Sharing their art

Marilyn Dingle jabs a sharpened spoon handle through her partially made basket and pokes a thin strip of palmetto palm through the hole, securing another tiny section of bulrush. Next to her, Dingle's daughter and granddaughter practice the same technique.

Dingle's grandmother used a nail to make holes instead of a spoon. Her ancestors used a piece of animal bone.

Practicing their craft while gathered around a space heater, the women feel closer to those early ancestors, enslaved West Africans who made sweetgrass baskets to aid in rice cultivation. They continue to teach younger family members in hopes of keeping the tradition alive. Three of Dingle's other grandchildren also know how to make baskets.

Talking as they weave, the women also grow closer to each other. On this particular day, LaNeikqua Youson finds out that her grandmother was part of the hospital worker's strike in 1969, a famous local civil rights protest. Lynette Youson recalls watching on TV as her mother was loaded into a paddy wagon. They talk about LaNeikqua's pregnancy and the baby boy she's expecting.

A foot or more of bulrush sticks off to the right of each woman's basket-in-progress, barely missing sweeping another's hands or face. They're all right-handed; otherwise their weaving materials would protrude to the left.

Sometimes they're transported back to the shade of an oak tree near U.S. Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant, where each of them learned to sew sweetgrass baskets.

Dingle was 5. She would pick up the material her grandmother dropped on the ground and pretend she was making nests for the birds.

"I guess I kept on bothering her and bothering her, so one day she just sat me down and taught me how to do it," Dingle said.

Lynette Youson was 7 when the same woman, her great-grandmother, asked, " 'Are you sure you're ready? It's the right

way or no way.' If you did it wrong, she ripped it out, and you'd have to start it all over again."

The summer she sold her first piece, a $2 placemat, Lynette Youson says she thought she'd struck gold. She was amazed that someone else appreciated her artwork.

"I've been weaving full time ever since."

Preserving the past

Deborah Wright of the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston has been working to preserve the tradition by collecting oral histories of sweetgrass basketmakers.

Wright said that collectively, the basketmakers look upon the tradition with great pride and see it truly as a family craft passed down from mothers, grandmothers and aunts.

"They make baskets because that's what they were taught to do," Wright said. "It's their tradition. It's their heritage."

The director of special projects at the Avery Center said many are concerned about the tradition continuing. They think the younger people in basketmaking families aren't interested. "It's a different time, a faster pace and it's harder for young folks to focus on such a tedious, slow process as coiled basketry," Wright said.

Many of the audio interviews have been transcribed and are available in hard copy. Later, the center hopes to make portions of the interviews available online and to publish a book.

The center also is hosting an exhibit through May 15, "Sweetgrass: A Living Legacy of Families and Communities."

It includes baskets made by children in the Next Generation project, a series of lessons held last year at the center and led by basketmaker Henrietta Snype. She has been teaching children how to make sweetgrass baskets for 20 years, most often in schools as an artist-in-residence with the S.C. Arts Commission.

Snype thinks young people and adults are becoming more interested in the craft and isn't worried about the tradition dying. "It can't be dying when there's so many exhibits going on," she said.

Snype, who learned the art from her mother and grandmother, has been invited at least three times to the Smithsonian Institution to speak about sweetgrass basketmaking.

What she is worried about is the scarcity of materials needed to make the baskets. The traditional marsh and woodland collecting spots are disappearing as development in the Lowcountry continues.

Her request to developers, business owners and home-owners: "If there is material -- and I don't just mean the sweetgrass, it could be the palmetto -- allow people to get access to those areas and get this material."

Kiawah Island has opened up some channels, she says. So has Mount Pleasant Waterworks.

"Things are changing," Snype said. "When you educate people on what this art is about, you get more help. But if you don't ask, it will not be given to you. You gotta keep on asking."

An act of love

Lynette Youson weaves at least 10 hours a day, sometimes 15. She works while selling baskets with her mother, usually on Broad Street near the Four Corners but occasionally at the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Pavilion in Mount Pleasant Memorial Waterfront Park.

When she goes home, she continues to weave, often while watching "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" or "Deal or No Deal." In the passenger seat of a car or while waiting at the doctor's office, she's weaving.

"I have to be doing my baskets," she says. "I weave everywhere I go."

Except for short stints in retail, she's been a full-time sweetgrass basketmaker her entire adult life.

Dingle, on the other hand, worked as a nurse and then an EKG tech until retirement.

The 67-year-old says she's glad her grandmother told her to never stop making baskets.

Now she works similar hours to her daughter, often stopping for the day around 1 a.m.

Dingle's husband harvests the materials (as he has since she developed melanoma), wearing boots and making noise because rattlesnakes love sweetgrass, Dingle says.

The baskets they create are more complicated than those of their ancestors. Some have ornate touches, such as French knots, small loops in the handles or large ripples along the outside called elephant ears.

Their baskets typically range from $20 to $1,200. The most expensive basket of Dingle's sold for $1,500 in the 1980s. It took her 2 1/2 months to make.

"I don't know why I made a basket that big," she said. "I had to put it on a stool in order to work on it. I said I would never, never do that again."

LaNeikqua Youson considers teaching a child to make a sweetgrass basket an act of love.

She points out that you have to take time out from making a basket you can sell in order to teach.

It's important to the 19-year-old student that the tradition of sweetgrass basketmaking continues.

"I think it's something special that not a lot of families know how to do," she says. "Once you learn something special like that, from love, I think you should try to carry it on."

Reach Kristen Hankla at 937-5548 or khankla@postandcourier.com.