Good Dirt

Port City

Port City

1831

T o understand the value of the jar you need to go way back, to long before it was made. You could start at any number of points, but a good place would be the year 1670. That was when the first group of planters from the English Caribbean colony of Barbados came up the coast to what would later be called South Carolina.

Sailing inland by river, the newcomers brought slaves and arms. They moved west into the backcountry, taking land away from the people who had always lived there. The descendants of the more fortunate settlers went on to produce rice, indigo, cotton, and sugar for export. Some started textile companies, potteries, or other industries. All of them relied on forced labor to grow and maintain their wealth.

This was the world into which a boy named Willis came to be.

Willis was born in 1817 to an enslaved mother who would die by his twelfth birthday and a father who was sold away right after his birth. He had only ever lived with his mother and older sister Flora in a row of wooden houses between the rice fields and the pottery where he worked, closer to the Savannah River than the sea, but his first trip of consequence took him all the way out to the Atlantic coast. Willis had just turned fourteen, and his deep brown face was still smooth and full on the day that he began the journey. But by the time he returned from the port city, he had sprouted the first thin mantle of hair above his mouth and was already forming a vision of his life that diverged from what had been decided for him by others.

At the start of the journey, Willis loaded jugs, jars, bowls, and cups onto a cart and settled in beside Old Joe, the aging wagoner. It was a long, tough ride. At first, Willis cursed his bad luck. Workmen were still preparing the new railroad, and the horseless wagons that traveled along the rails on a belly full of fire would take some time yet to start carrying goods from the backcountry.

The journey by wagon took days of sitting on that hard, wooden seat, breathing in the smells of horse sweat and manure and hay. It took days of having the bones rattled out of him by the ruts in the road. Took nights of dozing in the back of the wagon or on the ground, taking turns to keep watch over their large cargo. Hours of trembling through a fever after he’d got himself stuck by a scorpion. Later, he would recall Old Joe taking liquor from his flask and patting it on his face and chest to bring down his temperature.

As they neared the port city, Willis had grit in his teeth and so much dust on his person, his clothes had grown stiff. They’d hoped to bathe at a watering hole along the way but had run into two bird-watching men with guns. Had thought it best to move on. But now, there was water everywhere, snaking this way and that. Seawater flowing into fresh. They laughed at all the fish popping their heads above the surface.

Willis and Old Joe walked right into the river, clothes and all, then sat in the sun. As the tide flowed upstream from the sea, they caught a catfish and some crabs for a meal. Willis wished then that he could sit there forever. Not go into the city, not go back to the pottery, just be a boy on the riverbank, with a clean face and a stomach full of food, who belonged only to himself.

He slipped a hand into his satchel and pulled out a pencil Moses had given him and started a sketch on a blank piece of paper he had ripped from the back of a ledger at the pottery. One of the birdmen they’d run into had been making designs on a large piece of paper. It had made quite an impression and Willis would think about that man often, over the years. Willis imagined himself, now, as that man. Imagined himself with all that blank paper and the freedom to draw.

Within minutes of his arrival in the city, Willis’s previous ideas of the world flew from his head. There were more people than he had ever seen at the pottery and the farms and the railroad worksites put together. White men talking words he had never heard. African and country-born colored folks walking everywhere and working in every shop. They were banging on metal and wood. Sewing cloth. Pulling wagons full of fruit. Hauling, hoisting, and unpacking goods.

The colored men and women wore copper badges on their chests like the one that Joseph had given him to wear for the journey. The badges announced their various occupations. Porter, mechanic, servant, fisher, fruit picker. The badge Willis wore said Turner .

Willis knew how to read the badges because his sister Flora had taught him his letters. So Willis knew what it meant when he entered the port city and saw a man with a badge that read Free . He had seen free rivermen in the backcountry and he had known of at least one free woman. Most had been yellowish in color, except for one, a man as dark as Willis though four times as old. But in the port city, Willis saw young, dark-skinned craftsmen wearing Free badges. Free young men who looked like Willis. He would think of their faces years later, on the day that he first embraced the jar that, eventually, would come to be known as Old Mo.