MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C.
Emily Manigault wants to make a good impression.
At her roadside stand along Highway 17, she sweeps the sidewalk, a crucial slice of concrete that leads potential customers from the corner of a Home Depot parking lot to her collection of handmade sweetgrass baskets.
It’s a Friday afternoon and no one has stopped by yet, but Manigault is undeterred.
“You sit and you wait and you hope,” Manigault said, as she prepared to spend a few hours at her sweetgrass basket stand.
Standing beneath the summer sun, with hair like pieces of strong silver thread, Manigault dabbed the back of her neck with a white hand towel. She looked toward the six-lane highway where hope comes when a traffic signal turns green.
A cavalry of cars and trucks suddenly roared down the road, each motorist a possible basket buyer. They whooshed past Manigault and her stand, ignoring the posted 45 mph speed limit and her intricate baskets that are keeping a centuries-old craft alive in America.
“Some days nobody comes. Some days, you know, you have maybe two or three people,” Manigault said. “But sometimes, you have a lot of people that stop, but then nobody buys.”
Designated as “Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway” in 2006, this 7-mile stretch of highway was once a thriving roadside marketplace for sweetgrass basket vendors like Manigault. Today, these makers, who call themselves sewers, speak of a discouraging reality intertwined with a personal quest to keep a Gullah tradition alive.
Sewers say it’s getting harder.
Tourists openly question the price of the baskets sold here, with some going so far as to barter with vendors like it’s a yard sale.
They don’t understand, the sewers said, the skill, dexterity and time involved to make a single piece.
Also driving up the price of baskets is the increased development in the coastal region, which continues to cut off access to the very plants Black families use to make sweetgrass baskets. And then there’s the concern about time itself, as a generation of sewers worry that this craft, which can trace its origins to the 17th century, will not be carried on in the way it once was.
“The people getting scarce, and the grass getting scarce,” Manigault said, shaking her head.
But the artisans on Highway 17 also say they are also determined to keep their heritage alive in this place.
Sitting on her front porch with her basket-making materials resting in her lap, 97-year-old Lucille Gilliard said, “I’m gonna do it until I can’t do it no more.”
‘This is our heritage’
Manigault has been selling sweetgrass baskets on Highway 17 for more than a decade. That’s longer than the Home Depot building that now looms behind her.
It used to be the site of Laing High School, her alma mater. It was also the last segregated school for African Americans in Mount Pleasant. Manigault wore a T-shirt from a high school reunion for the class of 1961.
“A lot of the Black people are gone,” she said of Mount Pleasant, which was once a rural farming community and is now one of the fastest-growing towns in South Carolina. Census figures show the town’s population is nearly 92% white.
“But this,” Manigault said, holding up the basket her nimble fingers were weaving to life, “this is our heritage.”
She pointed to the basket’s center, where each piece began with a single knot.
Notice the detail, Maingault said, as her finger traced the swirls of intricate coils made of sweetgrass, bulrush and pine needle. Using a tool called a nail bone, which looks like a spoon handle, she punctured the bundle of grass fibers and sewed the coil together with narrow strips of palm leaves from a palmetto tree.
The basket itself is a continuous coil that can be sculpted into whatever shape the maker desires, whether it’s a traditional rice fanner, a fruit basket, a bread basket or something else entirely.
The sign of a good basket, though, is a tightly woven one.
Manigault will sew, sometimes for hours, in the sweltering Charleston heat to make baskets that are as endemic to South Carolina’s Lowcountry as a bowl of shrimp and grits.
“These baskets are investments and works of art,” said Georgette Mayo, an archivist at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. The research center boasts a large collection of sweetgrass baskets.
The stands that still dot Highway 17, Mayo said, represent an important chapter in the story of African sweetgrass basketry in America.
How it started
Before the first stands went up here in the 1930s, basket makers in the Mount Pleasant area sold their baskets to a Charleston merchant named Clarence Legerton.
Legerton would commission the baskets from sewers in Mount Pleasant, and then he would sell them across the harbor in his King Street shop and sell them wholesale to department stores in New York and other northern cities.
That all changed in the 1930s after the opening of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929 and the paving of Highway 17 in 1931. Visitors could now travel across the Cooper River by car, and soon the idea of a middleman no longer seemed necessary, Mayo said. Basket makers could now reach their primary market directly.
And so, that’s what Lottie “Winee” Moultrie Swinton set out to do, followed soon after by Lydia Spann Graddick, when she put her chair along the highway to display baskets for sale.
Soon, other basket sewers followed.
Though the baskets were initially made by men for the tasks of plantation life, like winnowing rice, soon it was women who began to take over the craft. They sold their baskets on the roadside, displaying them on chairs or overturned crates.
Over time, the baskets would grow in popularity and transform from utility pieces into works of art.
Mary Jackson elevated the craft into an art form, becoming a world-renowned basket-weaver whose pieces can be found in galleries and collections around the globe.
Two of Jackson’s baskets reside in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Prince of Wales purchased one of her baskets, as did the Emperor of Japan.
According to research by Dale Rosengarten, who in 2008 published the book “Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art,” some of the earliest images of highway basket stands were taken in 1938 by Bluford Muir, a land scout for the USDA National Forest Service.
The series of four photos were taken at the intersection of Hamlin Road and Highway 17. Back then, the highway was two lanes with plenty of shoulder space for cars to veer off and shop at the roadside stands.
Today, in the spot where a row of stands once stood at that intersection, power lines and utility boxes now stand next to a sidewalk that runs parallel to the road.
Farther down the highway, in front of a Walgreens, Marie Rouse sat up a little taller on a recent Friday when two women got out of their cars and began to look at her pieces on display: her bread baskets, her decorative wall pieces, her fruit baskets, a collection of sweetgrass coasters, a wreath and even some jewelry made of sweetgrass.
There are no shoulders for motorists to safely stop and shop on the highway, said Rouse, who wore a pair of dangling earrings that displayed small, tight sweetgrass circles.
Rouse considers herself lucky. Her customers can park in the Walgreens parking lot behind her. Others, she said, have to hope that people see their baskets and find a way to turn around, or that they remember them and come back another time.
For the moment, Rouse focused on the women who shared that they were visiting from Arizona. In less than 10 minutes, one of them bought a coaster for $20. Her friend said she adored the baskets, but her eyes widened when she flipped over the price tag and saw that the basket cost more than $100.
“Yeah, I like them. I just can’t afford that,” she said, apologizing.
“It’s a lot of work, though,” Rouse, 84, said.
“I know, I know,” the woman replied. “But, I just can’t.”
Then, they asked to take a photo with Rouse before getting back in their car.
After they left, Rouse sat back down in the plastic chair she set up near her stand and sighed. She said she will never be paid what the baskets are worth.
“We don’t want this to be a dying art,” Rouse said when asked why she stays. “This is what we pass on.”
Why they stay
Betty Manigault, who is Emily’s sister-in-law by marriage, operates a stand farther down the highway, closer to Awendaw.
Located on the southbound side of the highway, she banks on her baskets catching the eye of tourists driving into Charleston from Myrtle Beach and beyond.
She also sells her baskets in downtown Charleston on Meeting Street, in the heart of the tourist district.
“There are always tourists walking by, and they are already on the street, so they don’t have to pull off the road,” Manigault said. “They just have to stop and look at the baskets.”
But she said she won’t ever stop operating her stand on Highway 17.
“A lady took a chair and put it by the highway and put a basket on it, and that’s how it started,” she said. “And ever since, somebody else has come behind and kept it going.”
Like other basket sewers, Manigault said the money she makes selling at her roadside stand is supplemental income, but she said doing the work on Highway 17 is paramount.
“It’s the history,” Manigault said.
Thomasena Stokes-Marshall said she still worries about the fate of the sweetgrass basket technique found along Highway 17.
The former Mount Pleasant town councilwoman founded the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association in 2004 as a way to highlight the art form and the history associated with it.
After the pandemic canceled last year’s event, the annual Sweetgrass Festival was held Saturday at the Mount Pleasant Memorial Waterfront Park.
Stokes-Marshall said the festival is not only a chance to elevate the work of Mount Pleasant basket sewers. The festival’s former executive director said each year’s event is an opportunity to educate the community about the people for whom Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway is named.
“One of the things that has occurred within the past 20-plus years is the increase in our Mount Pleasant residential population. The majority of our residents have relocated here from elsewhere in the country and have absolutely no idea what those stands are, what purpose they serve, how long they’ve been there, who put them there and why they are there,” Stokes-Marshall said.
She bristles when she remembers how some in the past called for the stands to be torn down.
“The very essence of the sweetgrass baskets is buried into the history of this area,” she said.
Betty Maingault said she finds the sewing process relaxing, and she will often find herself praying while she works.
“I’m telling God that ‘I’m making this basket and I’m going to go ahead and sell this basket.’ And sometimes, it happens like that: I make them and put them out and they sell that day,” she said. “Sometimes, I keep them for a long time, but I feel good while I’m making them. Talking to the Lord is very freeing, and I also think back on my grandmother.”
Her grandmother, Ella Milligan, taught Manigault the craft when she was 6 years old. Even now at 79, Manigault said she can still remember the first thing she ever made: An oval basket.
“It looked more like a bird’s nest,” Manigault said, chuckling. “It was nothing to brag about, but it was a starting point.”
Since then, her designs have evolved with the times, and her coils are tight. Some of her handles have a twist to them or extra flourishes. Manigault said she still prefers to make the traditional style, the way her grandmother taught her.
When she finishes, she signs the bottom of each basket.
In each basket, Lucille Gilliard leaves a piece of herself behind. She is 97 and said she spends most days waiting on her front porch, sewing baskets. She moved to Mount Pleasant from nearby Awendaw, where she said she was welcomed by basket makers in the 1940s.
Since then, Gilliard has seen the highway widen and change. She’s seen traffic grow as more subdivisions popped up on nearby streets. Gilliard displays her baskets on a homemade stand that sits in her front yard, located just off Highway 17 itself.
And now, as she has always done, she is waiting for someone to stop.
Sitting in a chair beneath a tree in the front yard, her son, Eugene, works on a basket of his own. He sells his creations at the stand in their front yard, too.
He will continue the legacy, Gilliard said, nodding her head.
She just hopes he will not be the last.
This story was originally published July 22, 2021 5:00 AM.
