Good Dirt

The Jar

The Jar

T he jar had been part of the Freeman family for six generations. Ebby’s parents called it Old Mo because of the initials MO carved just below its lip, clearly visible under the dark glaze. One of Ebby’s first words as a toddler was oh-mow . She and her brother used to love their family’s Old Mo stories.

The twenty-gallon stoneware pot, with its broad mouth and earlike handles, had been a source of pride for the family, despite its origins. It had been crafted by an enslaved man in South Carolina but would become part of a daring flight to freedom, traveling by wagon and ship more than a thousand miles to the Massachusetts coast.

“The jar is a reminder of how you children came to be Freemans,” Ebby’s mom used to say, caressing it like a cat. She would trace her fingers over the ridges in the glaze and along a small trail of leaves painted in white slip down one side. Mom loved that jar, but it was Ebby’s father who had been born into the Freeman family, and it was his dad, Gramps Freeman, who told Ebby and her brother what their ancestors’ lives had been like in the early days of the jar, after it had made its unlikely journey to Refuge County, Massachusetts, where their grandparents still lived.

“Tell us, Gramps,” Baz would say whenever he and Ebby visited Gramps and Granny, though they already knew the stories. They would sit on the back porch of their grandparents’ house in Massachusetts, trying to imagine what the property would have looked like in the 1850s. Those were the days of the one-room farmhouse, before the first Freemans added cabins for their sons. Before prosperity allowed them to expand the main building, which grew over the years to become a gabled three-story manor restored in the Victorian style.

Their gramps’s favorite details were from well before the manicured lawn and paved sidewalk and asphalt street were put in. Years before the closest town grew large enough to surround their family’s land altogether.

“The only thing that hasn’t really changed is that old shed out back,” Gramps Freeman told them. “That became the room where the Freeman children and kids from other rural families used to learn their letters.”

In the early days, Ebby’s ancestors had only one door to their house and often used the jar to prop it open.

“The great strength of that jar,” Gramps Freeman said, “was that its true worth was underestimated. Just like the value of the enslaved man who had crafted it and signed it at a time when people in bondage were not allowed to read or write. Just like those first Freemans in Massachusetts, who moved all the way out here to hide from the slave catchers who were crossing state lines in search of people like them.” Gramps raised his brows and nodded silently in that way that he did when he wanted to be sure the kids were listening carefully.

“Most of the trouble in this world boils down to one person not recognizing the worth of another,” Gramps said. “But sometimes, that can be an advantage.”

The jar was typical of the kind of clay pot used to store pickled meats and such in the mid-1800s.

“At first glance, the container appeared to be pretty ordinary, but the more you looked at it, the more you could see that the jar glowed with the spirit of the earth from which it had been forged. That potter had a special touch.”

By the time Ebby was born, the jar had already been moved to the Connecticut town where she and Baz were growing up, but when Gramps talked about the container, it was as if Ebby could see Old Mo sitting right in front of them. The glaze was the color of wet soil and mossy rocks at the bottom of a shallow river, a series of glistening browns and greens overlaying one another, their shapes seeming to shift along the curve of its surface. The jar had been one of her favorite things in the whole world. And she knew that had been true for her brother, too.

Ebby was barely ten years old when she heard the jar hit the floor, followed by that other sound. A dull crack-crack that signaled the supersonic flight of a bullet toward her brother’s torso, followed by another that missed him altogether and ended up lodged in the wooden bookcase behind him. Even before she heard her brother cry out, before she reached the bottom of the stairs, before she saw the gunmen running out the front door, Ebby understood that along with that piece of pottery, something else in her life was splitting apart.

There was the moment before and there would be everything after . And in time, Ebby would come to understand her role as the surviving Freeman child. To be uncomplicated, to be successful, to stay alive. She has tried, but now she feels the only way to move forward is to find a place where she isn’t reminded constantly of what was taken from her.