Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

I was shy of dressing in African clothing, which would invite obruni jokes (“Can you walk in kaba and slit? The slit is tight-o, and you don’t have a big bottom to balance you!”) that Eurama insisted were admiration. But kaba and slit was intoxicating. I didn’t like all the styles—many of the newer fashions were too fussy, and the layers of cloth that women wore and the lining needed to stiffen the bodice and skirt and add volume to the shoulders and hips and behind seemed uncomfortably hot. What I liked most was the way African women’s dresses, their coverings, or wrappers, or head ties, were constantly being retied, repositioned, refashioned as they were worn, with movements as reflexive as repocketing a handkerchief or pulling up a sleeve. I wanted to learn that vernacular of dressing, which was so kinetic and personal and felt similar to listening to a story being told, where the teller reinvents and embellishes and plays on your ears as they deliver it to you.

  The rites of sewing and dressing, my idleness at Eurama’s, and my frustration with the pace of my work left me wanting to pierce wider the veil of this cult of cloth. One day I gave Lady Diana a piece of synthetic indigo print that I’d found in Makola market and picked a style from the chart.

  “Lady Diana, please make me kaba and slit.”

  She took the cloth, smiling at me only very slightly, and put it in a basket under her sewing table. I knew that something was yet to be said.

  When I returned at lunch, Eurama waved the cloth in her hand. “Hey, my friend, we cannot sew this. No.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “This be nyama-nyama cloth! It be shit.”

  “I know it is just a cheap tie and dye, but the pattern is very nice,” I said.

  “We only sew kaba from good things,” she said with finality. “We don’t use local cloth.”

  She dug furiously into Lady Diana’s sewing bag. “My dear, if you want kaba, this cloth will be sweet on you.” She pulled out a floral print, a factory reproduction of a batik, with wild reds and deep blues. “This cloth is called ‘Koforidua flowers.’ ”

  She saw I was unmoved.

  “Oh! You mean you don’t like this? ‘Koforidua flowers’—hei! Koforidua girls are very, very lovely! They wear heavy, heavy gold because of all the cocoa money there—and diamond money too. They are very black, and the gold looks good against their skin. This is why this cloth was given this name. It’s fine-o! And the colors suit you.”

  I was not enthusiastic.

  “Esowara,” Eurama laughed and muttered. “It’s up to you! Anyway, I will take you to find something. Christabel has begun to menstruate. I want to buy cloth for her; she can wear kaba now to church. My Lady Diana too will marry soon enough. Her boyfriend has asked me for the list of things that his family must bring as dowry.”

  “Maa, I don’t like kaba-o!” Christabel protested. She was a lovely girl, with a delicate head and eyes like huge pools of dark sap, her body long and lithe. She was wearing a denim dress that she’d saved for by selling homemade toffees at the shop, convincing Senam to sew it for her from his scraps.

  “When your hips come, you will like kaba! And even if you don’t wear it, you have to at least begin your cloth box. When you have a cloth box, it shows you are mature. Every respectable woman has cloth. Plenty of cloth! For Ghana women, it is the most important thing after having children. Cloth is more than our bank account and our insurance. Even if you don’t own land, you own cloth. You could say it is like a European lady’s silverware! The price of fine cloth never decreases, while our money, its value keeps on changing. If you have three hundred pieces of good cloth, like a real madame, well then you have something!”

  It made me think of my biological father, an artist and one of the early Black interior decorators who, even into his eighties, still prides himself on dressing “editorial” every day, in suits and fancy hats, bedecked in diamonds and turquoise jewelry, a nod to his Choctaw mother. As with many West African women, most of my father’s wealth hangs in his closet.

  “And when you die-o! Cloth will go to your grave with you—we take our finest to the afterlife. But cloth itself never dies. Your children inherit it and keep you near to them. When you die, they will open your cloth box and see how you have lived! Every wedding, every birth, those who die, church occasions, new presidents, festivals, anniversaries, customary rites—each one has its cloth, and your cloth will tell your story. My old lady—the aunt who raised me—when she dies, you will see she has hundreds of cloths! She has married—twice! She has eight children. She is a mother-o! She has cloth from my mother and grandmother. More than a hundred years of family life! Her cloth will show you how she is respected. So my dear, don’t argue when I tell you I’m going to sew kaba for you!”

  Later, we three visited the cloth stores in Makola. “This is proper-proper Holland,” she said, pointing to cloths that could only be called African, lining a glass case.

  “Holland.”

  “Holland, my lady!” she exclaimed, pointing to the finished edge of the cloth. “100% Guaranteed Real Dutch Wax. Vlisco. That is the finest! Then GTP—Ghana Textiles Printing. This is Vlisco too, but it’s made here in Ghana, at Tema Harbor. GTP is second. Then we have what we call ‘small Holland.’ These are the copies that the Nigerians and Chinese and Indians make. And then there are all these cheap-cheap things.” She waved dismissively at the lighter-weight cloths, their colors not as brilliant, thin enough to require heavy polyester linings when they were sewn.

  She selected a pale yellow and brown and red version of the spider design I’d been seeing from the stack of GTP.

  “This is an old design,” Eurama said. “My grandmother wore this. Her grandmother wore it. When people see it, they will admire it; it is a cloth every woman will collect. She can wear it to church. The spider is Ananse, the trickster, who is part of our folklore. I’ll buy this for Christabel.”

  As Eurama counted her bills to pay for the cloth I calculated it cost her more than a week of profits from the shop.

  “As for you, you are from New York, so you are already a madame! And you like fine things like indigo. Well, indigo is finished at the moment, so your spirit demands Holland!” She pointed to the edges of cloths in a brilliant colored stack, the fold of each six- and twelve-yard piece hard and hefty like the spine of a book, and called out their names.

  “‘Capable husband.’”

  “‘Sorry, I’m taken.’”

  “‘Free as a bird.’ Sika tu se anumaa. Or, ‘Money flies like a bird.’”

  “‘Your foot, my foot.’ Or, ‘When my husband goes out, I go out.’”

  “Ahwene pa nkasa. ‘Fine beads don’t make noise.’ That means ‘A true lady knows how to carry herself with reserve.’ Try to follow this advice.” She punched my arm playfully.

  “ ‘Men are not like ears of corn.’ You see-o! You can pull back the husk, but you don’t get to see the rotten insides until you’ve already brought it home.” The kernels in the design looked like teeth in an abstract grinning mouth.

  “Okuunu paa. ‘Good husband.’ Some women will wear this to show appreciation, or to make their husband feel like a big man. Or they buy it and pretend their husband is buying them cloth, but maybe he is really spending his money on girlfriends, or her co-wife is abusing her, so she bought it to upset her.”

  “‘Death steps.’ Or ‘Stairs to heaven.’ Everyone has to travel them.”

  “Oba paa. ‘Good woman.’ This one was from the sixties. We named it for Queen Elizabeth’s visit.”

  “‘Nothing in my hand I bring.’ This is an old cloth, from before my grandmother’s day. During indepen­dence we used to say, ‘It takes the whole hand and not single fingers to build a nation,’ but now we’re in poverty and it has a whole new meaning.”

  “ABC. Suukuu nko na nyansa nko. ‘Attending school does not mean one will be wise.’”

  “Sraada. This is ‘Carpenter’s saw.’ Like life, it goes up and down.”

  “Okla ete ablotse. ‘My spirit has traveled abroad even
if my body has not.’”

  “Afa me nwa, ‘You have taken me as cheap and easy as the snail.’”

  “Hand and egg. ‘Hold life like an egg—your destiny is in your hands.’”

  “I like this one,” I said, admiring a bright purple and yellow cloth with tiny geometric designs.

  “Dwene wo ho. No, it is not good for you!” Eurama said.

  “Why?”

  “This cloth says, ‘Think about yourself.’ People will look at you and laugh.

  ‘Awo, the obruni says, Think about yourself’! This one will be better. It is an old-old design from the fifties. ‘Nkrumah’s pencil.’ That is the cloth we wore after independence—the design is like the pen our first Black president used to sign the British away. The pen is mightier than the sword! But later, when Nkrumah was getting mad and putting everyone in prison, it became his pen to sign away freedom.”

  “Eurama, you are a historian!”

  “As for me, I left school when I was eleven years old. My mother had died, and my father had another family. My aunt who adopted me—I call her my mother—well, she sent me to work to pay my brother’s school fees. But I know cloth, Papa!”

  Indigo cloths, like the professor’s, also had names and meanings: ‘No more velvet,’ a finely detailed cloth that sprang out of a Nigerian sumptory imports ban. ‘Ibadan city is sweet,’ celebrating a legendary Yoruba town. ‘Holding up the sun,’ a celebration of the strands of tiny beads that women wear seductively at the waist, that a lover can roll and play with and count. ‘Praise the goddess Olukun,’ the Yoruba deity who is owner of the oceans, the mediator of life and death, the goddess of patience and wisdom, who oversees dreams and fertility. The cloths spoke of commercial longings, and history, the spiritual, and domestic conflicts. What I thought had been lost with the disappearance of indigo—the language of the cloth, the very African-ness of its vernacular—was in fact still alive in these Dutch wax cloths.

  “Ah, this one is named for a beautiful hotel in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where people used to go and dance highlife and enjoy after independence. ‘City Hotel’! We have one too, in Ghana.”

  In the spiraling, almost whimsical weblike yellow floral pattern on a hot pink background was an ode to the promises of independence and modernity and its aspirations. I thought of Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, set in this very hotel. He had lived at City Hotel in the 1940s during the last three years of World War II as a colonial officer and suspected secret agent. It was the place where he’d written The Ministry of Fear. The hotel became a landmark and it would burn down later that year in my first year in Ghana in a fire caused by squatters who were refugees from the long civil war.

  I decided “City Hotel” was the cloth I would buy. It was a beautiful countertext to Greene’s stories. I had known Africa first and primarily by novels—African and Western ones—and now I was learning the stories and histories embedded in a different kind of text. Cloth could tell a story and make social meaning. In some cases, they were literal monuments to social history. The stories had a depth I had not realized—they were complex, cloaked in a superficial beauty, so that they were inscrutable to the illiterate. I wanted to read them, and to be read wearing them, to make their stories my own.

  Eurama asked the owner for twelve yards.

  “We can each take six yards and sew kaba,” she said. “It’s called making an anchor. You sew the same cloth with your friends or your family or church or whoever to show your closeness to them.”

  The cloth cost more than the rent on my small apartment in Accra, more than a third of a median Ghanaian annual income.

  Eurama was standing looking at me with seriousness after I paid. “My dear, you have eyes, but you don’t see! Look at this blue!”

  I looked at the cloth again. Indeed, there was a fine, crackling, gently bleeding blue line that laid the foundation of the batik and became a wonderful filigree-like setting for the explosion of other colors. Vlisco would become my modern lead back to indigo.

  That afternoon, as we sat, exhausted from the market, on the bench in front of Eurama’s, a woman passed wearing an old Yoruba cloth like one from my professor’s house.

  “Please, stop the person for me!” I begged.

  Eurama looked at me with pity. “You this girl, they will think you are a mad person! In Ghana here, we believe a person’s spirit is in their cloth. And true, if you say you admire something, the person will feel obliged to give it to you. Especially if you are obruni. This is how we are. How can you ask a person for their cloth? And you—do you have something to give her when she nakeds herself for you?”

  But even as she was protesting, she called to the woman. “Oh, Catherine, you want to disgrace me! Shame on you!” she hissed.

  When the woman approached us, Eurama acted sheepish. “Mi paachoe! I beg you, excuse her, eh? She is obruni, and she is a student—studying our local cloth. Eh, heh. She is admiring your dress.”

  The woman laughed at the strangeness of the encounter. “Ah, it is an old-old cloth. It was my mother’s cloth. And you see I am not at all young!”

  “Thank you sooo much. Madame! Thank you. You have helped her,” Eurama said smiling. I could tell she was heading me off, afraid I would ignore her warning.

  I was ready for her editorializing.

  “My dear Catherine, what you don’t understand is that this cloth—maybe her mother got it when she gave birth to her, and it was passed on when she died. The cloth is having some spirit in it. It belongs to an ancestor. You see-o! It is not a small thing. Can she give you her own mother’s spirit, even her body?”

  My face burned with shame.

  “Blue! Blue! Maybe we will have to find you a blue husband. Like you’ll marry a Niger man. Would you like it? They wear proper-proper indigo. They wear it until it paints them. The man will romance you, and your whole body will be blue-o!”

  “If you wait until the Harmattan, we will find you a Niger man—hey!” Lady Diana laughed from her sewing table. “The Harmattan is ‘the doctor,’ it blows cool wind from the Sahara, and it carries us many wonders.”

  “Don’t mind her!” Eurama laughed. “It’s only a lot of dust! It’s just that it will be close to the holidays, and those Niger people always come selling their cows and their things.”

  Two

  A Burning Heart, Ghana

  Just before Christmas, as the fasting for Ramadan ended, the world of the Blue Men, the Tuareg people, started to appear. First two boys at the gate of Barclays Bank, wearing matching dirty white tunics, bare feet in splayed-open sneakers cast in blue rubber, with blond-streaked afros and narrow faces that blended the African and the Semitic much like my own. The tiniest one hurled his bony frame at me and clung desperately to my waist, his legs seizing my thighs.

  “Ma!” he wailed. His lips were pursed in a small O, his hand swept his mouth like a newborn’s signing of hunger. The older boy stood a few paces away, pleading with his eyes.

  “Please,” he said in a choking whisper.

  “Obruni, your children want to eat,” a woman said, handing the older boy a coin. The boys exploded in grins.

  Then a woman stood on the dangerous meridian at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, nursing a child, taking money from slowing cars. Her milk-white skin, her long, fine hair plaited in two and anchored by tiny brass ornaments that hung in front of her ears like a Hasidic man’s earlocks. The dark vegetal blue of her dress made me feel a kind of anxious excitement, recalling Eurama’s early promise of the traders from the north, as if my desires were advancing with the desert storm.

  Every day I encountered another child or woman begging. Then two Tuareg men in one week arrived at Eurama’s shop, offering the same reading after greeting me: “You have a clean heart, your third eye too is clear, but you have three enemies—one of them be woman. Maybe your husband has taken a second wife or girlfriend? You have a problem with the womb.” The men had looked at me, one with quiet amusement, the other weariness, as they
waited for an exchange: a Coke, a boiled egg and bread, or some coins. Later, I met a woman with the same sharp features, the same earlocklike braids in a guard booth at the U.S. embassy compound. A vendor sold exquisite hand-tooled leather picture frames in front of the Libyan supermarket; a man in a fine-tailored bush coat began to pass my house in the morning in a slow-crawling Hummer with diplomatic plates; a lone man walked Sunyani Highway; another herded holiday goats to the market at Pig Farm.

  They were mysterious in the way their name “Blue Men” suggests—especially the men, whose virile femininity was much like the delicate gauze of their taglemusts, the desert turbans they wound into spectacular hives from five-meter lengths of gauzy cotton. The swaths crossed the face, covering all but the eyes, a band dropping open to reveal the mouth. They appeared unanchored from the world they passed through. Strangers too in the village of urban Accra. In fact, the particular mix of Islam and Sufism, the African and the Arab-Semitic, marked their place at the frontier of the Sahara, wedged between uneasy alliances of north and south, Christian and Muslim, Arab and African. They were agents and conduits in the impassable hinterlands of the desert, drivers of the legendary ancient caravans that had carried indigo and other sumptuary items like gold and ostrich feathers and ivory to the Mediterranean, bound for European luxury markets beginning in the last century a.d. Their darker history places them as middlemen and raiders in the centuries-long Arab slave incursions from Africa’s north and east.

  But in Accra the Blue Men were not blue in any way. There was not a trace of the legendary blue leached from their clothes into their faces and bodies and hands. Instead, they wore simple, light-colored robes of factory-spun cotton and damask, indistinguishable from many Accra citizens. They had arrived from the increasingly inhospitable North, wracked by civil strife, locust blight, and desertification. The poorest of them had walked from their homes in Mali and Niger—hundreds of miles, some surely a thousand or more—across several nations, down to the coast.