New book celebrates the life and work of 19th-century enslaved potter and poet

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Poet Kent Foreman — once called the “elder statesman of the spoken word” by the Chicago Tribune — had a profound influence on his daughter, Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and professor of African American studies and history at Penn State and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. When her father died in 2010, Foreman honored his memory by embarking on a decade-long creative endeavor that culminated in her recently released edited volume, “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake” (University of Georgia Press).

“When my father passed away, I started working with artists and dancers to fill the void of his enormous intellectual and creative and cultural energy,” Foreman said. “I decided to say ‘yes’ to anything that had to do with poetry that intersected with the 19th century, which is my area of specialty.”

Foreman’s “yes” turned into a multi-layered collaboration with internationally renowned dance educator Lynnette Young Overby, award-winning poet Glenis Redmond, and the famous painter Jonathan Green, as well as with other choreographers, composers, dancers, artists and musicians, to commemorate the life and work of David Drake and showcase the work of people who “claim him as an artistic and cultural ancestor.”

David Drake, likely born in 1801, was an enslaved South Carolina potter who often penned couplets and verses on some of his pots, signing his work as “Dave” in large letters at a time when literacy was outlawed for those enslaved in the state. “His pots served as his pages,” Foreman said.

Today, Drake’s pots — among the largest turned stoneware vessels of the nineteenth century, some as large as 40 gallons — are on display in prominent museums across the country, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

Though widely recognized as a master potter during his lifetime, Drake was neither granted his freedom nor permitted to buy it until after the Civil War.

“Being in charge of your own money and therefore your own destiny were illegal for enslaved people in South Carolina, but those laws were countermanded by his enslavers as a novelty,” Foreman said. “He would write on his pots with the permission and probably the encouragement of the people who claimed his life and his wares as their own and sold them for their own capital production.”

Drake’s work began to enjoy national prominence after a 1998 exhibition researched and curated by the late Jill Beute Koverman, chief curator at the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina. Titled "I made this jar: The Life and Works of the Enslaved African American Potter, Dave,” the exhibit sparked interest in Drake’s pottery and inspired several books. In “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter,” Foreman, Redmond and Young go beyond writing “about” Drake to writing “for” him — praising him through essays, interviews, poems, paintings, performance and photos.

The book features a Drake-inspired series of paintings called “Sir Dave” by the renowned painter Jonathan Green, a 20-poem cycle by Greenville, South Carolina poet laureate Glenis Redmond; and photos of a musical stage performance produced by the artistic director Lynnette Young Overby who oversaw a 10-year collaboration that included performances on The Three Harriets (Tubman, Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson), the Colored Conventions (political meetings held in the U.S. and Canada by African Americans from the 1830s until after the Civil War), and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (an 1800s American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher and lawyer), who are also subjects of Foreman’s scholarship. With music composed by Ralph Russell, the shows were performed in venues around the country. Foreman was able to tour with “this amazing group of young people, community members and professionals who were involved in the dance production.”

The book also includes the most complete rendition of Drake’s verses, transcribed as closely as possible to the way Drake wrote them on the pots themselves, with “dashes, slashes, capitalization, apostrophes and other stray marks he incised on the vessels he made.” Foreman and her collaborators spent two years acquiring photographs from museums and speaking with curators in order to correct the various renditions of the couplets that were circulating on the internet and in books of poetry.

"David Drake is important because he's a multi-faceted artist and artisan. Though he has been recognized as a master potter, this book recognizes him as an overlooked poet, indeed, as one of the progenitors of Black American poetry,” Foreman said. “It is important to understand the complexity of Black creativity and the ways in which Black people and all people continue to create — to be fully human — under circumstances that are explicitly structured to quash their humanity.”

“The Black literary tradition is just beginning to recognize David Drake as a literary ancestor,” Foreman continued. “It is important to understand Black culture, Black intellectual interventions, and Black political commentary as central to Black life, Black expressivity and Black survival in a country that never meant us to survive or express ourselves fully.”

Foreman said “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter” is both an academic volume and a coffee table book to be enjoyed by any interested reader. “It has been a real pleasure to be working on Drake for the last ten years and to have it come to fruition in a book that we can share with so many,” she said, adding that his legacy has deep, personal meaning for her.

“All of us deal with loss and mourning, and this collaboration for me was born out of the ashes of loss and mourning for my father," she said. "When you lean into the things you love about the people you’ve lost, you too can be involved in an incredible amount of joy and creativity and collaboration to honor their memory. And the depth of that loss, the shape and contour of that absence, can be filled with an energy that contributes to a larger community in ways that keep their memory alive. ‘Praise Songs’ is a story of personal resurrection that accompanies the historical resurrection at the center of this book. There are ways we can keep those we have lost with us.”