BOSTON — Inside the wide mouth of a stoneware jar, Daisy Whitner’s fingertips found a slight elevation in the clay, a mark she hoped was a trace left behind by her ancestor, the enslaved potter who shaped the vessel nearly 175 years ago in South Carolina.
Standing in a gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston last week, Whitner said she felt a quiet connection with her predecessor, David Drake, in that moment.
“I used to tell the kids, ‘Inside this jar, I’m sure I can feel his tears, the sweat coming down his face, his arms,’” said Whitner, 86, a Washington, D.C., resident and retired account executive for The Washington Post.
The urn is one of two returned to Drake’s family as part of a historic agreement this month between Drake’s descendants and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, one of the institutions that holds pieces of his work.
These vessels are among hundreds of surviving works by Dave the Potter, an enslaved man who worked making alkaline glazed stoneware in Edgefield, South Carolina, in the decades before and during the Civil War. Dave signed many of his urns—and wrote some in rhyming couplets—an extraordinary and unparalleled assertion of identity and authorship during a time when reading and writing for enslaved people were criminalized.
The agreement represents what experts say is the first major case of art restitution involving works created by an enslaved person in the United States — a process traditionally associated with families seeking to reclaim artworks looted by the Nazis in World War II.
It is also rare: because enslaved people were denied legal personality and documentation, tracing ownership or lineage of their labors was often impossible.
Children’s book author Jaba Becker, Dave’s 54-year-old fourth-generation grandson, described the return as a “spiritual restoration.” Baker, whose first two children’s books explore black history, said the family felt a dual sense of pride and sadness. He noted that many black families struggle to trace their ancestors after a few generations. Restoring Dave’s work gave them back a part of themselves.
After the museum returned the pots to the family, they sold one of them so people could continue to learn from Dave’s legacy. The other is leased to the museum, at least temporarily. The State Department in Boston said it would not disclose the amount it paid.
“We don’t want to hide them in our house. We want others to be inspired by that,” Baker said. “We want people to know that this person, Dave the Potter, who was told he was just a tool to be used, realized that he had humanity. He deserved to have his name written on his pots. He deserved to write poetry. He deserved to know who he was.”
While working in the pottery yards in the South Carolina heat, Dave etched his name next to the date — July 12, 1834 — on a pottery jar that his owner would sell and use to store pork and beef rations for enslaved people like him throughout the region.
He also engraved the jar, which likely ended up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, with the passage:
“Put it all in between / Surely this jar will hold 14” to define the 14-gallon capacity of the jar.
The vessel was the first of hundreds, if not thousands, of stone jugs and jars that Dave made along with other enslaved potters over 50 years before and during the Civil War.
Much of Dave’s poetry followed Christian themes. As he grew older, he wrote more and explored themes related to his enslavement. One of his most resonant poems was engraved in a jar he produced in 1857, a time when scholars believe Dave and his family were separated after being sold to different slave owners.
“I wonder where my relationship/friendship is with everyone – and every nation”
Several of Drake’s grandchildren said they felt particularly moved by Dave’s question about his relationships — and that their compensation felt like Dave’s question had finally been answered.
It is not clear what happened to the tractor after Dave’s death. Purchased by the Foreign Office in 1997 from an art dealer. Ethan Lasser, head of the Art of the Americas Division at the State Department in Boston, said he believes these paintings mostly survived “benign neglect” in South Carolina because they were large and difficult to move or break.
The State Department has at least two Drake jars, the “Poem Jar” and the “Signature Jar,” both from 1857.
The urn that Drake’s descendants sold back to the museum is similar to the 1857 jar in which Dave asks about his relationships because it uses first-person language that indicates ownership — which is what makes it particularly powerful, Lasser said.
“Think of this as an enslaved person, speaking in the first person and claiming authorship,” Lasser said.
Dave says in the poem:
“I made this jar = cash-/despite its name = money-trash.”
On more than one bowl, Dave writes “and Mark” next to his name, suggesting that he worked on the piece with another enslaved worker. Oral history suggests that Dave was disabled after losing his leg, although it is unclear how, and he may have needed assistance with his ceramic work later in life.
His last surviving urn, made as the Civil War raged in 1862, reads: “I made this urn, all cross / If you don’t repent, you’re lost.”
Researchers believe that Drake died sometime in the 1870s after gaining his freedom in the Civil War. It was counted in the 1870 census, but not in the 1880 census.
For Drake’s descendants, confronting Dave’s work was both poignant and difficult — a collision of pride in his art and sadness over the conditions in which he lived.
Yaba Baker, who has a 17-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son, said the experience gave his family something they had never had before: a traceable connection.
“I was able to turn to my son and say: This is your lineage. Not only was Dave the Potter a great artist, he resisted oppressive laws, even though he could have been killed for it. “That’s where I come from. Before, we didn’t have that connection.”
Yaba Baker said he often thinks about the pain Dave might have felt if, as some historians speculate, the poems on his urns were attempts to refer to family members who were sold from him — a common trauma of slavery.
“I can’t imagine not knowing where my kids are,” Baker said. “Completing that circle is very emotional for me.”
For his mother, Pauline Baker, discovering Dave’s story filled a void that many black families know intimately.
“If you’re not African American, you don’t understand the missing links in your history,” she said. “When you find a connection, it becomes very personal.” You examine his life—the heat, the work, the loss of a limb—and wonder how he managed to achieve such precision and focus. “He wouldn’t let them enslave his mind,” said Baker, 78, a retired speech pathologist who worked for three decades in public schools in Washington, D.C.
Since the MFA agreement was announced, the family has heard from museums and private collectors who hold Dave’s works and want to discuss what ethical compensation would look like for them as well.
Daisy Whitner said she felt the presence of her ancestors every time she put her hand inside the jar.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “The outside is beautiful, but when you think about what he went through—from sunrise to sunset, in the South Carolina heat, on one leg—this poor enslaved man had no say in working hard for nothing.”