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I'm proud to be a Gullah-Geechee person. §
This material right here, the dark brown right here,
is longleaf pine needle. The light color is sweetgrass.
And this material all along here is bulrush, the material they made the Moses basket out
of. This is bulrush here.
Most large baskets are made out of bulrush. Especially the fanner basket was made out
of bulrush. And you don't pull this.
You use a knife to cut this right here. And we usually get this in the summertime.
§ When we dry it, it turns brown, when the sun's
good and hot. This time of year, it take forever to dry.
I'm the sixth generation in our family. This art came from Africa over 300 years ago,
and the Gullah people are still living here in South Carolina.
§ We used to gather material on the edge of
the Intracoastal Waterway, but now it's developed on the water.
This is palm. You use this on Palm Sunday.
What we use it for are to put the baskets together.
This is palmetto thorn, the hard part of the palm,
what they used to use to make baskets to work in the fields.
The first tool we used was made of beef bone. But today, I'm using mine with a metal file.
The second tool we used to make the basket was a nail.
Today we use the end of a fork or spoon handle. All of 'em serve the same purpose.
This is sweetgrass. You see the flower right here?
When it's in flower, we cannot use it. I can salvage just a little of it.
You don't cut it; you pull it. Sweetgrass is green,
and we dry it to the cream color in the basket. Ain't nothing I don't know about the basket,
from the ground on up.