[Still on vacation, but the hotel has wifi, so I thought I'd get one in. This one happened quickly this morning as I am up early (Stafford-like). It needs editing, but here it is anyway--a dispatch of sorts from the road.]
At a streetside corner of what was the slave market in oldtown Charleston, a beautifully long-lived woman weaves herself into a tidal pool of sweetgrass baskets. A son or grandson beside her works carefully and contentedly through what seems to be a long apprenticeship, he is no longer young.
Simple paper tags tied with white string are marked exquisitely in the hundreds, and I am oddly happy not to be able to afford one. And happier still that there are plenty, both tourists and locals, that can and do open wallets and purses and pay up.
Each corner of the market and many of the stalls are filled with similar craftspeople at their work while we watch, admire, and occasionally fret or regret. Like history itself, I was not here when they arrived and I had already moved on when they loaded up supplies and surplus for the next day’s wage and headed home to a part of town I may have driven through on my way to a middle-of-the-road hotel.
The symbiotic economy of this market seems to work for many on this peninsula that was once at the heart of the heartbreak of a nation. Though I am not bringing a basket or even a bracelet home to my mother as a souvenir of my travels, I am bringing home for myself a memorial portrait of this matriarch in water reeds who remakes history by hand, without needing to sing, and teaches a lesson that never seems to be reported in the schoolbooks & tourits' pamphlets quite honestly enough.
