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Alison Stewart: This Is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Allison Stewart. A new exhibition at the New York Historical Society focuses on a Free Black Potter, who for almost 200 years was thought to have been white. Even though Thomas W. Commeraw was born enslaved around the time of the American Revolution, as an adult, he made his name as a potter who owned his own home and business in New York City. Commeraw's pottery was bought and shipped around the world. He was a master with his own distinct style. He weighed in on social and political issues at a consequences for free and enslaved Black people in the City.

Dozens of Commeraw's works are now on view as part of the Historical Society's exhibition called Crafting Freedom, the Life, and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw. It is up until May 28th. With me now as Allison Robinson, co-curator and Postdoctoral Fellow of Women's History and Public History at the New York Historical Society. Allison, welcome.

Allison Robinson: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is Sana Musasama, a Queen's based ceramic artist and activist who made three pieces for this show, inspired by Commeraw's work. Sana, nice to meet you.

Sana Musasama: Nice to meet you also.

Alison Stewart: Allison, when did you first hear about Commeraw and his legacy as a potter?

Allison Robinson: Well, in 2002, Brandt Zipp, who is a man who sells ceramics, broke groundbreaking news that Commeraw, who was long thought to have been white craft, was actually a free Black man. We know that he would have been one of the only Black potters in New York City and my country. I have to say, considering the fact that historians and scholars assumed Commeraw was white for well over a century, this shocked me as a young museum professional and certainly the larger scholarly community as well.

Alison Stewart: Sana as a ceramicist yourself, what were your thoughts when you learned more about this story?

Sana Musasama: There were many, many emotions around it, but it didn't really shock me that Thomas was Black and that it wasn't discovered. So many of us are artists that need to be excavated and our histories retold, so I wasn't surprised at that. What I was warmed up about is that I'd been looking at his pieces and collections and never knew who he was, and it was really wonderful to make that complete circle and look at the formed and connected to a person.

Alison Stewart: As a ceramicist, you said as you were looking at the collection as an artist and thinking about a fellow artist, what was it about the craftsmanship or about the composition of the pieces that spoke to you? What struck you?

Sana Musasama: Many things struck me. One of the things is I love the salt glazing, the texture of it. I had salt glazed my work 25, 30 years ago. It's a German technique, and we learned it in ceramic programs and in outdoor ceramic institutions so I love the pebble. We called it orange peel texture. I love the texture of the glaze on his pieces. It beads up in puddles. I also love the wood ash that is on the pieces and their atmospheric in that the salt doesn't permeate or cover the entire bodies, but covers it heavily in the shoulders and the lips of his pieces, which are so lush and so beautiful and so seductive.

Alison Stewart: Allison, let me bring you back into this conversation to get a little bit of history. Although Thomas Commeraw lived most of his life as a free man, he was born enslaved. What do we know about his background and the conditions of his childhood?

Allison Robinson: We know that Thomas Commeraw would've been born around 1771, just on the cusp of the American Revolution. He gained his freedom a couple of years later in the late 1770s as a boy along with his parents and his siblings. We are not sure how he made his way to New York City, but we do know that within a couple of decades, by 1792 was a young man who was married.

He had met a young woman by the name of Mary Roe who he married at Trinity Episcopal Church. By 1795, he was listed in the New York Directory as a potter. There's a lot of unknowns about his life, but we do know really shows a story that is relatable about a young man making his way through the world and eventually building his own business and making a life for himself too.

Alison Stewart: Everybody listening, New York is singing, "Where was he? Have I walked down the street where he did his work? Have I been near where his studio was?" Where was he working?

Allison Robinson: You absolutely have been walking where he was. He was first listed New York City Hall today, so I'm sure all of us have passed that point at some time. In the late 1790s, he moved to a neighborhood called Corlears Hook, just on the Lower East Side. It's really giving us a sense of how the pottery industry is moving in New York in the early 1800s, but also how this man was daring. He was on the cutting edge in terms of the location of his pottery, the designs that he was using, and was really making a name for himself as an entrepreneur.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Allison Robinson, co-curator and postdoctoral fellow of women's history and the public history at the New York Historical Society. Also in our conversation is Sana Musasama, a ceramic artist and activist. She has a few pieces in this show in conversation with Thomas Commeraw's work. I want to ask you about your pieces, Sana. There's three. One is titled Passage. Tell us a little bit about Passage.

Sana Musasama: Actually, they're all like siblings. Each one of them, as a ceramicist, we normally don't wake one piece. We make two and three because they're wonderful accidents that sometimes happen. When I began one piece, it gave birth to the next one and gave birth to the next one. When I looked, I had three of these pieces, and they all were echoing some of the things that I felt and saw in his work.

Alison Stewart: What were some of those things? What were some of those echoes?

Sana Musasama: As a Black American, I heard stories from my parents about the middle passage. What I was intrigued with is how he did the middle passage as a free person, and many of us, ancestors did it as enslaved or captured cargo. He decided, “This is not a land that I want to live in. I want to go to Africa.” He went to Sierra Leone, and Sierra Leone is where I went to study ceramics, so it struck a warm bell with me. The pieces are really talking about transition and moving and passage from one place to another.

He began here. He took the middle passage, five weeks. He went to Sierra Leone. He stayed a year or two, and then he came back. He came into hardship in Sierra Leone. All of them did. I came into blessings and gifts, so that's where we radically departure. I went for identity. He went also. He went for new meaning. Another opportunity. I went to discover who I could have been had I never left Africa.

Alison Stewart: Allison, there are dozens of pieces on view in this exhibition, and obviously they're quite old. Can you tell us more about the conservation and the restoration process for these pieces?

Allison Robinson: Absolutely. It's worth bringing up that stoneware is akin to Tupperware today. They are very, very hardy pieces. They're fired at a high temperature, and so they're nearly indestructible as well as being food safe. In terms of conservation, a lot of the process was, it entailed removing years of dirt and other things that tend to accumulate on utilitarian objects. In the process, by cleaning them, we discovered that, wow, they come in such a beautiful range of colors as well as forms. The blues, the cobalt blues that are used to decorate them really pop off and work, and we get a real feel for the creativity that Commeraw has used in order to make himself distinct within this industry.

Alison Stewart: As we mentioned, he was a free Black man in New York. Allison, what was the free Black community like in turn of the century in New York?

Allison Robinson: I cannot overstate how vibrant this community was. They were discussing a lot of the top political conversations of the day, whether it's voting rights and how to enact those. Whether it's the American slave trade and how the future of the slave trade and how to support newly free people. It's also one filled with religious celebrations, cultural celebrations. By the late 1820s, there’s even all Black Shakespeare [unintelligible 00:09:23]. It's really such a beautiful moment for Commeraw to come of age, start his business, and raise his family in New York.

Alison Stewart: Given this vibrant Black community and everything you've described, why for 200 years did people think Thomas Commeraw was white?

Allison Robinson: Part of it is that his name has been spelled at least 12 different ways in historical record. A fun part of the exhibition is the historians’ challenge of piecing together a life where so many of his contemporaries misspelled his last name. He was very much in the public- -eye, but it seems that individuals who recorded him in directories, on ship manifests, and in other spaces, couldn't fight fear and saw Commeraw. Thanks to the era of digitization and a lot of historical research, we've been able to piece together this really beautiful story.

Alison Stewart: The exhibition is at the New York Historical Society. It's called, Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw. It is on view through May 28th. My guests have been Allison Robinson, co-curator, and Sana Musasama, a ceramic artist and activist whose work you can see at the show as well. Thank you to both of you for being with us.

Allison Robinson: Thank you.

Sana Musasama: Thanks so much for having us.

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Alison Stewart: Thank you. Hey, team All Of It, we are about to go live in our event space with our February Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We've been reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Booker Prize, winning author, Marlon James. It's this incredible fantasy novel set in these fictionalized worlds, inspired by ancient African culture, history and folklore. The story follows a man named Tracker who's been hired to find a mysterious boy who's gone missing. As Tracker travels to different ancient cities, in his search, he encounters all kinds of peoples and creatures along the way. He's wondering, "Who is this boy? Why are so many people dedicated to keeping him hidden?"

It's the first in Marlon's Black Star trilogy. New Yorkers, you can still borrow your free e-copy. You may not finish by Friday, but that's okay because it is so fantastic you might want to join us to hear more about the story. This Friday, February 24th, we're hosting our live in-person event with Marlon James, and musical guest Brooklyn-based DJ producer, Tygapaw. Right now, here's a little preview of my conversation with Marlon about the novel to get you in the mood. I started by asking him when he knew he wanted to try his hand at writing fantasy.

Marlon James: I knew I wanted to go from actually before my previous novel, A Brief History came out. I didn't know it was a novel-- It's actually two answers. I knew I wanted to dive into African history is a different answer from I knew I wanted to write a novel about it. I knew I wanted to dive into African history because having written a lot of historical stuff, I can see what happens when a people know their mythologies. Even if they take it for granted, I know, I walk around the British and I go, "Yes, you’re still drunk on King Arthur.” It's cool, okay, at least you know who King Arthur is.

I can see. There are some people in this country who’re still drunk on Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. Then I thought, "I don't have that." It was that. It’s I think your mythology is your emotional history. I think your mythology is your legacy. I think your mythology is the world in which your people originally saw it. What happens when you grew up thinking ground-zero was a slave ship? I wanted to see something. I wanted it to connect with that mythology that I find at the core of every people, and that's what I did. It's reading it and going, "Man, this stuff is crazy," then it turned into a book.

Alison Stewart: How did you begin your world building? That's such an important part.

Marlon James: It's a mix between, one, using stuff that's already there, if you got a research. The great thing about doing a story set in an ancient Africa is that there are so many ancient Africas. I didn't even have to go for the usual trickery, so just reach for the pyramids. I didn't have to go about in the Sahara desert, because there's just so many fantastic cities, the great Zimbabwe, which people think was one fortress when it was around 100 different ones, different people in Sub-Saharan Africa, going back and looking at everybody from the Masaai, to the Ethiopian, which is a little about the Sahara Desert.

But not doing the usual thing, which is to try to find how much the West African history was. I wasn't interested in trying to write Western literature in Brown face. I look at what it actually was and then build something fantastical on top of that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Marlon James. The name of the book is Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It's our February Get Lit with All Of It selection with our partners at the New York Public Library. Tracker is this man who's been hired to find a boy that we learned at the very beginning of the book is now dead. I'm not giving anything away, but we learn more about the search, his life and past. Is Tracker a reliable narrator?

Marlon James: Man, I'm trying to think of how do I answer that question. Because the sequel is already out and the sequel is by a character who was the villain of the first book, and she's like, "Don't believe him, believe me." I will say that when I wrote Black Leopard, I believed him. When I wrote the sequel, I believed the character, I believe the Moon Witch. I think that's the thing. On reliability, remember the reliability is something I think the reader has to decide. I'm not going to tell them who to believe. When the third book comes out, they're going to have to fight over it. Largely because, when my grandfather and grandmother told stories that were closely linked to our African stories were, sometimes it was about the trickster. If it was a--

Alison Stewart: Anansi, yes.

Marlon James: And if Anansi is telling a story, you can't believe a word of it, but you want to hear all of it. I think I wanted that. I wanted the kind of characters who you may believe, you may not believe, but it's up to you. You're going to have to choose.

Alison Stewart: What is the political state of the world that you've created? Who's in charge?

Marlon James: The sad thing about the world that I created, it's not much different from the world now. It's people jockeying for power and people either trying to find diplomacy or force. One thing that was very important for me when I was writing Black Leopard is I could have done this like every other-- not every other, but lots of fantasy readers starts with a king, and the rebellious son who may or may not be queer, who's fighting for the throne and the daughter who really should get it, and so on. All of that actually does end up happening.

It was more important for me. I remember when I was plotting this, I had the kings and queens and filtered all the way down to the bottom of the page and I literally turned the page upside down and went, "Oh, there's a story. Let's start in the street. Let's start in the working class, serf subject who's at homes with unlikely heroes." These guys are mercenaries. They're hustlers, they're tricksters, they're people who grew up on the street. They're people who grew up in the far more agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies and said, "Let's write a story about them and how they change the whole sequence of events in the world."

Alison Stewart: Do you do that often? Do you do take something and invert it, or was it just in this particular--?

Marlon James: All the time. I've stopped believing that I think naturally. I don't think in a linear way, sometimes that is a problem, because then I'll think the story that I'm writing, that that's the beginning. I'll be so frustrated if it doesn't work, and I realize, no, it's not the beginning. I have never begun a novel at the beginning. I keep thinking it is, and all that does is it just clears the space. I'm like, "Oh, wait, it should be a hundred years earlier," or, "It needs to start next week, not this week."

Alison Stewart: When does that epiphany happen for you? Is that the kind of thing, are you eating breakfast, and it happens or--?

Marlon James: I'm like, "It should have happened earlier like at page 4 as opposed to page 60.” The worst for me was that it happened at page 500. I'm like, “Oh wait, this is not what I'm supposed to do." I just realized it's all part of the process. I have been lucky in that all the stuff I write end up being used anyway. I just can't think straight. I never start at the beginning. I start where the characters appear in my head and then if they want to tell me how they got here, then I get that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Marlon James. The book is Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It's our February Get Lit selection.

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If you enjoyed that conversation with Marlon James, we're still a few in-person tickets left. Head to wnyc.org/getlit, to reserve them for Friday's event. If you can't make it in-person, you can register to watch on the livestream. You'll get to hear the music of our guest, our music guest you're listening to right now, Tygapaw, a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based DJ and producer whose own work has been inspired by Marlon James' writing. Let's check it out.

Tygapaw: It's a bad girl ting.

Alison Stewart: It is DJ Tygapaw and Marlon James, this Friday at the New York Public Library. Go to wnyc.org/getlit to reserve your free tickets. That's wnyc.org/getlit. Can't wait to see you on Friday with Marlon James and DJ Tygapaw. That's All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

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