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Corey Alston is a rare artisan in the craft of coiled basket weaving, a tradition brought to the American South by enslaved Africans in the 1600s. Most experts are older women, taught by their mothers and grandmothers. Alston is a man in his 30s.

At a time when many weavers worry about their shrinking community, Alston is keeping the basket sewing tradition alive. Along with his mother-in-law, he and his wife taught their two daughters to weave sweet grass baskets when they were young. Now they’re teenagers, who sell their baskets alongside their parents in Charleston, S.C., in the open-air Charleston City Market.

Still, Alston worries that not enough weavers are passing the skill onto the next generation. “Women have preserved the art for over 300 years and should be given all the credit for that,” said Alston, who learned from women. “There’s never going to be enough. There’s always going to be the possibility of a lack of artisans.”

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The keepers of the craft are the Gullah Geechee, descendants of the enslaved Africans who worked the rice and indigo plantations along the swath of coast from northern Florida to southern North Carolina. The Gullah Geechee, also known as the Gullah, in the South Carolina Lowcountry — the eastern marshlands, sea islands and beaches extending from Charleston to Georgia — say the sweet grass basket is inextricable to their culture.

The craft is featured in many museums including the National Museum of African American History and Culture and in PBS documentaries. Baskets are collectors’ pieces and can sell at high prices.

Alston believes it is the responsibility of older artisans to teach the next generation, as he did with his daughters.

“The way of Southern parents, you say, ‘no ma’am, yes ma’am.’ Whatever, mom or grandma said do, you do it. You are going to sit down, and you are going to learn how to tie a [basket] knot,” Alston said.

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Yesmine Alston, 19, says her father didn’t force her to learn, but he strongly encouraged it.

“It’s a very important art with me being a sixth-generation basket weaver,” she said. “It’s very important because there aren’t many people my age or my sister’s age.”

None of her friends weave, she said.

Alston believes weaving is important for the preservation of his Gullah Geechee culture. During times of enslavement, men wove baskets as much as women; baskets were used for work and each person wove their own baskets for their tasks, said Dale Rosengarten, a professor at the College of Charleston who studies the origins of coiled basketry in West Africa and the southern United States.

In South Carolina, most weavers are women in their 60s, 70s or older who sell their basketry in Charleston just steps from where their ancestors were sold. Enslaved Black people who knew how to weave were more valuable, their skill cited as a selling point, according to the book, “Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art,” which is co-authored by Rosengarten.

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“Traditionally it was passed down right from mothers and grandmothers to daughters,” said Mary Jackson, a renowned South Carolina Gullah Geechee basket weaver whose work is on exhibit at the African American Museum.

Jackson, now in her 70s, learned from her mother and taught her daughter and her first grandchild.

“In many years to come there may not be any basket makers,” she said.

Among the rows of soap, jewelry and jam vendors at the Charleston City Market, relatives, sometimes three generations of one family, sell baskets with winding handles that begin to look like kaleidoscopes if the eye lingers too long. Strips of leaves from palmetto trees are intertwined with the sweet grass for contrast, giving the baskets their distinctive look.

The families are protective of their baskets and each other; many don’t allow photography. One Gullah Geechee basket maker said he won’t allow his children to be photographed making baskets out of fear it will look too “National Geographic,” Third World or impoverished.

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Mount Pleasant, a small town just across the Cooper River from Charleston, is the seat of sweet grass culture and where Jackson, the Alstons and many Gullah Geechee weavers were raised.

Nakia Wigfall, a noted Gullah Geechee weaver, who was featured in the PBS documentary “Gullah Roots,” gathered the women in her family together a few months ago to begin work on a winnowing or fanner basket, traditionally used to separate rice from chaff, to carry food or in some cases, babies. She was delighted when younger women in the family showed up to work on the basket and learn about their “family legacy.”

Kennedy Bennett, a 21-year-old Gullah Geechee Mount Pleasant native, is the daughter and granddaughter of weavers. She didn’t pick up the skill when she was a child but intends to learn this year.

The reasons younger people are less interested in learning how to weave vary, but Bennett thinks it’s largely because they have more education and career options, and not about indifference to the craft.

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“That narrative is a little bit dangerous,” Bennett said, who is a history major at Yale University. “We have an interest in basketry and we value the craftsmanship, but there are these external forces — economic, political, social — that play a role in how well the artistry is doing.”

In the 1930s, Black women set up commerce stands, just overturn boxes in some cases, along U.S. Route 17 and begin to make their sweet grass “show” baskets, a departure from the functional baskets for household tasks, Rosengarten said.

Sweetgrass basket commerce grew when the first bridge spanning the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant opened in 1929, Rosengarten said.

Many of today’s older weavers have returned to the craft in retirement and do it for enjoyment or extra money — the ornately made sweet grass goods and baskets can easily sell for $200 or more.

Corey Alston said he has been a full-time basket weaver for almost two decades.

Like the grass itself, the art is vulnerable to the elements that pose a risk to its demand or viability.

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The covid-19 shutdown cleared the streets of Charleston and Mount Pleasant of tourists; some artisans died of the disease.

Hurricanes are a constant threat to the region’s economy, including the sweet grass basket industry. Hurricane Hugo, a Category 4 storm that caused $7 billion damage in the area in 1989, hit Mount Pleasant hard, destroying a bridge across Route 17 in the town and leveling sweet grass stands that had lined the roadway since 1930, Rosengarten said.

Homemade sweet grass stands, some dilapidated, can still be found on the side of Route 17. Over the years, new shopping malls and residential communities have been built along the highway, which has become a major four-lane thoroughfare making it nearly impossible to stop safely at a roadside basket vendor.

The Gullah Geechee community is recognized as “a distinct American Culture,” Rosengarten wrote in “Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.” Families of weavers are known as bloodline, and it’s these people who shoulder the burden of keeping sweet grass weaving alive, Corey Alston and many others believe.

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Sweetgrass basket weaving is an art form that should stay if not in a family of basket weavers, then at least within the Mount Pleasant Gullah Geechee community, Alston said.

He is from a family of blacksmiths but married into a family of sweet grass basket weavers. The family matriarch, the late Mary Jane Manigault, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow in 1984 for her contribution to the art, gave him permission to learn the craft.

Many families of basket weavers believe very strongly in the bloodline concept and will agree to teach others only with the blessing of an older family member.

“The culture has to be kept tight,” he said. Otherwise “everything in the culture will fall apart.”

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