Containers for Memory
East of Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina, Market Street forks to accommodate a bustling, four-block city market. Visually reminiscent of the Temple of the Wingless Victory in Athens, Market Hall once cast a shadow over the stalls beneath it where enslaved African and African-American vendors sold their wares (Figure 1). In the shadow of the building’s grandiose architecture, Black artisans operated on an order of making and exchange that reflected their own subsistence traditions. The goods that they made and sold, from produce grown in garden plots to corn shuck mats, gave rise to local domestic economies that subverted regulatory strictures imposed by the slave-owning aristocracy. This context shaped the legacy of African-American coiled baskets, a craft tradition maintained by the descendants of enslaved artisans and vendors. On a stroll through City Market, one can hardly miss their stunning displays of basketry constructed with plant materials sourced from nearby marshes and maritime forests (Figure 2).
Before emancipation in 1863, Africans and African Americans enslaved on Lowcountry rice plantations made coiled baskets to aid in the cultivation of the region’s most profitable export. The baskets are coils of bulrush, a marsh sedge that lines wetland channels, bound together with strips of the region’s iconic sabal palmetto. Clutching the walls of broad-based winnowing trays called fanners, enslaved workers propelled pounded rice kernels skyward to separate grain from chaff (Figure 3). After emancipation, Lowcountry rice exports receded from a global market, but coiled baskets began engendering markets of their own.
Figure 1. Market Hall, 188 Meeting Street, Charleston, Charleston County, S.C. Photograph by the Historic American Buildings Survey, date unknown. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Figure 2. Sweetgrass basket stand, Charleston City Market. Photography by Molly Robinson, 2019.
To take control of pricing and to avoid acquisitive middlemen, women basketmakers in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, began selling their basketry directly to buyers at roadside stands along the newly paved Highway 17 in 1929 (Figure 4). An inflorescence of roads bloomed throughout the country, and southbound motorists from cities like Philadelphia stopped at the stands to buy the women’s magnificent baskets. As historian Melissa Cooper notes, tourists were followed by government-backed anthropologists, writers, and cultural workers who arrived in the region in the mid-1930s to chart the cultural landscapes of rural America. Among them was anthropologist William Bascom.
Figure 3. “Mrs. Green winnowing her rice.” Photograph by Leigh Richmond Miner, 1907-1909. Courtesy of the Penn Center, St. Helena, South Carolina, and the Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.
A mentee of Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University, Bascom studied the Yoruba culture of present-day Nigeria. To him coiled basketry was a missing link in the story of African cultural transmission during American slavery. He saw coiled basketry as a perfectly preserved African art form, reminiscent of baskets made in rice-growing regions of West Africa (Figure 5). To prove the genuine “Africanness” of the people he studied, Bascom conducted hundreds of interviews in 1939 with African Americans whom he believed were insulated from the culture of white America by virtue of their geographic isolation. Many of these communities lived on retired rice plantations and islands carved up by the region’s meandering waterways. He identified the people he interviewed as “Gullah,” a term that once carried pejorative connotations. Bascom viewed coiled baskets as both a static symbol of slavery and an index of the African heritage of his interlocutors.
Figure 4. Viola Jefferson holding baskets at Mount Pleasant basket stand along Highway 17. Photograph by John Muir, September 1938. Courtesy of Francis Marion National Forest and the U.S. Forest Service.
While Bascom’s curiosity about the African origins of coiled basketry is understandable, his studies were fueled above all by a desire to confirm Herskovits’s claim that African-American culture owed to the traditions, practices, and belief systems of African societies. The opposing belief, identified with sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, held that African Americans had no culture independent of white institutions. Despite their contrasting positions, both sides shared a view of culture as an impermeable monolith that mapped onto the race of the people who produced it. This terrible tangle of ideas about race and culture may seem unrelated to Bascom’s basket initiatives, but in fact made it difficult for him to see coiled basketry beyond evidence for Herskovits’s theory that African Americans living in coastal Georgia and South Carolina were more African than American (Figure 6).
“Coiled baskets are containers for memory operating at both the scale of a single lifetime and across generations.”
With little to suggest that he compensated those he interviewed for their participation, Bascom grilled them on the African-derived myths, rituals, and “hoodoo” they knew. He asked them painful questions about the fates of their enslaved African ancestors, and debated them on whether Black people died by suicide, all while skirting around the question of how Jim Crow violence shaped everyday experiences. The fraught terrain of race relations in the United States, compounded by Bascom’s intellectual goals, kept him from seeing that coiled basketry was not static at all, but still evolving to serve the needs and desires of those who practiced the craft. Coiled basketry represented not just an African-American past but a present and a future (Figure 7).
Figure 5. Braided Sweetgrass Basket. Photograph by Molly Robinson, 2019.
Figure 6. Celia Moultrie Anderson sewing a basket at a roadside stand in Mount Pleasant, S.C. Photograph by John Muir, September 1938. Courtesy of Francis Marion National Forest and the U.S. Forest Service.
This is why it was remarkable when basketmaker Isaac Baisden told William Bascom that he only began making baskets after he lost his vision and “needed something to do.” In an interview conducted on June 19, 1939, Baisden spoke of how he learned to make baskets by picking up and feeling old fanners sewn by his uncle. He learned by trial and error, wasting about five pounds of material before making a basket that felt satisfactory to him. Baisden said he was motivated by a spirit of “invention,” which led him to create baskets with covers. His novel designs were guided by “just his idea of the way a basket should look,” Bascom wrote. He also noted that Baisden had inspired a twelve-year-old boy to begin making baskets. The scene Bascom limned in his field notes broke with an understanding of coiled basketry as a vessel for an unchanging African craft tradition.
Baisden’s journey to basketmaking was driven by personal interest, enjoyment, and perhaps a desire to carry on a family tradition. He rarely sold his baskets but when he did, he charged a customer 40 cents for a fanner, less than eight dollars in today’s money. Historian Dale Rosengarten uses 1920s advertisements from a company called Seagrassco and from St. Helena Island’s Penn School to show that baskets were typically priced between $2.50 and $15.00 depending on their size. Baisden, however, neither targeted a group of buyers nor possessed the advantage of advertising. His baskets were not work tools, art objects, or dusty artifacts. For Baisden, baskets were a compass to navigate his sightless condition and a means of stitching together a dark world through touch and memory.
“These hybrid baskets are neither distinctly African nor distinctly Gullah. They embody instead the living memory of a historical separation.”
The roles of touch and memory in basketmaking endure in the work of contemporary basketmakers. Coiled baskets are containers for memory operating at both the scale of a single lifetime and across generations. Perhaps no Gullah basketmaker working today feels this more deeply than Nakia Wigfall. Wigfall, a fifth-generation Mount Pleasant basketmaker, travels to museums, schools, and festivals to teach people about her craft and to advocate for the conservation of basketry materials like sweetgrass (Figure 8). Family memory is central to the narrative of her practice. She learned to make baskets at age four by picking up and playing with the materials that her mother dropped on the floor when she sewed. Like the boy who began emulating Baisden, Wigfall simply copied her mother. “I pretended I was making a basket, too,” Wigfall told me.
Figure 7. Fanner basket collected by William Bascom during 1939 field work. Photograph courtesy of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology Online Web Portal.
Figure 8. Nakia Wigfall making a basket, Mount Pleasant, S.C. Courtesy of Nakia Wigfall and her website, Sweetgrass Gullah Connection.
Now Wigfall’s practice is connecting her with West African basketmakers. In December 2019, she participated in a homecoming celebration in Sierra Leone that honored the African heritage of her Gullah community. In Gullah Roots, a documentary about the voyage, Wigfall is shown visiting the basketmaking village of Rogbonko. In one frame she sits next to a woman constructing a bowl-shaped basket with a tail of grass that whips around as she fastens a coil. The basketmaker pauses and exchanges her basket with Wigfall. They begin adding new rows to each other’s work. Onlookers record the collaboration on cellphones. Then a young girl pushes through the crowd, wedges herself between the women, and picks up a base from the ground. She places it in her lap and begins working the grass with her fingers.
The baskets that Wigfall made in Sierra Leone blend traditions that may have diverged centuries ago as a result of the transmission of African expertise through the Middle Passage. But these hybrid baskets are neither distinctly African nor distinctly Gullah. They embody instead the living memory of a historical separation that Wigfall experienced in her own lifetime as a gulf of absence. “My whole life something was missing,” she said. “Now I know.” Crafting baskets with Sierra Leonean makers was a reunion that inspired Wigfall to see her African heritage as a source of potential for future collaborations. In a post-pandemic world, she plans to organize an event that would bring together basketmakers from a number of African countries. She imagines sitting down with other makers and swapping work so that the finished baskets are a mosaic of techniques, materials, and memories.
