South Carolina Culture

Along a four-mile stretch of Highway 17 in this Atlantic coastal town, there are 60 family-operated sweetgrass basket stands. Mazie Brown sits on a chair in the shade of Mazie's Sweetgrass Baskets, weaving her latest basket. Behind the basket weaver are scores of baskets she has created--bread baskets, casserole baskets, fruit baskets, flower baskets, knitting baskets, cookie baskets and planter baskets.

Along a four-mile stretch of Highway 17 in this Atlantic coastal town, there are 60 family-operated sweetgrass basket stands. Mazie Brown sits on a chair in the shade of Mazie's Sweetgrass Baskets, weaving her latest basket. Behind the basket weaver are scores of baskets she has created--bread baskets, casserole baskets, fruit baskets, flower baskets, knitting baskets, cookie baskets and planter baskets.

It is hard to know where to start in writing a life as long and resonant as Strom Thurmond's, who turned 90 recently and still sits as South Carolina's senior senator. In fact, Cohodas begins not with Thurmond at all but with his precursor, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, the loud race-baiter who held a South Carolina Senate seat at the turn of the century, and whom Strom knew as a boy. The Thurmonds and the Tillmans were friends in Edgefield, S.C.

On these quiet, dreamy islands just off Georgia and South Carolina, a culture is being lost, a people displaced and, in an odd way, a part of America's most painful history is being replayed across a 20th-Century stage. For nearly 100 years, since the land was ceded to their ancestors after the fall of the Confederacy, children and grandchildren of freed slaves lived here in virtual isolation.