It is time that I told you about clay.

In Carolina there was a clay whose rustic tinge and stubbornness reminded displaced clans of Scotch-Irish of their sunless home.  They sold sheared hills of forests to the coast, pocketing Ecuadorian gold in a quest to expose fistfuls of their tough red clay to the American sun.  Old dynasties bathing in a new light.

Not far away the clay was sliced, its plowed grooves parting slowly but always staying parted, the moist grainless texture preventing the furrows from caving in on the old shoes of sharecropping freed slaves and travelling families of poor whites. 

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The moldable redness gave birth to ranked armies of cotton plants, their light white crowns floating away in the winds that braved the hills.   They battled the taller tobacco, whose buds did not cut like cotton but whose leaves burned the insides of the world.  And clay was the middle man, bringing Spanish gold for sending its children to Liverpool, Reynolds, Camel.  Enduring the blades and stamping soles of the poor souls who worked in treeless, shadeless rolls of clay.  Homespun shirts covering breaking backs, lungs singed.