Fingerprints of slaves etched in bricks throughout Charleston, guides say

CHARLESTON, S.C. — In a city that begs its people to stare up at steeples, sometimes the building blocks of history requires us to look down.

“They walk over this or they walk past,” said Crystal Kornicky, a tour guide in training. She’s talking about the bricks lining Philadelphia Alley in downtown Charleston, which she says bear finger prints of the slaves who laid them in the ground.

“You can shake hands with an enslaved ancestor through the bricks of Charleston,” she said. “The brick fences, the brick houses, anything that’s made from bricks, those prints are in there.”

“The smallest hands and you can almost see the fingerprints of the child who made that brick,” said Paul Garbarini, studying bricks on Market Street. He says he’s studied bricks for years, and the fingerprints are a stamp of history left behind by the families that formed them.

“They’re mixing the sand, the clay, the water, slap it in the mold. When a child picks up a brick that’s a little dry and a little damp, sometimes they leave these little finger marks in the bricks,” he added.

Imperfections in the brick that show a city’s imperfect past.

“This is Charleston’s legacy in the slave trade in human trafficking,” Garbarini said. “This is evidence of the ancestors having left their mark for us to see.”

“These bricks are blood bricks,” Kornicky said.

Blood bricks with the hands of time, holding the past in the present.

“So all the blood sweat and tears that went into building the foundation of wealth for this city…I want to speak for those people and tell the world about their experiences.”