CIRCLE UNBROKEN

In solemn Gullah cadences, an old woman passes on to a grandchild centuries of history embodied in the Sea Islands’ distinctive sweetgrass baskets, as in equally solemn watercolors, Lewis takes the tale from an ancestral African village, through the Middle Passage and slavery days, to changes brought by the automobile and distant modern wars. Powerfully evoking the passage of successive generations linked by the ancient skill to create rice-winnowing baskets or “sewn” so tightly that they can “hold the rain,” this elaborates on the equally poetic, but briefer and more impressionistic, account of the same history in Sandra Belton’s Beauty, Her Basket (2003). (afterword, bibliography) (Picture book. 7-10)