STORY by ALEX TIEGEN
PHOTOS by JEREMIAH WILSON
The young woman on Henry Wallace’s carving table was born of nature and love. Wallace carved her from a hunk of dead mahogany, and she grows more beautiful every day.
Days ago, her wooden nose was a nub protruding beneath two empty eye sockets, and her face was unnaturally round. Her mouth was a rounded rectangle, and her ears: were boring, featureless knobs. Her breasts were mismatched; one was sharper than the other.
Now, the carving is coming to life. Her nose has shrunk to a delicate bridge with shallow nostrils. A smile parts her full lips. Oval eyes without pupils stare from a narrower, more human face.
The Rastafarian woodcarver, whose long dreadlocks are piled high under a tall white cap with patterns of green, red and yellow stripes, has carved adormnments on the woman’s head.
A cloth covering wraps around her scalp. A bowl of wooden fruit rests on her head. Her breasts are round, and her skin has been sanded smooth.
Wallace, who has been exhibited internationally, has given birth to a woman of wood.
The carving started as a piece of dead wood that Wallace found a few miles from his home in the small community of Red Bays, on the northwest coast of Andros Island in the Bahamas. On his shoulder, a dark oval marked where the tree scraped against him as he navigated treacherous rocks and holes on the walk home about a week earlier.
As he carved, Wallace said he expected to receive $2,500 for the finished statue from a fellow Bahamian artist. The artist, who is older than 50, supports himself and his family with the money he makes from large commissions and smaller sales.
While the highly regarded woodcarver survives off his art-he once earned $10,000 for a wooden mermaid−and is happy for the freedom his craft provides, it takes constant work to pay the bills.
“I still a poor man trying to struggle like anyone else,” Wallace said.
In a community where there are few jobs other than fishing or sponging, Wallace and the other artists of Red Bays try to earn their living through their creativity and their bond with the land.
Like folk artists throughout the world, Wallace and other artists must struggle to survive.
For Peggy Colebrooke and the other weavers of Red Bays, weeks can pass before customers purchase the baskets that are unique to the community.
Colebrooke will sell snacks to the children to earn money.
In the house of a weaver famous for making baskets large enough to sit in, a basket woven from silver-top palm waits for a customer who has yet to come.
Dreams of playing music in front of a large crowd must be put on hold for Wilton Russell.
The musician and woodcarver must set aside his guitar and hunt land crabs or do odd jobs to support himself and his family.
He stalks the creatures through saltwater marshes, such as those found near the abandoned home of his ancestors. He speaks to them as he pulls off their claws, saying he knows what it’s like to struggle.
On this island, art is a waiting game. The artists wait for their work to be shown respect.
They wait for customers.
They wait for money to pay for food and supplies for themselves and their families.
And they wait for escape.
The Cycle
The business of woodcarving has a cycle, said Wallace, who has been carving professionally for 39 years. He was one of many artists featured in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival dedicated to the Bahamas in 1994. (The festival was hosted in Washington, D.C.)
During hurricane season, the flow of tourists and other art buyers slows.
The rain also makes it difficult to find and bring home dry specimens of mahogany, which is a type of wood Wallace prefers to carve.
The slowdown in business often coincides with the start of the school year. Much of Wallace’s earnings go to his children’s school expenses at that time.
Wallace had seven children with his wife, Eldetta.
He also had three earlier with a lover, one of whom died as an infant. The other two don’t live with him on Andros.
Business picks up again in winter when visitors return to Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas.
To ensure he has enough pieces to meet demand, Wallace carves six days a week.
He supplements his income with money from larger commissions, such as the order for the wooden woman and one-man shows.
Wallace once earned $26,000 from one show. His international reputation also encourages buyers to seek him out. Wallace also won the Cacique Award for Arts & Crafts in 1999.
He said he can carve six bonefish a week that he values at $200 each. But sometimes Wallace is forced to lower the price, selling a bonefish for $150, or reduce the asking price of a larger piece.
“If I really need it, I’ll sell it,” Wallace said. “Only for my kids.”
The artist also has to contend with paying for utilities and government fees. When he returned home from a break in Nassau, he found a $250 phone bill and a $219 light bill waiting for him.
Though there is no income tax in the Bahamas, Wallace has to pay a monthly fee for the Bahamas National Insurance Programme and Fund, a type of social security. And while he is self-employed, Wallace had to pay about $400-to-$500 for a government-issued business license.
Wallace said he has not taken a vacation in more than 10 years, but he will take brief breaks in Nassau on the island of New Providence, about 30 miles away.
Although he was born in Nassau in 1957, Wallace says he moved to Red Bays when he was 21 to escape the noise and bustling streets of the capital city.
Art As A Way of Life
Art became a crucial source of revenue in Red Bays when the settlement was exposed to the rest of the world, said Heather Barrett, who co-organized an art show featuring the works of Wallace and other Androsian artists at the University of Florida in 2005.
Before then, the residents had been able to provide for themselves using the resources available to them, said Barrett, who was an independent art consultant at the time of the exhibit.
When a logging company built a road connecting the community the rest of the island in the 1960s, the residents faced a predicament.
“It made them need money in a way they didn’t before,” said Barrett, who is now a program development assistant at the UF International Center.
But the flow of tourists has not been steady enough for the artists to support themselves, she said.
Of utmost importance to Wallace is the guarantee that buyers show love for his pieces.
True art lovers pay the full price for his art, he said. The Rasta said he knows the perils of placing too much importance on money.
Working with the Land
Wallace, who will only carve dead wood, feels a bond with nature. As he carves in the wooded area outside his home, he likes to listen to birdsong or music with meaning, such as country and reggae.
The mahogany woman he’s creating lies on a work table made from wooden blocks Wallace carved himself. The table rests on a mound of wood chips shed from the artist’s carvings.
Wallace’s tools sit on the table. Several gouges used to chip away at the wood lie next to the sculpture of the woman.
Wallace’s mallet has grooves in it from where his fingers rubbed against the head. The handle, which has replaced older handles on the mallet, has been worn down by Wallace’s grip.
Wallace said he envisions what he can carve out of a piece of a wood or tree just by looking at it. The shape of a mahogany tree inspired a piece in Wallace’s most recent international show. The sides of the tree resembled the shapes of two sharks. In the finished piece, the sharks are jumping over Neptune, Roman God of the Sea, kissing a mermaid atop a reef.
That piece, which took about six weeks to create, was featured at the art show Barrett helped organize. Barrett met Wallace and other residents of Red Bays when she lived on Andros with her partner, who is an artist.
Barrett said Wallace’s reputation as a hard and consistent worker benefits the rest of the Bahamian artist community.
But with the expense of modern goods inflated by the Bahamas’ import tax and few goods produced on the island, it can be hard for Wallace and the other artists of Red Bays to earn what they need, especially if they have families, Barrett said.
The Hustle
Wallace knows what it’s like to hustle. As a child growing up in the historic neighborhood of Beantown in Nassau, Wallace had to wake up early to sell copies of The Nassau Guardian around 8:30 a.m.
But an affinity for art and nature were always a part of him, he said. He recalls carving on plain pieces of carpentry wood and living green wood. He carved tikis for $2 to $3 a piece and learned from professional woodcarvers who practiced their craft on Bay Street. When he was 14, Wallace competed against veteran woodcarvers and won 3rd place for his sculpture of a Bahama Papa, a man playing the drums.
Nassau was also where Wallace was introduced to Rastafarianism. Wallace was carving one day when he met famous reggae artist and Rasta Bob Marley, an incident he describes as the meeting of two brothers.
Wallace continued carving when he came to Andros, where residents who see him on the street greet him with calls of “Hey, Rasta!”
Wallace ran a museum south of his home in Fresh Creek, where he displayed artifacts of the Black Seminoles who settled Red Bays, and art. He would charge 50 cents or $1 for admission to the museum, which opened in 1991, and would give shows of his carvings, he said.
On days when there were no customers, he would go to the museum and continue to carve. While working there, he came to the attention of Smithsonian researchers and was invited to participate in the Folklife festival in 1994. The museum later closed in 1997 because of a lack of money and visitors, Wallace said.
Wallace said there has been a slowdown in customers in recent years, but he does not know why. Tourism could be promoted in Red Bays if taxi drivers would bring visitors to the settlement, he said.
Eldetta, Wallace’s wife, sometimes worries about money. Henry must travel south to Fresh Creek to find buyers for his art at times, said Eldetta, who carves and weaves baskets.
Though her son, Hentettoe, asked for a present for his 7th birthday, Eldetta found she lacked the money needed for even the ingredients for a birthday cake.
“I wouldn’t want them [my children] to stay in Red Bays,” she said. “No jobs. No nothing.”
A Weaver’s Work
A steady rhythm builds as Peggy Colebrooke weaves her bread and butter.
You can almost count how many times it takes to unite each piece of silver-top palm with those already woven into the bottom of a basket-in-progress.
A soft "thtumph!" sound, which echoes the twang made when pulling a taut rubber band, eases into the air as she slides the needle strung with the palm piece into a coil of leaves started that day.
By the time she has woven a yellow palm piece into the coil one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times, it will have almost melted into the design. The basket will join many others woven by Colebrooke, her aunt Vangie, and others in the settlement as they sit on a table outside Vangie’s house and wait for passing customers.
Baskets rest on a shelf near the kitchen counter and on the furniture. Some are meant to be used be used as hanging holders. Many have yellow, teal, pink or red flower-patterned batik cloth woven into their intricate designs. Others are topped with a wave pattern that flows around the rim.
But Colebrooke sometimes has to wait for weeks for a customer. After she sold two baskets to visitors for a total of $50, she wound up waiting at least two weeks for another sale.
When business slows, Colebrooke will sell candy and soda bought in Nicholl’s Town to children in the settlement. Colebrooke, who demonstrated her basket weaving at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1994, said she started doing this to pay for her children’s school expenses. She charges 50 cents for a Blow Pop and $1 for soda. Members of Colebrooke’s family will also help support each other in times of need.
Scrap Iron
The last large basket William “Scrap Iron” Colebrooke has woven in recent months sits unsold in the corner of his small, dark blue home in the forest off the main road.
Though Scrap Iron, who’s famous for making baskets big enough for a man to sit in, says it’s great to be an artist in Red Bays, he said he has decided to stop weaving because tourists no longer purchase his baskets.
Scrap Iron, born in 1926 was taught to weave by Omelia Marshall, the mother of the basket-making industry on the island. He started to enjoy the craft more when he figured out how to create the larger weavings he eventually became famous for and that fetched more money. He remembers that he had to remove half of his door to take one of his largest creations out of his house.
“Man, you could fit all of Red Bays in that basket,” Scrap Iron said.
Scrap Iron, who was also featured at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1994, made the large basket at least six months earlier and lowered the price from $900 to $800. But the customer who ordered the piece never came to claim or pay for it.
Scrap Iron, who partly supports himself by hunting animals and crabbing, said visitors will talk to him about his life but will decline to buy baskets. Visitors tell him that the weavings are too large to bring home easily on the small charter planes most people travel on. They often will purchase a weaving from Marshall, instead. But the artist says he doesn’t let the lack of customers vex him.
“I don’t let money bother me,” he said. “I don’t let nothing bother me.”
Being a root of the Family Tree
Art must take a backseat for Wilton Russell. The 51-year-old likes to pick up a 28-year-old guitar and tease out songs about how God blessed the sexy, sexy ladies and the green, green grass of the Bahamas. In a beautiful, gravelly voice, he sings about the fantastic love of a chickcharnie, a mythical creature that is half-human and half-bird. His grandson, Jaheem, thrusts his bare torso and chest back and forth as he dances to the music.
“All my cultural knowledge, my musical knowledge, comes from Heaven,” Russell said.
The musician and woodcarver, who has a reputation for “storying,” must go crabbing several days a week and perform odd jobs to support himself and his family. For example, he said he can make about $100 a day for removing trees from peoples’ yards.
Russell said tourists and other visitors take so long to come to Red Bays and buy carvings that he’s stopped making them for a time. When customers do come, they will pass by his house and buy from other carvers or weavers, he said. Russell said he will sometimes just give his carvings to friends.
Besides Jaheem, whose mother sends him from Nassau to Andros periodically to learn manners, Russell lives with his wife Terry and two of his sons, Jamal and Chino.
Russell says he dreams at night of playing music in front of a big crowd. He says the music is always in his head.
On Andros, Russell performs under the name “Suicide Bomber & Crew,” but he said that the name refers to musical suicide and is the title of one of his songs. His first solo album, titled “Soca is the Thing We Love,” sold about 900 copies, for which he received about $700.
Russell said he doesn’t have the money to pay for the instruments and equipment he wants, such as microphones and amplifiers. He wants to leave the island and is waiting for a passport. While he enjoys the quiet life that is found in Red Bays, he is tired of Andros and feels his life here has stopped.
“Nothing good can come to me because I’m in bondage,” Russell said.
This morning, he stalks land crabs on the swash, or saltwater marsh, near Old Red Bays on the island’s coast, though it is not his primary hunting grounds. He says he can make about $25 for about a dozen land crabs. He says the population of land crab is diminishing, and he has other spots he visits to search for the species.
Russell hacks at the low-growing plants with a large, old machete as he walks to the abandoned settlement. The settlement was founded by Black Seminoles, from whom Russell says he is descended.
The Black Seminoles, who were a mixed-race of Seminoles and African Americans, started immigrating to Andros in 1821. Old Red Bays, the settlement next to Russell’s hunting grounds, was abandoned after it was struck by several hurricanes. The founders later established present-day Red Bays.
As he walks among the black mangroves and other plants of the swash, Russell drops down and plunges his arm into a water-filled hole. Grimacing as he gropes, Russell jerks as he perches on his knees and belly with his arm submerged almost to the shoulder,in the watery hole that houses his prey. When he rises, he’s grasping a wriggling blue land crab, bigger than his palm when its legs are outstretched.
He speaks to his prey as he calmly pulls its legs off, saying things like, “You fighting? You fighting?”
“I talk to them, you see, because I know how they feel,” he said. He tosses the still-living crab bodies into the sack. He has caught 15 today.
The artists of Red Bays face a problem plaguing folk artists throughout the Bahamas, said Peter Davidson, founder of the Maritime Arts and Inspiration Center on Andros.
Red Bays has the potential to be a more significant art supplier to the popular Straw Market in Nassau, he said.
But authentic Bahamian folk art is being replaced by cheaper imitations made in Asia, Davidson said.
“You now think in terms of brand names and corporations, and the who of the art is forgotten,” Davidson said.
Henry Wallace, an internationally exhibited wood-
carver, loves his art.