Jery Bennett Taylor’s instructor for a style of basket weaving with roots in West Africa was Hurlene Coakley, her grandmother in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Gullah woman in South Carolina’s lowcountry is skilled in West Africa basket-weaving artisanship of Wolof
By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place
ST. HELENA ISLAND, South Carolina — Jery Bennett Taylor is a reflection of continuity, distinct Gullah ways — the traditions of African ancestry people in this The Lowcountry of South Carolina.
She sits weaving sweet grass, bulrushes — marsh grass by its other name — pine needles and palmetto leaves, a nail-bone in her left hand, separating the grasses, as she looped strands of bulrushes to keep the other weaved grasses in place. Jery Bennett Taylor is an artist who craft is basket weaving.
She looks like a kinswoman for sure, your mother’s oldest sister, Aunt Jery, who wore her hair natural when you were a child. She also looks like the first cousin you were raised with and also like one of the intellectually certified sisters, mature, with mostly grey hair, who graces the cover of an arts and culture magazine, if not Essence magazine. The latter, supposedly, would come here to do a piece on traditions that still connects us in The Lowcountry to Africa.
Taylor, with hands that know thousands of stories, is weaving strands of these sturdy grasses into what will become an intricately woven basket. History of this method, one looks on with proudly, dates back before the Old World discovered the New World and brought enslaved peoples from the ancient and primordial lands of Africa.
She sits at a visible vantage point overlooking Sea Island Parkway, on the front porch of Gullah Grub Restaurant, here on St. Helena Island, one of what are known as the barrier islands, lowcountry — coastal plains overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Gullah Grub — Gullah or Geechee being people who have linguistic and cultural ties to Sierra Leone in West Africa — is down the highway from the Penn Center, which is the curator of traditions for Africa ancestry people in of The Lowcountry. Here in this region of the country, curators at the Penn Center will tell you, Gullah/Geechee linguistic and cultural presence extends north from Cape Fear, North Carolina and south to Jacksonville, Florida.
Penn Center is also a vision that sprang out of Christian duty, forming a school to teach emancipated slaves.
From her vantage point on the porch of the restaurant, finished baskets are displayed at Taylor’s feet. All her baskets have their origins from a coil, Taylor will say, as opposed to the knot-method. There is an assortment of styles, wide and concave, trays from which fruit could be served; deep basket with elephant ears; baskets with twisted handles; wreaths and picture frames.
Taylor is a pleasant woman, easy to approach, obviously experienced at media and possesses adept marketing skills acquired since she was a child and this artisanship was passed on to her. Storytelling, that is family history, comes with being expertly set apart. Taylor’s hand-me-down instructor was Hurlene Coakley, her grandmother, who helped to raise her while working at Boone Hall Plantation, over in Mount Pleasant, which is eight miles from downtown Charleston.
Mrs. Coakley was handed down basket-weaving methods practiced by artisans whose skills survived the perilous Middle Passage — thinking about hundreds of thousands perished long the way — skills that are directly traceable to Sierra Leone and Senegal and the Wolof people in that broad region described as Windward Coast and Rice Coast.
(This note comes from the caption on a basket in the Penn Center: “Coiled baskets from Senegal, Tivaouane Region, made of Ndone, a wild grass that grows during the rainy season.”)
“I have my grandmother to thank for teaching me how to weave baskets,” Taylor says. “I remember starting when I was 5 years old, so I am in my fifth decade of weaving baskets. That’s a long time and I hope to one day teach others what my grandmother taught me.”
Taylor, sitting now with a guest who has come a long way, explains her dislike of the busyness of St. Helena Island, compared to days recalled when this place used to be tucked away, as it were, and frequented mainly by people who lived here. She is not talking about the yellow buses with the roofs cut away making frequent trips hauling freshly picked watermelons and tomatoes. The nearby fields have always been tilled and then planted.
This part of the country has two growing seasons. Someone at the Penn Center familiar with farming, before being sent to Gullah Grub Restaurant, mentioned that this is the second harvest for tomatoes and watermelons, among other crops.
Anyway, the busyness to which Taylor openly objects without invocation is development that began taking place two generations ago, forcing some Gullah families off land owned since emancipation. Some families, Taylor bemoans the practice, sold land to developers below market value. Some of the recently built strip centers and resorts with custom-made homes seen along the Sea Islands have a downside.
To be sure, such developments are making scare places where sweet grass used to grow abundantly wild.
“I liked it when it was not so busy around here,” she says. “All the traffic now doesn’t make this a better place. People from the outside have come here and are taking over from the people who have lived here going back to their great-great grandparents. Development has not made this a better place, although there a few new businesses owned by African Americans, where there weren’t African American-owned businesses before the developers arrived.”
Gathering sweet grass is an arduous task. Climbing Palmetto trees to cut of leaves is not unseemly, even for a woman Taylor’s age. Sweet grass is pulled by hand, snapping blades of grass off at the root. What’s left from the cut will come back with the next growing season. Bulrushes are swiped near the ground with a sharp knife. What is left will also come back with the next growing season. Pine needles are gathered with a leaf rake and then bagged.
To make up for increasingly scarce sweet grass, gathering trips are made nowadays into nearby Georgia and Florida.
Utility attached to gathering grasses, pine needles and Palmetto leaves is documented in “Prelude to a Sweet Grass Basket: The Sweetgrass Harvest Process before the Weaving Begins.” Calling herself a “fiber artist,” Taylor is subject of the documentary done like those seen on PBS. It was produced by Outside the Box Media Production.
Now time has passed and a visitor inquires about having lunch inside Gullah Grub Restaurant. Taylor is invited to join to continue the conversation. Oshi Green, owner’s daughter, chef and waitress in the moment, presents a menu. It offers a variety of LoCountry fare, including barbecue chicken and ribs, collard greens, red rice, crab soup, shrimp gumbo, fried shrimp and shark.
Taylor has a tossed salad with sliced grilled chicken. The other diner has barbecue chicken, greens, iced-tea and peach cobbler for desert.
Oshi’s father, Bill Green, has been featured on Martha Stewart Living cooking in the Gullah and LoCountry style. He is also a storyteller of Gullah history and culture. Bill Green is also a skilled horseman, huntsman and trainer of hunting hounds. Reportedly, he is the nation’s only African American teaching the art of the drag hunt, a form of hunting that doesn’t harm or use a live fox.
Taylor was born in Mount Pleasant. Nowadays she lives with her husband in Walterboro, but makes the daily 110-mile roundtrip to St. Helena Island to market her baskets. Mount Pleasant is lowcountry 82 miles northeast of here. The West Coast of Africa, Sierra Leone more specifically, where Taylor traces origins of her basket-weaving culture, is 4600 miles from here across the Atlantic Ocean.
(This is another note from the Penn Center: “My father, Mr. George W. Browne Sr., was basketry instructor at Penn for 34 years. His grand uncle, who was a slave, taught my father how to make baskets.”)
According to records of the Port of Charleston, South Carolina, obtained from a study of the National Park Service, Gullah people origins include Angola (39 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), the Windward Coast (17 percent), the Gold Coast (13 percent), Sierra Leone (6 percent), and Madagascar, Mozambique, and the two Bights (5 percent combined).
The National Park Service Study was instrumental in aiding Congressman James Clyburn, Democrat-South Carolina, in getting a bill passed and signed into law that establishes a “Gullah/Geechee Heritage Corridor.” This designated area will preserve culture and an economic catalyst for heritage tourism.
Taylor and a visitor who is now clearly her guest returns to the front porch of the restaurant to complete their conversation and photo shoot.
Jery Bennett Taylor uses a nail-bone to separate sweet grass, bulrushes, pine needles and palmetto leaves to weave baskets in same style of Wolof people of Africa.