By Clyde Edgerton | Feb/March 09 | 

Creative Freedom

The incredible story of a slave potter named Dave

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.