NARRATOR:
You’re looking at a selection of face jugs. Edgefield historian Wayne O’Bryant has traced their origin to the mid-19th century: from an illegal shipment of enslaved Africans.

WAYNE O’BRYANT:
The transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808. But in 1858, a man by the name of Charles Lamar purchased a ship called the Wanderer. So, he went over to the Kongo area and took onboard a little over 400 Africans. But when he landed on the coast of Georgia, since the authorities had already gotten wind of what he was doing, he put about 170-something on a boat, sent them up the Savannah River, and they landed in what was then Edgefield County. Some of them were put to work in the potteries. And so the face jugs began to pop up in the Edgefield County area around the same time. So that’s where the connections begin to start.

NARRATOR:
But why jugs with faces on them? O’Bryant has his suspicions.

WAYNE O’BRYANT:
When I was growing up in Charleston, there were actual legitimate drugstores that had backrooms that sold ritualistic vessels that were used in these conjures. They called it “putting root on somebody.” [laugh] And so when I first started seeing face jugs, it was more curiosity of what could they have used these for, and then it became more of, “I wonder if they’re used in the same way.”

NARRATOR:
Another connection may be found in the wooden figure on view nearby.

It’s a power figure from the Wanderer survivors’ homeland, Kongo. To summon the spirit living within, an nganga, or ritual expert, would insert kaolin clay—coincidentally, the same clay the Wanderers found in Edgefield.

WAYNE O’BRYANT:
They would have recognized that immediately. It must have been almost a source of joy for them to see that kaolin (Laughs) and in abundance like that.

I don’t think the Wanderer survivors that were sent other places made face jugs. That group that ended in Edgefield County, where they were making pottery, and they had the activating material, all kind of came together, and that’s why you didn’t see these pots all over the place.