Descendants obtain works of enslaved potter in landmark restitution deal

BOSTON (AP) — Inside the wide mouth of a stoneware jar, Daisy Whitner’s fingertips found a slight rise in the clay — a mark she hoped was a trace left behind by her ancestor, an enslaved potter who shaped the vessel nearly 175 years ago in South Carolina.

Standing in the gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston last week, Whitner said she felt a quiet connection to her ancestor, David Drake, in that moment.

“I was telling the kids, ’Inside this jar, I’m sure I’m feeling his tears, sweat drops off his face, his arms,’” said 86-year-old Whitner, a Washington, D.C., resident and a retired account manager for The Washington Post.

The jar is one of two returned to Drake’s family as part of a historic agreement this month between Drake’s descendants and the MFA Boston, one of the institutions that holds pieces of his work.

The vessels are among hundreds of surviving works by “Dave the Potter,” an enslaved man who labored in the alkaline-glazed stoneware potteries of Edgefield, South Carolina, in the decades before and during the Civil War. Dave signed many of his jars — and inscribed some with rhyming couplets — an extraordinary and unparalleled assertion of identity and authorship during a time when literacy for enslaved people was criminalized.

The agreement represents what experts say is the first major case of art restitution involving works created by an enslaved person in the U.S. — a process traditionally associated with families seeking the return of art looted by the Nazis in World War II.

It’s also rare: as enslaved people were denied legal personhood and documentation, tracing the ownership or lineage of their works is often impossible.

Children’s book author Yaba Baker, Dave’s 54-year-old fourth-generation grandson, called the return “a spiritual restoration.” Baker, whose first two children’s books explore Black history, said the family felt a dual sense of pride and grief. Many Black families, he noted, struggle to trace their ancestry past a few generations; recovering Dave’s work gave them back a piece of themselves.

After the museum returned the pots to the family, they sold one back so people can continue to learn from Dave’s legacy. The other is on lease to the museum, at least temporarily. The MFA Boston said it wouldn’t disclose how much it paid.

“We don’t want to hide them away in our house. We want other people to be inspired by it,” Baker said. “We want people to know that this person, Dave the Potter, who was told he was nothing but a tool to be used, realized he had humanity. He deserved his own name on his pots. He deserved to write poetry. He deserved to know who he was.”

David Drake

Laboring in the pottery yards in the South Carolina heat, Dave etched his name next to the date — July 12, 1834 — on a clay jar that would be sold by his owner and used to store pork and beef rations for enslaved people like him across the region.

He also inscribed the jar, which would likely end up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, with the couplet:

“Put every bit all between / Surely this jar will hold 14” to mark the jar’s 14-gallon capacity.

The vessel was the first of hundreds, if not thousands, of stoneware jugs and jars made by Dave alongside other enslaved potters over 50 years before and during the Civil War.

Much of Dave’s poetry followed Christian themes. As he aged, he wrote more and explored themes related to his enslavement. One of his most resonant poems was etched into a jar he produced in 1857, around the time scholars believe Dave and his family were separated after being sold to different slave owners.

“I wonder where is all my relation / friendship to all – and every nation”

Multiple Drake descendants said they felt especially moved by Dave’s question about his relations — and that their restitution felt like Dave’s question was finally answered.

Claiming authorship

It’s unclear what became of the jars after Dave died. The MFA purchased them in 1997 from an art dealer. MFA Boston’s Art of the Americas Chair Ethan Lasser said he thinks they survived mostly from pure “benign neglect” in South Carolina because they were large and difficult to transport or break.

The MFA has two Drake pots, a “Poem Jar” and a “Signed Jar,” both from 1857.

The jar the Drake descendants sold back to the museum is similar to the 1857 pot on which Dave asks about his relations because he uses first-person language that suggests ownership — something that makes it especially powerful, Lasser said.

“Think of this as an enslaved person, speaking in the first person claiming authorship,” Lasser said.

In the poem, Dave writes:

“I made this Jar = cash – / though its called = lucre Trash”.

On more than one pot, Dave writes “and Mark” next to his own name, suggesting he worked on the piece with another enslaved laborer. Oral histories indicate that Dave was disabled after losing a leg, although it’s unclear how, and may have needed help with his ceramic work later in life.

His last surviving jar, made as the Civil War raged on in 1862, reads: “I made this Jar, all of cross / If you don’t repent, you will be lost”.

Researchers believe Drake died sometime in the 1870s after gaining his freedom in the Civil War. He is accounted for in the 1870 census, but not in the 1880 census.

For the Drake descendants, encountering Dave’s work has been both moving and difficult — a collision of pride in his artistry and grief for the conditions in which he lived.

Yaba Baker, who has a 17-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son, said the experience gave his family something they had never had before: a traceable link.

“I was able to turn to my son and say, ‘This is your lineage.’ Dave the Potter was not only a great artist — he resisted oppressive laws, even though he could have been killed for it,” he said. “That’s what you come from. Before, we didn’t have that link.”

Yaba Baker said he often thinks about the anguish Dave may have felt if, as some historians speculate, the poems on his jars were attempts to signal to family members sold away from him — a common trauma of slavery.

“I can’t imagine not knowing where my own kids are,” Baker said. “Completing that circle is very moving for me.”

For his mother, Pauline Baker, discovering Dave’s story filled a void 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 do find a connection, it becomes very personal.” She studies his life — the heat, the labor, the loss of a limb — and wonders how he managed such precision and focus. “He did not allow them to enslave his mind,” said Baker, 78, a retired speech pathologist who worked for three decades in Washington, D.C., public schools.

Since the MFA agreement was announced, the family has heard from museums and private collectors who hold Dave’s work and want to discuss what ethical restitution might look like for them as well.

Daisy Whitner said she felt her ancestor’s presence each time she slid her hand inside the jar.

“It broke my heart,” she said. “The outside is beautiful, but when you think about what he went through — sunup to sundown, in that South Carolina heat, on one leg — this poor man in bondage had no say in working so hard for nothing.”