Fingerprints

Fingerprints. We leave them everywhere, on almost every surface we touch. Our imprint. “I was here”—conscious or oblivious. They were a cornerstone of modern forensics, long before DNA provided more specific clues. But here they are poignant—evidence not of a criminal, but of a builder, a builder in a hurry to turn out molded forms as quickly as possibly, probably for the task style of slavery well-known in the Carolina Lowlands, whereby a set number of bricks, or baskets of rice, or containers of cabbage, had to be completed per day—with subsequent hours left for an exhausted worker’s toil on his own house or in her own garden. These may have been bricks for a plantation’s jewel of a main house, for the smaller, plain houses of house servants (field workers had wooden homes), or prepped for shipment from a rural brickworks for Charleston homes. Bricks allowed house servants tended to be rejects from grander projects, irregular in size or shape, but long-lasting nonetheless. The museum displays several fingerprinted bricks, as well as two touchable casts. Pressing your fingers into their imprints is surprisingly intimate, even more than a photograph. One of the characters from my novel Tired will be a brickmaker and mason, leaving his fingerprints at the end of a bone-weary day.

Fingerprints

On a cast of a brick at the Charleston Museum

Two of nine surviving

South Carolina’s Boone Hall has nine surviving original brick buildings that stood before the plantation house, abutting its gardens and once housed enslaved house servants. The bulk of the workers lived out of visitors’ sight in wooden cabins screened by trees.