I was hurrying out the door when I wrote my previous note and didn't have
time to say that the religious use of pots was/is an African tradition, so
the Black Hairstons and other enslaved people across Virginia preserved, on
these shores, a very old African practice. See: Rawick, *The American Slave*,
vol. 1, *From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community*, pp
40-45. Following Rawick, I wrote in *Hairstons*: “As containers of water,
pots were sacred to the gods of the rivers, who were believed to be the
deities with the greatest sympathy for mankind. An upturned pot invoked the
protection of one of these gods; the Africans put pots on the floor to
protect a house.”

I would add that the early chapters in *Hairstons* – “Damn Your Souls, Make
Tobacco”, and “Beaver Creek” – have, I believe, important oral histories
which I was fortunate to have the opportunity to record. Now that I think
of it, there are oral histories from slavery time near the end of the book
as well. When I was doing my research in the 1990s a historical window was
closing. The enslaved people were dead; but people who had actually *talked*
to the enslaved were still alive, so I was able to record oral history from
people who were only one degree separated from slavery time. And then there
was “sharecropping time”, which Daniel Hairston and other Hairstons
described vividly. And then there was so much else.

Henry Wiencek

Charlottesville

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