Dave, the African American Slave Potter

“Give me silver or give me gold/though they are dangerous to our soul /27 July 1840″ – Dave (slave potter) Edgefield, SC

photo by Gavin Ashworth /for Ceramics in America

Living in South Carolina, with an ear open to authentic local craft and art, one hears often of the Edgefield District, known for its distinctive traditional stoneware. South Carolina is rightfully proud of her two native crafts, the carefully woven Sea Grass baskets, made in the traditional style by the Gullah people, African Americans, who were formerly enslaved on the coastal Sea Islands, and also for its stoneware pottery, which is most significantly, tied to a slave named Dave who inscribed his massive pots with poetry. Dave’s legacy has grown not only because of his superlative technical skill but also because he dared to write poetic couplets on his pots, and to sign his name, which was bold, brave, and daring. His pots now fetch six figures in the antiques market.

The Charleston Museum, was, in 1919, given the first inscribed jar by Dave, by a contributor named Stoney. The massive forty gallon jar so inspired the director at the time, Paul Rea, that he wrote, a few months after it arrived, that “the jars should be collected…to prepare a history of the old potteries.” That did not happen until Laura Bragg, subsequent director of the Charleston Museum, visited the Edgefield area in 1930, learning about the one legged potter who worked in the area all his life, from 1834 to about 1870. The Edgefield pottery collection at the Charleston Museum is a testament to Bragg as a preservationist. Bragg offered an article about the history of the South Carolina jug and pottery for International Studio, which had previously printed her work, but the pottery piece was never published.

Dave they say, lay on the railroad tracks when he learned he was to be sold and relocated to a plantation to the west. The train severed his leg, making him less valuable to the buyer who then refused him. Dave, now one legged, continued his work as a potter, working with am able bodied companion, named ‘Baddler”: the latter works, which can be seen at the Charleston Museum, were signed “Dave and Bladdler”. The great potter stayed and worked in South Carolina all the days of his life. He continued to produce pots – large, great pots, inscribed with short phrases of poetic wisdom, and bravely inscribed in his hand and signed with his name, a testament to an undaunted spirit.

The following couplets are some of the poetic inscriptions, on the pots of Dave, the slave potter, of Edgefield, South Carolina.

I made this jar for cash
Though it is called lucre trash
22 August 1857

I made this for our Sott
it will never – never – rott
31 March 1858

This noble jar will hold 20
fill it with silver then you’ll have plenty
8 April, 1858

When you fill this jar with pork or beef
Scot will be there to get a peace
(on the other side)

This jar is to Mr. Seglir
who keeps the bar in orangeburg
for Mr Edwards a gentle man
who formerly kept Mr Thos bacons horses
21 April 1858

Tabby! She’s no Alley Cat

Tabby Smokehouse (Bleak Hall, Edisto Island) Built in 1840

Pigs and barbeque and the new rock star butchers in Charleston have been on my mind for the last few days, so this well preserved smokehouse outbuilding, on Botany Bay Plantation, conjured images of charcuterie close to home. Built in 1840, this smokehouse would have originally hung with the well butchered pigs of the Botany Bay Plantation, on Edisto Island, a place owned by John Ferrars Townsend, one of the island’s largest sea island cotton planters.

Charcuterie

The smokehouse is made of tabby, which was a type of concrete made from oyster shells, lime, sand, and water. Lime was created from burning the shells to make oyster shell ash. Tabby was the first concrete building material made and utilized in the United States, and was used as a building material along the sea islands and coast for over a century, until the development of portland cement in 1843. Tabby ruins are found along the coasts in from South Carolina to Florida and are reminders of the vernacular, of the irreplaceable cultural history of the sea islands. So unique is the tabby that one is able to see the varied tactile texture that is obviously a mark of the handmade, the artisan. Historians disagree on whether its use originated along the northwest African coast and was taken to Spain and Portugal, or vice versa. The origin of the word tabby itself is unclear: the Spanish word tapia means a mud wall, and the Arabic word tabbi means a mixture of mortar and lime. Similar words also appear in both Portuguese and Gullah.

A symposium took place a few years ago to study the conservation and preservation of tabby and is an excellent resource was published by the Georgia Dept. of Public Resources, including much about South Carolina building traditions. I was delighted to see so much written about the existing structures on Edisto Island, where I live. In Beaufort, on Sapelo Island in Georgia, and on Edisto, there are examples of the tabby construction that connect cultural histories, that of the sea island cotton planter, whose slaves’ labor surely mastered the art of building with tabby, and the Native American population whose large shell middens, high domes of discarded oyster shell, provided raw material. One shell mound, one they call Spanish Mount, indicates a Native American settlement they say existed 4,000 years ago on Edisto Island. It is now protected by the State Park near the South Edisto river.

Examples of tabby on Edisto Island exist at Point of Pines Plantation on the North Edisto river, where thick wall ruins still stand at the place where the original residence of Paul Grimball was built in 1696, known as the earliest tabby in South Carolina. Botany Bay Plantation boasts several tabby foundations, one for the ice house, which was also uniquely filled with charcoal between the interior and exterior walls, said to have been included to act as insulation.

tabby detail, grain house wall, Botany Bay

Tabby Ruins, Sunnyside Plantation, Edisto Island, SC

Additionally, tabby was used in the early 1700’s to fortify forts, in industrial use to build the Indigo vats at Burlington Plantation in Beaufort County, then again on Edisto, in the church foundation and baptismal pool at the First Baptist Church on highway 174. Sunnyside Plantation, on Edisto, is owned by the same family since 1860, and boasts the tabby ruins of an old cotton gin, built after the civil war in the 1870’s.

The story of Hepzipah Jenkins Townsend (1780-1847) wife of Daniel Townsend, is a fascinating one that still resonates on Edisto Island. She helped endow the First Baptist Church, than gave it to the African American congregation, who pack the church every week to this day, traveling from miles to attend (all morning) services on Sundays, and who serve up some of the delectable celebratory feasts on special occasions, Gullah style.

Artists redefine “Proper” at the Gibbes

'Sexually Ambiguous' Susan Harbage Page, 2009

The new show at the Gibbes Museum reminds me of the great Aretha Franklin song, RESPECT. In it she sings about coming home and getting her propers, her r-e-s-p-e-c-t. Truth is, the word in the song is profits, now that I look it up, but that works, too. Profits and propers are both due. The show is called Prop Master and is the work of the Executive Director, Angela Mack, in collaboration with artists Susan Harbage Page, and her husband, Juan Logan, who both teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Juan Logan is black, Susan Page is white. Props in this case are many things, but for this show, Angela Mack gave the artists free rein to use any of the art in the museum, as props. Prop Master is about race, class, gender and sexual identity in the South, and particularly, at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, which for the last 100 years, included only 40 works by African Americans in its collection of 10,000. pieces. “Props” support us, and here we question all that.

This is a powerful and brave installation. There are many conversations going on at once, and it bravely asks us, the viewer, questions. Mack said, “All museums share a fundamental obligation to provide context and challenge perceptions.” This one does that. Often when we walk into something daring, what we feel is a mirror of ourselves and our own ideas. So, seeing the truth may be unsettling. This show will no doubt bring out some dragon fire from within us, but that is a good thing. It is a conversation that, in the South, in Charleston, needs to become commonplace and everyday, not rare.

African American influence in the American South affected everything, from the foods we consider regional to the way we speak. Logan and Page create this presence, and symbolize it the way the South has traditionally treated this subject, by using wallpaper imagery and it covers all the walls in this large gallery space: tiny white oval faces spray painted everywhere. They use the museum’s portraits of old Charleston families and hang them side by side with new photographs of African American residents who continue to carry on the same last name, in a portion of the show called “Famous Last Names.” It includes neatly folded Ku Klux Klan robes, wrapped and tied in pretty little bundles, with ribbons, to allude to the South’s infamous past and suggests that we still hold old attitudes, though politely. One of my favorite details is a narrow strip of a repeated photograph. It is an image of a tea party from the fifties. A proper white woman serves a man a cookie on a silver tray. It wraps the room.

This show is terrific, and will be up through Spoleto, Charleston’s Arts Festival that runs from May 22 to June 7. Angela Mack is to be commended for insisting that this conversation be a loud one. It is thrilling to be in a city that is facing her dragon, and using artists to help us see ourselves. Tell everyone you know; bring everyone you know. For me, I’ll be humming Aretha’s classic song this week and thinking in fresher ways about what she means when she sings that word.

Motown’s Musical Roots

Detail of early painting from South Carolina, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

As a child, my mother rocked me to sleep in a rocking chair and sang a song about ‘going to tell Aunt Dinah.’ It went on…. “the old grey goose is dead, the one she’s been savin’, to make a feather bed.” Who was Aunt Dinah, and where did this song originate? I have no clue, but I remembered it, and sang it to my children, and again, a generation later, to my grandchildren. These are the arts that live in the everyday; they are the family recipes, the songs, the music we listen to even now, I believe, that tie us to the stories of where we came from, even when there is no written history.

Jack McCray, author of “Charleston Jazz,” wrote a piece in the Charleston Post & Courier today about James Jamerson, the legendary bass guitarist, who lived from 1936 to 1983. On March 19 of this year, largely unnoticed, at the State Capital, State Rep. Wendell Gilliard presented Charleston musician Anthony McKnight, a South Carolina House of Representatives resolution honoring McKnight’s late cousin, James Jamerson, an American music innovator. To borrow from a tribute written by Allan Slutsky, his biographer, “James Jamerson was a jazz musician born on Edisto Island and grew up in the city of Charleston. Before he finished high school he moved to Detroit, Michigan. Like many other jazz players, Jamerson, a bassist, took to playing pop music to earn a living and he ended up a charter member of the Funk Brothers, the legendary house band for Motown Records, the sound of young America, as it called itself, during the 1960s and 1970s. That period was its prolific heyday. He took the rhythm and aural textures of the Lowcountry to Detroit and made major contributions to one of the greatest phases in the evolution of American music. Jamerson played on virtually all of the hits by acts such as the Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Martha and the Vandellas. He played on more No. 1 records than the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys combined.
This story is long overdue.

Jamerson began playing music as a little boy on Edisto Island, with one string in the sand, “to make the ants dance.” John Michael Vlach, professor of American Studies and Anthropology at George Washington University has written much about American Folk Art, and he reveals the interesting history of many instruments that owe their history to “Afro-American instrument makers….one of these is called the “one-string” or “one strand”. Early African Americans made this into a banjo, which was built from a gourd. He goes on to say, “It is clear that the banjo as it was first known in America was an African instrument. It remained a black instrument until the 1840’s when minstrel shows took it on as part of their black face farces. Only then did the banjo become a badge of ridicule for Afro-Americans; they generally gave it up, allowing white southerners to claim it as their own invention.” For an in depth discussion of this and many other traditional folk arts of the Lowcountry I highly recommend Mr Vlach’s book, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, University of Georgia Press.

The one string instrument that James Jamerson played as a child was one his ancestors most likely played. This was his Aunt Dinah song. Music heals and soothes us, and her history in the Lowcountry is a large part of her soul. I can only imagine the sounds of the boatmen who sang in rhythmic time, during long travels over these waters, and the metaphoric music of work songs, and spirituals, songs that often spoke in secret codes. The music worked ingeniously to communicate one message to the master and another to the slave, yet all along it continued to be music, to soothe and heal the spirit. How many more stories like James Jamerson’s exist? Do you have songs passed down in the family whose roots may tell you something about your ancestors?

To borrow again from Jack McCray, “The next time you hear the soulful bass introduction to “My Girl,” the thunder-and-lightening licks to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” or the rollicking romp of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” President Barack Obama’s campaign theme song, remember Jamerson and the pulse of the Lowcountry.”

Now, this is pretty close to church, I say. Amen, brother.

Fresh History Gullah Style

“Jesus, Hide me in a sacred place.” – an old Gullah prayer
-from Nick Lindsay’s book, And I’m Glad, an oral history of Edisto Island

Alphonso Brown in Philip Simmon's workshop

The real thing. It’s not often one meets a real teacher, someone so infected with the real thing that they stop you, touch you, change the way you see the world. Robert Henri, who was an artist but who is most known for the jewel of a book called The Art Spirit, was one. So is Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist’s Way and started a movement. They both emphasize that art-making is the inevitable result of living well, of being fully alive. Henri says that the public might understand art more, too, if our motive, wit, human philosophy, or evidences ‘of our interesting personality’ show up in the work.

Yesterday I went out on the cobblestones and met a man named Alphonso Brown. He is friend to Philip Simmons, the revered blacksmith, and knows the man well enough to infect you with Mr. Simmon’s gentle and soulful spirit, a man whose work and life has all of the attributes that Henri suggests we should have as artists. Alphonso Brown teaches the other half of Charleston’s history, the part not told by her many historic statues and plaques. African American slaves physically built most of this fair place, and certainly much of the famous Lowcountry cuisine was also created by a people who were enslaved as house servants.

There is something about people who can laugh and make you laugh. Something deep down strong. How do you tell the history of a people who endured so much? The story coming from this man feels like the smooth, cooled, curve of iron, like that forged in the fires of Philip Simmon’s studio. It feels strong and beautiful now, resiliant, dignified by the adversity. I particularly liked his tales involving color. Did you know that the bright red of so many roofs in Charleston is from the Bible? The Gullah say it is from story of the Passover, where, in Exodus, God says that “the Blood will be sign for you on the houses where you live”. Red roofs protect the “Holy City”, he says. And the reason that brides carry blue, and continue the tradition of “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”? Gullah. Blue is another protective color to the Gullah people. ‘Ghosts’ and ‘hags’ just don’t like the bright blue shade that is that painted on houses to this day in the Lowcountry.

If you want an unforgettable experience of the city, go find this man. Gullah Tours.com. He will pepper your experience with glorious tidbits of new history. And he will speak and teach and sing to you in Gullah, which, as a language, has a very regular syntax and phonology of its own. It is what many call a song language, and it is distinctively American, a creole, that is a clever blend of the different cultural influences of the Lowcountry. I left my time with Alphonso Brown inspired, a little awestruck, with a longing to learn more from this man. He has a book I can’t wait to order: A Gullah Guide to Charleston: Walking Through Black History.

The Blacksmither’s Art

Jewelry of Simmon's gate design

Philip Simmons is a living legend. He is Charleston’s best known blacksmith. His love of the anvil and the hammer is evident and his recognition is long overdue. The Smithsonian Museum named him a National Heritage Fellow and the National Endowment for the Arts named him a “master traditional artist.” The curled circles of black wrought iron, that grace the doorways and windows of so much of Charleston, continues a tradition begun here by the early colonists. “Wrought ironwork (much of the early pieces were balconies) of the 18th and 19th centuries featured scrolls, fleur-de-lis, leaf and flower patterns, spears and wiggletails.” according to the Historic Charleston Foundation.

Many of the earliest gates and balconies in the city were destroyed in the fires of 1740 and 1778, and much of what survived was removed to support the Patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. According the John Michael Vlach, whose 1991 work on African American Vernacular art, By the Work of Their Hands, and who also wrote a book on Philip Simmons, wrote about the earlier blacksmiths: “In the middle of the 19th century, almost one fourth of the African American blacksmiths were free men. Christopher Werner, a prominent metal worker in Charleston, owned five slaves. ‘Uncle Toby’ Richardson is remembered as a “top rank artist in iron”. Werner is credited with the design of the famous “Sword Gate” (at 32 1/2 Legare Street) but Richardson, perhaps, should get the credit for making it.”

Traditional blacksmithing has been carried on by Philip Simmons, and he has trained apprentices to continue the art. He will turn ninety-seven on June 7th. His home and workshop at 30 1/2 Blake Street is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the 11 most endangered places. He began working at this small shop, for Peter Simmons (no relation) at age 13. Peter was given the place by his father, a slave, in the late 1880’s. The wonderful snake gates, the design that inspired this silver bracelet, are those of the Gadsden house, at 329 East Bay Street. This piece of jewelry can be ordered from the Foundation, or purchased at the Gibbes Museum Shop and was created to support the Foundation established to preserve and continue his legacy.

Why Remember?

“Memory is an act of redemption. What has been remembered has been saved from nothingness. What has been forgotten has been abandoned.” – John Berger, from About Looking

My daughter asked me once, “Why are you so interested in the ancestors?” She was genuinely puzzled, and truthfully, once you get into the genealogical mire of dates and names, it can appear to be mindless preoccupation with past glory. My grandparents’ generation could rattle off the ancestors, and in this part of the country, great pride was attached to this ability. The elders sat the young ones down, or paraded them past the portraits in the hallway, attaching story to the names.

The photograph illustrating this post was taken behind the tombstone of my grandfather many generations ago now, the Reverend William Hutson (1720-1761) who was a minister of this historic circle of a church on Meeting Street. The Circular Church, also called The White Meeting House, it was home to a mixture of Protestant dissenters that included English Congregationalists, French Huguenots, and Scottish Presbyterians. The magnificently preserved slate carved stones on either side of William Hutson’s, are of my grandmother, Mary Woodward, and his second wife, Mary Sarrazin Bryan Prioleau. The graveyard is one of the jewels of Charleston, containing some of the most beautiful headstone imagery in America.

But much of my generation, with the revolutionary eyes of the 1960’s, were just not interested in hearing about history that was complicated by the South’s role in segregation. Consequently, many of us do not know the family histories by heart anymore. But the ancestors simply called me, when I tripped over a headstone of a Woodward cousin, in of all places, Miami, Florida, while in college working on a photography project. One might call it serendipity. I remain motivated by the colorful stories that appear as unexpected surprises, like finding artists among us (more later on 18th century Rosella Torrans!) and I suppose I am hoping to revive the Lowcountry tradition of knowing our histories. Whoopi Golberg said, about her own complicated history as an African American, ” When it becomes habit in us to be able to rattle off our individual histories it will calm our spirits…….” Indeed. The supporting spirits of the ancestors, too, are here, with my every step.

Gullah, and the Circle Dance

The Old Plantation. Anonymous folk painting, South Carolina, c.1777-1794. (The Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, VA)

I am really into circles lately, the spiral of the conch on the beach, the perfect geometry of the nautilus shell, the water in the tub, circling, before it descends below.

This fabulous rare painting, according to the painting’s original owner, Mary E. Lyles of Columbia, South Carolina, was painted by one of her forebears, probably on a plantation in South Carolina somewhere between Charleston and Orangeburg between 1777 and 1794. It shows a rare glimpse into the original culture of the slaves, the clothes, the musical instruments that we can trace to Africa. The women are playing what Sierra Leoneans easily recognize as the shegureh, a women’s instrument (rattle). Scholars think what’s portrayed here is actually a communal social dance gathering, participants forming a circle with the dancers taking turns in the center to express themselves through the medium of dance as well as to perform a solo exhibition of their dancing skills.

On the sea islands nearby, the Gullah tradition of the Ring Shout continued as a blend of traditions and was a form of praise and thanksgiving to God. By 1710 South Carolina became the first mainland colony to have a black majority and by 1740 the black population outnumbered the whites by two to one. The African influence was obviously a big one on the English, French, and Barbadians who settled Charleston. Slaves adapted to Christianity and the planters began to eat rice and okra and watermelon. We all (even the French, in France!) say “ok”, a word derived from the Gullah word, “okeh”. Old Charleston was always a proud city, proud certainly of her old beauty, but proud I think, too, of her individuality, her blend of cultures, of her religious tolerance. She has soul. I would like to think that we are ready, now, as Southerners, as Americans, to hold hands in a circle. We have a smart and accomplished American President who is African American. Michelle Robinson Obama’s family were slaves, from Georgetown, just north of Charleston. Don’t you think we need a little more dancing in lives, in our everydays? Yes, the circle dance will work for me.

Fresh History

Welcome to my blog about Charleston, South Carolina. A place proud with history, beauty, and art. Sometimes we feel a call, to be, to go, to do. I felt that about Charleston many years ago upon the discovery of a large trunk of letters and photographs about the Carolina Lowcountry, written by my grandmothers, cousins and aunts. I also felt the call to be an artist, even when I was in my teens, when my favorite haunt was a tiny bookstore on an old street in Asheville, where I was living and attending an all girls boarding school. I can remember being deeply moved by poems, by art, even then. Our ancestors are a part of who we are today. The African American culture has understood that I believe more than my own, and have recognized the presence of the ancestors in the everyday, perhaps a practice brought from the traditions from Ghana and Angola. I have been called to this task, to tell some of the stories of this place, not only so I can remember, but so that we will continue to make and tell our own stories. Today I will begin with some that surround these weathered cobbled streets in the French Quarter of this glittering holy city.