If you are from around these parts, you’ve most likely met Bea. She’s been weaving beautiful sweetgrass baskets at the Pawleys Island Hammock shops in South Carolina almost every day for the last 27 years. I remember watching her as a child, amazed at the way she could take materials from the earth and turn them into something so useful and beautiful. Although I was wasn’t yet old enough to truly appreciate the art of her craft, the importance of her work, I could sense that what she was doing was more than just making baskets, larger than just herself. She was carrying on a generations-old tradition of her people, passing her story to all of us in the hopes of keeping this historic skill alive.
The art of sweetgrass basket making came to South Carolina in the 17th Century by way of West African slaves, brought to the south to work on rice plantations. Traditionally, the older African men would weave these baskets, making large “fanners” to be used in the rice fields. Later, women took up the craft, making coiled baskets of different shapes and sizes to hold vegetables, shellfish, and cotton. Sweetgrass would be gathered along the marshes, dried, and then bundled together and coiled, held in place with palmetto fronds. Sometimes bulrush and pine needles were woven into the baskets to add decoration. And Bea Coaxum continues this exact technique today. She proudly showed us her sewing bone, a sharpened metal spoon that she has used to make these baskets for as long as she can remember.
I was so thrilled to be able to bring my daughter to Pawleys Island this summer, to share this tradition with her, to teach her the importance of learning from our ancestors. And sweet Bea stayed late the day we came to talk to Anna, to let her help weave a basket, and it was magical. What beauty she creates. Bea said that it has been difficult to get the young gullah generation to become interested in her craft, but she’s holding out hope that one of her granddaughters will carry on the tradition. If you’d like to purchase one of Bea’s baskets, you can write her at PO Box 316 Pawleys Island, SC 29585.