Good Dirt

Love, Again

Love, Again

1847

L ife could be strange, that way. How a change could come when you didn’t expect it.

When Moses worked on the larger pieces, he needed someone nearby to kick the wheel for him as he stood up to work on the clay. Willis often helped, but one day, when Willis was busy painting slip flowers on a jar, Moses called out to one of the two women at the pottery, the yellow woman who was busy carrying two buckets of water across the yard. Betsey was her name. She was a newcomer who, lately, had been working between the pottery and the big house.

Betsey had a way of speeding up and slowing down the pace of her kicking in a way that made things much easier for Moses. She stood close to him, pushing at the base of the wheel when he nodded. She seemed to have understood, right away, something fundamental about Moses and the way he worked. He asked her to come back again. Betsey was a natural. And Betsey was undeniably beautiful. She had a way of lowering her head when she smiled so that, mostly, all Moses could see was a brief flash of light in her eyes.

When a woman like Betsey smiled at a man, he could forget everything else. He could forget the loneliness of losing his wife. He could forget that he was an old man, more than forty years of age. He could forget the backbreaking labor of turning, throwing, and firing the clay, day after day. The heat on their arms as they loaded all those pieces into the blazing kiln. Feeding the beast, the men used to say.

Took a man tall as Moses a good fifty paces or so to walk the entire length of that kiln. It could hold some four thousand gallons’ worth of greenware from various potteries at a time, all being cooked in the fires of hell. Keeping up the pace required to produce all that pottery could take away from the beauty of the clay. But Moses was an able turner, and every once in a while, he allowed himself to slow down. Take his time making a piece. Return his mind to the feel of it. Savor the power to shape, to create, to undo mistakes.

To start again.

Betsey was much younger than Moses. And yet, he was sure she had taken a liking to him. For the first time in a long while, Moses looked forward to Saturday afternoon. Lately, he had taken to walking with Betsey over to the makeshift market where they and other slaves would gather to barter their surplus produce. On one particularly fine day, Moses cut some ripe squash out of his garden patch and filled a calico sack. Then he snipped a cluster of blackberries for Betsey. He watched a hummingbird hover near the red cedar as he headed for Betsey’s cabin.

This time of year, the hummingbirds would be fixing to nest.

But as Moses neared the small, square building, he saw Master Oldham’s nephew Jacob opening the door to Betsey’s cabin. Moses held back. The sight of Jacob Oldham entering a slave woman’s cabin could mean only one thing. In another world, Moses would have said, What are you doing over there? But in this world, Moses belonged to Martin Oldham and Jacob was Oldham’s nephew. Not his favorite relation, for sure. Jacob Oldham was known to be a particularly coarse person. But he was Oldham’s kin and he was white and he was not a man to be crossed.

“Moses,” Jacob Oldham said. “What brings you around these parts?”

“Market, sir,” Moses said, holding up the sack containing the squash and jutting his chin in the general direction of the market site. But the younger Oldham wasn’t even listening. He had already turned his back to Moses. Moses felt his jaw tighten as the other man stepped inside Betsey’s cabin and shut the door behind him. Moses felt his face burning as he continued in the direction of the market.

He met Willis along the road.

“Betsey?” Willis asked.

Moses shook his head.

The next day, Betsey was not at Bible study, and Moses knew better than to go looking for her. On Monday, Betsey turned up at the shed with bruises darkening her forearm and her eyes cast to the ground.

“What happened?” Moses asked, reaching for Betsey’s wrist. She pulled her hand away. Didn’t speak. Just shook her head and looked at the wheel. No need for her to answer, anyhow. Moses could see everything he needed to know. Around here, a person could lay claim to another person, just like that. Betsey stayed very quiet that day. Didn’t come back to Moses’s wheel the next. Took to crossing the pottery at the far end of the yard, looking straight ahead. That evening, Moses went out of his way to walk by Betsey’s cabin, but he didn’t knock. He couldn’t risk running across Jacob Oldham there again. Turners like Moses had more leeway than most, moving about and such, but he had to be careful.

Moses glanced down at the plants in the vegetable patch outside Betsey’s cabin. There were dried leaves that needed clearing away and weeds that were up to shin level. Betsey had not been tending to them the way she normally did. He hadn’t noticed before. It was then that the thought came to him and hit him square in the middle of his stomach: How long has this been going on?

When a woman like Betsey touched your arm, you could forget that another man owned you. The problem was, you might forget that another man owned the woman, too. Much later, Moses would conclude that he must have gone temporarily mad, to have blocked such a thing from his mind.