For a moment I am sure I am hallucinating. George Washington, or someone dressed like him—embroidered breeches, waistcoat, tricorn hat, curly white wig—has just folded himself up into a blue Kia Soul and sped away. Two women in mobcaps, shawls, petticoats, and aprons follow, piling in a Prius and leaving the parking lot, too.
This is my first time in Colonial Williamsburg, and I hadn’t considered that when the 325-year-old Virginia town’s church bell tolls five o’clock, many of the interpreters who work at “the world’s largest living history museum”—as milliners, carpenters, cabinetmakers—simply leave the scene. Here at Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, “living history” (at least from nine to five) walks the streets or passes by in carriages or toils inside open shops as silversmiths and tailors, the aesthetics of the past integrated everywhere the eye can roam.
The story often taught about this chapter of Virginia is one of patriots and loyalists, of a new country forging its existence out of the colonist-described “wilderness.” Lately historic sites like Williamsburg have made strides in telling a more expansive, complicated narrative about America’s early years by including the histories and perspectives of Black and Indigenous people. On the cobblestoned streets, for instance, the first man I meet is the interpreter James Ingram, who portrays an elder Reverend Gowan Pamphlet, one of America’s earliest ordained Black preachers, whose congregation swelled to more than five hundred in the late 1700s. Williamsburg researchers have unearthed this once enslaved man’s tax records and manumission papers and fleshed out his story, one Ingram has embodied since 1998.
That kind of inclusive storytelling has drawn me to town for “I made this,” a conference and exhibition focused on Black artists and artisans from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. I’m particularly interested in the work of David Drake. Known as Dave the Potter, the enslaved Drake created large alkaline-glazed stoneware jugs from the 1820s to the 1870s in Edgefield, South Carolina. Precious few Black artists of this era were able to sign their names to their works, as literacy for enslaved people was outlawed in the 1700s. But Drake sometimes did. In addition to the skills required to make jugs as large as forty gallons and fire them, he could write. He even composed poetry on his work, the rhyming couplets contemplating his place in the world and perhaps serving as signs of resistance. In August of 1857, he wrote on one piece, “I wonder where is all my relations / Friendship to all—and every nation.”
In recent years, Drake’s ceramics have reached new audiences and traveled to places he never could: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. In 2021, one of his pieces sold for more than $1.5 million. The following year, his work starred in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. The man himself passed from owner to owner until Emancipation; historians believe he died in the 1870s, when he disappeared from census records.
Thanks to Drake’s inclusion in Williamsburg’s conference, I find myself almost five hundred miles from Edgefield—a town I pass on my commute between my job at Augusta University and my hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina—surrounded by interpretive actors and craftspeople in period dress, a number of whom are Black. That’s historically accurate: On the cusp of the Revolutionary War, enslaved people made up more than half of Williamsburg’s population. Much of the town’s Black population—enslaved and free—were skilled tradespeople. We know this from the objects they left behind.
Williamsburg underscores that truth on its tours. Harold Caldwell, an apprentice carpenter, leads one centered around enslaved tradespeople called “Voices of Their Hands.” A throng of us walk from west to east with Caldwell as he explains the daily tasks that would have occurred along Duke of Gloucester Street. He pulls out a facsimile of the Virginia Gazette, the state’s first newspaper, started by William Parks in 1736 and published with the skilled help of at least one of the twenty people Parks enslaved. Caldwell reads aloud from the text: advertisements seeking to buy, sell, or hire enslaved tradespeople; descriptions of and rewards for runaway slaves; a story in which enslaved people are put up as part of a lottery to settle a debt.
Trained in eighteenth-century tools and techniques, most interpreters like Caldwell begin as apprentices in a trade and then, after some years, get promoted to journeymen. After many more years, they can achieve the rank of master. The process takes patience, and their knowledge of their craft gives dimension to their perspectives on historical artisans. Interpreters see objects not as static things but as actions: Each choice a creator makes leads to an animation that dictates how the materials move and take shape.
“Anything is just a series of micro decisions,” explains Bill Pavlak, a master cabinetmaker, as he shows woodworking videos at the conference. “No two makers do things in the same way. So how something was made reflects who made it”—a simple thought, but one that struck me as a new way of seeing. The choices the Williamsburg colonists made, particularly the Black ones, might have doubled as assertions of their personhood. The past’s material culture—oyster jars, jugs, metal buckles—holds enduring stories. Williamsburg is giving context not only to the lives of the artists I am encountering here but to all artists.
Afterward, as I walk through the on-site Bassett Trace Nature Trail, I can’t get Pavlak’s words out of my mind. I swish through the autumn leaves—golden yellow and brilliant scarlet swirling at my feet, the remnants of sweet gums, sour-woods, and beeches whose ancestors may have stood when Virginia politics, economics, culture, and ideas intersected here.
Williamsburg uses this landscape to ask modern visitors to witness the past in conversation with the present. Back at the conference’s corresponding exhibition in the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, I find an eighteenth-century plow plane, a carpentry tool made by Cesar Chelor, a formerly enslaved toolmaker who ran his own shop in Massachusetts. Surrounded by his work and dozens of other pieces—textiles, paintings, ceramics, and quilts that span centuries—I ponder what these thousands of choices are telling me. About who these artisans were, what they valued, their flesh-and-blood humanity. I begin to see tales of survival, sacrifice, family, and faith in each imagined flick of the wrist. Before I leave, I stand in front of a five-gallon jug made by Drake, who inscribed several pieces over the years with the words “I made this…”—the inspiration for the conference’s title.
As a writer in the age of the seemingly ephemeral internet, I often wonder how much of what I make will last in that kind of tangible way; it seems nothing I’ve produced yet might physically endure through the ages to stand as my semi-surrogate, as these pieces do for their makers. I am writing a book, but it represents a fraction of my work, about 10 percent of the million or so words I’ve written in the past five years.
I pop into one of the gift shops, where I buy two needlework primers—an assemblage of fabric and embroidery floss meant to help me re-create colonial-era designs. The first is a pocket that women wore around their waists, under their petticoats, with a pattern of vines and blooms. The second is a letter sampler displaying the uppercase and lowercase alphabet above a depiction of the colonial gardens I wandered earlier in the week. These sorts of samplers were used to teach young women needlework skills.
Needlepoint is the closest I have to something like a generational craft—my mother and her mother, Grandma Corley, used to complete such samplers, often choosing designs that reflected gardens or other elements of the natural world. While needlework has never been my thing, I like that the primers will remind me what it feels like to create something with my hands. To make something I can hold on to. So I will try again, hoping that age has brought me a little more patience.
When I am finished, I plan to get one framed and give it to my mother, who has always been dismayed that I didn’t pick up her proficiency with a needle. At Christmas, she will unwrap it, and I will get to say, “I made this.”
