Carrying the Spirit: Jery Taylor’s Artful Preservation of Gullah Geechee Traditions
Jery Taylor’s journey is not just a story of personal resilience but also a vivid tapestry of the cultural and historical significance of the Gullah Geechee people. Her life is an emblem of generational continuity and the enduring spirit of African traditions. Born and raised in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Jery’s childhood was steeped in the rhythms of Gullah life, where every moment was an opportunity to learn about survival, craft, and heritage. The Snowden community of Boone Hall Plantation provided the backdrop to the earliest chapters of her life, a place rich in history and cultural memory.
Although raised by her mother, Albertha Fludd Bennett, her grandmother, Herline Coakley, and her great-grandmother, Bessie Coakley, Jery was particularly cherished as her grandmother’s baby. “My father got killed when I was seven months old. He was hit by a car. My grandmother said that he came back in a dream and told her to make sure and take care of me. So everywhere my grandmother went, I was right there with her,” Jery remembered. African cultures, including the Gullah, who trace their lineage to West Africa, regard dreams as direct messages from the spirits of ancestors. These messages are never to be disregarded. Jery’s grandmother, Herline, embraced her spiritual calling by ensuring that young Jery was deeply loved, equipped with the knowledge needed to navigate life, and prepared to serve as a vessel for preserving and passing on cultural memory.
Jery’s grandmother, Herline was born in South Carolina in 1916, was the oldest of 13 children, and did not have the privilege of a school education. Naturally, she prioritized teaching her granddaughter how to survive. Those survival lessons included, as Gullah Chef Bill Green explained, learning how to “live off the fat of the land,” a practice central to the Gullah Geechee way of life. Herline taught Jery how to grow and harvest vegetables, as well as how to catch blue crabs by trapping them with a stick, sneaking up from behind, and swiftly tossing them into a bucket. “My grandmother used to say that when you had a footprint, the gala[1] and his wife would go in that hole, so when you take your stick and feel it in that hole, it would be both of ‘em in there. So we get two for the price of one. And they were always fat crabs,” Jery recalled.
Tales of Br’er Rabbit repeatedly outsmartering Br’er Fox is another way Jery’s grandmother taught her how to survive. Though smaller, Br’er Rabbit avoided Br’er Fox’s ambushes because he was clever, resourceful, and quick-thinking. “Br’er Rabbit would tell Br’er Fox that he would be somewhere at six o’clock. So Br’er Fox would plan to get him at six, but Br’er Rabbit would have already gone at five,” Jery shared, recalling the age-old tales that enslaved West Africans brought to this country. “When my grandmother was telling us the story, we just thought it was funny, until we started growing up.”
Basketry is another survival tool that Jery’s grandmother gave her. Coming from Africa, Jery said weaving baskets was men’s work. The Civil War reversed the roles. When the men went off to fight, the women picked up the practice. After the war, women continued weaving and men, for the most part, left it alone. “Once we as women start doing things, men think it’s a feminine thing,” she explained. Today, most basket makers are women, while men primarily take on the responsibility of sourcing and harvesting the grasses, often journeying great distances to gather the materials needed to sustain this sacred craft. Rooted in Gullah culture, the tradition of basket weaving has been documented in plantation records as far back as the 1690s, according to the National Humanities Center.
“When these baskets came to this country,” Jery explained, “they came for the cultivation of rice.” The same for many of the West Africans who were brought from countries like Ghana, Senegal, and Sierra Leone to the Southeastern United States. Their mastery in clearing wooded swamps, building dams, and planting and harvesting rice made Charleston County, which Mt. Pleasant is part of, one of the wealthiest regions in the world in the early eighteenth century. Those enslaved Africans would use the baskets as fanners.
“Fanning,” according to Jery’s brochure that she gives customers for educational purposes, is “a method of cleaning grain, similar to one found throughout West Africa. The rice is placed in a wooden mortar and pounded with a pestle to break the hull. After pounding, it is winnowed in large coil baskets to separate the hull from the seed.” Today, Boone Hall offers workshops where participants, who are cautioned to wear sunscreen, use bug repellent, and bring water, learn about “the early economic history of South Carolina plantations,” as described on their website. One of the activities includes fanning, a practice once carried out by Gullah people in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the beginning of the 20th century, rice cultivation in the Low Country dramatically decreased, so basketweavers started selling baskets in markets and on the roadside.
Basketry is also found in indigenous communities throughout the world, including those native to the United States (formerly known as Turtle Island). In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer explained that, in their elders’ time, “the lake, the woods, and garden gave them most of their food and other provisions, but at times, they also needed store goods, and baskets were the cash crop.” Jery echoed this sentiment. Her family grew much of their own food and fished from the nearby creek, but sold baskets for money to buy food they didn’t already have, furniture, and insurance. They had neither the luxury to keep baskets for themselves nor the knowledge that what they had was unique and worth preserving. “They knew our history when we didn’t know it, you see?” Jery pointed out, “We just thought that everybody in the world made baskets. Back then, [my family] didn’t have cars, so you didn’t get to travel to different states and stuff.”
Jery may not have traveled as a child, but she made up for lost time as an adult. She’s presented workshops and showcased her work up and down the Gullah corridor, including her “Beaufort Basket” at the York W. Bailey Museum at the historic Penn Center on St. Helena Island. She’s also included in exhibits and collections in galleries in Pittsburgh, the Mailou Arts Fest in Tampa, the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the San Fransisco airport, the University of Kentucky, and more. Jery has journeyed to Africa twice, each trip marked by meaningful connections.
In 1999, she traveled to Ghana, joining community members from St. Helena Island, South Carolina, who accompanied the 100 Male Voice Choir as they performed at the opening of a new museum. Over two decades later, in 2022, she visited Tanzania to meet her niece’s in-laws. Traveling to Ghana and Tanzania were transformative experiences that deepened her understanding of her heritage. In Ghana, she connected with the land of her ancestors, while in Tanzania, she found kinship with a community that shared similar traditions and values. These journeys reinforced the global significance of Gullah culture and its ties to the African diaspora.
Although she’s known how to weave baskets since the age of five, Jery didn’t take up the craft as her full-time occupation until 1983 when she was about 30 years old. And while sweetgrass is the most widely recognized basket of the Gullah people, she didn’t limit herself to one type. She’s also mastered making baskets with horse hair, pine needles, and bulrush. The latter is a type of basket that was made in Ancient Egypt. The book of Exodus tells the story of the pharoah’s daughter finding Baby Moses adrift in the Nile River. Moses’s birth mother had bundled him into a basket and placed him in the river to save his life. That basket was made of bulrush with tar on the bottom. Bulrush is a tall, grass-like plant that grows near marshes and other shallow waters; it’s also known as cattail.
Jery learned how to make bulrush baskets by watching a woman named Janie Cohen. Janie learned from her father who was student of the historic Penn School on St. Helena Island. Jery had asked Janie why she wasn’t using sweetgrass. “Being the Gullah woman she was,” Jery recalled, “Miss Janie said, ‘Gal, ain’t bun no sweetgrass ova yea.’” Janie wasn’t interested in teaching anyone else how to make the baskets, though, for fear of the culture being exploited. So Jery, the clever student of Br’er Rabbit that she is, learned by paying close attention to how Janie worked her magic. She’d already mastered the sweetgrass technique, and bulrush wasn’t more difficult. It was just different. Since Janie’s passing, Jery names herself the only one in the whole wide world who still knows how to make bulrush baskets. She’s since created the Jery SweetRush basket by combining bulrush and sweetgrass, paying homage to the two women she learned from: her grandmother, Herline Coakley, and Janie Cohen.
“The history of [sweetgrass] is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Whereas Janie couldn’t get her hands on sweetgrass back then, the aromatic perennials are even more difficult to come across today. The main issue is development. The land where sweetgrass traditionally grew has largely been paved over for the construction of highways, bridges, plazas, resorts, and subdivisions. This makes sweetgrass baskets more valuable (and costly), and it also threatens the future of sweetgrass baskets. For customers complaining about the cost, Jery’s response is that if you want a part of a history, then it’s for you. If you think it’s too expensive, then it’s not for you. “But these baskets will outlive all of us,” she said and still has a basket that was woven by her mother and another by her grandmother to prove it. “Penn Center has baskets from slavery,” she added.
Critics of basket prices are further proof why education around basket weaving is so important. All the time and energy invested in the actual weaving is only a fraction of the labor involved. The disappearance of sweetgrass makes the work before the weaving even more difficult. The brochure that Jery gives patrons also emphasizes the urgency of this matter. Basket makers “depend on open access to these indigenous natural materials if their art is to continue,” it reads. “Increased public interest is needed to ensure the future of this Low Country tradition.” In addition to educating the public, another way that Jery is attempting to address the problem is by sowing sweetgrass on her own land. Another approach is combining sweetgrass with other materials.
The basket that Jery designed for Acres of Ancestry’s permanent fiber art and agrarian material culture collection is a blend of firm sweetgrass and soft horse hair. Serendipitously, it honors the Black and Native people who the art of basket weaving started with. Narrow at the base, it widens in the middle like childbearing hips, then narrows again until it forms a small opening at the top. A ponytail hangs from the top edge at the point that Jery decided that it was done. The tail begs you to stroke its blonde strands to imagine how it must have been gathered, wrapped, and coiled into its classic but unique spiraled design. After all, no two baskets are just alike. They may be similar, but they’re never identical.
True to the ways of a serious artist, the process for Jery matters just as much, if not more, than the final product. It’s a by-faith-not-by-sight practice. Unless commissioned, she doesn’t plan her designs, never knowing how big, how multidimensional, or how much time the basket will take to make. Some of her pieces are so small, you can fit them into the palm of your hand. Others, such as the commissioned slave castle made of sweetgrass, take time and forethought. Someone told Joseph McGill, Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, that such a project could not be done, but he knew to ask Jery before dismissing the idea. “The minute he asked me to do it,” she said, “I started thinking about how I was gonna get this to come together, you know? My husband got the burs from the pine tree, so that I could make the roof. And everything about slavery is on it. You got cotton, you got the jumping over the broom, you got the mortar, the pestle, the rice.”
Another unconventional commissioned work came in 2013 when Jery was tasked with making a key out of sweetgrass. This wasn’t the typical three-inch shiny key though. Beaufort, South Carolina wanted to honor American Idol winner, Candice Glover with a Gullah-style key to her hometown. When Jery asked the mayor how big the key should be, he “spread his arms about as wide as they could reach.”[2] Although she didn’t know how she’d get it done, she was confident that she could. With a little imagination and a lot of prayer, she created the first of its kind: a key made of sweetgrass. The tangible symbol of civil recognition turned out to be 39 inches and dropped everyone’s jaws straight to their chest.
Some designs take days, others take months, and there are those that take years to make. How do you know when you’re done? You just do. “Whatever comes out, you settle for that,” she explained. Admirers of her work will also have to do some settling. The product is for sale, but the process is not. Like Janie, she has no plans of teaching anyone her ways to resist ongoing cultural exploitation. When asked how she feels about Gullah people teaching outsiders the craft, she said, “Our people have always kept it for us…You’ve got the whole pie. You don’t need to share it. It’s for you and your family, it’s not for everybody.” While she offers workshops, no student leaves knowing how to start or finish their piece. When they arrive, the piece has already been started. When they’ve done all they can do, she finishes it for them. “I gotta keep something for myself, you know?” she added, “Don’t forget now. My grandmother taught me Br’er Rabbit stories.”
The concept of gatekeeping within cultural preservation is a recurring theme in Jery’s philosophy. By carefully choosing what knowledge to share and with whom, she ensures that the essence of Gullah culture remains intact. This approach is not about exclusion but about protecting the integrity of traditions that have been historically undervalued and exploited. It is a reminder that cultural heritage is a living entity that requires thoughtful stewardship.
Jery is an artist through-and-through. Basketry is not the only medium in her toolbox though. For a few years, she styled women’s hair. Even in cosmetology, she was fascinated by the extraordinary. “Going to the Bronner Brothers Show, you just can’t even begin to imagine the way people think to be able to come up with some of the stuff that they do.” Those elaborate hair designs and big imaginations influenced her artwork as well. Though she still resides in Mt. Pleasant, her studio is in City Market of Downtown Savannah. Jery lives in Walterboro. Baskets hang on the door and cover the windows. Once inside, the brick walls are lined with shelves of baskets of all sizes and designs, and canvases with painted scenes of church traditions, people harvesting sweetgrass, weavers making baskets, women warriors wielding machetes, children crabbing, etc.
Painting is Jery’s way of alternating her crops, as taught by Dr. George Washington Carver. Dr. Carver saved thousands of lives by teaching people the importance of crop rotation. If you only plant cotton with no breaks or varieties in between, you’ll deplete the soil. Exhausted soil cannot support life. Anything that does manage to sprout will lack vital nutrients. That’s a lesson for farmers and gardeners, and artists too. We have to give ourselves a break, and sometimes that break means exploring new territory. When you’re the best at what you do, however, your sabbatical might rattle the crowd. “They was going crazy when they found out that I had started painting. ‘But you can’t stop doing baskets,’ they’d say. ‘Oh, I don’t have no intentions of stopping.’ I just want to do something different, you know?” In place of cotton, Dr. Carver suggested peanuts—goobas, they’re called in Gullah. Painting is Jery’s goobas. “The first painting I did was the sweetgrass lady in purple. I sold it at my first show. Because it was the first piece that sold, she is my logo, the Sweetgrass Lady.”
The (real) Sweetgrass Lady will never stop weaving baskets. Even when she’s so tired of baskets, she can’t stand the smell of the grass, she always comes back to it. And money isn’t the main motivator. “I just appreciate the fact that my grandmother took the time to make sure that I was able to carry this on. She taught me everything that I needed to know, in order to carry this art on. So it’s just the love for my grandmother.” Love is an evident component of Jery’s life. She walks out of the house looking like, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, she got dressed instead of merely putting clothes on. Her childhood was full of love, and her husband of more than three decades maintained the same rhythm of adoration that she was accustomed to. The pure intention of a patient mother sitting a daughter between her legs to part and braid her hair is the same spirit that’s active while Jery weaves and paints. These baskets are handcrafted by an woman who is loved and is doing it for love.
As Jery approaches her seventh decade of basket weaving, she remains a symbol of perseverance and creativity. Her work is a living archive of Gullah culture, a tangible reminder of the history and values that define her community. Through her art, she not only honors her ancestors but also inspires future generations to carry the torch of cultural preservation. In a world that often prioritizes progress over preservation, Jery’s dedication serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of honoring one’s roots while embracing innovation.
“I want to be known as a person who has done all the genres of baskets. Most people only know the one.” Having expertise in so many basket genres paired with her decision to keep the craft close to her chest is an anomaly on one hand and a blueprint on the other. Sometimes true preservation requires gatekeeping. People of the sun are innately generous, but after centuries of traditions and inventions being stolen, carefully dictating who has access to what information is critical. Everything ain’t for everybody. Jery Taylor is a walking example of this truth. While she has no plan to stop weaving, according to her, she couldn’t if she wanted to. “One thing about us as basket makers, we never retire. We die with a basket in our hand.”
[1] Gala is the translation of “crab” in the Ewe language spoken in Ghana, Togo, Benin, and parts of Nigeria. Ms. Jery added that a gala is specifically a male blue crab.
[2] https://lcweekly.com/culture/local-color/candice-jery-mayor-billy-a-the-bulrush/