Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

American, ca. 1801–1870s
Enslaved at Stony Bluff Manufactory (ca. 1848–1867)
Jar, 1858
Alkaline-glazed stoneware
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment, 1988.85

Dave begins at least four of his surviving inscribed vessels, including this one, with the bold claim of agency and authorship, “I made.” He also attests to the durability of his creation, which will “never-never rott,” and includes fifteen dots that denote the jar’s capacity in gallons. Dave turned many vessels on a potter’s wheel, but the undulations on the surface of this jar suggest that he made it using a turn-and-coil method. This hybrid process involves turning the pot’s base on a wheel and then adding separately made coils of clay, and he used this method to create his largest vessels of the late 1850s, including some that could hold up to forty gallons.

Face Jug, ca. 1850–1880
Alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The John Axelrod Collection—Frank B. Bemis Fund, Charles H. Bayley Fund, and The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection, 2011

Known as face vessels, the jugs, cups, and pitchers in this exhibition, like the vessel pictured here, were powerful spiritual objects made by the Edgefield potters for their own use. The functions and meanings of face vessels in the African American community were likely multiple and varied: used as whimsies, receptacles for water or alcoholic spirits, deeper spiritual or religious purposes, or even for burial and funerary rituals. Their emergence coincides roughly with the 1858 arrival of the Wanderer, a slave ship illegally transporting more than four hundred captive Africans, some fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States.

Thomaston, Upson County, Georgia
Bible Scenes Quilt, ca. 1900
Cotton
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment, 1995.82

Pictorial quilts functioned as bed covers and as a means for disseminating didactic lessons. Pieced together from repurposed scraps of fabric, the appliqué shapes in this quilt animate the scenes in red and blue: figures, letters, ladders, trees, snakes, and tools. The quilt depicts two biblical stories in opposite sections: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Crucifixion. Bible quilts like this are usually symbolic in nature and are creative interpretations of oral imagery passed down through generations. Dated circa 1900, this quilt was passed down in the Drake family of Thomaston, Georgia. Despite the similar name, it is unlikely that the maker of this quilt was related to the potter known as Dave.

American, ca. 1801–1870s
Enslaved at Stony Bluff Manufactory (ca. 1848–1867)
Storage Jar, 1858
Alkaline-glazed stoneware
Collection of C. Philip and Corbett Toussaint

This jar was signed and dated by Dave on December 6, 1858, with the following inscription:
nineteen days before Christmas – Eve –
Lots of people after its over, how they will greave
Lm December 6, 1858 / Dave

Here, Dave uses rhythm and rhyme to juxtapose the joy of Christmas with his knowledge of imminent loss. Why will people “greave” after the holiday ends? It was common practice to “hire out,” and outright sell, enslaved people on New Year’s Day, which separated African American family members from one another, sometimes thousands of miles apart, with no way to communicate or find each other in the future.

American, 1926–1993
Skull, 1987
Unfired clay and human teeth
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Norfolk Southern Collection of Self-Taught Art, 1998.82

From childhood, James “Son Ford” Thomas worked with the sticky clay native to the Mississippi Delta region where he was born and raised. He earned his nickname “Son Ford” by sculpting Ford tractors, and later, the kinds of portraits on view here. He did not speak about face vessels in the oral histories he gave during his lifetime, but he worked as a gravedigger in African American graveyards where face vessels or other funerary ornaments may have been placed. His heads share the fearsome quality that Edgefield makers imbued in their face vessels, especially his skeletal form, which bears human teeth acquired from one of his patrons who was a dentist. Thomas was also an internationally celebrated blues musician, excelling at a genre of music that, like Edgefield face vessels, is a spiritual art form born during enslavement and made to mediate life and death.