Greg Harkins: The Last of the Masters

IN A THROWAWAY WORLD, TRADITIONAL CRAFTSMANSHIP RAGES AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

Icannot say when I first learned about the chairmaker Greg Harkins. For many of us native Mississippians, he has always just been there, out in the woods of middle Mississippi somewhere, making oldtime wooden chairs with his hands. Pinning down the moment I became aware of him would be like identifying the first time I heard Friday night whistles in fall, or those low-lapping Gulf Coast waves. He’s been there too long to know. What I can do, though, is tell you when I first decided to pay Harkins a visit.

It was the beginning of 2021, and I was traveling I-55 north of Jackson when I noticed a billboard. There was old man Harkins, white beard and all, standing beside one of his rockers. “WANTED: Apprentice workers,” it read.

Coincidently, I had just recently read Mark Stowers’ Mississippi Folklife story about Harkins’ search for an apprentice. Harkins had come to realize that if his traditional method of chair-making was to carry on into the future, he needed to pass his knowledge along to someone, and soon. At that time, he was approaching seventy.

The story had left me curious about what it feels like when a craft you have spent your life mastering is in danger of vanishing with you, when you are the last of the line. Years ago, a cobbler told me that we have come to live in a “throwaway world”—a world without need for his sort of craftsmanship. Since then, I’ve wondered about the inner monologue that must accompany that realization. I figured Harkins might have some insight, and in March, I called the number on the billboard.

Harkins lives about fifteen miles north of Jackson down an unpaved road in a two-story house. When I pulled up, Claire Henson, his partner, welcomed me inside and offered some “cowboy coffee.” A few minutes later, Harkins came downstairs.

The first thing he did was hand me a prayer booklet, which he explained had been given to his father by a nun in 1924. His father was only three years old at the time, boarding a train in Tennessee bound for Mississippi, where he would meet his adoptive family. Harkins had only recently come into possession of the booklet, and as he relayed its story, he seemed to be blinking back tears.

It had not been five minutes since we’d met.

Even at seventy-one, Harkins looks bull strong. The things I noticed most about him—that his hands were thick and sinewy, that he smelled of wood polish, that he possessed a calm self-assurance—were each a result, I am sure, of his life’s work.

Harkins has been making chairs the nineteenth-century way since the mid1970s. He learned the craft during a three-year apprenticeship to a no-nonsense master chairmaker and his wife, Tommie and Mable Bell, who worked alongside Morgan Haynes, who learned from a man history only knows as Rouse. They were from a place on the Natchez Trace called Thomastown, where Harkins’s ancestors were from, and though each one has long since passed away, Harkins says their fingerprints cover every chair he makes.

In 1980, Harkins took some of his work to the Neshoba County Fair, looking to make a few sales. Ronald Reagan spoke that year and, as he did so, someone photographed Nancy sitting on her husband’s lap, in one of Harkins’s rocking chairs. Almost instantly, Harkins became a Magnolia State legend. Orders poured in. “If I had tried to plan all this, I couldn’t have,” he said at the time. “It just happened.” Since then, he has made chairs for six U.S. presidents, celebrities like George Burns and Bob Hope, and thousands of everyday folks who appreciate fine craftsmanship.

At one point during my visit, I asked Harkins what separates his chairs from those in national retail stores. He responded only by tapping his temple with his forefinger. That exchange took place in his workspace while I was sitting in one of his rocking chairs. Pitfalls await anyone who tries to describe how it feels to sit, but let me say this: That chair had a way of making gravity agree with you.

These days, there is a young man named Hodges Boland working in Harkins’s workspace. When I visited, he was rubbing polish on spindles. Harkins has imparted the basics of chairmaking to Boland, and he spoke highly of his artistic abilities. Right before this issue went to press, Harkins shared that Boland had recently completed his first chair constructed from top to bottom. But neither of them, when asked, ever committed to the idea of the twentytwo-year-old becoming a long-term apprentice.

I should say now that during my time with Harkins, he never quite opened up about passing down his craft, though it is clear that it continues to weigh on him. “What I want more than anything in the world,” he said, “is to teach people this art.” He was sincere, and Henson later shared that it stays on his mind—it’s why he paid for that billboard. But whenever I tried to get him to expound on the topic, he never quite answered, not directly—speaking instead about the ways that his body is slowing down—how he can no longer stand on his feet all day long. Often, when I asked him about the unknown future, Harkins brought up the past.

He told the story of his maternal grandfather, who immigrated from Greece and made a life in America. He spoke in detail about how Tommie Bell made chairs for sixty-four years. He recalled the great effort of having the Catholic church his family built in Tho mastown moved onto his property. He told the story of his father, who never once spoke of his adoption and instilled in his son a drive to be worthy of the family name. He showed me a pho tograph of his daughter when she was young.

Henson later told me that when Har kins goes to Thomastown, he says he feels the spirits of his ancestors. Not figuratively—literally, he feels their presence, and draws strength from it. I suddenly saw more clearly how so much of what Harkins does is tied to the past. Building his own house. Grow ing the vegetables he puts on his table. Faithfully following recipes established decades ago. In making chairs like the ones his ancestors sat in, he is not only keeping a tradition alive, but staying in touch with his forefathers. For Harkins, this preoccupation with the past is more all-consuming than the future.

I let it bother me, for a while, that the story I hoped to write—about a mas ter craftsman trying to pass along what he knows before it is too late—did not materialize. I had arrived at Har kins’s place with visions of gleaning some hard-won wisdom from him, but instead had been given only what felt like disparate pieces of his past.

Then I remembered our first telephone conversation, when I called to arrange a visit. Harkins had been as pleasant as could be, but there was some awkwardness due to the fact that while talking with me he was also helping someone—I assume Boland—in some facet of woodwork. It was hard to tell when he was speaking to me, or to his student.

When I told him I was interested in talking to him about the need to find an apprentice, he responded: “When you’re fifteen, twenty-five, you’re never going to get old.” This made me grip my pen, ready to jot down what he might say next.

“Brace your drill on the table,” he said, having clearly gone back to Boland.

It happened again when I asked about the potential end of his line of work. “There is an end to this,” he said, and I got ready to record his next utterance, which was: “Worry about that later.”

I assumed he had turned back to Boland. Maybe he hadn’t, though. Either way, there was work to be done and, God-willing, there will be, until the end.• harkinschairs.com