Hidden Figures: Moses Green, The Monastery’s Celebrated Mason

Visitors to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit (MoHS) may not know the name Moses Green, but his work abounds throughout the Monastery grounds. If you see brick on brick, it was likely done by Mr. Green, who wasn’t just an ardent supporter and creator of the MoHS but also a master mason and celebrated teacher at Rockdale High School. At some point, the monks gave Green land where he built his house and settled down and lived with his family. The following is an account of Father Edmund Brad recalling working with Green. 

“Moses Green was our celebrated brick-layer. I often watched him work at his trade here as he laid bricks, tiles, concrete blocks, etc. for our walls, floors, window jambs and altars. He had a unique talent for doing those things; ‘never wasted a stroke,’ some said. It was a pleasure to watch his ‘rhythm’ as he applied the mortar and set the piece in place.

“After several years of ‘brick-laying’ for us, he was engaged for teaching brick-laying at Rockdale High School (a Black man tutoring a predominantly White-pupil school). He also was the first Catholic to teach at Rockdale High School.

“After he completed that phase of his work, he retired but was called back some years later to raise the height of our cloister water pool to keep the rain from flushing debris into the pool. Then, more recently [in 1993], he was asked to do the pillars for the new security gate for the avenue leading to the entrance [and] bookstore. This is the only job he did which bears his signature (after many years anonymous). I look at this as a memorial to all the labors of his career. 

“Another note: The Greens, Moses and Azalea, who lived in South Carolina at the time, worked at Mepkin Abbey [a fellow Trappist monastery], in Moncks Corner, SC. We got him from there in around 1950. The Greens have an adopted son, Marty, whom we saw grow up. He was in Father Malchy’s Catechism class. Marty has a boy, also named Marty.”

Of course, it was not just the monks at the MoHS who admired and remembered Green. The famous American writer, theologian and monk Thomas Merton was equally impressed. He wrote about Green and another Black laborer on page 305 of his book The Sin of Jonas:

Two colored bricklayers from South Carolina are working on the guest house building with the rest of Mr. Ray’s crew. The laybrothers are building their new novitiate. The two colored bricklayers from South Carolina are the two best-dressed bricklayers I ever saw. Especially one of them called Moses, who works in a soft felt hat and what appears to be a gabardine suit. The other is most informal–he wears a baseball cap and a wind-breaker. They are very high-priced bricklayers. Today they came in from work with newspapers, and sat down out of the rain on some potato sacks under the cellar entry by the secular kitchen; as they opened their papers I thought I will never again be mad at people for reading their newspapers. (The mystical body of those who read the newspapers.) For half a second I wondered if I were missing something, not because of the news, but because of the happy calm of the two bricklayers sitting on the potato sacks.

Green was born in 1919 in Moncks Corner, SC and educated at Vorhess Junior College in Denmark, SC and Georgia State College. He was also a member of Conyers’ St. Pius X Catholic Church and baptized at Saint Catherine’s Catholic Church in New Haven, KY in October 1951 and confirmed on June 10, 1957 at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta. 

In addition to an adopted son, Green also had two daughters, Carolyn and Pernetta Simmons. The master mason passed away on April 18, 1994, having fractured his hip the prior week. Father Anthony Delisi, who’d worked closely with Green, visited him at the hospital and gave the ailing man Holy Communion. Buried on April 18, a conventual Mass was celebrated for Moses at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit on May 3, 1994. That date was selected because it would’ve been Moses and Azalea’s fortieth wedding anniversary.