“I try to be as much as I can like an African griot. The griot kept the oral history of the tribe, as it had been passed down for thousands of years. He was in charge of remembering everything. He was a storyteller…The stories weren’t just for entertainment. Like the ones I tell, they have a purpose.”1
Cornelia Walker Bailey
Like cast nets, the weaving of sweetgrass baskets is a skill that can be traced directly from Gullah Geechee communities in the Lowcountry back to the shores of West Africa. The knowledge of how to weave these baskets was carried across the Middle Passage by enslaved Africans, and passed on to their children, generation to generation. Today, Gullah and Geechee basket weavers continue to practice their craft, and their baskets are now recognized and prized by collectors, as well as being exhibited in museums.2
Sweetgrass baskets are a tangible, tactile item that have been passed down, but just because they are something that can be seen and touched does not make them any more real than other pieces of the Gullah Geechee culture that have been passed on generation to generation. Language and songs, storytelling and oral histories, these are the inheritances of Gullah Geechee peoples from their African ancestors as well.
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Footnotes
- Cornelia Walker Bailey with Christena Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 324. Available here.
- “The Gullah Geechee People,” Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/thegullahgeechee/. “Georgia’s Gullah-Geechee Heritage: Sweetgrass Baskets,” Research Guides, College of Coastal Georgia Library, Accessed May 1, 2021, https://libguides.ccga.edu/c.php?g=282583&p=1882631.