Pots preserve a slave's name

 Clay is a marvellous medium for historians. Fired, it can preserve images or text down the ages more surely than most other media. As well as reaching back to the dawn of history, pottery can also bring to light people who have been almost deliberately anonymised. Such is Dave the Potter from the days of slavery in the US, remembered in a Jstor article.

From the trenches of the Antebellum South, enslaved potter David Drake (ca. 1801-1874), otherwise known as “Dave the Potter,” constructed hundreds if not thousands of functional pots while working on plantations and in factories in Edgefield, South Carolina, a region now famous for its ceramics. Dave was heralded for his enormous storage jars and for writing on his pots.

During the nineteenth century, life on some plantations revolved around pottery making: Jugs, jars, pitchers, and kitchen wares were generally made by hand, by the enslaved in the rural South. Most of the potters at this time, those who were enslaved as well as the white laborers who were not, did not inscribe or mark their work in any identifying way. Dave was different. He signed his name on the walls of his pots. He engraved markings, for example, such as forward slashes and circled X’s that may have been a way to keep inventory, or that hearkened to ancestral roots. Dave also wrote dates, the location where he fashioned the pots, lines of poetry, and Christian proverbs. All of these practices set him apart.