Inside the wide mouth of a stoneware jar, Daisy Whitner's fingertips found a slight rise in the clay—a mark she hoped was a trace left behind by her ancestor, an enslaved potter who shaped the vessel nearly 175 years ago in South Carolina. Standing in the gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston last week, Whitner said she felt a quiet connection to her ancestor, David Drake, in that moment. "I was telling the kids, 'Inside this jar, I'm sure I'm feeling his tears, sweat drops off his face, his arms,'" said 86-year-old Whitner, a resident of Washington, DC, and a retired account manager for the Washington Post.
The AP reports the jar is one of two returned to Drake's family as part of a historic agreement this month between Drake's descendants and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, one of the institutions that holds pieces of his work. The vessels are among hundreds of surviving works by "Dave the Potter," an enslaved man who labored in the alkaline-glazed stoneware potteries of Edgefield, South Carolina, in the decades before and during the Civil War. Dave signed many of his jars—and inscribed some with rhyming couplets—an extraordinary and unparalleled assertion of identity and authorship during a time when literacy for enslaved people was criminalized.
One of his most resonant poems was etched into a jar he produced in 1857, around the time scholars believe Dave and his family were separated after being sold to different slave owners. "I wonder where is all my relation / friendship to all—and every nation." The agreement represents what experts say is the first major case of art restitution involving works created by an enslaved person in the US—a process traditionally associated with families seeking the return of art looted by the Nazis in World War II. It is also rare: because enslaved people were denied legal personhood and documentation, tracing ownership or lineage is often impossible.
After the museum returned the pots to Drake's family, they sold one back so people can continue to learn from his legacy. The other is on lease to the museum, at least temporarily. The MFA Boston said it wouldn't disclose how much it paid. Researchers believe Drake died sometime in the 1870s after gaining his freedom in the Civil War. He is accounted for in the 1870 census, but not in the 1880 census. It's unclear what became of the jars after his death. The MFA purchased them in 1997 from an art dealer. MFA Boston's Art of the Americas Chair Ethan Lasser said he thinks they survived mostly from pure "benign neglect" in South Carolina because they were large and difficult to transport or break. (Read the full story for more examples of Drake's rhymes.)
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