In the 1909 edition of The Pottery and Porcelain of the United States, Edwin Atlee Barber recounted his conversations with South Carolina, planter Colonel Thomas Davies.[5] The latter owned the Palmetto Fire Brick Works, a pottery in the town of Bath, then part of the Old Edgefield District. Davies recalled that in 1862 local slaves made “homely designs in coarse pottery” including “weird-looking water jugs, roughly modeled on the front in the form of a grotesque human face,—evidently intended to portray the African features” (figs. 4-6). He also noted that face vessels were not made in secret and that the white population in nineteenth-century South Carolina derisively regarded them as having African precedents:
These curious objects, which I have seen in several collections, labelled “Native Pottery made in Africa,” possess considerable interest as representing an art of the Southern negroes, uninfluenced by civilization, and we can readily believe that the modelling reveals a trace of aboriginal art as formerly practised by the ancestors of the makers in the Dark Continent.[6]
Aside from Barber’s interview, nothing of substance was published on Edgefield face jugs until the early 1980s, when they captured the attention of Robert Farris Thompson, a prominent art historian at Yale University and an authority on Yoruba art and the African diaspora. In his book The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds and essay “African Influence on the Art of the United States,” Thompson cautioned readers not to ignore the distinctive cultural context in which the makers of face vessels worked or the possibility that African traditions influenced their work—an oversight that continues to constrict a fuller understanding of those ceramic forms. He described the potteries’ dependence on slave labor, pointing out that African-Americans were responsible for much of Edgefield’s production, and attributed face vessels to three anonymous potters: the Master of the Davies Pottery; the Master of the Diagonal Teeth; and the Master of the Louis Miles Pottery. In sum, early Edgefield face vessels were not the creation of a single potter but rather an artistic concept based on a shared background and belief system among certain makers and users.
Much of Thompson’s work centered on slave potters that originally came from the Kingdom of Kongo (Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, and Angola) and on visual relationships between Edgefield face jugs and Bakongo wooden figures, which were often made with additional materials including different clays, mirror fragments, and cowrie shells, and, in the case of certain forms, augmented with nails, bones, teeth, bells, and other objects applied during the course of use (figs. 7-8).[7] Thompson noted that the use of kaolin to make the eyes of Edgefield vessels white relates to the ancient northern-Kongo practice of “inserting porcelain fragments within the eye sockets of carved human figures”[8] as well as to West African figural carvings, which occasionally have cowrie shells representing eyes. The use of white or reflective materials in that context facilitated and reflected spiritual possession, what Thompson describes as the “flash of the spirit”:
The vital spark or soul within the spirit-embodying medicine may be, according to the Bakongo, an ancestor come back from the dead to serve the owner of the charm, or a victim of witchcraft, captured in the charm by its owner and forced to do its bidding for the good of the community (if the owner is generous or responsible) or for selfish ends (if he is not).[9]
One class of object Thompson singled out for comparison with Edgefield face jugs are minkisi (zinkisi south of the Kingdom of the Kongo; sing. nkisi), horns, shells, gourds, bundles, ceramic vessels, figures, or other objects infused with the powers of dead spirits (fig. 9). Kaolin and red ochre were important in the composition of some minkisi since the white color of kaolin was associated with the dead (fig. 10) and red ochre was associated with “blood and danger because the dead have the power to both afflict and cure the living.”[10] About 1900, Mu-Kongo Nsemi Ikaki defined a nkisi as:
[t]he name of the thing we use to help a person when that person is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicines combined together. . . . Thus an nkisi is also something that hunts down illness and chases it away from the body. An nkisi is also a chosen companion, in whom all people find confidence. It is a hiding place for people’s souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life.[11]
