Postcard from Boston: potters once known

The first time I saw a pot made by Dave, sometimes known as Dave the Potter or David Drake, was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2019. The year before, I had moved from Singapore, where I was born and have spent most of my life, and as a writer, I’ve always relished spending time with art, opening myself to other imaginative possibilities. That afternoon, I joined a tour of museum highlights. Instead of focusing on the Monets, John Singer Sargents and Georgia O’Keeffes that the museum was famous for, the guide led our group into a gallery of American art which I had never really noticed on previous visits. Among the ornate paintings and objects that dominated the room, she gathered us around a large, ordinary-looking jar. It was dark brown, streaked vertically with a sand-beige glaze and about half a metre wide, with two notches for lifting it. 

The guide drew our attention to the words inscribed below the rim:

I made this Jar for cash–
though its called lucre Trash

Below it was the word Dave etched in a cursive flourish, the tail of the e trailing off to the right.

The guide told us that Dave had been an enslaved Black man in South Carolina. He made the pot under what must have been harrowing, likely brutal conditions and, remarkably, had chosen to leave his personal stamp on it—not only his name, the date (Aug 22, 1857) and the name of his white enslaver (LM for Lewis Miles), but also the two lines of verse quoted above, brief, cryptic yet expressive of his social reality. Dave was caught up in a world where cash or lucre drove human activity—“capitalism”, we would call it today. Just as Miles sold the jars made by Dave to enrich his pottery manufacturing business and himself, so too had Dave, born into slavery, been repeatedly sold for cash and profit against his will (Miles was his fourth enslaver, at least).

The guide said that regrettably little was known about Dave’s life. Nevertheless, she emphasised the high level of skill and craftsmanship he had possessed to create such a heavy, enormous and sturdy object of elegant proportions. His work was also a reminder of the millions of enslaved people in the United States whose names and labour had been made invisible or erased from the countless things they produced, from food and raw materials to artistic works.

As the tour moved on, I lingered at the jar. Its plain appearance made it seem out of place, surrounded as it was by elaborately painted and ornamented artworks. Yet, it radiated a vital energy, a luminous brown beacon claiming the right to be examined and valued with as much seriousness and depth as an Impressionist painting. I returned to see it on subsequent visits, considering the man named Dave and the historical silences around the work he made.

I visited the exhibition three times and was deeply, profoundly moved. Pottery is a human imaginative practice that hasn’t changed, in essence, in 20,000 years. We take earth or clay, work it into a new form and expose it to high heat so that it holds its shape. The making of pottery, even today, connects us with the primaeval past of our species—to a time when one of the few raw materials we could easily access was the earth we walked on, and one of the few innovations we had to enhance our lives was the use of fire. No one culture can claim to have invented pottery; it emerged in many different places across the globe at different times and, over millennia, came to be enhanced by using various tools and decorative elements. Importantly, it is made, first and foremost, by hand, which means that every pot, plate or fragment thereof produced before the advent of modern mechanical manufacturing expresses the human touch and physical prowess of the people who made it.

Looking at the work of Dave and the Edgefield potters, the most striking thing was their immensity. Like the one I first encountered in 2019, they were large enough for a small child to comfortably hide in. The exhibition text described them as “monumental”: each large jar is about half a metre in height and, when empty, weighs about 95 pounds, or 43kg. They were primarily used to store food such as grain, butter, molasses or meat before refrigerators were readily available, and each could hold 28 gallons or almost 106 litres of food. Seeing one on its own had been impressive; with about 10 arrayed around the room, the sheer space they took up conveyed a sense of how arduous the work of making them had been. As David Mack, a contemporary Black ceramic artist, mentioned on the audio guide to the exhibition, pottery “takes not just your hands, but it takes your entire body. It takes your back. It takes your legs. You’re talking about 40 pounds [approximately 18kg] of clay. That’s a lot of weight.” Building each pot on a wheel, finessing its final shape (“turning”, in ceramics terminology), then heaving it in and out of the kiln would have been no mean feat for any able-bodied person, what more enslaved people forced to work amid deprivation, hardship and terror. 

Physical labour would have also gone into firing and maintaining kilns, and managing a multi-stage process of producing stoneware on what historians now describe as an industrial scale. There were an estimated 24 pottery-making sites in Edgefield, involving hundreds of enslaved people who made tens of thousands of vessels every year from 1820 to 1865 (the year slavery was abolished in the American Constitution). One kiln dating from that period was 150 feet or 32 metres long, about five times the length of a typical kiln in the American South. (If you have visited the two remaining dragon kilns in Singapore, each is 43 metres long—though they were built about a century later, also for industrial production.) The kilns in Edgefield were wood-fired, which meant that in addition to the work of shaping pots from clay, enslaved people also had to chop and cure huge quantities of firewood. There would have been “a village in and around the kiln itself,” said anthropologist George Calfas on the audio guide. 

It is strange today to think of an industrial product as being handmade, but that was the case in Edgefield. Each piece came into being through human touch and intention, and bears the bodily marks of its makers—the imprints of their fingers and hands, seared permanently into place by kiln fire. The audio guide described how the Black contemporary artist Simone Leigh, who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2022, responded to seeing Dave’s pots: “She felt compelled to feel the walls, one hand inside and one hand outside, to understand how he had thrown the work. For her, it was a way to commune with the potter.” 

Indeed, one fragment, recovered from Edgefield and displayed at the entrance to the exhibition, has a tantalisingly clear hand print: a gleaming pale orange impression of five fingers and the thick base of the palm. Some researchers posited that it might belong to Dave. Regardless of the potter’s identity, the indisputable record of his or her being remains substantiated in ceramic. It’s a particularly poignant indication of authorship, since many objects made by enslaved people weren’t marked or signed, and enslaved people could be prohibited by law from learning to read or write (about which more below). 

Fragments, fingerprints, monumental yet fragile, smashable jars. The names of 150 enslaved people, recovered through painstaking research, listed in the exhibition text and recited in its soundscape. Yet, also point to many, many more that haven’t been, and might never be traced given the violent historical gaps that enslavers and the institutions effected around American slavery.

Which brings us to Dave.

Around 1857, Dave was again forcibly separated from his family, this time his wife and children, who were sold at auction and moved to a different state (this was a common traumatic experience faced by enslaved people, who had no way of contacting or finding their kin afterward). That year, he wrote on one of his immense jars: I wonder where is all my relation / Friendship to all—and every nation. The first line is poignant and unanswerable, swiftly counterbalanced, or cloaked, by the second line’s expression of general goodwill.

The last piece of work that has been identified as Dave’s, based on the handwriting, is a broken, curved piece that bears the partial inscription, –ay 1866. This suggests that he continued to work in the pottery as a free person following Emancipation in 1865. In 1868, the name “David Drake” appeared on a voter roll in Edgefield; Drake was the surname of his first enslaver. The museum stated that “the circumstances of its adoption by Dave are unclear”; that is, whether he took on the surname willingly. In 1870, “David Drake” appeared in the census and historians believe that he passed away some time in that decade.

The fact that Dave signed, dated and wrote inscriptions on his pots was highly unusual. Most Edgefield pottery and objects made by enslaved people were unmarked or bore only the names of the enslavers who were the business owners. Moreover, in 1834—the year Dave signed the “Concatination” pot—South Carolina strengthened its laws to impose fines, imprisonment and corporal punishment, such as 50 lashes of the whip and more severe penalties, “for teaching slaves to read and write.” Although Dave continued inscribing his pots over the next three decades, of the known works he seemed to have written more verses between 1857 and 1859 than in all the previous years combined. His writing in that two-year period was also larger, incised more deeply in the clay and thus more visible compared to earlier works. The fact that no pots with his personal verses have been found from certain periods of his life have led researchers to consider that some enslavers may not have permitted him to write, or that he did not always feel that it was safe for him to do so.

We do not know why Dave persisted in writing on his pots despite the threat of harsh and unjust punishment. Two of his fourth-generation granddaughters, when interviewed for the exhibition, offered their own inferences. Pauline Baker said, “He showed his intelligence and his rebellion by writing his feelings by still disguising what he felt.” Daisy Whitner went further: “He wanted the world to know he was a human being…I’m somebody.”

To make a mark on an object is to indicate, if nothing else, I was here. To write one’s name is to deploy literacy to insist on one’s identity and individuality. To do both on a pot of one’s own making—an unbending shape and form conjured at the touch of one’s fingertips from once-crumbly bits of earth—is to assert a claim on one’s imaginative capacity, labour, skill and selfhood. And what capacity Dave had. Besides factual information, he sometimes inscribed lines of playful poetry, such as these from 1858: 

This noble jar = will hold, 20
fill it with silver = then you’ll have plenty 

and 

when you fill this jar with pork or beef
Scot will be there; to Get a peace, –

He did all this as an enslaved, unfree person, seen as less than human in the eyes of those who held power; vulnerable to physical and emotional exploitation and abuse, judicial or extrajudicial punishment and death, Thus, calling attention to his work as an act of resistance—a challenge and a rebuttal to an oppressive society. Letting his imagination breathe and speak was not what an enslaved person was supposed to do. Although his gestures were by some measure quiet, they are real and enduring, as the monumental jars show. Writing on the objects he made enabled his thoughts, feelings and indeed his touch to travel from the place where he was physically confined to the wider world of the American South and beyond. Even today, a yearning echoes in his words across the years to us.

Dave was but one person, what we know of his story only a partial glimpse of his life, albeit a tantalising one. Multiply that by the 150 other named Edgefield potters, and by the many more whose names have not been recovered, their works in the exhibition accompanied by captions identifying the maker as __________ (Potter once known). Extrapolate that to the labour, artistic and otherwise, of millions of Black people enslaved in the United States over almost 350 years. As one of the exhibition curators, Ethan Lasser, said in an interview with the Boston Globe, “How many other Daves were there, working in any number of other materials? All of these objects are monuments to lives unrecorded, of feeling and thought.”

While these systems and their respective legacies are not identical to the institution of slavery in what is now the United States, as a Singaporean contemplating the Edgefield works I couldn’t help but see haunting, uncomfortable parallels. The vast majority of Singapore’s landmarks, streets and buildings from both the colonial and independence periods have been constructed, refurbished, maintained or made beautiful by migrant labour. These are men who worked, and still work, at low-paying although highly skilled jobs, and who lived, and still live, in the country in cramped, unhealthy and undesirable conditions—qualitatively not all that different today from the shared shophouse lodgings that are regularly portrayed by museums as a bygone relic of the 19th century. Migrant workers, both women and men, have kept Singapore’s homes and workplaces in good running order for decades, confined to low wages despite the all-consuming physical and emotional demands of their labour. It is impossible to imagine modern Singapore being so clean, green and glitteringly attractive without the toil of migrant workers. Yet, while their names may be scrupulously recorded in government archives and databases, there is little sustained and meaningful acknowledgement of their contributions in public or popular expression.

Instead, migrant workers face legal restrictions on their movements and activities, everyday hostility and xenophobia from the Singaporeans they work for and live among. And a lack of viable legal options for redressing wrongs, such as the unlawful withholding of pay and other forms of employer abuse, including death. These conditions culminated during the Covid-19 pandemic when some  300,000 male migrant workers living in dormitories were subjected to one of the longest and strictest forms of confinement in the world. Workers likened it to house arrest or prison life—a far cry from the loosened regulations for other Singapore residents. Migrant workers who speak frankly and publicly about the injustices of the system risk being deported or having their visas cancelled.

Forced labour is not slavery in the historical American sense of one human being legally “owning” another as chattel or property. Nevertheless, in its modern incarnations it drifts decidedly, uncomfortably close to an employer or business owner feeling entitled to demand all that a worker can make, produce, feel and be, subordinating their personal needs outside of work hours—to eat, sleep, be with loved ones and find meaning in life—to the job as well. It’s unlikely that employers and business owners would tolerate such a totalising form of control for themselves, yet in Singapore it has become a matter of course in the government’s laws and policies stipulating how employers are expected to manage low-waged migrant labour. While the government undoubtedly does not intend to enslave anyone, the lived experience of migrant workers in Singapore is characterised by an excessive degree of social and moral policing and regulation that threatens or infringes, if not violating entirely, a number of basic human rights (see, for instance, the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics statement on International Migrants Day 2022).

These are not easy truths to stomach, both when I was at the Edgefield pottery exhibition and today, four months later as I write this. It is one thing to contemplate artworks in a museum, presented as artefacts of a historical moment in a country not my own; it’s much tougher to reflect on my complicity as a citizen of a nation that continues to systematically disempower and take unfair advantage of individuals from impoverished, vulnerable backgrounds. I suspect it is the reason it has taken me this long to finish this essay, which I started on May 23rd. Perhaps it is why I still don’t know what to say, at the end of my deferring and procrastination, other than feeling the unquietable urge that we must do better than this.

The words of Dave, etched on his pots, expressed the inner life and emotional desires of an enslaved person who was not permitted or expected to be a thinking, feeling human being. Likewise the words of Singapore’s migrant workers, which only occasionally enter the public sphere. While doing research for this essay, I came across the following statement by Neyaz, a migrant worker in Singapore who was interviewed in 2020 during the pandemic:

We will tell you everything that is going on here. All that the supplier companies do that is illegal. The government will say one thing on the contract and what is happening here is the opposite. You don’t think us workers don’t [sic] know this? We all know. But who will listen to what a worker has to say?

Note: This essay includes quotes from 19th-century American artworks that contain spelling and punctuation variations. These variations have been retained, not corrected or marked as “errors”, to honour and acknowledge the circumstances in which they were written by enslaved people.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of Singapore: A Biography, the editor of How We Live Now: Stories of Daily Living, and the co-editor of In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her essays have appeared in BiblioAsia, We the Citizens and Mynah Magazine. Originally from Singapore, she now lives in Boston, where she is writing a novel.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.