Chicago Tribune

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. – Day after day, 64-year-old Geneva Monroe sits beneath an umbrella in the blazing South Carolina sun, carrying out a tradition that began with her ancestors who were brought here from West Africa as slaves.

Like many people in her community, she sews baskets made of sweetgrass, a straw-like grass with a vanilla smell that grows wild. For generations, Monroe and others have sold their wares from makeshift stands at the edge of U.S. Highway 17, the main road through the land they have called home for more than three centuries.

At one time, her family’s home stood across the street. It is where her mother and aunts taught her to sew baskets by hand and she passed the tradition down to her children. In the mornings, as the men headed to the marshes to chop sweetgrass, the women went to their stands on the shoulder of the highway and waited for tourists on their way to Florida or Hilton Head Island.

That was 70 years ago, when the community was a fishing village known as Four-Mile and before the two-lane Highway 17, a major north-south road along the South Carolina coast, was turned into a four-lane roadway. Construction began last year to turn it into six lanes.

Like many of America’s cultural traditions, sweetgrass basket making is threatened with extinction as the older people die and the younger ones move away. Efforts are under way to secure protection for a stretch of Highway 17 that was once lined with basket makers by nominating it for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Though South Carolina has recently begun to promote the basket industry as a part of the state’s heritage, some say officials might have waited too long.

Over the years, development has diminished the sweetgrass that used to grow wild in the open fields. Office parks and subdivisions now stand on that land, forcing basket makers to travel to Florida or North Carolina to get the sweetgrass needed for their baskets.

And Highway 17, which once helped the basket makers thrive, has become their foe.

While an estimated 60 percent of black residents in the Mount Pleasant area are basket makers, most of them have left a three-mile area along the highway where their families sold baskets for generations. They are unwilling to battle the urban sprawl of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores and compete with noise from bulldozers.

But Monroe has stayed. She will wait until the project is completed later this year to see how the new highway affects her business, which supplements her family’s business.

“I have been sewing all my life,” she said, sitting in a lawn chair as she turned a bag of dried sweetgrass into a work of coiled art that will sell for about $200. The intricately designed baskets can take 12 hours to three months to complete. Depending on the size, basket makers sell them from $10 to $2,000.

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Like many in this small community of Gullah-Geechee people, direct descendants of the slaves who were brought to Charleston to work the rice fields, Monroe moved to New York as a young adult, hoping to find a better way to earn a living.

But after a few years, her longing for home became too strong, she said, and she returned to Mount Pleasant.

When I came back, I couldn’t do anything but clean buildings. That’s why people went up north in the first place,” she said. “I am glad I learned how to sew baskets as a child because this is my job now.”

Six days a week, she is here from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The dust, the noise and the bumper-to-bumper traffic have begun to take its toll on her business.

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A steady flow of tourists used to pull off the road to browse through her impressive selection of baskets. But now, because of road construction, there is often no place to stop even if they wanted to. She is lucky if she sells one basket a day; most often she sells none.

Sweetgrass basket making is one of the oldest African art forms practiced in America today, according to Jeannette Gailliard-Lee, president of the Original Sweetgrass Marketplace Coalition, an association of sweetgrass basket makers. The baskets have become a favorite of craft collectors. They are not only found along Highway 17. They are in museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. They are sold in the Charleston Market, upscale department stores and hotel lobbies. Some basket makers have become so savvy that they have Web sites where their products can be ordered from around the world.

Thomasena Stokes-Marshall, the only African-American on the Mount Pleasant Town Council, is pushing to establish a Gullah-Geechee sweetgrass pavilion in a new 27-acre waterfront park the town is building at the foot of the bridge to Charleston. She also would like to see land set aside to grow sweetgrass so that the basketmakers basket makers would have ample supplies. Last year, she began sponsoring the annual Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival to bring attention to the craft.

“All of this used to be open space and homes, and people could set up a stand anywhere they wanted. Now there are more stores than anything else,” Stokes-Marshall said. “Developers come here from New York and don’t know about sweetgrass. They send a bulldozer out and cover the land with concrete. And they have no idea of the impact that has on this community.”

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People in this close-knit community are skeptical of outsiders who want to capitalize on their culture.

“There has been a lot of exploitation of the basket makers,” said Gailliard-Lee. “People take their pictures and sell them or they research them and get all kinds of recognition for it. And the women get nothing for it.

“This is something that has been handed down to us. You don’t let it out of the family. It’s like a good recipe.”

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