Good Dirt

Old Mo

Old Mo

2000

T he last time Ed told his children the story of how Old Mo helped him win their mother’s heart, the jar was dressed up in Baz’s baseball cap and a silly paper mustache that the kids had taped on its front.

“I knew your mom was special,” Ed said, glancing over at Soh. “But she wouldn’t pay me any mind.” It was a story the kids had heard umpteen times, but they never seemed to grow tired of it.

“It’s not that I didn’t pay you any mind, Ed,” Soh said, giving him the side-eye. “I noticed you. I just didn’t think you were all that .” She wobbled her head and wagged a finger at him and made the kids laugh.

Ed and Soh had grown up in the same county and done community service with the same club, but they’d attended different schools. It wasn’t until their families ended up in vacation homes next to each other on Martha’s Vineyard that Ed and Soh, halfway through high school and fully in the throes of adolescence, began to spend any real time around each other.

The next year, they were back in the same summerhouses, and this time, there was a kiss. They had climbed up into a red oak and were sitting side by side in the crook of the tree, where they could flirt without being spied on from afar.

“I saw an article about trees,” Soh said as she drummed her heels against the trunk of the oak. “It said climbing trees isn’t just good for building strong bodies, it’s good for building confidence and perseverance, and problem-solving.”

“Who knew,” Ed said, “an old oak could do all that?” Then he leaned over and kissed Soh.

And Soh kissed him back.

But Ed and Soh were on their way to separate universities and to the kinds of experiences that led teenagers to lose track of each other. There were new places, and friendships, and attractions. Until Soh came home from law school one Memorial Day weekend and went with her parents to a barbecue at the Freeman home.

“Haven’t seen you in years!” Soh said when she saw Ed.

Ed looked at Soh. He knew that it had been exactly five years and nine months. Their parents had seen one another, but Ed and Soh had always been up to something else, somewhere else. He didn’t want that to happen again.

“Have you met the oldest member of our family?” Ed asked Soh, tipping his head toward the doors off the patio and trying not to slide his eyes down over her backside. Trying not to breathe in the faint whiff of vanilla in her scent. Trying not to reach out and touch her face. He led Soh into the family library, a room that looked a lot like a storage space going through some kind of filing crisis. The shelves running from the oak floors all the way up to the ceiling cornices were fully stacked with books, along with almost every other available space.

Every time the Freemans looked at the mess, they told themselves they were a bookish kind of family and nodded proudly to one another. There were books on the desk, books on the chairs, books piled horizontally inside an old pine sideboard whose doors had been left open. There were art books on one half of a sofa and other volumes laid out on the rug under the coffee table. There was even a paperback perched on a half-full glass of water. But on the coffee table itself, there was only one thing. A twenty-gallon clay jar sat at the center of the tabletop like a small monarch on a throne. The gleam in Soh’s eye told Ed that she had some idea of what she was looking at.

“Is that from the 1800s?” Soh asked.

“Yes, it is,” Ed answered.

“Georgia? South Carolina?”

Ed raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t something he’d ever learned about in school. But Soh had studied history before law school, just as her mother had, and she was a Bliss. She would know something about stoneware produced by enslaved potters in the South. She might have heard of at least one or two of them who had inscribed pieces during a time when they were prohibited by law from learning to read and write.

Ed nodded, pointing to initials inscribed under the lip of the jar. He explained that a potter named Moses had been working in bondage for a certain Martin Oldham at the time. The inscription MO was considered a label representing the owner of the enterprise. But the Freemans believed Moses had been making a veiled reference to himself.

When, nearly two centuries later, Soh saw the antique jar in Ed’s home, stoneware by enslaved turners had already caught the eyes of historians. Some vessels were distinguished not only by initials but also by designs of rice and other plants that had been painted onto the clay before firing. The MO pieces, dipped in the characteristic alkaline glaze of the region, had also gained attention among a handful of African American families, though few people living up north had ever seen one outside of a photograph.

A couple of these objects had made it all the way across the Atlantic to Liverpool. Still others were believed to have been offloaded at Boston and kept in private homes in Massachusetts. The Freemans’ jar was one of those. But more likely than not, if anyone still had a MO sitting around their house or barn, they hadn’t given much thought to who had signed the piece. Especially if they were a white family, which was probable.

“How did this jar end up here?” asked Soh.

“Sailed up on a square-rigger from South Carolina,” said Ed. “With one of my ancestors.”

The Freemans’ jar had a small trail of leaves painted over the glaze that actually climbed out of the mouth of the jar and descended from its lip. It curved under the maker’s initials and the inscription of the year, 1847, ending at the widest part of the container. But Ed knew that the best part was the thing you couldn’t see right off, the secret inscription on the bottom of the piece. Relatively few people had ever seen it because it was never shown to anyone outside the family.

As she stood in the library of Ed’s family home on that summer day in 1983, Soh pulled air into her mouth, slowly, like an oh, only in reverse. She walked over to the jar and reached out her hand.

“May I?”

“Go ahead,” Ed said, placing a hand on the jar and nodding. Soh glanced at Ed like a child, as if suddenly shy in the presence of a new toy. She placed her hand on the fattest part of the curve. Ed watched as she ran her fingers back and forth over the dark glaze, as if reading a line of braille, then up toward the initials engraved under the lip. Her lips moved silently as she read the date next to the initials.

“Hello, Old Mo,” she whispered.

After that, Ed, too, started calling the jar Old Mo.

“Imagine someone with a name like your mother’s,” Ed told his children, “finding Old Mo in a private home in New England!” Because their mother’s nickname, Soh, had a story all its own.

Isabella “Soh” Bliss was conceived while her mother, Gwendolyn, was studying history down in New York. This was before she decided to go to law school. As an African American scholar who also happened to be female, she was going against everything society was telling her she was supposed to be doing. The same was true of her marriage to Lemuel Bliss, a widowed lawyer fifteen years her senior.

Eight months later, in February 1960, four black college students sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave unless they were served. Word got out, protesters joined the scene, and police made the first arrests for trespassing. More than five hundred miles away in New York, Gwendolyn Bliss doubled over in pain on the lawn of her university, her thin body jolted by the force of a premature contraction. The pains came and went over the next several days until, finally, Gwendolyn gave birth to a tiny baby girl. As more people joined the sit-in, Gwen decided on a name for her daughter.

“Let’s call her Isabella,” she told her husband, Lem, back then. “For Isabella Baumfree.” Lem understood his wife’s motivation to name their baby after the nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Although Baumfree, better known as Sojourner Truth, had died in 1883, she remained an inspiration to the contemporary civil rights movement. Maybe even to those students at the lunch counter.

Still, Lem frowned.

“Didn’t we already agree to name her after my mother, Elizabeth?” Lem asked.

“We did,” said Gwen, “but don’t forget, Elizabeth and Isabella are the same name. One English, one Spanish, right?”

Lem nodded and gave a grunt in assent. He had always been a wise person. Never one to waste his words on an argument unless it was one he was sure to win or that at the very least, merited the effort. Contradicting his wife’s sense of conviction in this delicate matter did not appear to fall into either category, especially not after all that Gwen’s body had just been through. In the years to come, Lem would merely smile as Gwen repeated the story of how they named their first child after both her grandmother and Sojourner Truth. They quickly took to calling their little girl by the nickname Soh, the name their daughter grew to prefer.

Years later, when Soh first said the words Old Mo, Ed felt that the stories of their respective families were entering a new phase, one in which they would tread the same path together. Ed was so sure of this, already, that on the day he showed Soh the jar, he reached down and turned the vessel on its side so that she could read the inscription that distinguished this piece from all others.

Soh leaned in to read the five words carved into the bottom panel, and when she looked up at Ed, her eyes were filled with tears.