Good Dirt

Moses

Moses

Twenty Years Earlier

B ack when Moses was still learning his craft, he rode all the way out to the port city with Master Oldham and Joe the wagonmaker, his back leaning against a load of new pottery as they traveled due southeast. The sight of the sea after so many years put him in mind of his arrival there as a child, in his fourth or fifth year, he would never be certain which. It took him back to the rocking of the ship in the water. To the memory of the vessel’s hull, creaking and stinking with brine and life and death.

It wasn’t the first time Moses had traveled by ship. As his mother held him close, she reminded him that he had come across the Atlantic from the savanna of her homeland to Barbados while still in her womb. And there they were again, not heading back across the ocean to the land of the Mandé but this time north to America. His naa had told him this story before and she recounted it again, trembling from the sickness as she spoke.

“It was cold but I kept you warm, just like this,” she said, hugging her belly where the next baby lay inside her. “You were born three moons later, when the sun was bringing the first light to the sky. And since then, you have always loved the early morning.” His mother smiled at him then, but it would be the last time. By the time the ship reached land, his mother and the baby-to-be were gone. They had succumbed to the sickness, and Moses was left alone in the world.

The ship’s crew had opened the cargo hold to find little Moses whimpering and clinging to his mother’s body, one small hand clamped around the tiny goat-shaped figurine that his mother had made for him. A man with hair and skin the color of sand hoisted Moses into his arms and carried him off the ship. He still remembered his first sight of the docks, the clamor of the market, the large stone room where Moses and the other stolen people were sent to wait until they could be sold. And with a great weight in his chest, he recalled how the clay goat was knocked out of his hand on the way to that room. How he wailed when he saw it crushed under a wagon wheel.

The vessel that had brought Moses up from Barbados must have been one of the last ships to dock at the port city before the ban on the trade of slaves between nations went into effect. Moses would have been too young to know this and, as he grew into a man, it would not seem to matter. Over the years, there were all manner of persons bound with ropes or chains, including children, still being driven or walked or shipped up and down the coast and even, on occasion, from across the seas.

Within days, Moses was taken away by two pink-nosed men and put into a wooden cage on the back of an open cart. Many hours later, they reached a cluster of cabins flanked by a dirt road on one side and broad, tall fields of green on the other. Standing in the doorway of one of the cabins was a woman who looked old enough to be the momma of his own mother.

“The boy will stay here,” one of the men said to the woman. She nodded once. She was dark brown like Moses’s naa, not pale like the planter man who used to come by their cabin on the island.

“You’ve come a long way, child,” the woman said in English, with a slow, drawn-out kind of voice, similar to those of the foreigners who had brought Moses from the port. She cupped Moses’s chin with one hand.

“Sit down, now. You eat,” she said, pushing a plate of cornmeal mush toward him. When Moses started to cry, she said, “Hush, hush,” and took him back outside. She set him down next to a large bucket of water, wetting a cloth and wiping his face and neck.

“Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to do the garden,” she said. “You can make yourself useful around here.”

The woman told Moses to call her Auntie. She taught Moses how to care for the plants, how to tell a viper from a common garden serpent, and how to tend the fire for cooking. He helped her to mix up ointments for use when she was birthing other women’s babies. Her husband, Uncle, took Moses hunting for wild game and fishing over by the river. He taught Moses how to build a chair, how to make a man from straw to scatter the ravens, and how to read his Scriptures. In addition to the Holy Bible, Uncle had a little blue book with which he taught Moses to sound out letters and write them down.

“This is just between you and me, now,” Uncle told Moses. “Master Oldham won’t holler about it, but I can’t say the same thing about any other member of his family. This could get you and me whipped. It’s against the laws of the state. Do you know what I mean by that?”

Moses shook his head no.

“Well, just do as I say. Don’t talk about this, just practice.”

Over time, Moses learned to read and write and talk like Uncle and Auntie, who were country-born and had always lived in those parts. He followed them into the rice fields, and then to the trading tree, where they swapped squash and cabbage for things that other slaves had brought. He came to feel that he belonged not to Master Oldham but to Auntie and Uncle, much in the way that he had once belonged to his mother. When Auntie caught some kind of fever after a long day in the rice fields and died, Moses wailed like a little boy. Shed a bucket of tears, even though he was already in his tenth year.

Moses was still living with Uncle when a man whose pants were splotched with a whitish kind of dirt arrived in a wagon to fetch him.

“You,” said the man, pointing at Moses. “Come.”

Moses looked at Uncle, who nodded.

The reddish man was called Prince. He took Moses to a long, broad yard full of dirt mounds and long buildings, the longest of them spewing smoke out of one end. Moses had seen this place before. It was the pottery.

“You do what you’re told,” said Prince, raising his voice, “only stay away from the fire and the river.”

Moses nodded. He looked over yonder, where two men sank huge shovels into a mound of dirt. Others ground and filtered the dirt, pounding and kneading it into huge logs of clay, before dividing those pieces into small loaves and rolling some of them into long strands. The smell of the clay brought to mind the scent of his mother’s hands. Everyone was busy doing something. One man chopped wood while a woman walked back and forth across the yard with two buckets of water. Finally, he came to a shed where a trio of men worked with their heads and backs bent over tables.

Moses walked up to one of the men and watched, transfixed, as the potter dumped a wad of pale gray mud onto the plate before him. He then kicked at a wheel under the table with one leg. As the surface of the table spun, the man put his hands on the mass of clay. Moses watched as the mud kept changing. Until that moment, he’d thought that he understood the nature of dirt. He had worked in the fields, played with dirt clods, and pulled crayfish out of the mud. He understood that food grew out of the dirt, and that critters could live in the earth, and that dried mud could be formed into shapes, but until that day, he’d had no idea that the soil itself was a living thing that could grow so quickly.

His thoughts turned to his mother, then, and a memory came to him. Her fingers, working with a ball of clay, moving quickly until a tiny goat took shape in her hands. She had made a bowl that day, too. But it had been a slower, quieter process. Moses watched, now, as mounds of wet, filtered dirt were turned and pulled and grew into large jugs, jars, and platters. The arms of the turners working at the wheels seemed like extensions of the mud and the tools they were holding. All parts of the same whole. And now Moses felt it. How the sound of the wheel made his heart pound like a drum. How the smell of iron in the dirt filled his chest with both energy and a great sadness.

By the end of that first week, the clay was everywhere. On his hands, in his hair, on his clothes, and even inside his mouth, leaving a fine grit on his teeth. He oiled his hands every night, but still they grew cracked from the work of digging up earth, grinding it, liquefying it, and filtering it. There were weeks where his back would seize up on him like a scorpion fixing to strike.

For years, Moses went every day to the pottery, until he had grown to be a man and was given his own wheel to work at and bedding to sleep on, in a cabin not far from the kiln. He worked there every day, with only half Saturdays and Sundays off. When he could, he would catch a ride on a wagon hauling stoneware and stop off at Uncle’s to sit for a while with the old man, or else he walked the entirety of the distance to and fro.

“Better there than in the rice fields,” Uncle told him, and Moses grunted in agreement.

Eventually, Moses worked almost exclusively on the larger jugs. It took two men, sometimes, to add the coils of clay for the larger pieces. Once the greenware had dried long enough to become leather-hard, Moses would take a thin wooden tool and write under the lip. On each piece he would put his master’s initials, M and O , and the date. Moses never signed the pieces in front of visitors or potential customers. He’d wait until they had left. Both he and his master would suffer the consequences if Moses was seen writing, even if all he was doing was labeling the vessels.

Sometimes, Moses would drag the triangular tip of his sculpting tool over the curve of the piece with a delicacy and dexterity that allowed him to leave a small design of a rice plant on its surface before glazing it with an alkaline mixture of wood ash, lime, feldspar, and such. It was a while before Master Oldham made note of the decorative marks that Moses left in the pottery.

“That’s a fine-looking detail,” the master said more than once. Martin Oldham was not shy to praise a person’s work, and he did not mind a bit of innovation. He considered himself a God-fearing gentleman. But Master Oldham also was given to looking the other way if one of his kin had a fit of temper and took to beating one of the slaves or broke up a family by selling one of its members. Moses had seen it happen. In this way, Master Oldham was just like other men. Quick to look away when there was something that he did not wish to see.