No one knows what he looked like. In those days slaves did not have their pictures made. No marble column was erected to him after he died; a fieldstone or pottery shard bearing his name may once have marked his unknown grave. His work alone remains to testify that the man known simply as Dave was a master craftsman, a poet and a survivor.
In the Vero Beach Museum of Art’s Schumann Gallery, “David Drake: Potter and Poet” features the work of Dave (c. 1801-c. 1870s), an enslaved African American (Drake was the name of one of his masters) who worked in a pottery manufactory in Edgefield, S.C.
There’s more to the group of pots on exhibit than first meets the eye, says Leonard Todd, author of “Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter, Dave.”
To the art-educated eye the olive-brown crocks, pitchers and jugs – resplendent with the drips, speckles and rivulets of their unpredictable alkaline glaze – resemble the earliest clay vessels of ancient civilizations: elemental in shape, generous in size and sturdily built. From foot to lip, they were made to serve, and oftentimes outlast, generations of users.
For Todd, “Each of these pots tells a story – tells three stories.”
One of those tales speaks of the little-known ceramics industry in 19th century Edgefield.
Another relates the story of slavery in the South. Todd notes that “in the pottery industry, the majority of the workers were African American slaves.”
Ultimately, the pots tell the story of Dave.
Dave is notable not only for the simple beauty of his utilitarian wares, which once held salted meat, pickled vegetables, cider and other foodstuffs, but also for inscribing his pots with his name and on occasion his poetry.
Dave’s enigmatic couplets, two of which can be seen on pots in the current show, include references to the seasons and hardships of rural life, exhortations to heed the Bible, and odes to the function of a particular piece of stoneware. Some of his more mysterious inscriptions might be autobiographical.
From the 1970s, when researchers first began piecing together the facts of David Drake’s existence, scholars and curators across the country have become familiar with his work. So significant is Dave’s story to African American history that one of his inscribed storage jars is on display at the newly unveiled Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
The Vero art museum’s curator Jay Williams became well acquainted with Dave’s work in 1998 when, as curator of exhibitions at the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, he worked with researcher Jill Koverman (today the McKissick’s chief curator) and “a host of other scholars” to organize an influential survey exhibition of Dave’s pottery.
Williams organized the current show in conjunction with South Carolina-based collector Dr. Corbett E. Toussaint who, with her husband Dr. C. Phillip Toussaint, lent 13 objects to the exhibition.
The signatures, dates and sometimes poetry inscribed on the vessels identify them as Dave’s, but he did not always sign and date the works that have been attributed to him, let alone write poetry on them.
Of the 31 objects on display in the Schumann Gallery, 13 are known to be from Dave’s hand, while 10 others are ascribed to him. The remaining seven objects include five “face jugs” from the mid-1850s. They are thought to have been made by enslaved Africans in one of Edgefield’s potteries.
It was rare for slaves to be able to read and write, says Todd, whose book details how antebellum laws in the South promised lashings for slaves who learned to read and, at the very least, steep fines for those who educated them.
“Who taught Dave to read and write, and how was he allowed to do that, is the big mystery of Dave’s life,” says Todd.
Tradition holds that Dave’s first owner, Harvey Drake, taught him to read the Bible so that Dave could find salvation in God’s word.
“That’s the theory,” says Todd.
“I don’t know if it helped his religious life or not, but Dave took it and ran with it,” adds Todd wryly. Dave began to write poems on his pots as early as 1834, Todd says.
It is known for certain that Dave, who as a slave had no birthright and thus no family name, adopted the surname Drake sometime after 1865, when the Emancipation Act became law in the South.
Another of Dave’s masters, Abner Landrum, published a short-lived newspaper. The Edgefield Hive was a weekly that consistently featured a poem among its news items. Todd speculates that Dave, assigned to menial tasks in the newspaper’s offices when he wasn’t working at the pottery, either read the poems for himself or heard them repeated aloud.
“I think that just as Abner Landrum is publishing poetry in his newspaper, Dave is publishing his poetry on his pots, in the only way he could do it,” Todd asserts.
As religious or educated as they may have been, Dave’s masters (there were several of them, all related to one another) were nevertheless committed to holding Dave in bondage. According to Todd, one master in particular, Franklin Landrum, was exceedingly repressive.
“There are records of a slave woman hanging herself in the pottery after he had whipped her,” says Todd.
When Franklin Landrum took over the pottery in 1846 and purchased Dave along with it, the potter-poet ceased writing on his wares.
Lewis Miles next acquired ownership of Dave and the pottery in the late 1940s. From that time on, Dave appears to have blossomed as a poet despite the bleak conditions of slavery.
Todd notes that 35 of Dave’s 45 poetically inscribed pots were made when he worked for Miles. Evidently the master-slave relationship was relaxed enough that Dave could tease Miles by writing on one pitcher (not in the show) “L.M. says this handle / will crack.” The pitcher has had the last laugh. More than 165 years later, its handle is as sound as the day Dave made it.
Only two of the jugs in the Vero show bear couplets and they are well worth reading in person. Incised in elegant script, one of the poems reads: “A pretty little girl on the virge (verge) / volca(n)ic mountain how they burge.”
“It is enigmatic, but it paints a picture – of a young girl on the edge of maturity, an exciting young woman,” says Todd.
Today it boggles the mind to think that a verse as freely imaginative and sensual as that one was produced by a man whose life, by law, did not belong to him.
“It was a dangerous period, a lot of repression, but Dave kept right on writing,” says Todd.
“That’s what I focus on in my book and in my talks – the courage and the guts he exhibited at that time.”
