The Coast
The Coast
T hey had talked about it from the start, but it wasn’t until six years after they were married that Ed and Soh finally made the move down to the Connecticut coast. Baz, five years old by then, helped his father to wrap an old sleeping bag around the jar before Ed loaded it into the back of his Volvo. Before Ed closed the hatch, little Baz patted the sleeping bag.
“Have a good trip, Old Mo,” Baz said, then climbed into his seat for the drive downriver to their new home.
The smell of the salt air flowing through the car windows put Ed at ease immediately. Ed himself had never been more than a recreational boater, having been raised by two lawyers who considered the seashore strictly a place for summer vacations. Still, he had never made a secret of his yearning to live right on the water. To feel the presence of his seagoing ancestors in the wind as he walked along the shore. To grant himself the privilege of simply loving the beach. It was just that no one had ever taken him seriously.
“But why now?” his mother asked when he announced he and Soh were moving. “We thought you were all settled in up here.”
“This is something I’ve always talked about, you know that,” Ed replied. “We prefer the coast. It’s a longer commute to work from here. And Soh and I need to make this move now, so that we can get Baz started in school in our new town.” There was at least one other reason that he hadn’t shared with his parents, but either way, the time was right.
Ed was barely thirty but had sold a couple of key patents to the right company, a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of good timing, and Soh was doing well at her corporate law firm. With their combined incomes, family gifts, and certain contacts, they had the resources to manage what no other black couple had done until then. Ed and Soh were moving into one of the more desirable homes in one of the most exclusive coastal neighborhoods in the state.
“Are you sure?” he’d asked Soh the night before the move.
“You’re asking me this now? With everything already in boxes?” Soh said.
“Seriously, Soh, you don’t mind being away from your parents?”
“We’ve gone over this already,” Soh said. “It’s not even an hour and a half, door to door.”
They pledged to drive north every weekend to see their parents, but that plan soon took a back seat to socializing with new acquaintances, and tennis matches, and seaside walks, and spillover work. Not to mention the hunger for catnaps that could sweep over the parents of a young child. But the bottom line was this: They were glad they’d moved.
Waking to the smell of the Sound was a luxury to which Ed and Soh quickly became accustomed. Ed had landed them in a neighborhood that was unattainable even to most white families in the state. He hadn’t wanted the status, per se, but he did feel he should be able to live near the shore, not too far from the city, in a quiet neighborhood, and in a place with excellent schooling.
The irony was not lost on him. When he and Soh were still kids, they would not have been allowed to swim at the beaches where they now took long strolls with the children or at the club where they had sunset drinks with neighbors. Some townspeople would wonder why anyone had let Ed and Soh put a down payment on a house there in the first place, but not all. Most people congratulated themselves on their openness to this photogenic, smart, and prosperous African American couple. They were proof, weren’t they, that anything really was possible in America?
In the 1990s, elegance, good looks, and a promising investment portfolio had a way of opening doors to newcomers. It didn’t hurt that Ed’s parents were known for the sizable donations made by their family’s foundation. And Soh had strong local connections. She’d worked or gone to law school with two of the governors of the town’s beach club, who had told everyone within earshot that Soh’s family had been landowners in New England since colonial times.
“Your wife is practically New England royalty,” a club member once quipped over a drink with Ed. “Even if she does happen to be black.” Ed didn’t feel it was worth it to formulate a reply to that comment.
Way back when, an enslaved ancestor of Soh’s mother’s had actually owned forty acres of property while still held in bondage by a white slaveholder. When he was freed, he went on to accumulate more land and considerable wealth. Ed, too, had come from a family of significant means, but they tended to give away much of what they had. It had been his invention, his sale of the patented designs for a construction-related gizmo to a multinational company, that had catapulted them into that category of homeowners who could live comfortably three blocks from the beach.
People liked to argue otherwise, but deep down, they understood that it was a challenge to level the economic playing field between white and black Americans when one group of people had inherited their wealth over generations by using the other group as forced or low-paid labor. So even a family like his would continue to be regarded with doubt.
Most of Ed’s neighbors were numbers men, and in their minds, the color of Ed’s skin and his financial ease just didn’t compute. After all, they didn’t live in the Boston area, or down in Rockland County, New York, or in a metropolitan area like Atlanta or Los Angeles, where Ed might have seemed like less of an anomaly. He’d grown used to that kind of perplexity on the job.
“Got in on the minority track, huh?” a colleague at his first company once said to him. “Well, it’s our gain,” the guy said right after that, with a grin and a light pat on Ed’s shoulder. Ed felt his Adam’s apple catch in his throat as he swallowed hard. Not long after that, Ed left and formed his own consulting group.
“Bad-mannered people” was what his mother used to say about the verbal slights that Ed called microaggressions. He understood that his mother hadn’t liked his decision to move, but knowing that he could raise his family wherever he chose was part of his sustained response to those bad-mannered people .
When neighbors did accept the Freemans and would come to visit, they arrived with certain expectations. And Ed suspected that his family’s lifestyle did not fit with what they’d imagined. Despite the impressive double-sided fireplace and large, contemporary kitchen, the rest of the house looked like what it was meant to be: a home where young children could grow and play.
There were no white chairs. Theirs was a home where you could put your feet on the sofa. Where old, ready-to-assemble furniture mingled with family antiques and new flooring. A place where a utility jar like Old Mo could feel at home.
“Look at that,” more than one neighbor had been known to say on walking into Ed’s study, which also doubled as the family library. Ed could tell from the raised eyebrows, from the forced up-tone in their voices, that they were trying to conceal their surprise at the clunky piece of stoneware clearly sitting in a position of honor on an antique worktable.
“I would have expected something different from you,” said Tucker, one of their friendlier neighbors, though they wouldn’t have classified him as a friend, exactly. “Something more twentieth-century sleek. Or at the very least much older. Pre-Columbian, say.”
“I know,” said Ed, chuckling.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Tucker said. “It’s a beautiful jug, in its own way. Really. The more you look at it, the more it seems…”
“Jar.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a jar, not a jug. Made to store food. It belonged to my dad, and to his folks before that, and theirs, too. So it’s very special to us.”
“I can see that,” said Tucker.
Several years later, a similar Mo jar sold at auction for nearly six figures. Eventually, engraved works by Dave, another enslaved potter who later went by the name David Drake, would break all previous records. But at the time, it was unheard-of to pay that kind of money for such work.
“Turned out to be a good inheritance, that old vase,” Tucker said the next time Ed saw him.
“I guess,” said Ed. He didn’t bother to say again that Old Mo was a jar. Tucker told him he’d gone online and looked at the potential appeal of alkaline-glazed stoneware from historic Southern potteries. He’d stumbled onto a couple of articles on the history of these sought-after pieces. He’d had no idea that such pottery, innovative in its day and made with some of the best clay in the country, had been produced primarily by enslaved craftsmen. He hadn’t realized that so many practical devices and tools had been made with “slave labor,” as Tucker putit.
“Who knew?” Tucker said.
We knew, thought Ed.
Ed’s old college classmate Harris, who’d come up from New Canaan that day, rolled his eyes behind Tucker’s back. He’d worked with Tucker in the past, and Tucker had a way of getting on Harris’s nerves. Ed smiled and raised his eyebrows, but the truth was, he was glad that Tucker had come to realize the jar’s value, though he never would have admitted that he cared what Tucker thought. In any event, the value of the old jar, for Ed and Soh, lay not in its marketability but in how it had ended up being part of their lives.
If a high price tag for Old Mo meant anything to Ed and Soh, it was only a form of affirmation in a society in which cash, so often, carried greater social weight than a person’s history. Ed didn’t need a New York auction house to tell him the true value of that jar. And anyway, it wasn’t as though he and Soh would ever think of selling it. That jar represented all those stories he could tell his children that most people never told about black folks in America.
Ed didn’t think Tucker could fully appreciate this kind of thinking. Still, he would be genuinely sorry, years later, when Tucker was one of the many souls declared missing after the 9/11 disaster. Tucker would leave behind a wife. No one should have to face that kind of loss. By then, Ed himself would have come to understand what losing someone suddenly and violently could feel like.