AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 186 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com thought to have been produced at three Edgefield potteries, owned, respectively, by Thomas Davies, Lewis Miles, and Miles’ brother-in-law Benjamin Franklin “B. F.” Landrum. It has also been proposed that the maker of the face cup illustrated, and the inspiration for the larger body of wares produced at the three sites, came from the illegal slave ship Wanderer . The story of the Wanderer excited considerable attention in its own day and continues to be a focus of extensive research. The swift-sailing vessel with ties to the New York Yacht Club was commissioned by the New Orleans sugar magnate Colonel John D. Johnson in 1857, and promptly resold to William C. Corrie of Charleston. Corrie subsequently partnered with Charles A. L. Lamar of Savannah in a scheme to refashion the yacht as an illegal slave ship. Fifty years after the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, the Wanderer arrived in West Africa, where it was met and outfitted for a contracted five hundred slaves by the agent of a New York illegal slave-trading firm. Returning to Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November 1858, it regrouped the surviving 409 of 487 men, women, and children for further transfer and sale. An estimated 170 of the captives were brought up the Savannah River to the mouth of Horse Creek on the steamboat Augusta . Twenty-three were purchased by Thomas Davies. Among them was a Kakongo-speaking captive named Tahro—subsequently named Romeo Thomas—who was born in the village of Kuluwäka in the Kingdom of Kongo. To date, Tahro is credited with being a master turner at Davies’ pottery and the possible maker of, or inspiration for, VMFA’s face cup. These modest forms provide a lens on the life and personality of two enslaved potters. Equally compelling is their shared experience as master potters in a single community. Recent scholarship points to the possibility of their reciprocal influence in the form of a monumental face jar attributed to David Drake and an Edgefield pot by an unidentified maker that is inscribed in what appears to be Kongo script. Storied clay indeed. 1 Susan J. Rawles is associate curator of American painting and decorative art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 1. There is considerable scholarship on David Drake, including Cinda K. Baldwin, Great and Noble Jar: Traditional Stoneware of South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). The unattributed pot is in the Chipstone Collection. For an overview of the historiography of Edgefield District face wares, and the notation about the Kongo- inscribed pot, see Claudia Arzeno Mooney, April L. Hynes, and Mark M. Newell, “African-American Face Vessels: History and Ritual in 19th-Century Edgefield,” Ceramics in America 2013 , ed. Robert Hunter (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation, 2014), available online at http://www.chipstone.org. Info rmation about the slave ship Wanderer can be found on the Jekyll Island website and in contemporary newspaper accounts. Fig. 2 : Face cup, Unidentified artist, possibly Tahro (Romeo Thomas), ca. 1862. Palmetto Fire Brick Works, Edgefield District, S.C. Stoneware, alkaline glaze. VMFA; Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment (2016.5).