they were placed under her pillow safe from prying eyes.

Helen was the beauty of the family, but she was unaware of the stares of people who were mesmerized by her black hair, lapis lazuli blue eyes, and ivory complexion. She was such a quiet child that other family members didn’t realize she was absorbing the world around her. As she matured, those people and events became the characters in her paintings, her poetry and roman â clef novels.

As a child, Helen scribbled her innermost thoughts on paper. As she grew up, she discovered other mediums from oils and chalk to pastels. Painting became another passion. She gave vivid, brilliant life to the visions swarming through her head.

My family had immigrated to Detroit, Michigan for jobs in the war plants in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Helen followed and lived with us until she found a job and her own little apartment in an old converted mansion. My sister, Bobby, and I felt as if a lovely fairy-tale princess had dropped from the heavens just for us. We often spent nights with her, and I’ll never forget waking up early one morning to see her sitting at her desk concentrating over a manuscript. She smiled at me, and motioned toward my sleeping sister, she said "Shhh, go back to sleep, honey. It isn’t time to get up yet.

The United States government issued a call for women volunteers to serve the nation. Helen promptly quit her job and joined the navy to become a WAVE. However, in the exciting new world she had entered, she didn’t forget Bobby and me. Gifts of hula skirts and silken leis, perfume, and cats-eye jewelry arrived from exotic places accompanied by photos of her in that wonderful uniform. The photographs showed a beautiful, trim, smiling young woman who seemed to treasure life. There she was, frozen by the camera in a salute to us from the avenues and byways of places we could only imagine. Her letters sang of joy, and occasional words of advice… "If you have belly cramps, you must exercise . . . that’s what they make us do . . ."

After the war, Helen returned, not to Michigan, but to the land of her roots, Bessemer, Alabama. She met William Hall, married him, and promptly began to raise a family of 6 children. However, her passion to create more than babies manifested its self in prolific, almost frenzied painting and writing—to the point of burdening her firstborn child, Billy, with parental responsibilities. She became obsessed with getting those visions out of her mind and put paint on canvas and words on paper.

This passion for the arts never waned, but over the years her health failed. She could no longer express herself with pen and paper, or fill canvases with glorious color. She died at home surrounded by her family and her paintings, and some of the very books she had carried about when she was a child.

Her poetry and paintings have survived in the collections of family and friends. When the home was sold, the children cleared the house of mementos. Any remaining furniture had been sold to the new owners who were due to take possession within hours. Billy, the eldest, expressed his disappointment that the manuscript of his mother’s novel had not been discovered. The chances of finding the book seemed to be nil. I’ve looked every possible place and I haven’t had any luck, he said to his wife, Marisha. He wondered if Helen had destroyed all of those pages she had labored over so diligently.

Marisha, the practical one of that marriage, said, Did you look under the bed in the middle bedroom? Under the bed! Such a simple place! And, there it was: a cardboard box discolored with age, listing to the side as if tired of its burden, and filled with pages and pages of yellowed, brittle manuscript.

Billy and Marisha have lovingly deciphered the faded text and brought to life Helen’s only known surviving full-length manuscript. When I read this book, I can hear my aunt’s voice echoing on the winds of time, and see shadows of her people moving through a misty pentimento painting of long ago.

The characters in this book are fictional, but she knew them from those days in that place called Potters. They live now because one woman cared enough to detail their struggles and their hopes and dreams.

Sweet dreams, Aunt Helen. I love you.

Jackie Smith Arnold

Prologue

Standing beneath the solitary oak tree on the top of the hill, with a summer breeze blowing through her soft brown hair and whipping her navy skirt against her well-shaped legs, Lena Jackson Garrett watched the cows grazing down the slope. Before her, the peaceful scene under a cloudless blue sky denied all the strife and turmoil of the past war-torn years. She had received her discharge from the WAVES a few days before and had come to her brother’s home here in Bessemer, Alabama before going on to her mother’s home in Talladega.

When she had asked her brother, James, and his wife Charlene, to come with her, they had declined, saying, You won’t find anything of Potters left. All the houses are gone and it’s only a cow pasture now. But if you want to go, we don’t mind.

With their words echoing in her ears, she had driven out to Potters. She thought of the years just past when she had joined the Navy after she had received word that her husband of only a few weeks had been lost in action in the early morning hours of December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and after she received the confirming news that he was dead. She had been so lost and confused for a while, but after she concentrated on the war effort by serving in the best way she knew how, she began to feel that she was helping to make Donald’s life and death more meaningful. Now that phase of her life was over, and she felt that she stood between two worlds, and wondered what she would do with her life.

She had met Floyd Wright again last night, and he had asked her to let him call on her, but she was not sure that she wanted to renew the friendship from her childhood when she had lived in this place. One of the reasons she had stopped off in Bessemer before going on to her mother’s was so she could visit Potters. She thought about the people who had lived here and what they had meant to her. She knew that many of the boys had served in the armed forces, and that some of them had given their lives for their country. She wondered if she would ever again see any of the boys and girls she had known here.

She thought for a minute about James and Charlene’s concern for her. Maybe they could understand a little of the restlessness that engulfed her at times when she felt her loss of Donald so strongly. She knew they hoped that her return to Bessemer would mean that she might find someone to care for again. The four years of travel from city to city and from base to base had not accomplished what they hoped would now be accomplished in a short visit. She had not told them that she had met Floyd Wright last night and that he had asked her out. She wanted to think about it a while longer, and this seemed a tranquil setting for thinking.

A while before, as she drove along the route she had walked with the Thomas boys when she had first come here with her parents over fifteen years before, she could see the change that had taken place in those years. A store had disappeared here, a new road lay off to the right and trees that had filled a vacant lot were gone. In their place stood a new house, with young mimosa trees growing in the yard. A filling station had been built on a corner lot and briefly Lena wondered how they had managed—war rationing had just ended. Soon she saw the large, and now battered, Coca-Cola sign that advertised Joe Hardin’s grocery store, and all was familiar again. The sign had been new when she had first seen it. She drove up the long clay hill and passed the huge oak tree that spread its shade on the lower road of Potters Camp.

She shrugged off all thought of the war that had just ended, and of problems that she puzzled over as she neared the hills. She parked the car on the dirt road, got out and walked to the barbed wire fence, and hunted a place to cross. Scraggly wild shrub and plum trees that had escaped the mowers grew thick around the fence bordering the pasture, but she found a small clearing and carefully parted the wires and crawled through. She was careful not to tear her blue WAVE skirt, even though she would not be wearing it any longer after she shopped for civilian clothes. She kept her eyes to the top of the green hill to the spot where her home had been, right there on the crest of the first hill. She walked up the slope to the level crest and found a narrow pit that she knew had been the cellar. She glanced around and discovered only the one tall oak tree where she knew there had been others. In her memory, she could place this one as being in the yard next to her own when she had lived there as a child. She went to stand in its shade because the day was growing hot and the sun beat down through her WAVE hat.

She could see all of Potters Camp from here, except where the turn of the hills had hid the farthest row of houses. And there was no sign that anyone had ever lived there, for no houses, fences, shrubs, or other signs of habitation remained. But she recalled it all vividly, and in her memory a Grandma Moses-like panoramic view of the village came before her. She had always felt that ‘Camp’ was a misnomer because it was not a collection of tents or moveable shelters that had housed the miners and their families, but rows of sturdy houses built to last through many years. Indeed they had, because the history of the camp went back to the late 1800’s. She also thought that the name ‘Potters’, as connected with a burial place for paupers and criminals would have been erroneous as well. The people who had lived there more closely fitted the word ‘Potter’ as connected with forming and shaping a useful item from clay—the clay of their lives—because they had in their own way taken the raw issues of their day and shaped a new way of life. However, she thought, the name ‘Potters Camp’ had the inconsistency of being true in the sense that the people were poor and tasted the bitterest of poverty before they had won their battle. And ‘Camp’ was also true; in the long run of history it had been temporary. The people who had lived, worked and worshiped on these hills in the years 1933 and 1934 when she had known them, had carved a place for themselves upon that history and the events of their time.

This may be an obscure and out of the way place for a people to be cast upon the mainstream of the happenings of a nation as wide and as broad as the United States, but she knew that in working out their destinies and struggling to better themselves, these people had contributed to the life of the Nation in a way that would benefit others for years. Theirs was the struggle to improve the lot of the common laborer and bring the force of their numbers to bear upon the economy of the land. It fell to them to be vitally involved with life at a time when the nation had fallen upon its darkest days during a grinding depression that swept away most of the wealth and left rich men destitute.

Theirs was a hard life of poverty and pride. For this they had a true mixture of faith and determination. With a working faith in God and a goodly portion of stick-to-it-ness, they saw it through. When times were leanest and their struggle hardest, they relied upon an inner strength that bound them together and held them to high purpose. They were patriotic too, and had an intense love for their country; they upheld the laws of the land and expected no less than to be protected by the law. There might have been a scarcity of material things, but there was no lack of hard work or the desire to better themselves.

The image that Lena had read in some recent literature did not coincide with her actual experience of life in a mining camp. And she resented some of the things that had passed for truth and by which her people had been judged by the strangers she had met in her travels during the last few years. She only had to remember her own father in a beaten land and the fight he made to shape a decent life and a good future for his children, to have pride in her background.

In this community there had been a singular way of life that she had not found elsewhere. It had been a closely-knit group of families who had been bound together by common interests. The men all worked for the same company in similar jobs, and the children had all gone to the same school and had experienced the same things. The women had the same problems of lack of water and household tasks that fell into the same patterns. The majority of the families had attended the same church and held a like faith. The recreational habits were formed of their peculiar needs and centered on the church and community life. People were deeply concerned about one another, and thought nothing of going in to see about one another when there was sickness or death in a family. It all led to a closeness that Lena had missed earlier on the farm.

While Lena stood under the tree and thought about the past, suddenly a vision shimmered in the sun and the pastoral sounds that had buzzed around her became mingled with the clatter and clanking of steel wheels across steel rails, recalling the early morning of the day in September of 1933 when she had first come to Potters with her mother and two brothers.

Chapter One

Dora Jackson had boarded the train at the crack of dawn on a fall morning in Gadsden, to go to Earl and their new life in a mining camp. The train trip had been an adventure for ten-year-old Lena and James who was twelve, until the last few miles. Lena sat across from her mother, and James sat on a long side seat. Seven-year-old Charles sat beside him, his feet barely reaching the edge of the seat. James felt the responsibility that being the oldest thrust upon him. He was often reminded in the months of his father’s absence, that he was the ‘man of the house’. He had kept Charles occupied with guessing games and had pointed out things of interest out the window as they sped past barns and silos on farms along the tracks. The children were excited with the anticipation of seeing their father and going to a new place to live and meeting new people.

James would lead in posing the question of ‘what would their new school be like. And what kind of house would they live in, and how many boys near their age would they meet?’

Dora was amused at times at their talk, and grinned secretly. It seemed an endless trip to her, and she hoped they would soon reach the station in Bessemer.

It startled her when the conductor came through the car and announced in a proud and proper manner, Birmingham. The children jumped from their seats and crowded to the window to see the big town they had heard so much about. People began to take baggage down from the overhead racks and move to the front, but Lena and her mother made a negative motion and knew they were not to get off. The train rumbled through back lots and by store fronts and finally came to a full stop where others took their luggage and left, but Dora sat quite still and waited.

James asked, Mother, don’t we get off, too? Almost everybody else is going. Don’t we?

No, our tickets call for Bessemer, and our conductor said we’d go straight through. So we don’t get off now. Dora answered with a patience that was a trait she displayed at the most disturbing times. They settled back in their seats to wait for the train to start its journey again.

Lena watched her mother as the weariness began to tell on her brow and saw her push a blond curl back from her forehead. Dora felt the backward movement of the train in the lurch of her body and the rebound thrust her against the backrest. Dora hitched her hips around to settle again into the worn contour of the seat. Oh, no, not again, she said aloud to no one in particular as the same patience became a little threadbare. Then, silently, she hoped this would be the last time they would switch, but the train lurched again and she realized they were switching time and time again as she waited for the rest of the trip. She was becoming eager to get it over and to see Earl again and settle down to living a normal life after the months apart.

She lost count of the times the coal-grimed coach switched, and she looked out the murky glass of the window by her shoulder to see which track they were on now, but saw only the maze of rails and the backs of red brick buildings that surrounded the Birmingham railroad yard. She could make nothing of it.

Lena watched as her mother turned, and turning too, she saw the uniformed conductor step into the doorway. She followed his glance to the gold watch in the palm of his hand. A dangling gold chain fell from the saucer of his hand to the small pocket below his belt.

Rather belatedly, he had come to inquire, Ma’am, we’ve got a few minutes yet to switch before we pull out for Bessemer, do you want to go to the waiting room?

While pushing her shoulders hard into the wine-colored cushion, she glanced around at the children and weighed the prospect of keeping up with them in the station and answered, No, thank you, I’d just as soon stay here.

Lena settled back, gazed at her mother and traced the blond curls with her eyes. Dora Jackson’s corn silk yellow hair waved from her forehead to her shoulders and her skin had a soft glow. Her nose tilted slightly and she had kept her figure without fussing and dieting. Lena thought that she had the prettiest mother she had ever seen. Lena grinned at her mother when she glanced at her, and her thoughts seemed to span the gap of silence, for Dora smiled as though she was pleased with what she saw in her daughter’s eyes.

But, in a few minutes, Lena caught her gazing out the window and funny little lines cut furrows in the fair brow, and Lena wondered what her mother was thinking to put those lines there. Dora would not have liked for Lena to know that she was privately scolding Earl for not meeting them here in Birmingham. She knew there was a good reason, for Earl was usually very considerate of her comfort. It must have something to do with his having to depend on George Thomas for transportation. It was only thirteen miles on to Bessemer, but this wait on the train while it switched around in the wait in the railroad yard was proving longer than the complete trip. It was tiring, and she was anxious to have it over and to be with Earl.

She had no idea what Bessemer was like, but it would be her new home. She would be with Earl, and that’s what counted. She hadn’t enjoyed giving up their home in Gadsden and making a new start in a new place, but she remembered having felt the same way four years before when Earl had finally given up trying to make a go of the farm they lived on in Georgia and going elsewhere to work. That was in 1929, when most of the crops in North Georgia had failed and people were starving all over the country. Many people had picked up and left the farms in those days. Her parents were still clinging to their farm, though. She worried about them because she remembered how hard it was to make a crop on the soil that had become poorer with each planting season.

She and Earl had grown up in the same community, had attended the same school, and had been in love since they were children. It came as no surprise to the people of the valley when they married. She knew that they would have been surprised if that Jackson boy had not wound up with the pretty Brown girl. Earl had planned to keep his father’s land and live on it. There was the old home place where his grandfather had homesteaded long before. They had not kept slaves, and did not consider their place a plantation in the sense most Southern landowners had. Dora recalled that Earl’s farm had stood in the path of Sherman’s march to Atlanta, and that both his grandparents had died from natural causes during that time. The family had intended to bury them in the churchyard cemetery, but it was on the other side of the passing army. The army passed by day after day, and finally the family had to bury the old folks in graves in the fields close to the house. This was something else that Earl had hated to let go when four years ago he had felt he must go elsewhere to work. When they sold the place for what they could get, he had asked the new owners to leave the little plot with the graves and stone barriers, and she had heard that the graves remained unharmed.

The depression was becoming harder all over the country at the same time that Earl made his decision, and he had a hard time finding work, but at last he did go to work in a boxcar factory in Gadsden, Alabama. He had to learn his skills on the job, and it took a while for him to begin to be paid wages that afforded anything more than food and a roof over their heads. She thought about the first place they rented when they got