“Feeling for my People”

“Dave belongs to Mr. Miles / wher the oven bakes and the pot biles.” ¹ So reads the poetic couplet that David Drake, an enslaved man who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina, inscribed near the rim of one of his epic-sized earthenware storage vessels that he created on July 31, 1840. A declaration of political no less than artistic independence, Drake defied the widespread dehumanization of Black women, children, and men as bodies to be bought and sold in a white racist US nation by claiming his right to an imaginative inner life. At the same time that he transformed everyday storage vessels into exceptional works of art by executing his earthenware on a monumental scale, he laid claim to his power over the art of creative expression by inscribing his poetic verses onto their glazed surfaces. All too aware that literacy was prohibited on pain of torture, persecution, and death for enslaved people living in the U.S. South, he incised cryptic verse fragments onto the rims of his large jars in a deliberate act of defiance against his legal status as a chattel who “belongs” to a white southern slave-owner. Drake rejected his dehumanization as a commodified object and instead celebrated his independent subjective consciousness by assuming his rights to authorship. Writing poetic couplets on his beautifully formed jars, as he understood only too well, David Drake “belongs” to Mr. Miles according to the laws of chattel slavery but to no one when it came to the expression of his political, intellectual, and artistic individualism.