Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_11 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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HISTORIAN COAST
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plain and glorious seem one and the same. Finally, look closely at the young black laborer standing in a tobacco field (page 20). You know he has worked in brutally hot, humid weather since sunrise. His fingers ache from cropping tobacco. The leaf nicotine stings his skin. His feet hurt. Notice, though, how he holds himself and wears his tattered trousers: He's the picture of verve and vim. Wootten has captured a strength of will that surpasses the limits of that tobacco field. Hard times will not hold this young fellow down. That's what Wootten was ultimately saying: We can rise above the Great Depres- sion and even what author Robertson Davies once called that "underlying, deep grief of things." We can do it right here, in this place, out of our own hearts, with our own two hands. The FSA photographers never saw it, never believed we had it in us. They saw merely the hard red clay of Depression-era lives. Wootten saw how North Carolina people turned that clay into the human equivalent of Jugtown's pottery; that is, into lives of quiet grace and, sometimes, iridescent beauty. □ David Cecelski is a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History Program and a regular columnist for Coastwatch. Ben Owen turning a pot, Jugtown COASTWATCH 21

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