Good Dirt

Epilogue Moses

1867

The war had ended and messages were getting through. Willis sent word to Moses, urging him to move to Massachusetts. There were potters up that way, too, Willis wrote. Their clay might not be as fine as that of the South Carolina backcountry, but it was of good quality, he assured him. Still, Moses could not see himself moving to that distant territory at his age, when he had spent most of his life out this way.

After being freed from bondage, Moses had walked southwest from the Oldhams’ and found paid employment as a turner for a competing pottery, one of the few nearby that wasn’t owned by the same family. The stoneware producers had done better than most during the fighting. Even the army had needed jugs and plates and such, and pottery was still in demand. Then, the following year, the son of a former associate of Martin Oldham’s rode over in a wagon and approached Moses with a business proposal.

Together, the two men opened a pottery and brickmaking enterprise in the next county over and soon had a sizable clientele among both white and colored folks. They had good dirt, out that way. Moses had decided to take Willis’s surname after emancipation, so the new pottery was called Lewis and Freeman. One white owner, one colored owner. Unheard-of in these parts, only five years ago. But now, there was a colored man on the local county commission and freedmen settling over on the border with Georgia in a town that used to be a major slave-trading post. Moses wrote all this down in a letter to Willis and imagined Willis laughing in satisfaction as he read.

By the time he turned seventy, Moses Freeman was no longer producing large pieces. Instead, he spent much of his time keeping the ledgers and training younger turners while his partner focused on the bricks and other production. At home, he had Abigail, a companion of nearly the same age whom he’d met at the market. He was grateful for the new affection and purpose that he had found so late in life, but he worried that the situation had grown more dangerous for men like him, rather than less so.

There were stories going around about the terrible things that could happen to colored folks around there. Violent things. Attacks on freedmen who had been able to prosper or hold political office. Attacks on colored people to keep them from voting in elections. Still, there were many people who hadn’t fled north, or down to places like Bermuda. For better or worse, Moses felt he was part of a community. And that community was changing.

At Abigail’s urging, Moses took on two local girls as apprentices. It caused a bit of a ruckus among the men, but he shushed them. Wasn’t going to have any of that here, he said. He liked working with the girls. They had a way of watching and learning things that you didn’t even have to explain. They made him think of poor Betsey. How keen she had been to acquire turning skills of her own. How she seemed to understand that clay was a living thing. How back then everybody was sure that Betsey could not have taken her own life, as that no-good Jacob Oldham had claimed. But Moses wasn’t so sure anymore. He only knew that, in any event, Betsey had gotten herself killed through a final act of resistance.

Moses and one of the apprentices watched the other girl, now, as she centered a wad of clay on the table.

“Good,” Moses said. “Go on.”

She pulled the clay upward, then pushed the thumb of her right hand into the mass and added her forefinger.

“Keep it watered,” Moses said. The girl wet her hand in a bowl of water and moved it back to the clay.

“Yeees.”

Moses smiled. This girl was barely fifteen. He thought of where she and the others might be in a few years, if they could learn the craft well and keep themselves safe. The latter, in particular, would be a challenge. But there was reason to hope. Over in Charleston, there was a colored barber who was stirring things up. He was fixing to get himself into Congress. And he wasn’t the only one.

Moses looked at the face of the girl at the potter’s wheel. How her eyes focused on the spinning table. How she nodded to herself as she pushed the clay to take on new shapes. He thought of his mother, all those years ago, living as a free woman in a village of potters, on the far side of the ocean. Moses should have been born over there. Should have become a blacksmith, like his father. Should have known his father, to begin with. But there was no turning back now. All he could do was keep moving forward and help the younger folks to gain back some of what had been taken away from him, his mother, and others like them.

Moses watched as the wheel sped up, then slowed, and a small jar took shape on the table.

Just look at that! The girl is able.

Yes, Moses thought, these were precarious times, but he was keeping his eyes on the future. And these young people would be part of it.

At least, this, he thought. At least, this.