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Grass Roots -- Charleston native provides looks at timeless Lowcountry traditions By Dionne Gleaton - 02/01/2006 The Times and Democrat CHARLESTON — Charleston native Joyce V. Coakley gives readers insight into two of the Carolina Lowcountry’s most unique traditions: sweetgrass basket-making and the Gullah language, lifestyle and culture. More than three centuries ago, 10 million enslaved men, women and children left the “Point of No Return” in West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade. Many of them would find home in what is now Mount Pleasant. They were among those who established the Gullah traditions and maintained the art of sweetgrass basket making.(Reprinted with permission from “Sweetgrass Baskets and the Gullah Tradition,” by Joyce V. Coakley. Available from the publisher online at www.arcadiapublishing.com or by calling 888-313-2665). With those words, Coakley sets the tone for her 128-page book, honing in on what she hoped would cultivate an appreciation for the rich cultural Lowcountry traditions of her childhood. “The Carolina Lowcountry is a repository of facts and culture for all African-Americans and the United States. So much happened here, and it is my desire that these few pages would spark the interest of African-Americans around the country to come to the Lowcountry and discover their roots and reconnect with distant family members,” said Coakley, a skilled sweetgrass basket maker and fluent speaker of the Gullah language. The author and historian is director of the College of Charleston’s Upward Bound program, president and co-founder of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Preservation Society and owner-designer of Sweetgrass Baskets by Design. She begins her book with the sweetgrass basketry tradition brought to the Lowcountry in the late 17th century. Born in the Christ Church Parish district of Charleston, where her family has lived since the 18th century, Coakley was exposed to the basketmaking and Gullah language, religious practices and games. The city of Mount Pleasant is now where most of her native parish area lies. Coakley’s collection of pictures and oral histories illustrate how enslaved West Africans took nothing but perennial seagrass and wove a beautiful tapestry of baskets mainly used for storing fruits, vegetables and other household products. Called “sweetgrass” because of the freshly harvested aroma, the baskets were made by slaves who used used strips of palmetto leaves to sew the baskets together. For color and firmness, the slaves wove in pine needle or bulrush with a “nailbone,” or piercing instrument. The West Africans used a filed cow or pig rib bone, until the late 19th century, when they were allowed to use metal with a filed spoon or fork. Sweetgrass baskets soon evolved into a commercial enterprise. Coakley added pictorial images of basket makers who sold their wares to make a living along Highway 17, constructed in the early 1930s and originally for passage from Georgetown to Mount Pleasant. The baskets quickly became collector’s items, particularly among Northern tourists who marveled at the expertly crafted items. Hats and lamps are now among the myriad of decorative objects into which sweetgrass has been crafted. “The book started growing. It started with the baskets and evolved into 10 chapters because it was so difficult to tell that story and not include all the cultural things surrounding the baskets,” said Coakley. Before she began her book, Coakley was working on a research project solely dedicated to religious traditions of free slaves in the Carolina Lowcountry. The book, which she says took her 30 years to research and eight months to write, also takes readers into the Creole language spoken by slaves and their descendants along the sea islands of the Southeast, Gullah. Without formal teaching, Africans attempted to communicate with Europeans and other Africans in a totally foreign language and soon developed their own distinct style in the process, she explained. A glossary of Gullah words and phrases, such as “dah,” which was added in front of a woman’s name to denote kinship and honor and was used interchangeably with “grandmother,” “aunt ” or “midwife,” is included in the book. “The Carolina Lowcountry is really a bilingual community that should be an example to the rest of the United States of who we are. We can live and work together to preserve the beauty of our national heritage and history,” Coakley said. Among the Gullah household’s main dishes are fish and grits and other Southern staples. The African community took care of their health which, because doctors were largely absent in the community, included home remedies, such as urine for chills and fever and fiddler crab juice for an earache. Coakley also tells the stories of the “flower ladies,” those women who sold flowers along with wild herbs and elixirs in the historical Charleston District even before Highway 17 was built. They represented an organized group which made the first attempt to earn their money outside the sweetgrass community. As documented in concluding chapters, many blacks migrated north between 1910 and 1930 to seek better social and economic conditions. Coakley also covers religious traditions and gives a pictorial retrospective of sweetgrass trailblazers. Among the latter are midwives who sought professional training in their craft at Voorhees College in Denmark and Betsy Johnson who established the first female-owned restaurant in the sweetgrass community in the late 1930s. “It excites me when people say, ’I can connect with this point,’ no matter how small it is. That lets us know that we’re not so different. Let’s hope that the book would initiate conversations ... and unity,” Coakley said. |
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