On July 25, 1798, Maritchia Van Remond, a free Black resident of the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao, placed her ten-year-old son John in the care of the Captain of the Six Brothers, a brig bound for Salem, MA. Mother and son never saw each other again, but John Remond would go on to fulfill his mother’s dreams as a leading citizen of Salem and the founder of a close and loving family of entrepreneurs, Black rights activists, and suffragists. Throughout his life, John treasured a single material trace of his mother: a Dutch-made, hand blown glass bottle—once filled with gin—that she gave him as he boarded the Six Brothers. Gin may seem like a strange gift for a boy, but in the 18th century, it was thought to have medicinal properties, and Maritchia likely hoped it would keep her son safe and calm during his voyage to an unknown world of challenges and opportunity. From the bakery in Salem where John first apprenticed, to the city’s most prominent catering company he ran with his wife Nancy Lenox Remond, to Rhode Island where they relocated in protest of Salem’s segregated public schools, to their return to Salem to reestablish their business and join the fight that would make his grandchildren among the first students to integrated the city’s schools in 1844, John always brought his mother’s gift with him. Sometime after John’s death in 1874, the bottle passed to his granddaughter Cecilia Remond Babcock, who donated it to the Essex Institute in 1911. With it was a first-person account by John of the bottle’s poignant significance. Although it was made far from the United States, this Dutch bottle from Curaçao represents the love and sacrifice that made possible John Remond’s American dream.