Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

A work of art in of itself, Christopher Benfey’s book details his family’s history, complete with the trials and joys of life, love, loss and grief, and the influence of art and aesthetics that has been central to his family’s culture for generations. His story is very much rooted in the tangible but has just the right amount of the ephemeral to bring the reader into the author’s mind. It gives readers a sense of the deeply rooted connection the author himself has with the ancient arts and work that his family has thrived off of, and his story illustrates the way people not only create art but are influenced and changed by art as well. In quite a literal sense, Benfey shows how art can shape us, just as much as a ceramicist shapes clay.

This book is an exploration by the author of the intertwining stories of his ancestors and the people, places, and practices that shaped and influenced their lives. Reading the book, I got a feeling that it wasn’t simply Benfey himself writing the book, as the book wasn’t too focused on his own experience. More accurately, it felt like Benfey’s entire ancestry and heritage coming through him to leave its mark upon his pages, and to give us insight into the lives of his ancestors, and therefore, into our own. It is the same way I feel the influence of all the people who have supported me in becoming who I am today---my family, friends, and teachers---coming through me in the things I do every day. Benfey himself is the culmination of the work of his ancestors, just as he and his book are the vessels that contain both his own story and the story of his forbearer’s relationship with art. Just as God shaped Adam from the clay of the earth, Benfey’s family forms and dynamic shaped both its history and its clay. They eventually shaped Benfey himself, who passes on the gift of his family through his writings. His book gives readers as much of an insight into the emotions the author discovers while sifting through his family’s past as it does information and history on the subjects he covers.

Something that struck me was how truly American Benfey’s family memoir was. It reminded me of my family, my friends, and my neighbors who all come from families that, at one point or another, left home countries to seek a better life in the promised land of America. In quite a literal sense, Benfey’s family story shows how American soil has a symbiotic relationship with the people who call it home. His family works the clay with their hands, and in return, the soil works them. Though the world of ceramicists is not all-encompassing, and art hasn’t shaped my family in the ways that it has shaped Benfey’s, the soil certainly has. My ancestors, like Benfey’s, immigrated to find a better life here in America. The soil that influenced so much of Benfey’s history moved mine in different ways that are just as powerful. The soil gave my family farms, fields, and orchards to nourish and be nourished by. The ethic of working hard and taking care of the land in return for the land taking care of us has been so deeply ingrained in my family that I can see it in the way my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all interact with each other and with the world around them.

The meaning of ‘family’ is not entirely logical or linear, and the way a family and a person identify themselves is not through the careful, concise way that one might want to. This is reflected in the rather scattered composition of the different parts of Benfey’s book. Often the chapters don’t cohere and seem to be placed haphazardly throughout the sections. However, though at first glance it appears that this reflects a lack of intention, a closer look at the true purpose of the book---a vehicle for Benfey to carefully tease out the truth of his roots from a dusty and confused past---reveals that the haphazardness of the sections mirrors the complexity and tangled nature of the life of a family.