The Words and Wares of David Drake: Revisiting "I Made This Jar" and the Legacy of Edgefield Pottery

By Jane Przybysz and Deborah Goldberg

A celebration of the remarkable poem vessels of Dave the Potter

David Drake, who often signed his work simply as "Dave," was an enslaved potter who lived and worked in Edgefield District, South Carolina. Despite laws prohibiting
enslaved people from learning to read or write, Drake was literate and signed some of his pots. His practice was not only to add his name and a date but also to embellish his work with commentary or verse—a powerful statement of resistance.

The Words and Wares of David Drake collects multifaceted scholarship about David and his craft. Building on the 1998 national traveling exhibit catalog, I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave, and featuring more than one hundred beautiful images and six new essays, this authoritative volume presents the diverse perspectives of scholars, artists, and collectors.

The Words and Wares of David Drake adds important depth and context to our understanding of both Edgefield pottery and Drake's life.

David's work is now so highly prized it is the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's traveling exhibit of nineteenth-century ceramic art from Edgefield.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (September 8, 2022–February 5, 2023)
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6, 2023–July 9, 2023)
• University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024)
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16, 2024–May 12, 2024)

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781643363226

Book preview

THE WORDS AND WARES OF DAVID DRAKE

Sir Dave, 1998, Jonathan Green.

Oil on linen, 18 × 24 in.

Collection of Kevin and Mary Ann Donohue.

The Words and Wares of DAVID DRAKE

Revisiting I Made This Jar and the Legacy of Edgefield Pottery

Edited by JILL BEUTE KOVERMAN and JANE PRZYBYSZ

SOME MIGHT SAY THEY ARE JUST POTS. These huge alkaline-glazed stoneware pieces were probably used for preserving and storing food on the large plantations of South Carolina. We don’t know much about the potter who threw these thirty-gallon storage vessels. We know his name was Dave, and he was a slave living in the 1830s near the Edgefield District. His works command my admiration for his mastery of the craft. But more, they touch a part of me beyond that of art or craft. They touch that part acutely attuned to the daily life of the rural community and the rhythm of routines that require an innate sense of timing. I see his hands on the clay and his foot on the treadle, using his unique creative energy and personality to breathe life and history into what would otherwise be simply utilitarian objects. The signature on many of his pots and the verses he inscribed on them testify to this.

As I reflect on his works, I feel the echoes of my own ancestry—one which thrived on a spirit of community cooperation, communication, and sense of purpose. It is a heritage imbued with the same silent sense of timing, dignity, and pride that has served as an ongoing source of inspiration for my art. This series of paintings portrays my impressions of the potter, Dave, as well as life in the communities near the Edgefield District. My palette, however, is not unbiased. Intertwined with and directing these expressions are my deep affection and respect for the many contributions of my ancestors. These gifts, the daily rituals of family and community, instilled their lives with a sense of purpose, place, time, and belonging. Dave, the potter, embodies these gifts and it is for this reason that I honor him as Sir Dave.

Jonathan Green, 1998

© 2023 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina 29208.

USCPRESS.COM

Designed by Nathan Moehlmann, Goosepen Studio & Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN: 978-1-64336-321-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-322-6 (ebook)

Publication made possible in part by the generous support of the South Carolina Arts Commission.

Contents

Preface

Jane Przybysz

Foreword to I Made This Jar (1998)

Lynn Robertson

Foreword to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Lynn Robertson

Introduction

Jill Beute Koverman

PART ONEI MADE THIS JAR

I Made This Jar

Karen Klein Swager

Searching for Messages in Clay: What Do We Really Know About the Poetic Potter, Dave?

Jill Beute Koverman

Edgefield, South Carolina: Home to Dave the Potter

Orville Vernon Burton

Dave the Potter and the Origins of African American Poetry

James A. Miller

Talking Jars: Dave and Larger Traditions of Pot-Poetry

John A. Burrison

Archaeological Findings Related to Dave at Edgefield Pottery Sites

Joe L. Holcombe and Dr. Fred E. Holcombe

Dave’s Verse as Social Response

Jill Beute Koverman

Catalog of Exhibition Objects, I Made This Jar, McKissick Museum, 1998

PART TWOI MADE THIS JAR REVISITED

There Once Was a Man Named Dave …

George Calfas and Carl Steen

Black Artists as Cultural Historians: Jonathan Green, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Drake

P. Gabrielle Foreman

Embodying Dave: Performance and the Creation of an Artistic, Para-Historical Narrative

Theaster Gates

Marking Time: The Dated Vessels of David Drake

James P. Witkowski, Arthur F. Goldberg, and Deborah A. Goldberg

The Last Dave Pot?

Carl Steen

Who Were the Potters in the Old Edgefield District?

Carl Steen and Corbett Toussaint

The Unknown Potter: Continuing the Search for Dave

Leonard Todd

Appendixes

Appendix A: Amendments to the Original Exhibition Catalog Text

Appendix B: Edgefield District African American Potters and Associated Laborers (1790–1900)

Appendix C: Inventory of Dated Vessels

Appendix D: Known Inscriptions Incised by and Attributed to David Drake

Notes

Index

Preface

Plans were already underway to reprint I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave when I arrived at McKissick Museum in the spring of 2011 to serve as executive director. Jill Beute Koverman, who as a graduate student had curated the groundbreaking exhibition of ceramic vessels signed Dave, had become Chief Curator of Collections & Research at McKissick. She had tasked herself with writing a new introduction to the 1998 exhibition catalog that would speak to the impact of the national traveling exhibit and accompanying collection of essays she had edited.

When an untimely cancer diagnosis required that she direct her energies towards addressing health challenges, Jill began working from home. Over time, we worked together to delegate certain of her professional responsibilities to other museum staff. But she could never bring herself to delegate the completion of the introduction to I Made This Jar. Till the very end, she continued to work on the essay that, at some point, I am sure she realized would be her final word on David Drake and on southern ceramics.

After she passed and we celebrated her life, the question arose as to how we might move forward with reprinting I Made This Jar. It was then that James Witkowski—recent past Chair of the McKissick’s Advisory Council and a pottery collector and scholar keenly appreciative of Jill’s substantial contributions to southern ceramics scholarship—suggested we make the reprinting of the catalog a festschrift—a collection of writings published in her honor. We made a short list of potential contributors to a volume that—while featuring the original catalog text and images—would include the last draft of Jill’s new introduction; an afterword alerting readers to errors in the original catalog uncovered by subsequent research; and a collection of essays honoring Jill Beute Koverman’s legacy that showcased new work built on the foundation she forged. Thus, the concept for and organization of The Words and Wares of David Drake: Revisiting I Made This Jar and the Legacy of Edgefield Pottery was born.

The perspectives that contributors to this volume bring to potter and poet David Drake are wide-ranging. They are the perspectives of African American studies scholars, archaeologists, artists, collectors, and historians, all of whom found in Koverman’s work the compelling story of David Drake that became the point of departure for their own investigations and creations.

I am deeply grateful to all the contributors, as well as to former McKissick Museum director Lynn Robertson, the McKissick Museum staff, Advisory Council members, USC Press acquisitions editor Ehren Foley and press staff, and the Koverman family for their patience and support over the years it has taken to bring this volume into being. Special thanks to the South Carolina Arts Commission for helping to underwrite publication costs with Folklife Partnership Grant funds. Since Koverman drafted a new introduction to what was then imagined to be simply a reprint of the original catalog, public awareness of David Drake’s legacy has grown tremendously. This preface picks up where Koverman left off in the review of scholarship, exhibits, and programs related to David Drake.

In the wake of Theaster Gates’s To Speculate Darkly (2010) installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Claudia Mooney, an assistant curator at the Chipstone Foundation that had produced Gates’s riffing on David Drake’s words and wares, launched The Dave Project. This was an ambitious effort to engage non-museum going audiences with Drake’s story—especially his words. From developing a guide to empower teachers to share Drake’s story with their students and challenge them to create their own 15-word poems, to hosting a youth poetry slam, The Dave Project was groundbreaking in its follow-up to Gates’s goal of connecting Drake to communities of color.

In 2012 Drake was the subject of the documentary film Discovering Dave: Spirit Captured in Clay (2013), directed by Mark Albertin and co-written by Albertin, Jo Ann Hoffman and George Wingard. This film starred Darion McCloud as David Drake, and McCloud subsequently worked with NiA Theatre Company to script and present FIREFLIES: A Dave the Potter Story, a one-man performance piece bringing Drake to life for South Carolina audiences, especially K-12 students. At the University of Delaware, P. Gabrielle Foreman—a contributor to this volume—teamed up with Dr. Lynnette Young Overby to co-direct Dave the Potter: Honoring the history and creativity of an exceptional enslaved potter and poet, David Drake, through performance and poetry, which premiered March 14, 2014. On April 27, 2016, Drake was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame, and in July that same year the town of Edgefield, SC hosted a Dave Day—not only to celebrate Drake as an important historical figure—but to welcome and acknowledge the twenty-some people that April Hynes’s research had uncovered as his likely descendants.

McKissick Museum’s former Curator of Art, Jay Williams, facilitated the exhibit David Drake: Potter and Poet at the Vero Beach Museum of Art from September 24 to December 18, 2016. The catalog accompanying the show offered new insights into Drake’s poems thanks largely to extensive archival research that archaeologist Carl Steen and Edgefield pottery collector and scholar Dr. Corbett E. Toussaint (both contributors to this volume) brought forward to deepen our understanding of the historical contexts in which Drake’s pots circulated.

Kentucky Educational TV aired the story of Slave Potter Dave Drake as part of its Muse Moments series in 2016. South Carolina Educational TV followed suit with its own Dave the Potter program in 2017. Two children’s books joined the Caldecott Medal award-winning Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave by Laban Carrick Hill (2010). Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet by Andrea Cheng debuted in 2017, and I am Dave: The Potter’s Gift by Deborah K. Appleby was published in 2019. These books helped ensure that pre-school through sixth-grade students might encounter and be inspired by David Drake—the man, his pots, and his poems.

With the 2017 publication of The Stoneware Pottery Communities and Heritage of Edgefield, South Carolina, a series of ten essays in the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage edited by Christopher C. Fennell, the scholarship relevant to the study and interpretation of David Drake’s life and work took great strides. Based on archaeological digs at two Edgefield, SC stoneware manufacturing sites—one at Pottersville and the other at Horse Creek, these essays pointed up the industrial scale of ceramic production where Drake worked; identified important differences in how work and domestic spaces were organized at differing sites; and introduced the term taskscape as a way of conceptualizing how the experience of laboring at a stoneware manufacturing was constantly being shaped and reshaped by the diverse social actors and activities taking place at the site that linked local manufacturing to regional, national and international economic, political and religious conversations (Zev A. Cousin, The Social Landscape of Potteries: Refined Earthenwares at Pottersville, (pp. 225–42, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, Vol 6, No 3, 06 Nov 2017).

The plantation model of spatial organization of work vs. domestic space found at Horse Creek differed considerably from the relatively less hierarchical way domestic structures appear to have been built around Pottersville work spaces. Pottersville appears to have been much more conducive to work and social interactions between and among enslaved and free peoples. The proliferation of European ceramic sherds found at Pottersville’s functional work spaces, compared with the paucity of those unearthed at Horse Creek’s, likewise, suggested that Pottersville occasioned a higher level of social intercourse between and among those who labored there, customers, and/or visitors to the site.

Of course, different people owned and managed the Pottersville stoneware manufacturing site while Drake worked there, and an owner’s onsite work role, social status and political leanings would have shaped the intensity of work and social interactions. By the time Drake incised what is believed to have been his first published word—concatination—on June 12, 1834, Pottersville had passed out of the hands of liberal-minded Unionist and former Edgefield Hive editor Dr. Abner Landrum (1785–1859) and his nephew Harvey Drake (1796–1832). It was then co-owned by Harvey’s younger brother Reuben Drake (1800–1867?) and Jasper Gibbs (1810–1877). How did this change in ownership affect the numbers and kinds of people who visited, worked at or were customers at Pottersville? Were the kinds of conversations Dr. Landrum’s experimental sensibility sparked occurring with less frequency? Might there have been talk of The Works of Samuel Johnson LL.D. in twelve volumes originally published in 1810 and reprinted in 1825? In that collection, American readers would have encountered Johnson’s 1753 meditation on the useful arts in No. 67. On the Trades of London. Here Johnson confesses he cannot but admire the secret concatenation of society that links together the great and the mean, the illustrious and the obscure; and consider with benevolent satisfaction, that no man, unless his body or mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burthensome to the community: he that will diligently labor in whatever occupation, will deserve the sustenance which he obtains, and the protection which he enjoys; and may lie down every night with the pleasing consciousness of having contributed something to the happiness of life. How much of what David Drake published on his pots makes not so secret that secret concatenation embodied by the material culture or art in everyday life? How much of what David Drake wrote invites us still to reflect on the extent to which we daily and often mindlessly enjoy the labour of a thousand artists?

Speaking of concatenation, the meaning of which continues to be much debated by Drake scholars, Michael A. Chaney developed the thesis he introduced in "The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter (African American Review, Vol. 44, Issue 4, 2010. John Hopkins University Press) with a collection of essays titled Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of Dave the Potter (2018). This collection brought many new voices—especially African American scholarly and artistic voices—into the conversation about Drake. From Faith Barrett situating Drake’s poetry within the context of works by enslaved antebellum African American poet George Moses Horton (Faith Barrett, Great and Noble Lines: Dave the Potter, George Moses Horton, and the Possibilities of Poetry, pp. 26–50, Where Is All My Relation? 2017) to a consideration of how Drake’s poems may have come as a response to Dr. Abner Landrum’s March 12, 1830, Recommendation of Poetry in the Edgefield Hive, whereby Landrum explained his editorial decision to publish poetry as a strategy for de-escalating the extreme partisan politics that was spilling over into acts of physical violence (Michael Bramwell, Potter’s Field: Trauma and Representation in the Art of David Drake, pp. 197–208, Where Is All My Relation? 2017), the essays collected here usefully complicate any simplistic reading of Drake’s incised texts and marks. They argue instead for a multivocality that warrants further exploration.

By the fall of 2021, many major art institutions had acquired significant works by David Drake: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Art Institute; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; St. Louis Museum of Art; and the San Francisco de Young Museum. American Wing curator Adrienne Spinozzi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had assembled an exhibit development team that included Ethan Lasser and Jason R. Young and set in motion a multiyear research project to underpin its first exhibit of Edgefield pottery, built around the recent acquisition of an inscribed Drake vessel. Now chair of the Arts of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lasser was formerly with the Chipstone Foundation and had curated the landmark installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum titled To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter. This exhibit uniquely situated Drake’s work within the history of labor and craft in America’s past and present, leading one to expect the Met’s exhibit will offer new insights on this front based on the archaeological and archival research undertaken since 2010. Young’s scholarship on rituals of resistance born of African Atlantic religion in Kongo and the antebellum South promises a more nuanced understanding of how Drake’s verses and vessels were resistant within the contexts in which they were written and read.

As this volume heads into production, it should come as no surprise that artist activist Theaster Gates—a contributor to this volume—continues to mine Drake’s story as integral to his own origin story with a three-part retrospective exhibit titled Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Curated by Lydia Yee, this exhibit surveys the range of Gates’s ceramic production—from early utilitarian wares to recent Afro-Mingei sculptures and large stoneware vessels on plinths of hand-milled wood and stone. The show situates Gates’s practice within the context of select historic ceramics from a variety of cultures and times, including a vessel by David Drake; and features a filmed sermon on clay. A Clay Sermon participates in a wider circle of art activities that Gates is staging in London. It’s aligned with Theaster Gates: Slight Intervention #5, an exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum (September 18, 2021–January 9, 2022), and his being named the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion designer. Gates will be the first non-architect to undertake the challenge of designing a pavilion as a platform for live summer programs.

You have to wonder whether Pottersville might serve as a source of inspiration for Gates’s design. For it was not only the spectacle of firing the immense dragon kiln that left its mark in the Edgefield District community’s collective memory, at least as white folks have recorded it. It appears to have been the entertainment—the grandiose speech of Dave Pottery—together with his prowess as a potter that drew people to Pottersville. Boys and girls thought it a fine Saturday frolic to walk to old Pottersville … to watch old Dave" (Edgefield Advertiser, May 11, 1859). One young master recalled seeing and greeting Drake with one of Dave’s own set speeches—how does your corporosity seem to sagatiate (Edgefield Advertiser, April 1, 1863).

With the public persona he developed at Pottersville and honed over a forty-year career, David Drake made himself memorable.

That the pots, poems, and story of David Drake are traveling in ever-widening circles is a testament, first and foremost, to Drake’s highly resonant skills as an artist activist in the antebellum South. But it also bears witness to Jill Beute Koverman’s dedication to teasing out, sharing, and amplifying that story. Thank you, Jill.

Jane Przybysz, PhD

Executive Director

McKissick Museum

Foreword to I Made This Jar (1998)

It is the purpose of the foreword to assist the reader in moving ahead to the more substantial contents of the book. It is also a nice metaphor for our propensity to always be looking ahead toward new developments, be they a few pages or a few years ahead. Museum exhibition catalogs are unique publications, as their value is often to present new research or provide new interpretations of old objects. It is the job of museums, after all, to collect the past and preserve its physical state. We pride ourselves in saving these artifacts for future generations. But objects of the past, even if only a few years old, are not really of value unless they are used to help us understand our culture and remind us of how the past influences our current thoughts and attitudes.

The subject of this exhibition and catalog is an excellent example of this symbiotic relationship between past and present. Among curators and collectors, especially in the South, Dave has long been an almost-mythological figure. Even though little has been known about his life and work, he is still talked about today in hushed and reverential tones. At a recent estate auction held on the front lawn of a South Carolina house, I overheard a local resident tell the story of Dave to her interested companion as she pointed to two well-worn Edgefield storage jars on display. He was a famous slave potter who made jars like those but great big pots with writing all over them. I have some old pots that look like his. Maybe they are. Wouldn’t that be something? Her friend asked whether the pieces in question also had writing inscribed on them. The speaker said no, but that she still hoped they were made by Dave. What I found interesting about the conversation was that neither participant brought up the question of financial value. To them, a possible link to the past and this renowned artist was the most important aspect of these humble pieces of utilitarian ceramics before them. Another incident that reveals Dave’s influence was told by Dr. George Terry, former director of the McKissick Museum, and once the curator of the historical collections at the museum. He recalled how in the fall of 1976, while unpacking various university collections being moved into the newly created museum and reviewing their records, he had his first encounter with Dave. A worn caption concerning one of the pieces of pottery caught my attention immediately. It described a storage jar produced by an African American slave named Dave and indicated that there was a poem incised on the vessel. Dr. Terry also remembered that the museum had very little in the way of resources to conduct research into the collections. But his intrigue with Dave over the next five years led to enough information on the significance of the Edgefield potteries for the museum to approach the staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities about funding a comprehensive study of Southern alkaline-glazed stoneware. Today, collecting and interpreting Southern traditional pottery remains central to the museum’s mission.

Why did Dave become this legendary figure? Why does he continue to fascinate people from such widely different backgrounds? I think the answer lies in his artistry. His huge vessels are expressively formed. His thought-provoking couplets tease us intellectually as to their ultimate meaning. His expressive signature touches each of us with its universal message of self-awareness.

Taken as a whole, these elements of size, expressiveness, and historical context make his utilitarian vessels important cultural artifacts. Though his position as a slave demanded that he turn the proscribed jugs and jars, the pottery owners must have recognized his skill since he was given special latitude to create these unusual objects.

The importance of Dave and his work to larger issues of African American history and culture, and in particular the contribution slave artisans made to American craft, are just becoming nationally recognized. Major American museums and collectors are now acquiring his vessels whenever they become available. This is partially in response to several exhibitions that had a significant impact on museum collecting and interpretation because they looked at African American material culture through new scholarship. These include John Michael Vlach’s The Afro American Tradition in the Decorative Arts mounted in 1978 by the Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts and Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South produced by the Museum of the Confederacy (Richmond, VA) with a team of national consultants. Museums’ efforts to preserve, exhibit and understand objects relating to the history of Black America would not have been possible without the rich and growing body of scholarship on the African American community that now exists. Eugene Genoese’s groundbreaking work in the 1960s and the publication of Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972) used an interdisciplinary approach to recreate the lives of human beings under the slave system. Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside (1984) continued this humanistic approach with a detailed exploration of one South Carolina community. Looking at the objects produced by these communities as cultural evidence of the complex interaction between the lives of individuals and the historical setting in which they are situated has greatly enriched our understanding of the formation of a distinctive African and American culture. Robert Farris Thompson (Flash of the Spirit, 1983) and John Michael Vlach (By the Work of Their Hands, 1990) have long researched the relationship between historical and contemporary artifacts as well as the communities that produced them. They have presented persuasive evidence linking African influences with American folklife. Gladys-Marie Fry and Dale Rosengarten have added to our knowledge by examining specific craft forms. Other important scholars who need to be mentioned include Peter Wood, Theodore Rosengarten, and Philip Morgan, who, through their work, have promoted a greater understanding of race issues as well as drawn our attention to the complexity and richness of African American life.

The two years of research undertaken by guest curator, Jill Beute Koverman, have given us new information and allowed the Dave of legend to become a historical figure, complete with a surname, more accurate biographical statistics, and a fuller listing of extant works. It is our hope that this exhibition will allow Dave to be shared by all audiences.

Lynn Robertson

Director, McKissick Museum

April 1998

Foreword to the Revised and Expanded Edition

In the twenty years since McKissick Museum issued I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of the African-American Potter, Dave, much has happened in the study of southern ceramics, especially concerning the work of this extraordinary artist. I Made This Jar was the first publication focused exclusively on David Drake. But its age does not negate the value of the original essays contained in this volume. In fact, well-worn copies of the original printing are still treasured and used by their owners with secondhand copies only rarely appearing for sale on Internet book sites. Over the years there have been many requests for a reprint of the 1998 edition.

I urge you, as you read the original essays in part one of this volume, to remember that they were written in the early days of our puzzling out the many mysteries that surrounded the man who was until then only known as Dave the Potter or, sadly, Dave the Slave. Since their publication many new signed