The story of a mystic potter (part 1 of 2)

The man who came out on the porch of the rustic shed smiled tentatively. He was slight and tousled and somehow fragile-looking, and he wore bandages on several fingertips.

“Mr. Gordy?” I asked.

He led me through a bright bare room into his twilit living room. Sweeping papers and clothing off one end of the couch, and in a shy yet courtly manner, he invited me to sit down.

I was on assignment for “Fulfilling the Promise,” a coffee-table book I wrote in 1989 about west-central Georgia. Much of what you are reading now was cut for space and has not been published before.

I really had not known what to expect when I came to meet famed folk potter D.X. Gordy. A more commanding presence, perhaps, an aloofness in keeping with an artist whose work is honored in the Smithsonian Institution? At best I had thought an unannounced visit would merit only a brisk exchange of pleasantries.

Instead I found myself entranced by the vulnerability of the gentle person seated across from me. His eyes were intelligent and his gaze direct. When he smiled – and he smiled often – his cheeks rose on fine bones, and the twilit room brightened. He talked and I listened for several hours. At last, only the impending darkness pulled me, reluctant, from that place.

He spoke softly, in a voice so low I sometimes had to strain to hear it above the growl of lumber trucks on Meriwether County’s stretch of U.S. Highway 27, the Roosevelt Highway. The distance between this sensitive being and the rude confusion of the outside world seemed inadequate.

I had heard so much about him, I said, and of his being the link between an ancient world and young artists hungering for authenticity. I knew he was born in Fayette County, in a village now vanished, and was for all his (then 75) years in and out of this region. His hands, it was said, took this very earth and reshaped it into new forms, new uses, new beauty, as his father’s had done before him.

William Thomas Belah Gordy, descendant of a Scot who came to the New World in the 18th century, “prospected” in Aberdeen, Georgia, a busy little community of which there was little trace when Peachtree City later rose from the same ground. In and out of partnership with other potters, often making bricks as well as household ware, Gordy finally settled in nearby Shakerag and chinked the gaps in a log cabin there. That was his pottery shop; he moved his family into a rented house nearby. His second son, Dorris Xerxes, was born there in 1913.

Itinerant potters stayed in the room above the shop when they passed through, bringing with them a glimpse of the outside world. When D.X. was nine years old, the family moved to Alvaton, Georgia, back to a shop his father had kept before. It was the youngster’s responsibility to keep a mule going around and around the pug mill, its mechanism mixing the clay and extruding it from the bottom.

Alvaton was home for the Gordys for the next 17 years, and there was much demand for the potter’s wares. “Everybody had a cow, and they needed churns, bowls, pitchers, and crocks. Then plastic and aluminum, those types of ware came into being, and people quit using pottery things,” Gordy said.

“I remember back in the ’20s, as far back as I can remember, there was a great demand for jugs – up until the repeal of the 18th Amendment ended prohibition. Then [making liquor] was legal as long as you paid the tax and were a registered distiller. Back then it was immoral to moonshine because it was against the law; now it’s immoral if you don’t pay taxes.

“Lots of potters in the ’30s quit, but we stayed with it. When Roosevelt began coming to Warm Springs, and Warm Springs became famous, we decided to move to the Roosevelt Highway because all the dignitaries and officials came by here. We made souvenirs and vases for people to buy as mementoes.”

When the governor of Louisiana stopped by Gordy’s shop, he ordered a pair of vases. Two of the largest pieces Gordy ever fired, they were placed in the Governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge.

Then for a time the shop made garden ware – figurines, birdbaths, planters – for Davison-Paxon, Atlanta’s largest department store, now Macy’s. It was not unusual for Gordy to work up half a ton of clay in a day.

W.T.B. Gordy died in 1955. By now his other sons and daughter had moved away into other lines or other places, and D.X. was alone in the shop. “I was running the whole thing,” he said, “and I thought, I’m going to do a little experimenting.” He decided to teach his craft.

“I never did sell my place,” but he taught at the Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences two days a week for three years, “coming back here to make souvenirs for the Little White House. I had to inscribe on every piece, ‘Little White House, Warm Springs, Georgia.’ I’d see those words when I went to sleep and when I woke up, and I thought, If I don’t quit that, I’m going crazy!”

An art school in Columbus asked him to teach two days a week, and he stayed with them until the doors closed finally three years later.

“Then as time went on, people wanted me to have workshops. I’d do workshops, art festivals, shows. Since 1958, lots of my work has been teaching, one place or another.”

Continued next week….