I’ve seen María and Julián Martinez’s pottery in museums and galleries all over the Southwest and never knew what I was admiring or who invented it. Now I do. But that isn’t what’s important about this book.

I have never read an as-told-to narrative where the ghostwriter or in this case ethnographer managed to so ably efface themselves that only the subject’s voice remains. In her foreword Marriott writes that María’s story

…was gathered in 1945 and 1946, through several months of almost daily interviews with Mrs. Martínez…What happened is told informally, as a story, and as often as possible in Mrs. Martínez’ own words.

And from thenceforward Marriott disappears into the woodwork (or in this instance adobe) and María steps forward, mistress of her own story. It begins in mythic style.

So these things happened in the pueblo of San Ildefonso…At the time when María began to remember…Water had shaped the earth from the beginning, and men had shaped earth and water to make their houses and the towns that were walled with houses. Because the towns came out of the earth and were part of it, they hardly showed against the countryside.

And then we come to María herself, a five-year old girl sent to sell door to door her mother’s cheese and, incidentally, to begin to learn the art of trading that would be so useful in her career as one of America’s most renowned potters and with her husband, a re-inventor of the black-on-black pottery for which San Ildefonso is so famous. Now, 44 years after her death, black-on-black pottery is still being made and shown and admired and acquired. Not only did it provide a good living for the family, including the purchase price of luxury items like stoves and sewing machines and new wagons, when she and Julián open a storefront in the pueblo other Tewa come to María and ask her to teach them the black-on-black pottery and to sell theirs, too. María tells them

…when my aunt taught me to make pottery, she told me something. She said that pottery-making belongs to everybody. Everybody who came to her and wanted to learn to make pottery, she taught. She said that was the way it was supposed to be. I want to do things right, the way she told me.”

When Julián comes home from the fields that night, she asks him

“Will you teach their husbands about firing?”

and he replies

If they want to learn…I don’t want to have things other people can’t have. If you have the best things and begin to get famous and rich and all, then nobody’s happy. Other people can be jealous and begin not to like you, and it’s not good. I’ll teach anybody that wants to learn, the way your Tía Nicolasa taught us.”

San Ildefonso has by now been irrevocably changed by timber companies clear-cutting the forests that hold onto the water that nourishes their crops, and by the incursion of alcohol, sold to the Indians in defiance of the law. It was just another thing to hurt the pueblo.

“You don’t drink,” said María.
“I don’t need to,” Tomás [her father] answered. “I know what I’m afraid of, and I say it. When a man is afraid and doesn’t know why, he can’t always face the fear. Then he may drink. Fear is worse than something to fear.”

María goes so far as to use her savings to buy out Spanish Pete, the local bootlegger, and move him out of the pueblo. It doesn’t stop Julián, though, who doesn’t know what he is afraid of, and eventually the drinking kills him in 1943. María and her children and the rest of the women continue to make and sell pots, and the men continue to paint the designs upon them, and eventually their work becomes acknowledged as art and curators of museums and owners of galleries begin to ask for their pots to be signed.And that even as María continually reminds them that it isn’t the potter who is important, it is the pueblo.

The strongest thread that runs throughout María’s story is that of the San Ildefonso Pueblo, the community in which she lives most of her life and the place where her heart remains no matter how far she travels from it.

She needed to feel the pueblo around her to feel that she was safely alive.

The creation and sale of San Ildefonso pottery saved the pueblo, which still exists today and still sells pottery to the tourists, and to the museums and the art galleries and the collectors. María died in 1980, the recipient of two honorary doctorates and a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian, and was featured at world fairs in Chicago, San Diego, and San Francisco.

I think María must have been a bit of a witch, too, because she certainly casts a spell. A good witch, undeniably, one with wit and intelligence and an overabundance of talent and a robust sense of humor. When she and Julián return home from a road trip to D.C. she is asked

“Which place did you like best?”
“Tennessee,” María answered promptly. “It has the best clay.”

Because of course they had stopped to gather clay everywhere along their route.

Highly recommended.

Book Review Monday Chatter Alice Marriott Maria The Potter of San Ildefonso