Jar

Near the rim of this jar, while the clay was still damp, David Drake wrote his name under the date June 6, 1857. Drake, the skilled African American potter who made this substantial 10-gallon storage jar, is renowned for inscribing his signature, dates, and occasionally a rhyming verse on hundreds of utilitarian ceramics. His hand is also visible where his fingers gripped the base as he coated, dripped, and splashed the vessel with brown- and ochre-colored glaze. Drake was born into slavery and worked daily while enslaved in potteries around Edgefield, South Carolina. He incised his ceramics at a time when laws prohibiting literacy among enslaved people were common. In that light, his powerful ceramics are defiant expressions of literacy, authorship, and creativity in the face of slavery.