Page 13 of Good Dirt

Clay

1803

K andia dipped her hands in a gourd full of water and closed them around a mound of clay. She squeezed and pulled, wet her hands in the bowl again, and began to roll the first coil. Later, she would try to recall the quiet of this moment. Her hands, cool in the clay. How it felt to be sitting on the ground in the shade of a karité tree, her mother and sisters working nearby, all of them unaware of what was to come.

Like the other women of her caste, Kandia was born to pull shapes from the soil. Only the pottery women were permitted to climb into the sacred pits and dig out the earth they required, though their men often waited nearby to carry the heavier loads. The women would filter the clay, mold it, and bake it into containers for food and water, or medicines and rituals. People from other villages needed their services, but they were wary of the power that issued from the potters’ hands. Raw clay was a living thing that could be reshaped and reborn, until the potters committed it to the fire.

The pottery women were destined to live apart from the others. In Kandia’s village, they married only blacksmiths, men who, like the women, could create things from the elements. It was said the pottery women drew their talents from the spirit world. Kandia herself believed this, until the day the people hunters came to her village and treated her like an ordinary woman.

The people hunters seized Kandia and cut down her husband as he fought to defend his family. As they dragged her away from her husband’s lifeless body, Kandia could hear the distant cries of her mother and sisters, but when she turned to see where they were being taken, she felt the point of a spear between her shoulders. Kandia would have preferred death to separation from her family, but she knew she had to survive. She was carrying her husband’s child.

With a great weight in her heart, Kandia recalled her husband’s stories. There were men, he’d warned her, who captured and herded people up and down the coast. But Kandia, like her sisters, had never believed the hunters would come this far inland. She had not believed that anyone would dare to turn her people into prey.

Kandia felt the clay on her hands and clothing drying into a powdery film. The kidnappers were marching her toward the setting sun. Toward the coast. If Kandia truly had possessed the powers of a sorcerer, as often was said of the potters, she could have wielded her magic. She would have made a fortress of clay rise out of the earth to shield her family. She would have kept the people she cared for from venturing beyond its walls. She would have held herself back from the sea.

Instead, at the dawn of the next moon, she found herself shivering inside the rank cavern of a foreigner’s ship, a monstrous vessel with wings of cloth, rocking and groaning as it crossed the water. She kept her arms resting over her belly, trying to warm the baby growing within. This was all she had left of her family, now. All she had left ofherself.