Page 26 of Good Dirt

Kandia

1806

T he humid, slithering island where Kandia had been trapped for three years was different from the village where she had grown up, but there was something familiar in the smell of its clay. The people hunters had sold Kandia to a family of sugarcane planters who also operated a pottery. They produced mainly ceramic molds used in the processing of sugar. Strangely, the people who were forced to work there were men, not women. It was yet another sign that this place negated all that was natural.

The pottery men sat on stools and used curious tables that spun around and around, upon which they quickly grew mounds of clay into the shapes they chose. When she could risk it, Kandia would stop at the door to the workshop on her way from the water well to the plantation house. She would watch the men for just a few moments, careful to leave before the overseer came along. If he saw her there, he might push her toward her cabin. Force her to lie with him again. She put down the water buckets just long enough to take two deep breaths and fill her chest with the smell of the raw clay.

On occasion, Kandia and the other women were given surplus clay to hand-build bowls and jugs for their own use. As soon as she wet the clay and began to mold it, Kandia felt the pains in her back and shoulders begin to ease, though her heart never stopped aching from the memory of all that she had lost.

One day, as Kandia rolled coils, she glanced over to see Moses, then three years of age, scratching at the dry dirt with a stick. She pinched off a small portion of the clay and fashioned a piece shaped like a goat. She would fire the goat in the kiln with the bowls she had made and give it to her son to play with. The child was still small enough to be allowed to play. He was still too young to know what lay ahead of him. Too young to know that he could be taken from her in an instant and sold away.

Kandia tried to forget the terror she felt for her son. She squeezed the clay to form tiny horns and ears. She pulled at the clay beneath the goat’s chin to mimic a beard and smoothed the rounded sides of its belly. Perhaps it was not too late, she thought as she shaped a leg. Perhaps her child’s destiny was still like the wet earth in her hands. A living thing that could be molded and, if needed, reshaped into something altogether different.