The Indigo Girl

by Natasha Boyd

  “You are smiling and crying at the same moment,” Charles said, and then he pulled me close.

  I fell into his warm embrace, my cheek against the rough texture of his coat. The smell of pipe tobacco, sandalwood, and salt breeze invaded my senses. I would miss this man most of all.

  A warmth started deep in my belly and burned through me to the tips of my fingers and toes. You are everything he needs. Mrs. Pinckney’s soft voice rode on the breeze off the water.

  I pulled away, my hands swiping at the remaining tears that were not soaked into his jacket. “Oh, forgive me.”

  “Hush, Eliza.”

  “Mr. Pinckney, I—”

  “Please. Call me Charles. Call me Charles at least once before you go.” His gray-blue eyes burned into me with a sudden intensity.

  I swallowed, gathering my strength. “Charles,” I said softly. I took his hands again and looked up into his face. “I know I am young. And I have nothing to offer you except some seeds. But I do not want to leave this place. And when I think of leaving, the one thing I think about most, with the most crushing sadness, is leaving you.” I took a breath. “I—”

  “Eliza.” My name broke on his lips, his face tortured. Full of something I could not read.

  I’d shocked him. Horrified him, perhaps. “I know it’s too soon,” I rushed on. “I loved your wife, dearly. I, I …” My voice failed me under the weight of the emotions struggling to climb from my heart. “It’s too soon, I know. Time is not on our side.”

  “My age,” whispered Charles. “Time is not on my side, you mean.”

  He clutched my hands harder. His jaw was tight and his eyes vivid. The breeze blew a lock of his hair free. “I never thought … I never dreamed you might feel … I have loved two women so very deeply for so very long. I thought I was about to lose another.”

  The breath left my chest at his admission, leaving my heart gasping. I reached up and brushed the stray lock of his hair behind his ear.

  “Could you love me, Eliza, my little visionary?”

  My throat ached. “I do, Charles. I do love you.” My heart flew up and out of me as I spoke the words. “Will you marry me?” I asked him. “Will you marry me and keep me here?”

  He smiled, and the world seemed to brighten all around us. “I will. And we will parcel out your seeds among our friends. We will grow your indigo and whatever else you’d like to try. And we’ll build a legacy together.”

  “As long as Quash helps us.” I smiled back at Charles.

  He shook his head. “You imp.” His eyes danced with merriment. “Fine. I will include Quash, and anyone else you wish, in those plans.”

  “Everyone. Even Essie must stay with me.”

  “Anyone you wish.” His voice was serious and tender. This man knew me better than perhaps my own family. He had seen my weaknesses, my mistakes, my ambitions, and my shortcomings. Yet, he loved me.

  “And Quash …” I took a deep breath. “One day I’d like him to be free.”

  Mr. Pinckney’s expression never wavered in his regard. “Anything you wish.”

  “I think we’ll do great things together, Mr. Pinckney,” I whispered, overcome.

  “Charles,” he corrected.

  “Charles,” I said.

  THE END

  “Having our passions in due subjection to our reason is the greatest victory that can be acquired, and perhaps ’tis a lesson the easier learned for being early taught.”

  —Eliza Lucas, 1722–1793

  Eliza Lucas and Charles Pinckney married in May of 1744 in a small ceremony at St. Andrew’s Parish Church. Her only dowry was her slaves and the crop of indigo still growing upon the land that was no longer owned by the Lucas family. Her family returned to Antigua without her.

  Allowing the indigo to go to seed, Charles and Eliza shared the seed out amongst several planter families in the area.

  Later that same year, England and France declared war against each other, and, no longer able to buy indigo from the French, the English paid a bounty per pound of indigo from the colonies. Within a few years, the French were so threatened by Carolina indigo, they made the export of indigo seed from their islands a “capital crime.”

  Indigo went on to become one of the largest exports out of the colonies, laying the foundation for colonial wealth that shaped United States history. The Winyah Indigo Society, formed by planters to commemorate the source of their wealth, endowed, supported, and survived the American Revolution. It also funded one of the first free schools in South Carolina. Just before the revolution, the annual export of indigo amounted to the enormous quantity of 1,107,660 pounds.

  Eliza herself signed a document of manumission freeing Quash from slavery in 1750. He continued to work for the Pinckneys, acting as paid carpenter and architect in the building of the Pinckney house on East Bay. He was well remunerated and bought property in Charles Town from Charles Pinckney as well as several hundred acres along the mouth of the Santee River, becoming a planter himself. He bought his daughters out of slavery for $200 each. He renamed himself John Williams.

  John Laurens’ son, Henry Laurens, went on to make his fortune in slave trading. It is estimated that eight thousand souls passed through his markets.

  Eliza fell deeply in love with Charles, and after his sudden death in 1758, wrote:

  The greatest of all human evils has befallen me. I have lost the best and worthiest of men, the tenderest and most affectionate of husbands.

  ’Tis not in the power of my words to paint my distress.

  My nights have passed in tears and my days in sighs without a single exception since the fatal twelfth of July when I was deprived of what my soul held most dear upon this earth …

  How uncommon a loss I have met with.

  Eliza and Charles’ son Thomas went on to develop and sign the Pinckney Treaty that gave the United States use of the Mississippi River for trade, setting the boundary between the United States and Spanish colonies. And their other son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and represented South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Active in both state and national politics, Charles Cotesworth did much to shape the educational and cultural institutions within South Carolina.

  Upon news of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s death in 1793, President George Washington, at his own request, served as a pallbearer at her funeral, laying her to rest in a cemetery in Philadelphia.

  Two hundred years after her death, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was inducted into the South Carolina Women in Business Hall of Fame. In 2005, a new chapter of the National Society for the Daughters of the American Revolution organized in her honor, and named itself the Eliza Lucas Pinckney chapter of the NSDAR. And this year, 2017, the “Miss Eliza” 2018 Junior Doll, representing all the strong women of Colonial South Carolina, will be unveiled at the Continental Congress of the NSDAR in Washington, DC.

  To this day, the South Carolina state flag is blue in honor of indigo.

  As so eloquently put by her descendant, Ms. Harriott Horry Ravenel in 1896, “When will any New Woman do more for her country?”

  A Note from the Author

  Dear Reader,

  In September 2013, I attended an indigo exhibit at the Picture This Gallery on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The exhibit featured many different types of artists who used or were inspired by indigo. There were dyers and textile makers, jewelry makers, painters, and a lady who was a living Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and who stayed in character all evening.

  I overheard a conversation the gallery owner was having with one of Eliza’s descendants who was in attendance. I caught snippets of a story that would light a fire in me. It was a story about a sixteen-year-old girl who ran her father’s plantations in her father’s name. “This girl,” the unknown person said next to me, unaware of my eavesdropping, “made a
deal with her slaves: she would teach them to read, and in return they would teach her the secrets of making indigo.”

  Now, I realize I am not a historian. But I do know that there once lived a remarkable girl whose name, outside of Charleston, has mostly been forgotten. And the need to tell her story became so overwhelming that I couldn’t ignore it. I told myself that if I could tell her story in such a way as to capture her spirit and her fire, and introduce her back into our consciousness, then I must try.

  The story that you just read was based on true events and historical documents. However, as with any fictionalized version of history there are elements that had to be created to demonstrate character or give fabricated reasons for actions where the truth behind certain deeds has been lost to time.

  Most of the slaves on the Wappoo plantation you read about were real, except for Essie and Sarah. Starrat was real and was indeed a witness on a deed to mortgage their property that I found, though perhaps not as vile. I have no idea if the Mr. L whom Eliza refers to in her letter to her father is in fact a Laurens, but based on her vehement rejection of his marriage suit (her exact words “the riches of Peru and Chile had he put them together could not purchase sufficient esteem for him to make him my husband” crystallized her character and made me laugh out loud), I imagined it must have been someone memorable whose principles were at odds with Eliza’s. When I learned about how young Henry Laurens went on to make his fortune in slave trading, I felt he and his father fit the bill perfectly.

  Nicholas Cromwell was real and so was his sabotage of Eliza’s indigo attempts. She never refers to a Negro indigo maker in her letters that are available in The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, however, there were a few things that led me to create Ben. She asks her father to send someone, and upon first read I felt it was someone she knew. In other letters to her father she appears to defend the innocence of her friendship with someone unnamed. I believe many historians have assumed it was Charles, and while their friendship and her flirtations in her later letters to Miss Bartlett (and Charles) could support that argument, her defense of this mysterious friendship was, in my opinion, far too early to be attributed to Charles.

  Later, in documents by her descendants (Eliza Pinckney by Harriott Horry Ravenel), there is a mention that her father did indeed send a Negro man to help her, and that it was well known in the family record that he did so. But who was this man? He is never referred to again.

  A boat with Lucas rice and “a” Negro man really did go down in the St. Helena Sound. One afternoon when I was in the Addlestone Library in Charleston, I found the written document in the Pinckney Papers of this entry of the boat, and to my surprise saw that the author had written “the a Negro man.” From that moment on, I became convinced that there was more to the story. And so Eliza’s childhood friend Benoit Fortuné was born.

  Forgive me, dear reader, for any anachronistic mistakes, either accidental or willful, or for any besmirching of the character of ancestors long dead. My intent was purely to revive the memory of a remarkable young girl, who perhaps due to her youth or her gender, or being eclipsed by the accomplishments of her sons, was largely forgotten by history.

  When you visit Charleston today, much of the Pinckney history is anchored in the life of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Eliza’s son. You cannot even visit her Wappoo land anymore. It changed hands several times and is now a suburban housing development in an area known as West Ashley. Though a quick look at the road names in that area that I cross referenced with an old plat map show Indigo Pointe Drive, Eliza Court, and Betsy Road. I suppose someone knew the land’s significance.

  Largely, Eliza and what she accomplished has been forgotten. She married well, that’s what people remember. There is no surviving portrait of her, and she has become known in some circles as Charleston’s most elusive face. Far from a sweet, genteel lady in history married to a powerful man (though she may have become those things too), she was ambitious, she was headstrong, she didn’t always conform to society’s expectations, she made friends with whom she chose and not who was expected, and she didn’t have an idle bone in her body.

  The letters in this book are largely taken from Eliza’s real words. In most cases, they are direct excerpts from longer letters. In very rare cases, letters are adjusted, combined, or slightly embellished. And one letter in particular, the one to her father asking for the indigo maker to be sent, was filled in almost entirely by me, the original letter being unavailable. The prayers are all her original words. I suggest anyone with further interest in Eliza pick up The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney.

  It was not available at the time of writing this book (2015), but since then the “living Eliza,” Peggy Pickett, has compiled a robust biography of Eliza published in early 2016. I highly recommend this for those seeking to understand more about Eliza’s life. It is listed in the bibliography that follows.

  Eliza Lucas captured my imagination and didn’t let go until I’d told her story. It may not have been 100 percent accurate, but she was heard loud and clear. Almost three hundred years later, I guess that’s all she can ask for.

  —Natasha Boyd

  Acknowledgments

  During the course of my research, I met many helpful people and read many books that touched on Eliza’s life or the lives of those of the time. Special thanks go to Andrea Feeser (author of Red, White, and Black Make Blue), Margaret “Peggy” Pickett (the living Eliza, who has recently published Eliza’s biography), Donna Hardy of Sea Island Indigo (who immediately returned my call for help in understanding the dye-making process and who is reviving the long-lost art of indigo-making at her farm in Georgia—as I type this, my fingernails are still stained blue from a wonderful day learning the secrets of indigo on Ossabaw Island, one of the only places left you can find “indigenous” indigo).

  And I have so many others to thank. The volunteers of the Pinckney Project (in particular Jill Templeton and Cator Sparks) and the Charleston Museum, who are raising money to restore one of Eliza’s dresses and also raising awareness of Eliza herself. The Charleston Historical Society, housed in the Addlestone Library, who politely put up with my amateur questions about how to find documents. Dianne Yarbrough Coleman, whose illustrated biography of Eliza will hopefully be published soon and whom I have stalked for visual inspiration on Facebook! And all the people along the way who’ve answered my questions, inspired more questions, and supported my telling of this story. Especially my agent Nicole Resciniti who gave me the courage to take the leap. Thank you to the descendants of the Lucas and Pinckney clans who have looked after and donated their family documents to libraries, universities, and historical collections around the United States.

  Thanks go to my family. In particular, my husband and sons and also to my mother, for their indefatigable support.

  Thank you to Karina Knowles; Alan Chaput; Dave McDonald; Judy Roth; Jennifer Wills; Rick Weiss; my editor, Madeline Hopkins; the whole team at Blackstone for believing in me and this book; and anyone else I missed whose fingerprints are on this manuscript.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Eliza, by all expectations, was an eligible prize. She was young (which meant she was malleable), and her family had land. Yet in her accounts and letters there is rare mention of more than an occasional interest in suitors. Apart from Mr. L, whom she soundly rejects in a letter to her father, and the obscure Mr. Murray, we don’t hear much about it. Do you think she didn’t find them worth mentioning since she had no intention of marrying, or was she really such a nonconforming lady that potential suitors didn’t quite know what to do with her?

  2. It is clear from the currency issues Charles was dealing with that colonists were already beginning to chaff under British rule even as early as the 1740s. Why do you think it took another thirty years or so for there to be a revolution?

  3. There is no surviving picture or likeness or even description of Eliza that exists today. She hard
ly discussed her own looks. But, after reading her story and getting to know her character, do you have a sense of her in your mind? Almost as if her character is what made up her likeness? How do you picture her?

  4. Do you think Ben really did die, or do you think Quash told Eliza he was dead so that Ben could be free and Eliza could grieve his loss? Why would he do that?

  5. Do you think Eliza and Charles Pinckney were in love before the death of his wife? Do you consider this infidelity on the part of Charles?

  6. In this story, who do you think killed Starrat and why?

  7. Eliza was twenty-one and Charles Pinckney was believed to be around forty-five at the time of their marriage. Did you think about their age difference as you read the story? How do you feel about it?

  8. In this story, Eliza’s mother seems to be working hard toward getting Eliza married off. Do you think her mother was only doing what she thought would benefit Eliza, or was she thinking of herself?

  9. It was clear that Eliza wasn’t exactly a fan of the institution of slavery. Do you think she could have done more to work against the system, and do you think she could have succeeded in producing indigo with paid labor instead of using unpaid slaves?

  Further Reading

  Edelson, S. Max. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Harvard University Press, 2006

  Feeser, Andrea. Red, White, and Black Make Blue. University of Georgia Press, 2013

  Goodell, William. The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice. New York: American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853

  Graydon, Ness S. Eliza of Wappoo. Columbia: The R. L. Bryan Company, 1967

  McKinley, Catherine E. Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011