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traditional Sujosa designs, so I presume she’s not self-taught.
    Leo Smiley : Her mother taught her to throw pots. In fact, her mother always said their family wouldn’t have survived the Civil War, if it hadn’t been for their pots.
    CJM : Did she mean they sold the pots for food money?
    Leo Smiley : As my mother-in-law tells it, her great-great-grandmother only had one child live through childhood, and his health wasn’t all that good. He had a limp. He had asthma. He needed glasses to read, and that was back when nobody in the settlement could spare money for glasses, nor time for reading. Since he was an only child, his parents scraped together enough money for little Junior’s spectacles. After all that sacrifice, there was no way in hell that they were going to send him off to a war that they had no interest in.
    CJM : Were they able to hide him for the whole duration of the war?
    Leo Smiley : Are you kidding? Everybody in Alcaskaki knew which families in the settlement had sons old enough to serve. It wasn’t long before the Confederates sent somebody out here to fetch Junior to the battlefield. Well, his mother knew he wouldn’t live a month if she let the army take him. She met the officer at her door. If you’ve seen my wife, you know that she was probably a fearsome sight.
    CJM : Yes, I’ve seen your wife. I understand.
    Leo Smiley : She handed a paper to the officer and stood there like the Queen of England until he took it out of her hand. He read the first two lines and started laughing at her. She stared him down until he went back to reading. When he got to the bottom, he looked at her gape-mouthed, saying, “You can’t be serious.” But she was.
    CJM : What did the paper say?
    Leo Smiley : It was a document excusing her son and all the other Sujosa boys—the ones who hadn’t already gone to war—from military service. She wanted him to sign it.
    CJM : He couldn’t possibly have agreed. The Confederacy was woefully short on men.
    Leo Smiley : But it was even shorter on raw materials. She was offering to tell him where the Confederacy could mine tin, which they needed desperately to build weapons. After he stopped laughing, he thought about it, and eventually he realized that he held a very good deal in his hands. He signed her paper.
    CJM : How did she know where they could find tin? It’s not something most housewives use every day.
    Leo Smiley : But potters use it all the time. There’s not a lot of tin in Alabama, but the Sujosa potters have known where it was for centuries. Ronya’s great-great-great-grandmother probably stretched that war out some by helping the rebels get raw materials for their weapons, but she insisted until the day she died that she didn’t care. She said the United States government never did anything for her before or after the war, and the Confederate government never did anything for her while they had the chance, except leave her boy alone after she bought them off. She never cared who won, not one bit.

Chapter Five
    DeWayne Montrose looked comfortable enough, resting in a faded recliner that seemed too big for the cluttered room, but his wife Kiki was a miserable thing. She sat in an old easy chair, swaddled in at least three blankets, her feet propped on a frayed ottoman. Illness had turned her naturally fair complexion to a gray-white, while failing to fade her lank hair from its original vibrant red. Withered skin clung to a set of patrician cheekbones that made Faye think of Katharine Hepburn. Carmen stood staring at Kiki, as if being in the same room with grave illness had wiped her mind clean. Faye wondered if Carmen was going to make it through this interview.
    The Montroses’ daughter, Irene, an eighteen-year-old with hair and skin the color of honey, hovered near her mother. It hurt Faye to watch her ply Kiki with drinks and snacks that the sick woman didn’t want, while DeWayne sat there ignoring them both. Even the blare of the TV couldn’t