Thomas Commeraw: the Black 19th-century potter who historians assumed was white
For Margi Hofer of the New-York Historical Society (NYHS), the fate of potter Thomas Commeraw – long presumed white but later proven to be Black – speaks volumes about how we look at race and history. “I hope the story of Commeraw’s identity is a cautionary tale to not make assumptions about identity when we look at objects from the past,” she said.
Although Commeraw’s pottery had been celebrated for well over a century by institutions like the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Grolier Club, it was only in 2010 that scholar Brandt Zipp revealed he was Black. Until that point Commeraw had been presumed to be a white man, as were most of the potters of the era. “When it came to light in 2010 that he was a Black craftsman, I was blown away,” said Hofer. “I knew it was a perfect exhibition for the NYHS.”
Hofer’s vision has now taken shape as Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W Commeraw, on display at the NYHS through 28 May. “I wanted to specifically bring attention to Commeraw’s work and life – that’s long overdue,” she said. “I also hope this will inspire curators and collectors to look more closely and take more notice of these hidden stories – I’m sure there are many more uncredited craftspeople in New York.”
Offering a fascinating look at a bygone art, the show is a delight for ceramicists, who can enjoy about 40 pieces made by Commeraw and his contemporaries. It’s the single largest exhibition of Commeraw’s output since his workshop closed in 1819. “It’s quite moving for anyone who knows the story to see all these pieces together”, said Hofer, “to really trace the arc of his professional career.”
One distinctive aspect of Commeraw’s pottery was the extreme care that he dedicated to his pots, in spite of them essentially being “the Tupperware of the time”. He was among the first potters to put his name on his vessels, and he set himself apart by using exuberant neoclassical flourishes not common in the pottery traditions of the time.
As Hofer put it, Commeraw’s innovations were a sign that he could not rely on the privileges taken for granted by white ceramicists. “He wanted to ensure customer loyalty, and I think it’s another sign of the pride that he took in his business, which was probably hard-won. He’s got more motivation than most of his competitors, who had inherited their business from their families. Most of his competitors were from multigenerational pottery families, reaping the benefits of generational wealth and knowledge, whereas he’s starting from scratch.”
Crafting Freedom is also a rare and fascinating look into the racial tensions of a period when large numbers of enslaved individuals were suddenly made free. Commeraw’s story is typical of many of the period, as, like many of his contemporaries, he was born enslaved and then manumitted – for Commeraw this happened in 1779, when he was about seven years old. Commeraw’s freedom came as part of a wave of emancipation via legislation and individual acts by slaveholders undertaken at the time in response to the ideals of the American Revolution.
As Hofer explained, the show documents efforts to maintain control over the newly freed Black population via discriminatory practices. For instance, although freed Black men had exercised the right to vote since the establishment of the United States of America, in 1811 New York worked to suppress the Black vote by enacting legislation that forced Black men to make their way through a cumbersome process in order to retain their right to vote.
“Among other things, Black people needed a certificate of freedom to vote”, said Hofer, “and that was not easy to obtain. They had to pay fees to various officials, and it also required an affidavit, basically a witness [testifying] that ‘I’ve known this individual and can attest that he’s a free man.’” Crafting Freedom exhibits such an affidavit signed by Commeraw, an example of the potter “marshaling his literacy to support his fellow freed Black people”. As Hofer shared, Commeraw defined himself as a fervent abolitionist who powerfully contributed to the political debates of the time, and who went on to attempt to found a free Black nation.
Crafting Freedom documents the fateful efforts by Commeraw and others to establish a liberated colony in Sierra Leone. “With the increasing numbers of freed Black people”, said Hofer, “there was increasing discrimination, and the Black community began wondering if it was better to stay in the US or to go elsewhere.”
In hopes of a better life outside of the US, Commeraw, his wife, his three children and members of their ex
tended family made the arduous journey to Sierra Leone on the first voyage of the American Colonization Society, but their efforts met with disaster. Malaria decimated the ranks of settlers, including Commeraw’s wife and a niece, and infighting and disorganization doomed the expedition. “Commeraw came back in 1822 and died the following year,” said Hofer. “He never resumed the trade of a potter and pretty much died a broken man. It’s a very dramatic and tragic end to his life.” Hofer added that Crafting Freedom exhibits two very poignant letters from Commeraw’s journey – one, from early on, painting a very optimistic picture, and a second from later describing the chaos and terrible reality of that voyage.
One of the morals of Crafting Freedom is that history continues to speak to us through the years, no matter how forgotten or seemingly insignificant it may be. Hofer shared that in order to help celebrate the opening of her exhibit, she made efforts to invite any living relatives of Commeraw. “I was determined to see how far I could get in his family tree to find living descendants. I did end up connecting with one such person, a great-great-great-grandson who lives in Florida.”
Although that relative was confined to a nursing home and could not come, Hofer shared that many of his family members did attend the opening. “It was a really moving and emotional event,” she said. “They were so thrilled to learn about this ancestor that they knew nothing about. It really underscores the humanity of this undertaking.” That more than anything indicates the great value of Crafting Freedom, its ability to bring humanity and vitality to the freed Black individuals who struggled to build their own version of freedom in the fledgling American republic – and the inspirational potter who was a community pillar, a vibrant businessman and a visionary artist.
Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W Commeraw is on display at the NewYork Historical Society until 28 May
man who “kept his life straight as a single issue”, which, for me, sums up the dedication (and reduced options) of such people.
2. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier CercasThis magnificent “true tale” follows a stalled novelist who becomes obsessed in the 1990s with the story of the falangist writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas and his escape from a Republican firing squad, thanks to a Republican soldier who spared his life. It’s a quest through archival scraps and oral history, one that demonstrates how our histories and legends are an accumulation of stories. It may start with Mazas, but the narrator’s encounter with Miralles, a forgotten Republican militiaman who went on to fight fascism in the second world war, forms the heart of the novel – and reminds us that injustices live on in the way different individuals and accounts are memorialised.
3. A Death in Zamora by Ramón Sender BarayónWhen the war broke out, the acclaimed writer Ramón Sender left his family to join the Republicans. His wife, Amparo Barayón, headed for her home town of Zamora, expecting to find a refuge there despite the fact that it was in rebel hands. Instead, she was imprisoned and executed. A Death in Zamora narrates Sender Barayón’s attempts to piece together the story of his mother’s fate. Incredibly moving, it deals sensitively with the difficulties of seeking out the truth in communities where victims and perpetrators have long lived side by side and is a powerful reminder that trauma can last for generations.
4. A Stricken Field by Martha GellhornWhen Ernest Hemingway settled down to write For Whom the Bells Tolls there was another writer in the house with him, also trying to write a novel about Spain. Except that, for Gellhorn, everything about her experiences there was still “too close” to translate into fiction. Instead, using “the emotions of Spain”, she wrote this bleak, protesting novel about an American journalist unable to save refugees in Czechoslovakia as the German army moves in.
5. Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by James YatesYates was born in Mississippi and was active in radical politics in Chicago and New York before volunteering for the International Brigades. He crossed the Pyrenees on foot in early 1937 and drove a truck for the Republican forces during some of its bloodiest battles, often coming under fire himself. His hugely readable memoir provides an example of the psychological significance that fighting in Spain could have for people with disempowering experiences of prejudice at home. Volunteering there was, he writes, “the chance to fight back for once in my life”.
6. Nada by Carmen LaforetPublished in 1945, Nada (Nothing) follows 18-year-old Andrea after she moves to her grandmother’s apartment in Barcelona to pursue a university degree. The family has fallen on hard times and the apartment is crammed with relatives who are routinely cruel to each other. Around the edges of everything that goes unsaid in the novel’s pages, the terrible legacy of the war simmers. This is a Spain in which rage and despair have been driven underground, erupting in the only possible place: within the home. Unable to sleep after a family disaster, Andrea lies in bed, “collecting all the griefs that swarmed, as alive as worms, in the entrails of the house”.
7. The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo
BareaThe romance surrounding the war can obscure the fact that it was, like any war, sometimes absurd, undignified and, most of all, a tragedy for the millions of Spaniards who never had a choice about whether to involve themselves. Barea ran the Republican foreign press and censorship office in Madrid. His mammoth autobiography puts the war into the context of Spanish politics and society over a lifetime, and is a valuable counterbalance to the accounts left by foreign journalists, who did not, as he put it, “suffer the civil war in [their] own flesh as I did”.
8. Only for Three Months by Adrian BellIn 1937, in the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica, the British government very reluctantly accepted the single largest arrival of refugees to this country so far and the first to consist almost entirely of children. Almost 4,000 from the Basque Country crossed the Bay of Biscay in a storm and found themselves housed in a hastily arranged field of tents near Southampton. Bell’s 1996 history assembles many of their voices. Some remember kind and welcoming strangers; others cold, disarray and unbearable anxiety about their families. “There are some things we have forgotten,” one of Bell’s interviewees told him, “and some things we have deliberately forgotten”.
9. Never More Alive: Inside the Spanish Republic by Kate ManganMangan’s dogged search for her German lover, Jan Kurzke, after he volunteered in the International Brigades slightly overshadows her memoir of working for the Republican press office (which comes with an introduction by the eminent historian Paul Preston), but hers is a refreshingly humorous and unromantic account, which cuts many a literary celebrity down to size. WH Auden, for instance, proves too timid to impress anyone, while the hefty Ernest Hemingway merely looks, to Mangan, “like a successful businessman”.
10. In Diamond Square by Mercè RodoredaRodoreda worked for the Generalitat of Catalonia during the war and later went into exile. A classic of Catalan literature, her extraordinary novel is narrated by Natalia, whose family suffers unthinkable deprivation when her husband leaves for the front and conditions in the Republican zone deteriorate. Natalia’s voice – stark, naive, despairing – speaks for the leftbehind and of one mother’s no-choice tenacity. Her matter-of-fact narration does not conceal the horror. “Obviously, they weren’t like they were before the war,” she writes of her starving children, “but they were still beautiful enough.”
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sholm said: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
Chisholm doesn’t get a mention in African Queens, and in general it lacks context or deeper analysis beyond the straight recounting of Njinga’s biography. We’re told in passing that Ndongo was “a very sophisticated society”, but don’t get much detail of daily life to chew on beyond some intriguingly scattered crumbs. (Male concubines, you say? Interesting …) It also seems a shame to secure the participation of academic luminaries such as
Prof Olivette Otele – vice-president of the Royal Historical Society and chair of Bristol’s Race Equality Commission – then have her recite a list of facts in chronological order. That, surely, is a job for Pinkett Smith.
This lack of star power is felt most keenly whenever African Queens starts flagging – as history lectures are wont to, around the 20-minute mark. When Samuel L Jackson made the BBC documentary Enslaved, he traced his own family tree back to Gabon. Lupita Nyong’o’s activist credentials may have taken a hit when she signed with De Beers diamonds, but Channel 4’s Warrior
Women, in which she sought out the real-life equivalent of Black Panther’s Dora Milaje female soldiers, remains a genre high point. Surely Pinkett Smith could have given African Queens a more personal touch? If a story’s worth telling, it’s worth telling properly.