Sarah Ann’s China

Two plates. That’s all that remains of Sarah Ann’s collection, which she painstakingly accumulated over years of buying bags of flour that included them as promotional items. She may have had cups and saucers or a serving bowl to match, but if she did, no one remembers now, and Sarah Ann has been gone for three decades. All her children, save one, died in infancy and the one that survived never had children, a legacy of battle in World War II. Two plates. No one to leave them to; no one to recall dinners at grandma’s house using the plates. Two plates. Lovely hand-painted plates of the Blue Ridge line from Southern Potteries, Inc. of Erwin, Tennessee. Two plates. The rest given away or lost down the river in a flood in 1959.

There should have been more to remember her by.

Some of my readers may remember Sarah Ann Sparkman Hopkins from the chapter “Hooker” in Spirits in the Field. She married her husband, Hooker Hopkins, in 1914. He was one of the three sons of the last family of Elisha Hopkins, my great-great-great grandfather, one of the more legendary characters of Pike County, KY. Ol’ Lige, as he was popularly known, married his first wife in 1833; accumulated two more wives (without benefit of marriage), and began more families around 1845 and 1856. In 1878, he legally married for the last time. I descend from the first marriage and Hooker descended from the last one. Over the decades, perhaps because the families loved to share stories of their infamous ancestor, they maintained contact with each other, at least at family reunions. I didn’t know Hooker very well, but I was very fond of his older brother Will, a kindly old man who used to give me nickels and dimes to buy treats with when I was growing up on Greasy Creek. “You remind me of your daddy when he was a boy,” he would tell me and my chest would expand with pride. When Uncle Will died in 1959, it broke my heart. I remember that Hooker followed him later that year and, except for occasional mention of him at family reunions, I had forgotten about Uncle Will’s brother for nearly forty years.

In 1999, I went in search of something of Hooker’s while I was attempting to identify graves on my family cemetery, graves that had little more than a fieldstone to tell me who they were. I had learned that Hooker kept a series of journals in which he meticulously listed the stories of each grave on the Old Prater Cemetery, which was first the ancestral burying-grounds of the Hopkins family. I was both a Hopkins and a Prater and I desperately needed the journals, since the cemetery was scheduled to be moved for road construction and I had exhausted every other source I had for information.
I did not find them. I learned that they were lost in a flood that carried away Hooker’s house not long after he died. Sarah Ann died in 1972 and her only child, Ersel, died in 1990. But with the possibility that the journals might have been given to her cousin Buster Ramey, I went to neighboring Floyd County to visit him and inquire about the journals.

Buster did not have them. He told me that Hooker “didn’t leave nothin’ because he didn’t have nothin’ to leave.” The flood had taken everything.

But not everything, as I later learned.

After visiting with Buster and his sister Cora Reed, a widower and widow who attempted to take care of each other after their spouses died, I returned to Pike County to continue my work. When the last of the graves were moved in 2003, I published my book as a memorial to my family, including Hooker and Sarah Ann. I told the stories I could remember, but there were so many more that I never learned, or had forgotten.

I went back a couple of times to visit Buster and Cora, taking them fruit baskets or little gifts to try to cheer them as much as I could. Cora had a special need for such things as she was blind, but it had been over a year since I last saw them, when my wife and I decided to visit them this spring.

When we got to the house where they lived, we found it padlocked. Buster’s old truck had two flat tires and looked like it had not been moved for years. I feared that they both had passed away from old age, and we went over to Beulah Collins’s house to inquire as to what had happened to them.

Beulah was also mentioned in “Hooker” and still lived in the comfortable house she had lived in since retiring from her business many years before. I had interviewed her for Spirits since both Sarah Ann and her son Ersel had worked for her in the past. She invited us in and told us that both Buster and Cora were still living, but were in nursing homes. (We later visited Cora at her nursing home, but Buster was farther away. We visited him on another occasion.)

I told Beulah that I wanted to give her a copy of my book, since she was mentioned in it, and I wanted to give a copy to everyone who contributed. I used her story of Hooker and the exploding can of biscuits in the chapter with his name.

“Well, let me give you something,” she said, and marched into the kitchen to return with two plates. “I been giving these away, and I only got two left and you ought to have them.” I was surprised that Beulah was giving away anything, but the story she told me was even more interesting.

“I pulled these out of the mud after the flood,” she said. “Sarah Ann had a bunch of them she got out of flour bags.” I wondered why she never gave them back to Sarah, but I did not ask. Maybe Sarah never knew they were salvaged or, for some reason, never wanted them back. Those two plates, along with a faded picture of Ersel in his World War II uniform and a copy of Sarah Ann’s death notice, are all that remains of a marriage of almost fifty years, a marriage that produced several children but no grandchildren. I suspect Beulah simply wanted somebody in the family to have them, and I was at least a Hopkins.

Later that night, my wife found the story of Blue Ridge pottery online and learned that these designs were made between 1939 and the end of World War II. I suspect Sarah Ann used them for Ersel’s homecoming meal after he came back from the war. I can see her shining them to a high gloss and proudly displaying them for that special occasion. I can also see her carefully returning them to her cupboard after they were used. They had to have been a source of pride for her; something that made her hard life a bit easier, and indeed the flowers painted onto the plates seem to be smiling.

There is apparently a market for the plates, as the Southern Pottery Company, yielding to cheap imports and disposable dinnerware, closed its doors in 1957. They are now collector’s items, and moderately valuable.

But we will never sell them.

They were Sarah Ann’s. Two plates; the last of her china, her pride and joy, painted by hand and given away in bags of flour. She made biscuits from the flour and placed them on the plates at Sunday dinners. They brightened the grim world of the coal camps she had lived in her entire life. They were plates she would have given to the grandchildren she never had. They were lost in a flood, somehow found, and survived another fifty years. Now they are back in the family.

Two plates. The last of Sarah Ann’s china, plates of the Blue Ridge line from the Southern Pottery Company of Erwin, Tennessee.

And there isn’t enough money in the world to buy them from me.