In the 1830s, in a pottery workshop in Edgefield, South Carolina, a man did something that could have gotten him killed. He signed his work. Not with a hidden mark or secret symbol, but boldly—Dave—carved into wet clay for anyone to see.

David Drake was enslaved. South Carolina law made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read or write. Yet Dave not only signed his massive storage jars, he inscribed them with poetry. Lines about time, about wonder, and sometimes—if you knew how to listen—about freedom. His vessels, some large enough to hold forty gallons, now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But their true value lies in what they tell us about resistance, creativity, and the unquenchable human need to say I was here.

The 1740 Negro Act made teaching enslaved people to write punishable by fine. After the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy, enforcement grew brutal. Literacy meant access to newspapers, to abolitionist pamphlets, to the power of communication that slaveholders feared most. In this context, every stroke Dave carved into clay was a crime.

Yet there it was—Dave—sometimes with dates, sometimes with the name of his current owner, but always unmistakably his. He didn't hide in anonymity like most enslaved craftspeople. He claimed authorship. Pottery experts have identified over 170 signed vessels spanning thirty years of production. Each signature was a small rebellion, a refusal to be property without a name.

What makes this more remarkable is that Dave's owners apparently tolerated it. Perhaps they valued his skill too much to stop him—his enormous jars were engineering marvels, requiring expertise few potters possessed. Perhaps they didn't fully grasp the defiance embedded in each carved letter. Or perhaps, in the strange intimacies of slavery, something more complicated was at work. Whatever the reason, Dave kept signing. Kept writing. Kept being.

Takeaway

Sometimes the most radical act isn't grand rebellion but quiet insistence on your own existence—claiming space for yourself even when the world says you have no right to it.

Starting around 1834, Dave began adding poetry to his signatures. These weren't random musings—they were carefully crafted couplets that operated on multiple levels. I made this jar for cash / though it's called lucre trash reads like humble self-deprecation. But look closer: an enslaved man commenting on cash and commerce, on the value of labor, on who profits from whose work.

Other verses seem almost impossibly bold. I wonder where is all my relations / friendship to all—and every nation appeared on a jar in 1857, just four years before the Civil War. The separation of enslaved families was slavery's cruelest feature. Dave put that grief into clay, then fired it permanent. His call for friendship to 'every nation' echoes abolitionist language that would have been seditious to speak aloud.

Some scholars read Dave's verses as encoded messages for other enslaved people, part of a tradition of hidden communication that ran through spirituals and folk tales. Others see them as sly commentary for the white customers who bought his jars, meanings hiding in plain sight. Probably both are true. Dave was a man navigating impossible circumstances with extraordinary intelligence, and his poetry carried whatever meanings he needed it to carry—and whatever meanings we need it to carry still.

Takeaway

Oppression rarely silences creativity—it transforms it. When direct speech is dangerous, art becomes the vessel for truths that cannot be spoken plainly.

Dave's artistry wasn't just literary—it was technical. He mastered alkaline-glazed stoneware, a distinctly Southern ceramic tradition that used wood ash and clay to create durable, waterproof vessels. While English and German potters relied on salt glazes, Edgefield potters developed something unique. Dave became its greatest practitioner.

His jars were enormous, some holding forty gallons or more. Creating vessels this size required sophisticated understanding of clay chemistry, kiln temperatures, and structural engineering. The walls had to be thick enough to support the weight but not so thick they'd crack in the kiln. Dave threw these massive pieces on a wheel, building them in sections, each join invisible in the finished work. Contemporary potters struggle to replicate his achievements.

The irony cuts deep: an enslaved man, legally forbidden from literacy, created works of such technical sophistication that museums now compete to acquire them. His pottery was functional—these jars stored meat, preserved vegetables, held the provisions of Southern plantations. But they were also beautiful, and they bore the mark of their maker. Dave proved that excellence can flourish even in bondage, that skill and creativity cannot be owned no matter what the law pretends.

Takeaway

Mastery speaks its own kind of freedom. When Dave's hands shaped clay into forms no one else could achieve, he demonstrated a sovereignty that no bill of sale could diminish.

David Drake died around 1870, just years after emancipation. By then he'd spent decades encoding his humanity into clay, creating a body of work that wouldn't be fully appreciated for another century. Today his jars command prices that would have bought his freedom many times over—a bitter irony he might have appreciated.

But the money misses the point. What Dave left us is something more valuable: evidence of an indomitable spirit, proof that creativity and dignity persist even under the worst conditions. Every signed jar, every carved couplet, says what he needed the world to know. I was here. I made this. I was somebody.