Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  We sat for a long time in silence. I was surprised by her passion, by how she’d observed me. I let her plea roll over me. She had only known marriage and shopkeeping, hard menial work, domestic life, children. I was the freest woman in the world, living a life of the mind on an esteemed American artist grant. I was not bothered by my solo trek; I’d worked hard to live unencumbered. But her words had a strange power too. It was as if she’d pointed at something akimbo in me, as obvious to her as the odd stupor of the shrine woman.

  “I need to do this work for now. There is still time to sort out those other things,’’ I said, wanting to turn the conversation.

  Eurama sighed. “Yes, madame. Be patient, then, and you will understand everything you need to.”

  Eurama began to invite me along to buy stock for her shop. Every third day I would awaken at dawn and accompany her to Makola, Accra’s central market.

  When we reached the market’s edge, Eurama would grab my hand and say, “Waatey! Let’s go!” Then we’d step into the acres of what appeared as a vast, gray, curiously undulating flatland from any station above its tin roofs. Inside was a dangerous crush of head loads: improbable portages of yams and car engines and bags of rice, nets filled with live chickens, calabashes of honey, stacks of plastic buckets, bolts of cloth, canned tomatoes, peanuts arranged on trays as if they were works from a modern design studio, crates of eggs, a tray of stinking pigs’ feet or enormous forest snails for soup, and a shimmering globe of nail polish bottles arranged in a plastic bowl by a woman who would dress your toes at any place where you could find room to rest.

  In the narrow passages moved kayayo, the mostly Muslim girls sent down from the north by their families. They sleep in bands in the market, and from dawn to dusk they carry spine-breaking loads to earn the capital for their marriage dowries. They work their way up to petty trading, with dreams of becoming store traders or even the fabled market queens—the cloth sellers at the top of that hierarchy—who control prices. Smaller agents and scores of petty traders scramble to raise themselves in the market hierarchy. Women and men passed me with Chinese Black Butterfly sewing machines on their heads, calling customers by snapping their long, heavy shears, adding to the din of shouts and car motors, competing radios, and the whir of tired refrigerator fans. Groups of petty traders editorialized the world of the market hierarchy by singing praise songs to their madames and insults to the Accra Metropolitan Authority guards who walked by barking orders and striking table legs and store sides with their punishing canes.

  Eurama hired a kayayo to follow us as we bought what was needed to replenish the shop—pins and soaps and rice, biscuits, toilet paper, zippers, and buttons.

  Once in the middle of this market there would have been an island of blue cloth. But that island slowly was swallowed up by the tall piles of mostly cheap factory-made cloths imported from China and India and Europe, and fewer uninspired tie-dye and batiks, “local cloth,” made with synthetic dyes on cheap cottons. Bigger stores sold expensive imported laces and damasks and European-made prints, but these “local cloth” designs had a roteness: uninspired, they were the work not of master dyers but of young women and men in the stumbling technical school economy, exercising their narrow options of training in hairdressing, batik-making, sewing, or catering.

  The cloth markets, vast as they were, were overwhelmed by the nearby sheds where bales of secondhand clothing were spread on the floors. Ghana had no full-scale ready-made clothing manufacturers, and the country seemed to have traded a large part of its sartorial brilliance, created from the explosive range of hand-tailored African cloths, for ship container loads of obruni wawu (“the white man has died”). Despite intermittent government bans to protect the enormous local cloth and tailoring industries, and health department campaign warnings, secondhand clothes from the United States and Europe had become a multimillion-dollar economy. Channeled mostly through Western charities, the clothes were graded and shipped and then resold across the African continent. Everyone loves a T-shirt, jeans, socks, and a sturdy bra, and so they defied the age-old notion that cloth is spirit—that a person’s spirit, their ghost even, lives in their clothes—and bought them. Obruni wawu was the dominant attire at the cocoa and cassava farms and workday streets. I felt ashamed that my biological mother’s family owed some of their wealth to this trade, in the Caribbean primarily.

  As we passed, the sellers pulled my arm: Madame! Smell dey—it no be proper-proper American? It be Levi’s!

  We would ask in vain for indigo among the cloth sellers. “I’m looking for indigo—Nigerian cloth. Tie and dye,” Eurama would say.

  “Ah! I go show you.” And the woman would return with any kind of batik or hand-stitched or -stenciled cloth. Never blue.

  “Yes, but indigo! Is this not yellow?” Eurama would say.

  They would return with green.

  “No, indigo. Not ‘leaf’!” Eurama would say.

  They would find us gray.

  “But this is ‘ash.’ Find blue!”

  They would find us pale violet.

  “My dear, find ‘sky’!”

  They would bring us cool, dark synthetic blue, spun on a Chinese factory machine.

  It is true that each culture perceives color differently, and that the spectrum of color is divided arbitrarily. Color can be a space, and that space, however wide, however narrow, can hold one name or many. It all depends on the world you’re in.

  “My dear,” Eurama said, “this is exactly the color, but she wants the one the Nigerian people make. The tie and dye.”

  “Ah, that cloth is colo! Kitikwa! You know, out of fashion. We Ghanaians left it with the colonial masters. So unless you get in some old lady’s porto-manto. Yes, you French people say portmanteau, isn’t it? Her old suitcases-o!”

  In the months before I met Eurama, I had had days filled like this. Circles of misunderstanding. But now, for the first time, I knew that it was not a dance of wills but a problem of languages, of senses.

  A woman who had been listening to us piped in, “Sister, there is a madame—her name is Salimata. A Nigerian. She sells those imported laces and ceremonial cloths. She will have proper indigo.”

  Eurama and I set off for Insurance, a vast cement building in the market, nearly a city block wide, that she’d directed us to.

  “Ah! Salimata. I go show you,” a man assured us, then led us down a passageway with signs of cloth sellers at its end.

  But the Salimata he knew turned out to be one of three sisters who owned a currency exchange bureau that doubled as a wig shop.

  “I think you want this other Salimata who used to sell here,” she advised. “The Accra Metropolitan Authority sacked the cloth traders a few months ago. Unless you go to Thirty-first December Women’s Market. The women left here are all from Togo, and they are only selling materials. If you want cloth, go there.”

  I looked at the bolts of imported calicoes and polyester blends beloved by Ghanaians. They would have them sewn into styles featured in the Macy’s and Butterfield’s catalogs that were collected from Western plants and sold like obruni wawu to West African shopkeepers desperate for paper to wrap food and wares.

  I looked at Eurama and shook my head, stuck on this funny absolute: materials versus cloth.

  This was not at all my world.

  In those months Eurama was teaching me how to look, peeling back Ghana’s layers with each interaction. Every day my eyes were doing a literal sharpening, like the slow adjustment to a new pair of glasses. As your senses dilate, it is as if you are given a new way of feeling, of being. It was part of what seeing in blue was, I imagined.

  But not even new eyes revealed anything of indigo. It was as if the color—not just dark blues but true indigo, with all its depth, like the complex cut of the diamond—had been wholly wiped off the palate. I was in the world of that woman of legend, hungering in my simple white cotton cloth for a sky that was tantalizingly out of reach.

  Eurama sat down on a
bench. She sighed and wiped my face with her handkerchief. “The cloth you are talking about, it is not just sold anywhere. Local cloth—Ghana tie and dye and the rest, you can get it. But these proper old styles-o—they are never just in the market! You wait. After Ramadan I will find you the Hausa traders, and those old, old Soninke men who carry them down from Mali and from Guinea.”

  I spent hours sitting beside the sewing table in Eurama’s shop watching her sister, Lady Diana, sew. Senam, the tailor across the street, sewed “styles”: jeans with African prints on the pockets, shirts with expensive bead embellishments, the latest Fendi dress designs in batik patchwork. He specialized in couture and American and European ready-to-wear sewn to Accra tastes. Lady Diana sewed kaba and slit, a coastal dress that had become Ghana’s predominant national dress. It had a tight, structured bodice, waspishly setting off the waist, that exploded with flourishes at the sleeves and neck and sometimes the hips. It shaped the buttocks, and the skirt tapered to the ankles. A long slit up the back or at the sides revealed flashes of ankle and calf. It had probably originated in the seventeenth century; its Victorian roots were imprinted in the often rigid, straitjacket form of the body of the kaba, but it was Ghanaian to its core. However much Christian-missionary modesty had transformed Ghana’s national dress in the colonial era, and no matter how much modern Christian and Muslim women might observe their own laws of decorum and cover (a glimpse of a thigh was shameful, and tank tops and jeans were the domain of prostitutes, despite their abundance in the obruni wawu markets), there was nothing as suggestive, or as un-Victorian, as the wide necklines and hoisted breasts and bold patterning moving tautly over powerful hips and thighs.

  Even the most modern Ghanaian woman takes off her suit or slacks or minidress and returns to kaba and slit, the formal clothing of the office, church meetings, customary rites for births and deaths, weddings, anniversaries, and any moment of formal gathering. And so with luck one of the “Heavy Madames,” the rich women who favored styles that proved their cosmopolitanism and who flocked to Senam’s shop, would later cross the gutter to order a kaba from Lady Diana. The area women provided a constant parade of orders and fittings, and the vendors who frequented the shop with new button and zipper styles, threads, and other notions kept me beside Lady Diana for hours. She did vigorous business from Monday until Thursday, altering sleeves, widening necklines, adding lace and embroidery, changing trimming—whatever was in demand for the usual three-day-weekend-long marathon of funerals and memorial services, baby-naming ceremonies, church programs, engagements, and weddings.

  Once when I was on the cusp of my teens, on a family trip to Scotland in the 1990s, I’d sat with my parents in a pub near a table shared by two African couples. I felt excited and anxious about being so close to Black people—to Africans, real continental Africans, no less, and self-conscious of my new Afro and my Waspy family. They were people from a world I knew I was a part of. I had carried in me the confusion of the many things I was named—Afro-American, Black, colored, mulatto—but understood that they were names for African people. Africa did not at all enter the landscape of Attleboro, the provincial and nearly all-white town in which I grew up in Massachusetts, except for an occasional body behind the windshield of a car passing through. Now I was deliciously near. The men wore a trilogy of patterned wool down to the tops of their platform shoes. One woman wore an awesome reddish curled wig, the other a green-and-red-plaid wool scarf wrapped in a high beautiful arch over her head. The women’s headpieces framed smooth, dark faces, penciled with heavy black brows drawn nearly to their temples. I admired the waxy-sheened, bright dresses they wore, which revealed sweaters at their wide embroidered and laced necklines. It was an odd way to wear a sweater, on the inside, I thought. But their dresses were so beautiful and the logic of it made simple, new sense to me, reweaving the dull, familiar textures of home, where our closets were full of sweaters from the British Isles, Scottish tweeds and herringbone, L.L.Bean, Burberry coats—the darks and plaids of my adoptive parents’ upper-middle-class world and their parents’ origins.

  I had worn these things uncomfortably, a kid in search of my own expression. I watched these women and noticed then the way that cloth became a skin, not just a covering or an accessory. For them, plaid was not an identity or a symbol to put distance on, the way it was for me. I wanted to feel free in my skin and in clothing the same way. It was patterning. Color. Simple adornment to make one’s own.

  At home I tried to mimic the women’s styling, going to my mother’s closet to retrieve a kilt she had once worn, adding a scarf of another color, a bright orange sweater, my red snakeskin shoes. Soon afterward I wore the outfit on a visit to my grandmother. In her most withering tone, she said, “Is that what they’re wearing these days?” It was a standard line for her. When I tried to defend my style, she pulled a face of disgust. “You are part Black, I know, but do you think you are at all an African?”

  I thought about my grandmother now and how she had helped set me on this road to indigo. Born at the turn of the century on an Arizona cattle ranch to British émigrés, she led many lives. Later, arriving in Brooklyn, New York, she traded schoolteaching and commuting by horse for Connecticut housewifery. She turned New York City elevator company owner when she was widowed in her late forties. She was quite a fancy clotheshorse and quite conscious of the quality of everyone’s “threads,” adorning her own with turquoise studs and Navajo jewelry.

  Just before I left for Ghana, I had visited her, using the excuse of helping her to do some housework as a way to spend extra time and quell my anxiety that, already well into her nineties, she might be an ocean away from me when she died. She related to me through questions, asking over and over for mundane details of my life, responding with reserve until something moved her to speak. That day, as we were sorting through things stored in my mother’s childhood bedroom—work I enjoyed because it elicited a rare quasi-intimacy—she started in on my Fulbright research. She seemed not to understand it, but I suspected it was a way to comment on my decision to do this work in Africa.

  Among my mother’s things, left in her childhood bedroom that had been preserved since she left home to work and then marry, were Fair Isle sweaters, plaids from her college sojourn in Scotland, more of my grandmother’s southwestern inheritance, and a pair of Levi’s jeans from the 1950s, carefully preserved. I pulled them from the drawer.

  “Grandma, look at these! Look at what I am wearing. These are Japanese jeans, they are dyed with pure indigo, and I won’t tell you how much they cost, but I bought them at Bendel’s, which is a store I know you approve of. You can smell the indigo dye!”

  She curled up her nose. “I know what that smell is. I’m a ranch girl, you know.”

  “Well, everyone seems to want to recapture that pure thing of the past. People are clamoring for these kinds of jeans. There is a company that sells them for nearly six hundred dollars. Do you know what someone would pay for these old Levi’s?”

  “Are you going to sell them to get money for Africans?”

  I laughed quietly to myself. My grandmother was hopeless. But I remembered when I had traveled to Ghana for the first time in the early 1990s, my old worn Levi’s had been worth more than what I might pay in cash for anything. Everywhere I went I’d received offers for them. They were singular emblems of American cool.

  “Grandma! What I’m saying is that I want to understand where our blue passion comes from.”

  “Well, it’s not from Africa. I can send you to the ranch instead. We wore jeans to protect our legs when we were riding. You’ve never tried to know those people.”

  “Grandma, all over the world, jeans are king, and they all descend from indigo. Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria was rigged with denim sails when it arrived at these shores. Levi Strauss built a fortune on the stuff. Look at him! He was your father’s contemporary—a Bavarian from a New York City dry goods family who went west in search of freedom and fortune. He arrived in San Francisc
o with one bolt of denim and sold most of it as tent material to raise funds for a stake in the gold rush. He sold a piece and sewed pants for a miner in 1873. Got a patent for his riveted pants with his partner Jacob Davis. The rest was history.”

  “Yes, that is America.”

  “Well, that is a piece of history that Africa is a big part of.”

  “Well, you do know how to live life, a-brown. Are you taking those jeans with you?”

  “A-brown?”

  “A-brown. It’s an old expression, it means someone is living a high life.”

  “Let’s say a-blue, Grandma!”

  “Yes, you spent too much on those jeans, and you need to stay away from Bendel’s. Anyway, I’m very proud of your Fulbright, even if it’s taking you to Africa. You can bring your mother’s jeans if you like.”

  The jeans stayed among my mother’s things, but what I carried with me was the sense of my family’s inheritance. Just as my grandmother would disavow my jeans, with her own closet full of Bendel’s, our family would think of the history of indigo, of our own relationship with fashion and clothing and material culture, as an almost vulgar enterprise. I decided I was going to embrace beauty and history all at once.

  Lady Diana’s dress charts arrived every few weeks in the hands of vendors, who carried them to the streets like breaking news. I would excitedly study them.

  The basic form of kaba and slit never changed, but the sleeves and necklines and tucks and hems were refashioned with intricate hand-smocking and aproning and pleating, new button and ribbon imports. The styles were named and renamed: Cash Madame, Sweetheart, Ready to Eat, Three Sisters (with three rows of heavy ruffles at the skirt). Women clamored to stay with the trends.