0.33 Carroll harris simms, b. 1924  (Page 2/2)

Angels and benefactors

[The art department] was half as big as a table. But Mrs. Susan McAshan along with Mrs. Jane Blaffer Owen—they were benefactors to TSU’s art department. Mrs. McAshan, she hosted the Women’s International Garden Club one year, and her daddy was the one responsible for our first [university]president Dr. R. O’Hare Lanier getting an ambassadorship to Monrovia, Liberia. So she kept up with our progress. When she discovered there was a man teaching ceramics, she said, “I’m going to bring the Garden Club women out there and let them see his ceramics; see what he’s teaching the youngsters.” So she called Dr. Lanier, and he called me on the phone and said, “Simms, Mrs. McAshan is coming out and bringing these women to see what you’re doing.”

Well, I wasn’t doing anything but hand-built coil pieces and things. And I had gone to Cranbrook that five weeks and I did three pots on the potter’s wheel. The tallest one was about nine inches, down to about four, or something like that. But I saved them and brought them with me. And I had a little collapsible table that looked like a card table. So I set all these little hand-built pots up that the youngsters had done, and I put mine with theirs and all these women came down on us. They just had a to-do over all these lovely little coil things, little pinch vessels—and they wanted to buy the wheel-thrown things and I told them I couldn’t sell them. I told them I hoped one day we’d have a proper kiln and a potter’s wheel and could do these kinds of things. So everybody left, and about a half hour later a student from across the street—not one of mine—came over and said, “There’s a white woman over there in the parking lot told me to come over here and look for Mr. Simms and tell him to come across there and she wants to see him for a few minutes.” So I said okay, and walked over there.

She said, “Mr. Simms,” then she looked down and opened her pocketbook. She said, “Here’s a check, my check for $100. You give this to Dr. Lanier and tell him that this is my promise to get a kiln and that your students will have everything they need to work with.” I smiled and said thank you, and she disappeared in her little car. She didn’t dress like she was a millionaire. She didn’t drive a car like she was a millionaire. But when she got out of sight I just stood there and looked. And I’m going to say this—I don’t care how it sounds: I said, “That white woman, she ain’t going to do nothing about that. She was just embarrassed about what she saw.”

The next morning I went over there to Dr. Lanier’s office and I told him the story that Mrs. McAshan made her visit with her group and said for me to give you her check for $100, and she was going to see to it that the people in my class would have a kiln and everything they needed to do their pottery. Sure enough, it wasn’t two weeks later before he called me one morning and said, “Simms, Mrs. McAshan called me this morning and told me to tell you to get a kiln and get the same kind of potter’s wheel they use at Cranbrook, and get everything you need for your students to make pottery.” She was an angel. She was a real angel on that one.

What miss mary said

A neighbor I remember as a child lived diagonal across the street from us when I must have been seven or eight years old. It was during the great depression and it was hard. Sometimes we didn’t really know where the next meal was coming from. And Miss Mary Price—there were maybe six old women over her age, the elders you know—saying, “I can’t do this.” Miss Mary Price had sort of a nasal sound and they all did snuff in those days. She’d fold her arms and grab back at one leg and then put the other foot forward and say, “Well, I just can’t say ‘can’t’ like ya’ll—because I got all these mouths to feed,” pointing her head toward her children. “I got to feed them, and I can’t say ‘can’t’ ’cause ‘can’t’ is dead.”

I never forgot that, and when I started teaching, each time I had a new problem about how to throw clay on the potter’s wheel and center it and all that, [my students] would say, “I can’t do that.” Well, throwing clay on a potter’s wheel is mysterious if you’ve never done it. And it really is annoying until you get the hang of it because you really want to experience that magic in your head and your hands that will make you center that clay and then open it and bring that pot up—and then when you get that you want, to say, “Hallelujah!” But when a student would say, “I can’t do that,” I’d tell them the story. I’d tell them what Miss Mary said. “You can’t say ‘can’t.’”

Changes in the city

I think Houston has outgrown its beautiful humanity of the old city. Nobody has time to be human and as warm as they used to be. That’s really my true feeling. In the early period there was a community feeling. This is a period where everybody is struggling to exist. They don’t have time to be a community anymore. I feel like that. Houston is a boom city, it’s no longer a post-World War II city. When it was a community city it thought it had to go to New York to feel like it was a city, but now New York comes here, because [now] New York is tired and arthritic.

Remembering artistic peers

I think Gertrude Barnstone’s work is speaking of her also, because looking at her work is like looking at flowers. Each time I look at a piece of her sculpture it’s like looking at a flower. When you look at Miss Barnstone’s sculpture—the way she handles glass—it’s only a medium, but aesthetically it becomes poetically a creative experience that is natural [enough] to be placed among the flowers in the rainforest. It could have been taken from the rainforest and put in the environment in which we live. We wake up in the morning and it’s there. We repose and at night it’s there, and we wake up and it’s still in blossom, just like the flowers in our garden are there. Her sculpture in glass breathes and it has permanence keeping us fresh.

John Biggers is a spokesman, the same as I. We both tell of the experience of arriving in a new world. And he does it in a sense that is more literal than me. But we both tell of being in a new world from Africa by being in the world away from Africa. My work, it’s symbolic. In a sense his work is literally symbolic.

Carroll Harris Simms was interviewed on June 20, 2006. You can listen to the interview here .