Potter Dave
There was nothing florid about the pots of David Drake. No surface decoration, no ruffles or flourishes. They were part of the utilitarian tradition of Edgefield, South Carolina where jars were made by the thousands in the nineteenth century. Turned for the working people of the region, they were intended for storage and labeled for size. A pot inscribed with the number 14 held fourteen gallons of whatever needed a vessel.
On occasion, the Edgefielders departed from this norm. I have seen so-called “face vessels” at the Met in New York City, and they are exaggerated, personal, bravura performances, but they seem to me like exceptions to the rule. The Edgefield pots are mostly vernacular containers. That is certainly the case with David Drake.
That doesn’t mean that they are somehow without interest. In their own quiet way, they are thrilling and monumental. Over the years, I have seen many of them, both at the Met and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Several are massive, rising from their bases in a graceful swell of striated, sturdy clay. Because they were done quickly, you can feel the man behind them, huffing to put out his daily quota. Nothing about them is precious or overwrought. They grow naturally upward guided by a hand whose imprint is still visible in the rough surface of the clay. Imagine the gorgeous Tamba pots of Japan or the vessels made for fermenting kimchi.
Most remarkable, perhaps, is that Dave was enslaved, the private property of at least five different owners. And yet he managed to declare his precious individuality despite the strictures of the time and place. An enslaved person could not, by law, be educated. It was a criminal offense to teach him to read or write. And yet many of Dave’s pots are inscribed with his name, a bid to be seen, recognized and acknowledged. He sometimes added the name of his co-worker, Mark, a generous attempt to foreground both of them.
Most notable of all, they are inscribed with Dave’s poetry, couplets that convey his spirit and individuality. If I were to nominate a poem for the ages, it would be the one he dreamed in 1857:
I wonder where is all my relation
Friendship to all—and every nation
The poem is a combination of wistful protest and pathos, crowned by a vision of universal affection. We have yet to answer the call of this verse, but it stands as a challenge to the American experiment.
If there is good news to be shared, it comes to us from Boston. In November of this year, two of Dave’s pots were reunited with his descendants. The good actor in this case was the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and its director, Pierre Terjanian. It is the very first time artwork by an enslaved person has been the subject of an effort at restitution. The model is the same that has restored looted art to the heirs and descendants of victims of the Holocaust. It gives me hope that this will happen again, and that the reparations question may be still alive.
To their credit, the heirs sold one pot back to the museum and put the other on temporary loan. That’s the way this matter is supposed to unfold. I am personally grateful to the Drake Family inheritors that I will be able to see these works for the rest of my life.