I’d like to thank the potters first. My friend and traveling partner, Mark Shapiro, a potter based in western Massachusetts, introduced me to the master potters Mark Hewitt and Karen Karnes, pushing this book in fresh directions. I also accompanied Shapiro to the crafts community of Penland, up above Asheville, where I was warmly welcomed by the director, Jean McLaughlin, and visited Cynthia Bringle, Paulus Berenson, Michael Kline, and other potters in the area.
In the North Carolina Piedmont, Vernon and Pam Owens have always been friendly and welcoming at Jugtown. The brilliant and generous scholar Charles “Terry” Zug III instructed me on the stunning beauty of nineteenth-century North Carolina jugs. Two knowledgeable collectors of North Carolina pottery, Tommy Edwards in Pittsboro and Bobby Kadis in Raleigh, were kind and generous with their knowledge.
Nancy Selvage, director of the Ceramics Program at Harvard, invited me to speak there at a symposium on “Japanese Ceramics: Cultural Roots and Contemporary Expressions,” on November 7, 2004. It was on that occasion that I first used the title and three-part structure of “Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay.” Three potters at the symposium were wonderfully supportive of what I was up to: Edmund de Waal, Julian Stair, and Rob Barnard. The Virginia potter and tile maker Joan Gardiner and the writer John Rolfe Gardiner were encouragingly curious about where this book might take me.
Back home in Massachusetts, the potter Bill Sax answered many questions about firing techniques and the changing pottery scene at Alfred University. Lisa Uyehara has deepened my understanding of the World War II resettlement camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry. Frank Murphy, a passionate scholar of literature and of pottery, followed every twist and turn of my research.
Second comes my family. My uncle John Wesley Thomas has chronicled the Thomas family connections, brick and tobacco, in rich detail. Bruno Benfey in Montreal has done the deep research on the Benfey genealogy. My father, Ted Benfey, has helped fill in the blanks while entering into the imaginative reconstruction of our family networks. I am deeply indebted to his support of this undertaking from the start. Since my mother, Rachel, is in many ways the central figure of my book, I can hardly thank her enough.
My brothers, Philip and Stephen, have done everything I’ve asked and more, hosting me in Chapel Hill and Tokyo, traveling with me, and accompanying me through great swaths of the story I tell in this book. Their imprint is everywhere. Elisabeth Benfey gave me a beautiful Jugtown tray, once housed in her own house, when it belonged to Juliana Busbee’s cousin. Punk Howard, my mother’s youngest sister, is a close friend and confidante, and shares my love for Jugtown pottery. Renate Wilkins, my father’s older sister, has shared with me her memories of Black Mountain College and the Alberses. During the late stages of this book, it has been a special pleasure to reconnect with my sister, Karen Boyd, of Winston-Salem.
Editors, many of whom are named in my “A Note on Sources,” have encouraged my forays into ceramics and family lore. They include Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books and Sasha Weiss at the New York Review Blog; Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic; Ann Hulbert at Slate; Nancy Novogrod and Margot Guralnick at Travel+Leisure; and Chuck Grench at the University of North Carolina Press.
Melanie Jackson is the ideal agent and literary adviser, as everyone who has the privilege to work with her knows. Ann Godoff strikes just the right balance as a brilliant editor, knowing the book and its needs much better than the author does. I’d like to thank her shrewd and smart assistant, Ben Platt, for minding the thousand details while keeping the big picture.
I can’t thank all the friends who made this book a better book. Let these names stand for them all: Sven Birkerts, friend and guide; Seamus Heaney, beloved teacher, who sent me a postcard of a bricklayer by August Sander at just the right time; Stanley Cavell, who pointed out key differences between the immigrant experience of German Jews and other refugees from Europe; Jed Perl, who urged me not to wait in writing this book; Roy Nydorf and Terry Hammond; Donal O’Shea; Eric Poggenpohl and Wendy Woodson, who tracked down Alex Reed’s memorial on Martha’s Vineyard; Karen Remmler and Holger Teschke; Mel and Priscilla Zuck; Nicholas Fox Weber and Brenda Danilowitz, friends and generous helpers at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; Kim Cumber at the State Archives in Raleigh; James Gehrt and others who helpfully provided illustrations; my supportive poker buddies, artists all—Nick Bromell, Eric Poggenpohl, Jim Gipe, James Steinberg, Kirt Snyder, and Don Hamerman.
My own family has sustained and supported me. Mickey Rathbun read every page and knew the right time for us to move to a modernist house on the edge of the old Amherst Brickyard, the perfect place for taking up the thread of our lives together. Tommy and Nicholas, sons and friends—what better company could a father have?
Chris Benfey
The Brickyard, Amherst
July 4, 2011