Man in New York reads about a pottery exhibition originating in and around Edgefield, South Carolina. The pots were made by a slave named Dave who signed the pots and sometimes inscribed verse or thoughts on them. Man is interested. Coincidentally, man grew up in South Carolina. Then man reads that one of that slave’s owners was his great-great-grandfather. Man, captivated, travels to South Carolina, starts asking questions. Eight years later, Leonard Todd’s Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave (W. W. Norton & Company) is published.

If you’ve ever told a family story to a non–family member who didn’t seem to get it, you’ve probably realized that the “outsider” was unable to grasp the resonance, context, familiarity, and kinships in the story. While Carolina Clay is a book for the family called Southerners, it will certainly be read, appreciated, and understood around the world. And if there’s a Head Teacher in the Sky, then this book—about history, art, life stories, politics, military history, family feuding, slave families, kinships, pottery factories, kilns, community relations, archaeology, the Civil War, the slave trade, and on and on—is required reading.

The life story of Dave Drake (he took a last name after the Civil War) is complex and fascinating, and was already mythical and legendary among some pottery collectors before Todd’s investigations. Dave lived from about 1801 to the mid-1870s, and during a time when slave literacy was rare, even dangerous, he inscribed many of the very fine large and small pots he made.

I wonder where is all my relation
friendship to all—and, every nation

Dave also wrote short religious messages and love poems in clay. Todd, burying himself in courthouse records and other documents, was able to speculate about the meanings and intentions of many of the inscriptions. And the stories of Todd’s discoveries—how he found out what he found out—are often as compelling as his subject matter. While reading through old records and letters, for example, Todd discovered that he had black relatives and then began to track them down. In other documents, he deciphered the business of buying and selling slaves, exposing details of unspeakable heartaches and hardships in the personal lives of human beings being bought and sold—not all that long ago.

As I read Todd’s narrative, I thought about the past not being dead. And not even past, as Mr. William Faulkner famously said. Reverberations from post–Civil War racial tensions and hatred that are described in Carolina Clay are found among us today in pools of unease, pockets of poverty, thinly veiled pronouncements of intolerance, and politics of division.

On the Civil War front, you’ll read about Sherman’s march into Aiken, near Edgefield: what he wanted, what he got, how residents felt about his march. I mean, listen, what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is to Savannah, Georgia, this book is to Edgefield, South Carolina. You’ll also read about militias of black men, shortly after the Civil War, marching while militias of white men marched nearby—both groups fully armed. Union soldiers were there to keep the peace—until they were prematurely called home, a consequence of a deal between Northern and Southern politicians.

The aftermath of the Civil War brought a new and different hatred and rationale for barbaric behavior to the South, leading to some of the greatest injustices in American history. A question arose as I read Carolina Clay: How can we believe that America has the potential to do evil today or in the future if we live in ignorance of the specifics of evil in her past?

And in the midst of the bloodshed and heartache, we find kindnesses among and between slaves and slave owners—though kindness is probably not the right word. Many of the right words, this book makes clear, aren’t in our vocabularies.

At the center of this narrative you’ll find a single slave who possessed a spirit that soared free and into art. So many slaves surely experienced similar flights. But so few of those flights are recorded by even a single word.

Those eighty years of Dave Drake’s life—years of turmoil, confusion, intolerance—are a great-grandfather of the New South. We need to get to know those years, that great-grandfather, so that we can better understand ourselves. Carolina Clay is transformative—it teaches that in some ways we’ve been on a slow march toward justice. Dave’s story, so eloquently and enticingly told in Carolina Clay, helps us continue moving forward.