Leaving Well Enough Alone

We’ve all heard stories of the lengths that people will go to score a would-be treasure. There are the dumpster divers who plunge in hopes of making a find. Perhaps the leg of an interesting small table, upturned in its disposed state, beckons from one of those waste receptacles. If luck prevails, the table might have simply been put out on the curb, ready for the plucking.

I have my own table story, which unfolded on a drive through East Texas, but it occurred in a small shop that offered a little of this and a little of that, some of it genuinely old. My table had been recovered from a heavy trash pile in this tiny town of less than a thousand people. It is a rare two drawer, tapered leg East Texas stand, constructed of walnut, with longleaf pine used in the construction of the secondary parts of the dovetailed and chamfered drawers. It costs me $66 and change, plus some restoration work on the drawer top. It’s not for sale.

My particular passions in old stuff include nineteenth century Texas furniture and stoneware. Because of the many cultures that settled Texas, our furniture includes a wide, interesting array of furniture styles, including Anglo from East Texas, German Biedermier, Polish and Czech from central and south Texas, Hispanic from south Texas and those parts of East Texas that were settled early in the 19th century, and Black-made pieces that can be found in any of the areas where Black people were settled in the 19th century. Texas-made stoneware, with prized early examples from East Texas as well as work from many other sites around central and South Texas, hit the news in a big way in the early 1990s when the collection of well-known authority Georgeana Greer was auctioned by a well-known New York gallery. That landmark event made the “Wall Street Journal”, and those who are constantly on the hunt for precious, desirable examples of Texas-made stoneware haven’t looked back.

Although I’m privileged to be the caretaker of a small share of 19th century Texas furniture and stoneware, my own collecting experiences include many tales of the one that got away. Back in the 80s I passed on an early alkaline-glazed jar that I had found in a small East Texas shop, not realizing that it was a rare early Rusk County, Texas piece. I just wasn’t in the mood to pay $65 that day. I blush in embarrassment at my own ignorance. When I went back two months later to see if it was still there, if you can believe such foolhardiness, it had sold two days before. I knew the guy who had bought it, and I had to pay handsomely to own the piece.

And so it goes. While leaving a nearby town recently, I caught in my periphery what appeared to be an old piece of stoneware sitting on the front porch of small white frame house. Normally I don’t use this residential neighborhood route. I stopped, backed cautiously into a narrow drive to turn around, and drove back, scanning for the porch where I thought I had seen this treasure. Finally, there it was, sitting next to an old flowerpot. I rang the doorbell about the same time that a small Black girl looked skeptically at me from her driveway. Her name was Tyler and she was staying with her grandmother. As it turned out, the house is currently unoccupied. The old woman who owns the house is ill and lives in Houston for now. The little girl escorted me inside her grandmother Mary's backdoor. Mary was tending an infant and visiting with a friend. She informed me that she had no idea if or when anyone would be returning to the house ("they usually come by during the night," she said), but gave me permission only to "look" at the stoneware jar.

Heart racing, I made my way next door. A small flower pot rested on top of the stoneware jar, and as I revealed the jar, a nest of angry wasps revealed themselves. It took me 45 minutes to get home and put a baking soda patch on my right forearm where one of those big red devils popped me. All the way home I watched the wound grow until it became a quarter-sized biscuit. I thought that perhaps I was being punished for not following Mary's instructions to only look at the jar. Instead, I had moved it, even after seeing the large nest of red, red wasps clinging to its interior. The bottom had broken away from the rest of the jar, and I should have followed my instinct to leave it be. But the impact of spying what had once been a really nice old piece of alkaline-glazed stoneware, probably from East Texas, seized me for that instant. As it turns out, I guess that old pot just wanted to be left alone. It, along with the porch table and chairs, were waiting quietly for someone with rights to return, and inevitably for an official dispensing of the long history found in and around this little frame house.

My forearm stayed swollen for several days, and the wound was hard and sore. I had several conversations about the wasp bite, but not once did I say that the incident spoke to something larger in meaning.

Saturday, August 11, 2001