159. David Drake Jar
- Rainey Knudson
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Slaves weren’t supposed to read and write. It was illegal, punishable by steep fines and torture by whipping, or worse. But the master potter who signed his name “Dave” was openly, unabashedly literate. We know of about 160 vessels he signed and dated, and roughly 40 that include short poems incised on the surface. A person who was part of industrial slavery—factory-level production with huge kilns producing thousands of pots—self-published his writing, sending his work out to a broad, yet unknown, audience of readers.
His first known inscription was in 1834, the same year a harsh anti-literacy law was passed in South Carolina. Over time, his inscriptions became deeper, larger, more confident. His family and friends were broken up twice, sold to multiple buyers upon the death of slaveowners both in 1832 and again in 1846. Scholars have speculated that one of the sales included his wife and children, whom he never saw again. Years later, he inscribed an elegiac poem on one of his jars:
I wonder where is all my relation friendship to all — and, every nation (1857)
We cannot know if he was wondering about the fate of his lost family, or deeper ancestors in the irretrievable past, or both. Regardless, he quickly defused the mournful line with the second one.
His writing was resistance, but surely also something more fundamental: the desire for recognition. He was here, his pots insist. We remember him, and we wonder how many other Daves there were, now forgotten.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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