The Press Gallery

The Acacia Collection in Country Home Magazine! (continued)

"This collection shows people doing the best they could with what they had," Greene says. "The results are mixed, depending on the technical skill, ingenuity, and imagination of the people involved."

Amid pieces of crude furniture, a hall tree is literally that--the trunk of a slender sapling, its limbs sawn to stump length to serve as coat hooks.

A century-old quilt covers one wall like a tapestry, faded but still vibrant. Its pattern defies predictability, with inventive shapes and colors reaching in random directions. The quilt has the impromptu qualities of jazz in a visual medium, a rhythm unlike the symmetry of more mainstream American quilts.

Crude musical instruments include a banjo crafted from a gourd in 1859. Its silence prods viewers to imagine it more than a century ago, a joyful voice rising in harmony with hope.

The pieces represent "a triumph of the human spirit," Greene says. "There is a spiritual aspect that one can extract" from studying them, he says. "We should look closely at what it is we discard that could enrich our lives."

The collection invariably strikes a familiar chord with visitors. "I'll have people come in and look around until their eyes light up at the sight of something, and I'll say 'tell me about it,"' Greene says. Triggered by the pieces, memories come to life and stories tumble from visitors who come to learn and learn to share. From the stories comes understanding.

"The culture of making do is universal," Greene says. "It is the culture derived from poverty."

Garage-sale items only a few years ago, scraps of this culture of making do are gaining the attention of collectors of Americana. Adding excitement to the search is the unpredictability of the market. As with folk art a quarter-century ago, America stands at the cusp of a new appreciation for these remnants of social history. By the nature of their meager origins, many pieces lack intrinsic value. So prices tend to be set by a seller's sentiments rather than any objective frame of reference.

Recognized collectibles in this genre have soared in value. Slave tags, for instance, traded for a few hundred dollars a decade ago, now fetch several thousand. Poring over the contents of attics, in yard sales and flea markets, Greene measures value in metaphors, weighing cents and sentiments. As unique and emotion-charged objects, their prices are never predictable, he says.

The appeal of these objects transcends ethnicity and reaches out to touch collectors of many backgrounds. "African-American material culture is a hybrid culture, not a transplantation," Greene says. As such, in its triumph and its tragedy, it is a powerful part of us all.