State

The Lady Who Made Cornbead Baskets Dock anybody Ml ill practice “Miss MyrickV* unusual craft? Bij Sli: DENNY No doubt one of the oldest arts in North America is basketmaking. The American Indian, in his basket-making art. used honeysuckle vines, pine straw, yucca, bear grass, willow, white oak. and river cane. Later, when he came to America, the white man adopted the Indian craft readily and continued to use the tried-and-true materials with success. The whites and the blacks, as well as the red man. have kept the art alive to this day. with very few materials having been added to the original ones. However, there was one material that was apparently unique to one par¬ ticular artisan. That was the "corn- bead." so named by the basket-maker who used it. An old lady. Mrs. Hill Wood, who lived within a few miles of our home in the western part of Randolph County, used the cornbead to make baskets for many years. "Miss Myrick," as we called her for reasons that have been lost in time, grew her "beads" by the side of her garden fence, along with the hops she raised for making the yeast she used in her salt-rising bread. 28 The combcads. which grew on vines and became as hard as bone when dry. were grey and about the size of a Crow¬ der pea. "Miss Myrick” gathered the beads while they were still tender and pushed the pith from their centers with a wire, "stringing" the beads on the wire at the same time. She then shaped the strung beads into baskets of vari¬ ous shapes and sizes. Her designs were obviously without precedent, all of them coming from patterns that she carried only in her mind. Some of her baskets were for deco¬ rations only, to be set on a table or open shelf, or to be hung from the ceiling. She made others to be used for fruit containers or for flower arrange¬ ments. People came from towns in David¬ son. Guilford, and Randolph counties to her little unpainted. two-room house three miles west of the Village of Farmer and bought her strange prod¬ ucts. They paid her the money that made up her total cash income. Knowing "Miss Myrick's" needs, my parents often sent us children to cut her wood, plow and work her garden, go to the store for her. and do any other chores she might have. And realizing that she was lonely, they would send some of us to visit her for an afternoon. We were also sent with a horse and buggy sometimes to take her to church, then bring her by our house afterwards for Sunday dinner. Not only did she tell us that she was pleased and grateful for our attention when we visited her. but she also served us the tangy-smelling salt-rising Son* of Ih* combcod boskets wort for decorotion only, os is this honging bosket owned by Осю Mor- gon, of Former, N.C. The combeod fruit bosket obo>e, mode by "Miss Myrkk”. is о prized possession of the writer. bread spread thickly with homemade jellies. From time to time she went even further to show her gratitude by giving us one of her beautiful baskets, some of which still remain in the fam¬ ily. apparently as sound as they were the day they were strung and shaped by her old but artistic hands. “Miss Myrick" has been gone for many years and her basketmaking art with her. To my sorrow, none of us learned her unique craft, which she had kept alive during the first two decades of this century. Neither did any of us get a seed from her combcads to perpetuate the growth of her raw product. I did not learn "Miss Myridk's" craft, norcverbccome an artisan. But I do have a second-best hobby: collect¬ ing some of the products of other peo¬ ple's skills. A prized possession of mine is one of "Miss Myrick's" corn- bead baskets. THE STATE. АРИИ 1979