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

Seaside

Seaside is the name of the old Sea Island cotton plantation, on Edisto Island, that was owned in the 1800’s by the Edings family. The original house still exists on land to the south of where I live. My little two acres is on old Eddingsville Beach Road – a wide dirt road – which should be spelled with one ‘d’ like Edingsville Beach – was the original road through the ancient oaks from across the island from Peter’s Point and Sunnyside, out over the causeway to what used to be Edingsville, the resort beach front town of the wealthy cotton planters, that was destroyed by the the hurricanes of 1876 and 1893. The more vulnerable white population headed, in summer, because of mosquitos and malaria, to ‘the salt’ or ‘the pines’. The area of housing at that beach is now a resort called Jeremy Cay, and gated. The beach however is still public and the inlets are wide and wonderful. There are still pieces of antique pottery washing up from the hurricanes of those years on this beach after a good storm.

I have no house on my land yet, only inherited Rosy, the RV, and a 8 x 14 ft. custom built “utility” building to hold my edited down version of possessions. It was built for me by the delightfully lowcountry Mr. Hughes in nearby Ravenel. He made the pitch high like a little church, and it has a red tin roof like Alphonso Brown of Gullah Tours says represents “the blood of the lamb” of Passover. The red roof is to honor those red roofs of the city of Charleston and to invoke this protective blessing, which must be true! I have another red roofed tiny ‘house’ in mind as an artist’s studio…

The idea of outbuildings have always interested me. I suppose it is the recreation of the look of the little cottages and buildings of the pre Civil War South in a way and The Small House Society has also captivated my imagination for the last few years. The thought of living fully in a small house, and living largely outside is something people do here. The benefits of less insurance, less ’stuff’ to manage, and a smaller carbon footprint are all reasons. Outside living rooms are quite common here on the island, and it is refreshing to see, coming from the big city where people have grand houses but never sit outside them or talk much to the neighbors.

California's Sonoma Shanty

California – also ’seaside’.. has now legalized a small house for backyards called “the Sonoma Shanty.” There, too, real estate is so costly and young and old are flocking to a more sustainable way of living and ways to create a housing for multiple generations on one lot.

Today I am blessed and intrigued by my new residence. There is so much new about living in an area so full of history. My little place still needs a name. Seagate, Seagate Allee, Allee de Lune, Seaside Allee…What do you think?

The Color, Blue

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”
Vincent van Gogh, Post-Impressionist, 1853-1890

The color blue takes up a lot of space here. Perhaps it is the broad expanse of sky and sea. Blue houses and shutters protect those living inside from evil spirits (‘haints’) – a Gullah tradition that has its roots in the African American sea island culture, and includes stories like ‘haints’ can’t travel over water, which is another reason for the common use of blue paint, perhaps.

Historically, there is also interesting research that indicates that the number of people who died of the mosquito born disease of malaria was reduced substantially when the region was producing its highest quantity of Indigo, the blue color. The production, by slaves, was quite profitable to the plantation that produced Indigo for export, in the Lowcountry in the early 18th century.

But just right now, the earth is offering up her most breathtaking version of the color blue in the Carolina Lowcountry. The hydrandea bush is in bloom like I cannot remember. This one spectacular round blue bloom is in my neighbor’s yard on Legare Road on Edisto Island.

Rosebank Farms, 4455 Betsy Kennison Parkway, Johns Island, hosts its 4th annual Hydrandea Festival 10am – 4 pm June 13th and 14th. Growers and horticulturalists will answer questions and provide advice about care, variety, and location. Call 843-768-0508 or write them at : email@RosebankFarms.com

Sacred Ground, The McLeod Plantation

When it becomes habit in us to be able to rattle off our individual histories it will calm our spirits…….
-Whoopi Goldberg

McLeod Plantation Slave Cabins - CHW photo 2005

It was hot and steamy that August when I arrived in Charleston from North Carolina, on pilgrimage. I became fascinated with my own family’s history in college and had memorized the people and the places for years, on paper. I was here for a full week, guests of gracious people, and I was determined to see for myself, and to get a sense of place. It is part of being an artist I suppose, feeling a place, letting your awareness listen with all its wordless ability. There was more to know than I could get in a book, or online. I needed to walk on the land, and breathe the air, in the places they lived.

The McLeod Plantation, owned by Historic Charleston Foundation for many years, was sold recently to the American School for the Building Trades, but whose plans for the property are worrisome to the non profit group called the Friends of McLeod, charged with her care. It is just over the bridge from downtown, on James Island. William Wallace McLeod, born on Edisto Island in 1820, bought it in 1851, and built the two story house that still stands at the site. Our mutual ancestors were the McLeods of the Beaufort area, John McLeod who married Margaret Johnston in 1743, and and their son, Aeneas.

So, here I was, in a place of astonishing natural beauty, standing in the drive of an oak avenue (an Allee), so distinctive to the Carolina Lowcountry, a place so quiet I could sense the stories in the air. Stephanie Hunt described this place as “bearing the blood, bones, and memory of settlers, slaves, soldiers, and planters.”

Now, the plantation encompasses 60 acres of fields and woods. It once included most of James Island, and is one of the few complete and intact antebellum ensembles, including a main house, a slave street with five frame cabins, a kitchen, a dairy, gin house, barn and outbuildings that even include a four seater outhouse. According to Alphonso Brown of GullahTours, blacks continued to occupy these slave quarters even until 1990, when the last owner, William Ellis McLeod, well known as “Mr Willie” died, at age 105. It is open to the public only occasionally now.

The plantation first appeared on a 1695 map as a 617-acre plantation along the Wappoo and Stono rivers on James Island. Originally belonging to Morgan Morris, the land changed hands several times during the 18th century. Samuel Perroneau, who purchased the property in 1741 first cultivated the land. His daughter, Elizabeth, inherited a portion of the land with her husband, Edward Lightwood II in 1771, and it remained in the Lightwood family when their daughter, Sarah Lightwood Parker, and her husband, William McKenzie Parker II, began cultivating Sea Island Cotton. Though this long staple cotton was normally considered highly profitable, a combination of poor drainage and depleted soil soon made the plantation known as “pick-pocket place”. McKenzie increased the size of the plantation to 914.5 acres of land and 779 acres of marsh, and in 1851, sold the plantation to William Wallace McLeod, from Edisto, the island well known for its Sea Island cotton. It was he who tackled the drainage issues, and he who built the house that exists today.

The main activity on James Island was the raising of beef, which gave this plantation a different financial advantage when everyone else was struggling with cotton. Cotton and rice were planted here but not on a large scale. Indigo was also a major crop at the plantation. McLeod’s Plantation was mainly known for beef, and the slaves from the Gambia River region, according to Alphonso Brown, were expert horseman and cattle herders. They were America’s first cowboys! Cattle was grazed on lands, often islands and savannas called Cowpens in the Lowcountry, and there is a small island on Edisto Island that still bears that name.
With the coming of the Civil War and Union occupation of nearby barrier islands, McLeod moved his family to Greenwood, S.C, and a slave named Steve Forrest was placed in charge of the plantation in the family’s absence. McLeod joined the Charleston Light Dragoons in 1861 and was mortally wounded in 1864. The plantation house served as headquarters for General Gist’s Brigade, as well as Confederate unit headquarters, a commissary, and a field hospital until the island fell to the invading Federal army in the spring of 1865. When Confederate forces evacuated Charleston on Feb. 17, 1865, Federal troops used the plantation as a field hospital and officers’ quarters. The 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiments, one of the first official black units in the United States Armed forces, were among the units that camped at the site. The front parlor was used as a surgical theater and many Union and Confederate dead were buried at nearby Battery Means and the old slave cemetery along the Wappoo banks in front of the house. After the Civil War, McLeod Plantation became headquarters for the Freedmen’s Bureau for the James Island district and in 1879, the McLeod family regained the property, and in 1918 William Ellis McLeod began raising potatoes, asparagus and dairy cattle.

“Mr. Willie,” as he was known, also knew to preserve this land, and arranged for it not to be sold to developers. This is rare earth as Georges Hughes, an older African American gentleman, who reenacted as a member of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, said, “McLeod is the last vestige of living history….It’s a sacred spot.” Indeed.

Southern Comfort

“Food is not about impressing people. It’s about making them feel comfortable.”
Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Pimento cheese is Southern comfort food, a cool mixture of cheese, mayonnaise and a little sweet pepper called a pimento. May is pimento month they say, and there are enough stories that surround food in the South to consider them an art form. Pat Conroy’s 2004 cookbook combines story and food like no other. Our classic, local, award winning cookbook is called Charleston Receipts, and is the oldest Junior League cookbook still in print, full of Gullah sayings and 750 recipes. Virginia Hendricks of Richmond, Virginia, charmingly calls we Southerners ‘cookahs, eatahs, and writahs’. That and more. Southern Foodways collected recipes and colorful tales specifically around Pimento Cheese during the 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational. Aunt Ella’s legend is one you will not forget.

One of my favorites family food stories, told in ‘Pon Top, the terrific Edisto Island cookbook put together by the Episcopal Church there, is of a cousin whose mother and aunt made ketchup by boiling their homegrown tomatoes in a huge pot outside, alternately stirring the concoction with a paddle and sitting in rockers on the porch, while at the same time, sipping a little vodka to stay cool. My grandmother, every Christmas, made cheese straws, which she made round, more like Pat Conroy’s version that he calls cheese coins. My Daddy-Tom kept them in a tin hidden in his desk, eating three every night at cocktail hour, until they ran out in February. My own mother is known for her rice and gravy, and my sister, Dianne, who was a marvelous cook, competed with me over our carrot cake recipe, arguing that she got hers from Nellie in Mooresville first, and that my Bundt pan version was just not right at all, “just not enough icing, dahlin”.

Pimento cheese is classic Southern comfort food, a favorite to serve to Sunday afternoon guests, for bridal luncheons and for that tray of sandwiches we take to the house after someone dies. Because of its rich flavor, ease of preparation and versatility as a sandwich, cracker or vegetable topping, it is an endearing favorite. It does not show up in the Charleston cookbook, and some say it only began to be made in the early 1900’s, when it was a delicacy for the Southern farm families who created it, said Millie Coleman, author of The Frances Virginia Tea Room Cook Book, which offers recipes from the legendary Atlanta restaurant. “Pimento cheese was a gourmet item,” the Carrollton, Ga., native said. “Generally, you ate what you grew. You had plenty of turnip greens and other vegetables, but on the farm you didn’t produce your own cheese. And when Southern farmers did make cheese, it was a white cheese, like cottage cheese or ricotta. Yellow cheese was Northern cheese, and to have store-bought cheese, that was a treat.” To turn it into a Southern creation, it got mixed it with mayonnaise, a typically Southern sandwich spread (my sister and many consider Duke’s mayonnaise the only one). They tossed in pimento peppers, which were once grown and canned across Georgia. It was served on white bread, not hard Northern rolls. “Our heritage was the heritage of England and Scotland and Ireland, where they had soft bread like scones,” Mrs. Coleman said. “In the North, where they came from other parts of Europe, they grew wheat that produced a harder flour. Flour from the types of wheat grown in the South is softer, almost like cake flour.” My recipe card (above) needs the grated Vermont white cheddar, an essential ingredient. Over the years I began to spice it up with red onion, grated with the microplane grater I use for the Parmigiano-Reggiano, and I add more freshly grated pepper, Coleman’s dry mustard, and a little balsamic vinegar. The food processor, like Aunt Ella used from the story about her in Southern Foodways is a lifesaver, and I use (forgive me) Hellman’s mayonnaise. It is the lemony thing I think. And goodness, no sugar. You can add jalapenos, red pepper flakes, or some tabasco give it a little more kick.

For whatever the reason, pimento cheese now has a legendary reputation in the South. Cousin Pinkney Mikell calls it Southern Caviar. The pimiento cheese sandwich is a staple of the April Masters golf classic at Augusta, Elvis insisted on it on top of his hamburger, a Pimento Queen gets crowned in Zebulon, Georgia during their annual Pimento Festival, and all summer long, it’s made with love by millions of southern families during the hot months of summer making it the coolest sandwich of all.

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.

A Room with a View

“Why should we use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.” - Brenda Ueland

Rooftop View (Library of Congress)

This rooftop view of Charleston, the view that I also love in Paris, is a photograph from the grand collection of the Library of Congress, a treasure trove of visual history, available to us online. It was taken in Charleston, from the roof of No. 20 East Battery, looking Southwest, by a photographer named C.O. Greene in 1940. During the depression of the 1930’s, swarms of photographers, writers and muralists were employed, by the Works Progress Administration, to document buildings and cemeteries and communities. The WPA was the largest New Deal Agency and it employed millions of people. Many of our cemetery records were recorded then, and the records are genealogical jewels for those of us who love studying family history. One of my favorite little books produced by the WPA is called The Ocean Highway, New Brunswick, New Jersey to Jacksonville, Florida; American Guide Series, produced by Modern Age Books, 1938. It is the 1,000 mile journey of US 1 and the details about mostly the rural areas South Carolina are detailed and mapped carefully with mile markers. The unknown authors travel to Pocotaligo, where the Reverend William Hutson first preached at the Stony Creek Independent, later, Presbyterian, Church, and they write about Edisto Island, and Peter’s Point Plantation and a dynamic small Gullah church off Steamboat Landing Road, called “The Sanctify”.

I like to think we could do some of this again, that we, as Americans could reprioritise. Daniel Pink in his book, A Whole New Mind, seems to think that the Master of Fine Arts degree is the new MBA. Tough times demand creative solutions. The challenging economic situation we are living through now, may, l like to think, lead us back to the arts. Arts exist to help us heal, to make us dance, to nurture our spirits. If there ever was a time when we all needed generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate people, it is now.

The Spirit of a Place

“Dead I say? There is no death, I say, only a change of worlds.” – Chief Seattle

The Great Chief’s speech goes on to talk poetically about how those intent on destroying Native American lands (in Seattle) …”when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisble dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone…at night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land….Be just and deal kindly with my people…to us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.” There is some dispute as to whether the great Indian chief wrote this inspiring speech, but, as in art, truth is not always the same as fact.

Charleston, as a place, has its own voice. Have you ever felt that in a place? When I visited Venice, and stepped out onto that earth and water, I felt the palpable presence of the stories of those who had walked there before me. And some years ago I discovered the principles of Chinese feng shui and dusted every corner of my house, and yes, it feels truly different than before I took the time to respect this place, this house.

So many cultures blended together to make Charleston a creole, from its beginning: the English, the Barbadians, the French Huguenot. The native Americans, and the African American cultures certainly revere the ancestors. This photograph is of a Gullah ‘bottle tree’ which reminds us of the spiritual world and is part of the great vernacular yard art tradition of Sea Island African American people.

My own mostly English family told historical stories, and collected the data to rattle off, about who, what and when. It was more of a left brain catalog of historical facts, I felt, growing up. Thinking the ancestors actually lived here now was too close to the superstitious for us, as respectable Episcopalians and Presbyterians. But we knew the stories and the legacy was important. My mother valued that old cedar chest passed down from her Aunt Caroline Martin Arnold, more than most anything in the house. And Charleston had an unusual population that early in her history recognized her value and insisted upon her preservation. The city began the historic preservation movement in the United States in 1920 when they formed the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings.

But there is even more reason I think. There is that spirit that Chief Seattle speaks of, and the one the Africans brought with them. An old song sung in church whose words recognize the Spirit, has a refrain that says “there’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.” I think I feel like part of that whole creole mix now, the mix that Charleston always was, and is today, and more and more what America is. There is a spirit in this place.

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 Dancing Women

“In sacred space everything is done so that the environment creates a metaphor.”- Joseph Campbell

Charleston simply oozes story and history. So does nearby Edisto Island, the last undeveloped sea island in South Carolina. The Gullah elders called the island ‘Paradise’, and even now, she is known as the Sacred Eden Isle. The trees in the lowcountry, and the respect for the natural world, particularly these great live oaks, protected by law, and native to the Southern states, are a large part of what makes this part of the world so unique, and so evocative.

Good art takes me somewhere else. It either reflects for me my own story, or requires of me. It asks questions, it notices. The great live oaks stand as grandmother trees for me; this one grows in the Magnolia Cemetery. She feels like a dancing, strong old woman. She has survived hurricanes and drought, all the while twisting and curving in her growth toward heaven. Art inspires us and it exists all around us, like the sacred spaces these graceful dancing trees create.