Page 33 of Good Dirt

Moses and Flora

1837

I f you thought it fine for a man to be compelled to work for another under the threat of beatings or death, and to be forced to follow his decisions on where you laid your head at night or whether you could keep the children that were born to you, then surely you would say that Moses was living fairly well. Master Oldham had never hit Moses or forced him to take a woman for breeding. And when the time came, Moses received permission to marry a wife of his own choosing.

His marriage might not be recognized in the eyes of the government, but everyone knew they were family. He and Flora had jumped over the broomstick held by her younger brother, Willis, and Joe the wagoner, after which Uncle had written their names side by side in the back of his old Bible. It was the same one he’d used to teach Moses to read all those years before. Uncle nodded in satisfaction as he closed the book and slid it into a clay jar under a layer of rice.

The book had to be hidden. It was one thing to read your Scriptures. It was quite another to record major events in the lives of enslaved persons in the back of your Bible. Marriages, births, deaths. Who had been sold, who had run away. Africans who still remembered their original names, the ones they’d used before they’d been made to take those chosen by the slaveholders.

Moses had known Flora for years. Her daughters from her late husband were both grown, now, and were living with their own children on another farm upriver. Willis had been shadowing Moses at the pottery. The young man had potential. He liked to paint designs on the pottery and he was good at it, too. Moses grew quite fond of Willis, but he took to Flora in a more particular way.

Just to hear the sound of Flora’s voice was a pleasing thing to Moses. Always had been, even when she had been another man’s woman. And then she chose to be with Moses. She let him fix some broken boards in her cabin. Invited him to sit down with her and Willis for a meal. Let him walk alongside her beyond the rice fields on Sundays, taking in the colors of the wildflowers, their yellows and pinks and violets bright against the green. The two of them would walk nice and easy, as if they were free to keep on going, cross the woods, and find a riverman to ferry them away from there.