Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  I didn’t fully understand, when I started on this four-year journey, that I was not just chasing beauty but trying to recapture some part of my own legacy and my blue inheritance. I was driven by a desire to live closely with that beauty; to become literate in the stories of those cloths; and to understand history through the African women, mostly, who mediate and wear and trade indigo. These women, unwittingly, taught me about birth and death and about the beauty and meaning that people make of the life space in between. They helped me to understand the power of these phenomena in my own experience and, as one of the heroines of my journey would promise, learn to truly “taste life.”

  Part I

  Seekers

  One

  An Invitation, Ghana

  It was a simple invitation. Voices from the tiny night market stalls—barely shelter, invisible in the rain-pounded, blackened street—called out, Sorry-o! Sorry! I stumbled past a row of shuttered stores hugging the gutter’s edge, the wind fleeting my steps.

  At a turn in the road, in the glow of a kerosene lamp, a woman cloaked in a dark sweater beckoned to me from under the canopy of a shop.

  “Sister, you are no more at England. Come out of the rain!”

  She looked hard into my eyes in a flash of lamplight. She grinned and pulled the sweater tighter against the curve of her face, ushered me inside, then disappeared through a back door into the night.

  I felt a presence behind me. A stool was pressed against the back of my legs. And then a surprising heat: a wild orange and green spider’s web-patterned wrapper—those essential two yards of cloth that West African women use as skirt or sarong or cover, baby carrier or headgear—dropped over my rain-soaked dress. A young woman at a sewing table giggled shyly as she put a charcoal-heated iron to the wrapper’s mate. From the back of the shop, a girl emerged in a peacock-blue taffeta dress with heavy lace at the neck, worn and buttonless the length of its back. She shyly curtsied as she set a cup of tea before me. A bush dog, as large and white and nappy as a sheep, sleeping against a fortress of rice sacks, settled his head against my foot.

  We sat in silence while the rain chorused against the tin roof.

  It began to break in spurts, and I heard a clink of bottles and the slapping of leather slippers on the wet concrete. The woman reappeared, ferrying a stack of Coca-Cola crates on her head. She was petite, with a wasplike, near-Victorian waist, but she seemed more ample than small, with thick muscled legs and a belly curved by pregnancies. Moving swiftly, lithely, she lowered herself so the girl in the blue dress could relieve her of the load. She removed the scarf from her head, and her hair fell in a shiny black cascade of tiny braids framing high, kohl-dark cheeks and crescent eyes.

  She fixed her smile on me, pulling wide the shutters on the shop doors.

  People who had dug out army jackets, leather trenches, an oilcloth overcoat from closets buckled under equatorial heat, had begun to appear, crowding the entrance, dropping coins onto the table as they took away their purchases: a tiny cone of peanuts; a single teabag and two teaspoonfuls of sugar, one of milk powder, tied in plastic sleeves; a quarter or half bar of soap; a tin of sardines or corned beef.

  I rose to leave, offering a cedi coin—pennies—for the tea. I was anxious to be home, to be away from the dangers of the flooded, unfinished roads.

  “Ei, why? Even I brought this Coke to serve you,” she said. “There is yam on the fire. Stay for some time! Someone can lead you home.”

  It was a familiar seduction. Invitations to sit, to eat, to be a sister or friend. The quick tuck of someone’s hand in the street. Affection, sometimes gentle, sometimes groping. Accra communitas. “Accra is a society much more than it is a city,” a friend had once observed. It is true—you can alight at any spot and “make yourself akwaaba.” You are welcome everywhere.

  The rain had begun to fall again. In the distance, flames danced along a wind-slackened electric power line that ran along the main sewer, an eight-foot gulf filled with months of rains.

  I thanked her again, contemplating the footbridge to the gutter’s other side.

  “Take this jacket, to stay a little drier,” she said. “You can return it anytime. I’m Eurama! Come back to us, eh? We’ll make you happy-happy in Ghana!” I heard her sing as I stepped into the street.

  The next day I set out in search of the shop at Nmetsobu Street with the jacket folded in my bag.

  “You have come-o!” a familiar voice called from a perch at the shop door. “My lady has come!”

  “I found something in the pocket of your jacket,” I said, my heart racing. “It is real indigo!”

  “Ma ba?” she laughed, quickly taking from me the tiny corner of cloth patterned like the Milky Way, tied around something hard and as long as a packet of chewing gum. “You are very excited! Indigo. Yes. For me, it be money!”

  She laughed a kind of outlaw laugh as she unwrapped it and a tight wad of cedi notes folded over a key. “Sit down and let me bring you tea. Don’t rush! I have something I must do; I’ll be with you very soon.”

  I accepted her offer of warm sugar bread and Lipton and ended up sitting for hours in the comfort of the canopy at the side of the shop. My mind stayed on that tiny bit of cloth.

  My days had become like this—unstructured. Purposelessness was beginning to cloud them like the slow filtering haze from the early Harmattan, a season of powerful dry, dusty winds blowing from the Sahara toward the West African coast. I had been in Ghana for two months. Each morning I would set out from home with my bag, heavy with indigo research, but as the sun rose higher, my ambitions sagged. The university where I had set up base for my Fulbright work had been shut down by a strike. I’d exhausted the few small embassy libraries, filled mostly with trade and governance books. In the cloth markets and dyeing compounds, I’d met an indigo wasteland. Not a dyer or farm, not even the university botany lab, could produce one tiny indigofera leaf.

  Here was a precious first scrap.

  I waited for Eurama, watching the steady traffic of feet along the walls of stately former colonial residences, reclaimed family lands that now housed a mix of relatives of every social ilk, various African and Arab diplomatic corps, and Western expats. It was a grand crossroads theater. Across the street a young tailor sat working in a small wooden kiosk, smartly painted and fashioned with large glass windows that were expensive and mod. As the hours passed, fancy cars would stop at the roadside, and women would alight, handing their heavy designer purses to their drivers, aware of how they were admired from the street. They would then stand in that window for some minutes before the curtains would close so they could be measured and fitted. The shop window reminded me of Amsterdam’s red-light district—the decorous promise and the thin veil between commerce and the street. Their cars competed for road space with women selling from head pans, wandering goats and sheep, and Ashanti boys pushing housewares or provisions arranged in wheelbarrows—their first step, after leaving home for the coast, toward a plane ticket to London or Italy or New York.

  All the while my thoughts were with that bit of cloth.

  When Eurama finally returned, she walked with a tiny box atop her head, a small handkerchief-size patch of the same indigo covering it.

  From a bench at the roadside, in the same blue taffeta dress she’d worn the night before, Dede, her shopgirl, had been selling drinks to passing cars. Eurama stood, counted the coins in Dede’s cup, and called playfully after people in the street with that flashing smile.

  She saw me eyeing her head.

  “Ah, this box be my wallet,” she sighed, laughing. “You had my key-o!”

  “I like the cloth,” I said.

  “This is part of a dress I wore when I delivered my last child. I use it to keep my money safe, so that it will grow and so no one will covet it. Anyway, you can get some of this cloth.” She shrugged. “I mean, you won’t get it easily. It’s an old design. But as it is almost the end of Ramadan, and Christmas too is coming, the Hausa people will be
selling some. I can take you to them after the fasting.”

  She reached up to a shelf above and retrieved a sleeve of photographs. She handed one to me.

  In a photo from the 1980s, Eurama stood in a studio, wearing a set of heavy gold jewelry and a blue-black damask boubou with a white pattern resembling the cosmos across the hem and her elaborate headgear. It was the same cloth that covered her box. She was proudly holding a bright-eyed newborn.

  “It is proper-proper Guinea indigo.”

  The photo was just that—a photograph. Not the thing itself. Just a sign of a certain kind of understanding.

  But it was all the hope I needed in a moment when my fortunes seemed to have turned against me. I had only just begun my work, but having a Fulbright grant suddenly seemed like a grand folly. I’d originally applied for a grant to Nigeria, but the political situation there was worsening and Fulbright grants were suspended. I was asked to make a case for Ghana, where indigo had been heavily traded but not much produced, and I put together an argument. But each day, as I turned up so little, the proposal seemed more and more hackneyed. I had just turned the corner of thirty. I’d left my job as a university administrator and creative writing teacher, given up my lease in the loft I shared in the East Village, and packed my things into storage. I knew almost no one in Ghana, though I’d traveled there before and had forged a few friendships.

  It was the eve of Y2K, and the world was staring down rumored oblivion. “If America will collapse, how much Africa?” people bemoaned as they hoarded U.S. dollars. Ghana’s currency plummeted daily, and people readied themselves for the coming departure from office of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, Ghana’s maverick president for twenty-one years. I decided I’d sit out the uncertainty of the last days of the millennium and the regime in Eurama’s comfortable store, hanging on to her promise to lead me to the indigo sellers.

  In the weeks to come, my visits there would frame my days. After breakfast I would sit with Eurama and settle my ambitions on the Twi and Ga language guides she bought for me one day from a bookseller’s head pan.

  “You can’t talk!” she had teased as she paid for them. “Of course you can’t do anything in Ghana! I’ll send you to Eurama University.”

  While I was in the shop, I kept the tiny books tucked inside a magazine, trying to follow the exchanges with customers.

  “Bloudo, enyi?” How much is bread?

  “Ha mi omo kotoku kome.” I want a bag of rice.

  “Paacho, sicle kitin kitin.” Small sugar, please.

  In the notebook where I copied down Twi and Ga phrases, I’d folded a favorite quote:

  And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore . . . some will tell you that you are mad and nearly all will say, “What’s the use?” For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research that does not offer him a financial return within one year. And so you sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you will sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a great deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard,

  The Worst Journey in the World

  I was a shopgirl suddenly.

  I tried to pitch in, to help with sweeping and stacking shelves, tying “ice water rubbers”—small plastic bags that Dede filled with tap water for drinking.

  “Ah, sit down and relax,” Eurama would insist.

  “I can’t just sit and be useless.”

  “My dear, never say that—you are good for business!” she said happily. “ ‘The Stranger is God’—it is one of our sayings. Everyone wants to come and look at the obruni’s face. And then you are from New York—hei! The shop past the junction complained that I am taking all of their customers. You see, you don’t need to do much to help out here!”

  I’d become intoxicated in my post, and now I felt a little worried. I had hoped real affection guided their embrace of me and not something so mercenary.

  “We like you! You remind us of my sister’s daughter who is in Washington. We are having some half-castes in our family. My sister married a British—he paid dowry and performed our marriage customs and everything! He had a big job with manganese. Then he was transferred to Sierra Leone. When my sister delivered, she packed her things and put the baby on her back and took a steamship all the way to Freetown. Heh! And met his London wife! But anyway, that is just a story. We like you fine! And I can see you need help with this your work.”

  And with that a true deal was struck: a funny kind of patronage for the newest shopgirl, in exchange for a promise and a kind of belonging.

  I was fascinated by Eurama—by her beauty, her quick tongue, her stories, and the kind of mysterious power she wielded with people. The sudden ease of our agreement was fascinating too.

  It was an act of volunteerism—becoming Eurama’s darling. There was an innocence to it, a gamble, and a certain desperation too.

  In the days that followed, at any hour, you might find me there, the Stranger God. Stacking a few tins. Sitting at the sewing table that her sister, Lady Diana, who had been named for the princess, worked upon. At the perch at the side of the shop. Standing at the roadside, Eurama’s arm circling my waist.

  “People’s ’Rama!” neighbors called. “She’s not only for you, obruni. She belongs to us all!”

  “This is my darling!” Eurama would laugh.

  “Aunty Eurama, I am also a human being. Come and hold me small!” they teased.

  “Eurama Spider has caught a lovely something!”

  “Omo a wa hoye fe no ye nya ewo omo.”

  “‘The beautiful ones are not yet born.’ Hmmmm,” she laughed. “It’s a saying. You see, the thing you desire with all your heart—well, don’t rush for it. Don’t force. You will likely find that it is not the very thing you are looking for.”

  She seemed lost in thought, a kind of wistfulness moving in her.

  “Obruni, be patient,” she sighed. “You will get your indigo.”

  Eurama and I would sit on the bench in front of the shop for long hours watching the road, as she counted her tiny profits.

  I would ask about indigo, my questions like those of a child. Her answers were like answers to a child’s riddle.

  I watched a woman passing, her high, shapely buttocks rolling beneath her skirt. “Why is she wearing blue?”

  “Ahhh, maybe she’s going to meet her boyfriend. Blue is the color of love. You see blue, it has its own smell, it even has a sound! It can be cool or hot—just like love.”

  I thought of my professor. That was cool love.

  “Blues are God’s stethoscope—they hold every feeling!”

  “And she?” I asked. A woman stood at the gate of a house down the road, holding the hand of the old woman she had been visiting. She was wearing a blue and white factory-made batik with the spider print that seemed to be popular. The baby at her back appeared nested in the web. She had a small handbag balanced on her head, and an umbrella to shade them.

  “She is a new mother. She has stayed indoors for the customary time. The baby is healthy, they’ve named it, performed the birth rites, and she is proud to show him to everyone. We wear blue for life!”

  Later, a small band of women in long formal dresses all styled from the same white cloth with deep indigo batik flowering vines filed down the street, solemnly negotiating the gutter’s edge.

  “Why are they wearing blue?”

  “. You see-o!” Eurama sighed. “ ‘Death Spoils a House’—There Is Death—the cloth they are wearing tells us. They are from the baker’s house. It will be the old lady. It is a good death. She was very old and had a good life. Blue is God’s color. They are praising God for all that has been given. I will have to dress up this afternoon and go and sit with them.”

  Another day a middle-aged woman passed us. She walked trancelike, gazing into nothingness, her bare feet mak
ing quick, shuffling steps. Her head was shorn, and her bare breasts hung nearly to her waist. Long white beads hung over them and were fastened cufflike at her ankles and upper arms and wrists. Three strands of white beads were tightened against a dark blue cloth at her waist.

  “And this woman? Is she after love?”

  Eurama laughed. “She is a bush girl! Look at her breasts—hanging like empty socks! Here in Accra, we don’t do that!” Eurama said. “This woman is Ewe, from the Volta region. She is from a shrine and probably married to a fetish priest. She’s witchcraft. The blue is what the gods demand. Hummpf. Some of them take some herbs and behave like mad people. Maybe she’s lost. She’s going to follow the road along the ocean to find her way back east.”

  She clicked her tongue in disapproval and then playfully slapped my cheek.

  “Or do you want to go with her? Your spirit also begs for blue. Blue-blue! It is all you think of. Go with her! It has already let you get up and leave your country, forget your family, forget everything!”

  We watched the woman disappear into the bend of the road. It was unsettling. She seemed possessed, driven by some mimetic force. I was afraid that that force was also a part of me. I was also a worshiper, set wandering in an unfamiliar land.

  “Obruni, I don’t really understand what exactly it is that you’re after. You are a writer? Uh-huhhhhnnnn.” Her face knit slightly with worry. “You love indigo. You have a big scholarship from your embassy to make research. Fine! You say you have everything. A good career, a good life. It’s only indigo you need. But how is it you are so alone? You are here in Ghana with only your Eurama. You say you don’t have a lover, a child. Nothing. We are waiting for your family to come. Okay, you say your parents don’t like to travel and leave their farm, but we are waiting for your American lover at least. You don’t keep a cell phone; you hardly call anyone. Cloth is cloth. It is everything to us, and it is nothing. It only becomes part of a devotion to other things, to people. You have to start life! Have a child. Get married—at least marry to have a child! Make a home! Care for another human being and make one with them.”