The Family Treasure

by Nicole A. Seitz

Nakia Wigfall holds the future of her family in the palm of her hands. Sitting on her front porch, her fingers weave together past and posterity in a never-ending basket made of sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needles and fan palmetto leaves. Her father started this basket – his work is there in the center – and her children have both worked on it. Now Wigfall carefully adds her own rows; sewing a palmetto leaf in and out of the grass with a spoon handle she calls a “nail bone.” She hopes to keep the “family basket” growing indefinitely as future generations continue the tradition.

The Wigfall “family basket” is a positive reaction to a growing problem: it’s getting harder to pass on this centuries-old tradition, a unique treasure of the Lowcountry. Wigfall harvests her sweetgrass and other raw materials on Dewees Island, but the supply is depleting – now she must take matters into her own hands. In her front yard there’s a roped off patch of sweetgrass growing from accidentally harvested roots. Just an arm’s throw away, fan palmettos sprout up at the base of a large oak tree. At one time, she says she tried to pull these up, but now she sees them as a blessing.

Wigfall, 46, sells her baskets out of her home and by word of mouth. She typically weaves at her kitchen table with a photograph of her mother posted on the refrigerator just feet away. And she likes to sing spirituals while she makes baskets, her face lighting up as the words leave her mouth:

I want two wings; wings, wings
I want two wings; wings, wings
I want two wings to fly away
and the world can’t do me no harm.

Wigfall’s parents instilled in her the importance of basket making not only as a source of income but also as part of their unique family heritage. But it’s not an easy thing to pass on to the next generation. Wigfall admits that she hated making baskets when she was younger; it was one of her daily chores. So she understands why her children, Yvonna, 16, and Micheal, 14, find sweetgrass basket making hard to compete with modern-day computers and television. She doesn’t force them to make baskets, although she hopes the tradition will go on. “As long as they know how to do it so they can teach their children,” she says, “that’s all I’m concerned about.”
The art form of sweetgrass basket making in Wigfall’s family goes all the way back to West Africa. She is a descendant of freed slaves who once worked on Bonneau Plantation in Berkeley County and migrated to the Six Mile Community of Mount Pleasant. Wigfall’s mother taught her the Gullah/Geechee tradition when she was just four years old.

“I remember sitting by her on the floor where she weaved,” she says, “and everything that fell from her lap, I kinda picked it up and tried to imitate her. Of course, my basket looked nothing like hers; mine just looked like a cat had gotten into a ball of yarn.” She laughs at the memory, but there’s sadness in her voice. Wigfall wishes she’d started the family basket back when her mother was still alive. But she has a plan – she’ll attach one of her mother’s baskets to the outside of this one and then hopes to donate it to the Smithsonian, which already celebrates sweetgrass basket making and other Gullah/Geechee cultural contributions.
The last time Wigfall sat at her own roadside stand was in 1985. “There were only a few of us out there at the time, but we didn’t have to worry about traffic.” Now she says there’s too much. So much so, construction has begun to widen Hwy. 17 in Mount Pleasant to six lanes. When this happens, Wigfall says the basket makers will probably have to move. Many stands have already been uprooted because of developers buying up the land beneath them.

Wigfall’s father, 85-year-old Henry Wigfall, still sells his baskets nearly every day at a stand on Hwy. 17 across from Snee Farm. Traffic rumbles by his shelter made of two-by-fours and plywood scraps. The walls are made of blue, brown and camouflage tarps, and there’s even a red carpet and plastic window. But behind his stand, a developer’s sign looms, offering the land for sale. The future of this land and his stand is uncertain, as is the future of sweetgrass basket making itself.

Asked what she hopes the basket making community will look like in ten years, Nakia Wigfall, who serves as the president for the Mount Pleasant Sweetgrass Basket Makers Association, has this to say: “I hope it will not change, unless it changes for the better – more children become interested in doing the baskets as well as (learning about) the history.” And she hopes the roadside stands like her father’s that dot Hwy. 17 are still standing – that her grandchildren will be able to see them for themselves instead of only in family photo albums, museums and history books. SCM

Editor’s Note: Nicole Seitz is a Lowcountry author and artist. Her first novel, The Spirit of Sweetgrass, will be published by Integrity Publishers in February 2007.