A Letter to David Drake from a Friend and a Relation

Shockley writes creatively in response to an inscription written on the side of the jar associated with the title of the collection. As a contemporary black woman and as a literary critic and a poet herself, Shockley seeks out her multifaceted relatedness to the person and legacy of Dave the Potter. In this hybrid of creative and scholarly writing, Shockley uses the format of the letter to imaginatively reply directly to “Dave.” In the process, Shockley transforms the terms of historical inquiry to better suit the diasporic terms of her relation to a “him” who is never finally in the past nor an object of impersonal history.