I begin just before sunrise when the world is still hushed and purple.

The red Oklahoma earth is cool to the touch, and eagerly coats my hands as I grab my first fistfuls.

I shove the clay soil into a wooden mold, pack more where it isn’t dense enough, flip the mold over, and pull its two halves up and apart to release the soft brick form. I re-shape the form where it is most uneven, gingerly lifting the tender brick, and set it aside; I then repeat this action one-hundred times over.

With each brick, it grows increasingly difficult to convince the wet clay to leave the wood and as the sun moves across the sky it grows increasingly difficult to reach over and grab another handful of dirt, to keep my hair out of my eyes, to stand up, to place a finished brick out-of-the-way, to remain sitting, to keep my eyes open; everything becoming arduous. In conceptualizing this work, I had imagined I would sit and contemplatively form brick after brick, pondering deep thoughts about injustice, systems of exploitation, persistence of slavery, cost of labor, complicity in ignorance and consumerism, and the extent of privilege. While these lines of thinking occurred, it did not fill the full seven hours. Maybe two or three of the hours I was thinking fixedly about these things and wondering about solutions—even if only by way of a small artwork—the rest of the day, my mind wandered.

I began thinking about almost nothing, preferring to mentally count how many bricks I had made and countdown how many I had to go. Arranging the bricks into vertical columns of five in a semi-circle around me, I could easily re-count them for my mental addition games; I kept forgetting how many I had made, how many I had to go— even though that’s all I was thinking about.

My lower back began to ache so much that sometimes the only solution was to lay completely flat— I think I drifted to sleep once. My knees gave me sharp pinches when I shifted or stood, yelping at me that I had been putting too much weight on them for too long. I allowed for one water break where I also enjoyed an apple. The water was sun-warmed, yet still incredibly refreshing. At first, I handled the apple with a paper towel because my hands were filthy, but by the time I reached its core I had discarded the towel in exchange for more immediate access to the sweet juicy flesh of the fruit. At some point, I felt myself needing to use the restroom but was too far in to give up or pause my task, so I kept on. The discomfort caused by holding my bladder became unbearably distracting and thought-consuming.

My bricks became more and more crude, less and less uniform, and I parallel their increasing incongruity with the deterioration of my energy, focus, and will. I only made it a little over seven hours. Then I stopped, got into my air-conditioned car, drove to my house, showered, ate, then slept until the next morning.

I had no one lording over me or threatening to beat me if I wasn’t going fast enough or doing well enough, I had no worries about if I would get food afterwards, get to relieve myself in the privacy of the bathroom of my home, or get to sleep in my bed without fear of intrusion; with the knowledge that the labor was finished.

This is not the experience of a person enduring a reality of forced labor;

where the presence of fear and the threat of violence is perpetual.