Mary Jackson was 4 when she learned how to weave. Sitting at her mother’s knee in the late 1940s, she tied her first knots with nimble little fingers, binding coils of sea grasses. In the Gullah Geechee communities of coastal South Carolina, where basket making is a centuries-old tradition, young children often start the weave for their elders. Jackson grew up surrounded by expert needlewomen who elevated this style of weaving from a strictly domestic craft to culturally profound artistry.
Those needlewomen specialized in the fiber artistry of the Gullah Geechee — Black Southerners who can trace their distinctive sea island dialect and customs back to homelands in West and Central Africa. By the mid-1970s, Jackson had mastered the types of baskets known to her family — but had also begun to change the weave in spectacular ways.
“A basket will evolve from one that I’ve made before,” she said. “Each one becomes an individual.”
While her work remains rooted in the traditions of her ancestors, Jackson, 79, has developed her own style that reflects a singular vision and the instinctive way she handles her raw materials.
Today many baskets continue to be produced by Gullah Geechee descendants like Jackson who still live near where their families were once forced to labor on plantations along the Ashley and Santee Rivers, and are sold at makeshift roadside stands on the Savannah Highway corridor. But few weavers have pushed the bounds of artistry like Jackson, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship recipient whose work is now in permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others.
“We don’t look at Mary’s work as craft; we look at her work as representing the visual arts of our region,” said Angela Mack, the president of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., where Jackson had her first solo exhibition, in 1984. “In the South, those lines are blurred. There are so many artists who are excellent at what they do but are identified a certain way because of the evolution of their art form, and how they learned it.”
Coiled baskets were introduced in the 17th century by enslaved workers from the Guinea Coast of West Africa who had skills essential to rice production in the Carolina Lowcountry. These included the fashioning of fanner baskets — wide, shallow winnowing trays used to separate chaff from threshed and pounded grain. When these enslaved people arrived in the Carolinas, they began making sturdy field and storage containers out of red oak strippings and black needlerush, locally known as bulrush, harvested from marshes edging the region’s brackish river basins. More refined pieces for household use — sewing kits, flower trays, casserole covers — were woven with a delicate grass found growing among the coastal dunes. (The plant’s common name, sweetgrass, comes from its scent when freshly cut.)
Each of Jackson’s baskets begins with her signature knot and then coils like a viper as it slowly takes shape in her lap. She starts by picking up her “bone” — an old teaspoon with its bowl cut off, the neck hammered flat — which she uses as a sewing awl to wedge a space between the coils before stitching another row in place. “My grandmother used the bone from an animal, filed to a point,” she said. “Or a tenpenny nail.”
Jackson then reaches for a bundle of pale grass piled on a coffee table in her second-floor studio on Johns Island, just outside Charleston. She weaves the marsh grasses that grow there, which are meticulously gathered and sun-dried by her husband, Stoney (a weaver himself), into place with a symmetry that is a hallmark of her skill, and ties longleaf pine straw into dainty French knots as a decorative flourish.
Jackson doesn’t use dyes, instead sticking to all-natural hues, shading from tea green to woodland brown. It can take her several months — or in some cases, even years — to complete a single piece. “This is what you call patience,” she said.
Jackson’s finesse and originality is perhaps best expressed in an extraordinary construction titled “Never Again.” Her husband drew a template and erected a scaffold for her to weave it on, and the result — a three-foot-wide enclosed basket that is flat like a fanner but ends in a sweeping frond of untethered grass — now hangs at the entrance to a gallery in the Gibbes named for Jackson. “The director of the museum asked, ‘Well, Mary, what do you call this basket?’” She paused and smiled wryly. “I said, ‘Never again!’ And that name stuck to it. I’ve never made another one since then.” (Jackson did, actually, make another, smaller version, which she called “Unfinished.”)
After taking a break to stretch her legs and admire the baskets she collected on a visit to Ghana and Togo, Jackson settled once again on a pink cushion. She snipped the base of a sabal palmetto frond to a sharp point and then spliced it into pliable strips with a practiced flick of her wrist. Using her bone, she swiftly threaded the palm into the base of a new basket, binding the coils tightly. (Jackson often works on several projects at a time.)
The weaving comes with a personal price. Her knuckles are warped by rheumatoid arthritis, and she has to take breaks whenever her hands grow cold. Another longstanding issue that troubles Jackson, as well as other Gullah Geechee weavers, is dwindling access to patches of wild sweetgrass, as encroaching development carves up the coastline.
“We always have to ask permission to gather grass on private property,” she said. “All of these places are off-limits in terms of people just coming in to harvest.” And while both Jackson’s daughter and granddaughter have learned her rigorous process the same way she did long ago, they have chosen to pursue careers in medicine.
“My goal was always to make a beautiful basket for everyday living,” she said in her soft, measured voice. “That’s how I was taught.”
