By Jennifer Deacon
Clara Clayton-Gough is an East Preston resident, a mother of seven and a seventh-generation African Nova Scotian basket weaver.
In a recent interview, Clara credited her grandmother for getting her started with basket weaving. “When I was eight years old, I started going to the city market to sell baskets with my grandmother, Selena Sparks Drummond, and mother, Edith Clayton,” Clara said. “One day my grandmother asked me if I wanted to make a basket and I said okay. She gave me a basket that she’d started and I finished it."
"There was a lady walking back and forth watching me and she wanted to buy the basket after I got it finished. I cried. It was the first basket I had made and I wanted to keep it. That was the start of baskets for me."
Through the generations, male family members have helped each spring and fall by cutting the red maple saplings for the baskets. "They cut saplings that are about three inches wide and about eight feet long and I can cut it from there,” Clara said. “I leave it on the ground until I am ready to split it to use for basket ribs and ribbons."
Clayton-Gough has used her basket-making skills to make a variety of items, such as weaving two life-sized figures. "I made the man in the image of my dad, Clifford Clayton. He used to wear an old felt hat, so I got one from one of his friends. The woman is in the image of my mom and she is holding a baby that represents me". These basket figures have been displayed in workshops, museums and galleries including the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum in Savannah, Georgia.
Basket-making has gotten Clara through some difficult times. "When my mom passed away it was a heartbreaking time, and basket weaving was my healing time. It was the only thing that kept me going. I would go right to the maple. It was just like something that was leading me every day."
Traditionally, Clayton-Gough sells her baskets every weekend at the Alderney Landing Market but she hasn't attended in the last year due to the pandemic. She now has a new focus. "People that bought baskets from my mom gave them back to me and bought one of mine. I started repairing all those older baskets. I enjoy keeping my mom, grandmother and great grandmother's names alive through the baskets. They were very strong women."
Clayton-Gough has been making baskets for seventy four years. "I love it and I just want to stay around as long as I can and see what else I can come up with.” Her granddaughter, Tracy Gough, "is interested in carrying on the family tradition."
Clayton-Gough has been featured in many videos and books about African Nova Scotian Communities. She is on the cover of It's Our Time by Wanda Lauren Taylor holding a basket with her woven sculpture of her father behind her. Clayton-Gough's baskets are in the Nova Scotia Museum and Dartmouth Heritage Museum. Her work can be found through the Basketry Guild or Eastern Shores Gallery.
