This book provides a critical introduction to David Drake, or Dave the Potter, an enslaved pottery maker and author of inscribed verses and couplets, who lived and worked in Edgefield, South Carolina, from the 1830s until the Civil War period. Various scholars, artists, and historians in the present volume join together to interpret the meaning of a figure who signed the prodigious vessels he made with the single name “Dave.” Topics in the volume range from considerations of the production forces shaping Dave the Potter’s activity to a study of the West African traces of artistry and religion in the vessels. With contributions drawing on disciplines ranging from literary history, poetry and poetics, and African American phenomenology to archaeology and material culture studies, the collection provides an exhaustive assessment of the competing meanings of a range of topics in the multifaceted writing and wares of Dave the Potter: slavery and the self, notions of mastery and the thing, dates and the slave signature, themes of alienation, plenty, creativity, and unintelligibility. In their totality, the essays finally comment on the (in)accessibility of the slave past and the ethics of representing a slave who is also a nameable exception.