Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  “Ah, so you want to learn about indigo,” Aunty Mercy finally said. “Indigo is for those who can afford. I only wear indigo and these my own cloths.”

  She had slipped on a boubou of oxblood-red-batiked damask with the long, ballooning sleeves popular with Senegalese women. She opened a wardrobe and took down two pieces of indigo that had been worn soft and textured like denim, patterned with subtle, lighter blue clouds. She began tying them, one full at her waist, the other across her head like a large, jaunty nurse’s cap. Then she covered herself in a cloud of Joy perfume.

  “I never used lavender until I met this Holland man. My husband-o! Every day for perfume! He would tell me, ‘Try to use this. This is not Africa. You have to smell like a European flower.’ Ah, a husband. You can’t trade a husband for anything.

  “This indigo, you won’t get it anymore. This cloth is very old. Formerly we had indigo. Real-real indigo—you will only find it being done in the bush. In the northern parts. In Accra here, it’s every day for Europe! We like what you people like. If you love something, we Ghanaians perfect the love. In Ghana here, indigo, brown, wine, green, black—these are colors for mourning mostly. But you people wear them plenty. I’ve come to appreciate them.

  “I married my Holland man in the sixties and went to Holland with him. Me, I didn’t have any education, so I went to work at the Vlisco factory. I saw how they do their cloth. The wax, the technique—it is taken from batik, only they have money for better dyes, better cotton, and it is done on those heavy machines. I said, ‘Hei! I am an African. I know the kind of beauty that is our beauty.’ So when my husband disappointed me, I came home and started my factory and fucked them all!”

  “Madame, someone is here to buy!” a girl called from outside the door. We followed Aunty Mercy into the shop, where she reclined on a colorful woven floor mat and ordered the helpers and the seamstresses around as more customers began to arrive. She reached constantly between chair cushions and under edges of the carpet, where she’d tucked wads of cedis and foreign bills of every kind; then she’d call out orders for beer, more food, a special zipper so a Swedish woman’s purchase could be made into a dress. By early afternoon I counted nearly six million cedis in sales—mostly to diplomatic corps wives and Ghana’s elite, who appreciated Mercy’s art and would pay her prices for the unusual colors that she achieved with her store of imported dyes. Six million cedis was more than the monthly fortune that Fulbright paid to me.

  Aunty Mercy represented an older generation of Ghanaian women, those “heavy Madames” who were descended from, sometimes inheritors of family guilds. They had been able to gain significant footholds in the economy before the collapse of the guilds, the opening of immigration (their children chose to go abroad rather than inherit the business), the country’s economic depression in the 1980s, and the effects of globalization. Eurama had told me that a certain huge mansion I’d wondered about—striking because it sat among crude cement and mud structures in Ada, just two hours east of Accra—was Aunty Mercy’s “family house.” Family property was typically as old as a family line unless ethnic conflict or colonialism had interrupted the ownership. I had done a bit of research on the Ocanseys. Aunty Mercy was the descendant of a family that had surely colluded with the transatlantic slave trade. Her Accra property—a former colonial residence—and her business would be a living part of that legacy. Even the house girls, who she said were “family” who had been “sent to her from the village”—an arrangement typical in Ghanaian households—were likely to be descendants of once-indentured clan members. Under the modern arrangement they would work from puberty until marriage for little or no wages, in exchange for “training” and a parting contribution to the girl’s start in business or her dowry.

  Aunty Mercy’s legacy was old and new.

  She was my first glimpse of African bohemia. Her seamstresses would emerge with copies of dull, outdated Western dress styles, and she would rearrange a sleeve or collar, order them to restitch it, and turn out some fabulous innovation. She was the funky, splendid Miles Davis of cloth, where each stitch, like his every note, undid the expected sound.

  I sensed that she suffered for her individuality. And from drink, judging by her ten o’clock request for beer.

  She asked me if I was ready to begin my apprenticeship, and I’d known even before I’d come there that I would not do it.

  “I’m interested in learning about indigo. But you don’t ever dye indigo here?” I asked.

  “I can do it, but it be money matters! It is a long pro­cess, and nowadays if people get money to buy cloth, they are going to run to buy Holland.”

  I could witness batik dyeing most anywhere in Ghana, and I had taken textile-dyeing classes. Mercy seemed hardly to work herself anymore, just supervising what came from the factory. What I wanted from her—her stories, and her way with cloth—I could get sitting right there in her shop. I planned to return and try to dig into the family’s history.

  I told her that my student money could not support an apprenticeship, and she looked disappointed. She made a counteroffer, and when I refused, we all sat quietly, Eurama’s eyes laughing.

  From a radio in the courtyard, a song, “Just One More Dance,” was playing.

  It was a colonial relic, a duet famously covered by Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba. A woman, out dancing with her lover as her husband lay dying, is urged home again and again. For weeks, Joy FM, the local radio station, had been mixing the song with its usual playlist of “hiplife”—popular tunes that were a blend of rap and hip-hop and Ghana’s famous horn-driven dance music called “highlife,” which originated in the 1900s. They played a British version from the 1950s, and each time it broke over the airwaves the young would moan and old timers would break into old steps. They would sing along and begin to reminisce about the old dance halls and old lovers, Independence and later coups. Aunty Mercy danced a few slow winding steps, her body moving effortlessly, her hand handkerchief spinning gracefully in the air.

  She lowered her beer glass and looked up to the sky. “Serious-o! A husband is not a small thing. For me, if I had a husband, I would not play around. If he died-o, I would mourn him properly.”

  “You see this woman? She has had four or five husbands already,” Eurama quipped. “As for me, I have just one, and he married drink long ago.”

  Aunty Mercy didn’t seem to hear her. She stood up and moved a heavy clay planter with her foot, revealing a small key. She went to unlock a wardrobe at the back of the shop and pulled out an exquisite woven cloth like one worn by the women I’d seen in Mali. In a field of bright royal blue were elliptical white markings, like the dance of a small bird’s feet, tapping out a cosmic message or sign.

  Eurama grabbed playfully at my breast. “Hei! My friend, see how your whole body is shaking! I tell you, someone has made cloth your lover.”

  Aunty Mercy laughed, “Ah, this be proper-proper indigo. It is fine-o! I might sell it to you, but it will be very expensive and you are only a schoolgirl, you say. Ah, you won’t get it easily. You won’t see it—no, you won’t see indigo at all nowadays. Unless there is a funeral.”

  I felt like I was in the grip of the same fever from the day at Makola. Eurama was eyeing me. I calculated how much it might cost, how much I might pay, what I would trade—of my budget, of my dignity, of my pose as a schoolgirl—to have it.

  “Ah, Gifty!” Mercy called. “Gifty, show obruni my blue beads. This girl likes blue! She’s a student so maybe she can afford at least beads-o!”

  “Please, her money is toooo small,” Eurama insisted, “even for beads.”

  She had saved me from myself. She rose to leave, and Aunty Mercy took my hand.

  “Come back, obruni. Come and visit anytime. I like you, eh? I will find you indigo. Fine-fine indigo.”

  Three

  Widow’s Blues, Ghana

  I was awakened before dawn at the sound of Eurama at my window, calling for me to unlock the gate. The sun was only
half-risen, and she was dressed in a very formal kaba and slit. Her face was tight with worry.

  “Mr. Ghilchreist is sick-o! Please, bathe and come quickly. I need you to come to the hospital!”

  In the weeks since Eurama had confessed her troubles to me, Mr. Ghilchreist had started to appear more and more. He had become more slender and wizened, walking drunk, past Eurama’s shop every afternoon, tipping his hat at us before he retired to his bedroom. Occasionally he appeared at the back door of the shop, sheepishly handing over money for a razor or soap.

  “Did you see that spirit passing? It resembles my husband,” Eurama would joke. “Now that I’m not bothering him for money, he feels free to roam. He knows you’re helping me and yesterday he said to me, “Suppose Catherine had a prick? You would have a proper new husband. I like her and I wouldn’t argue.”

  When I arrived at the house I found Mr. Gilchreist half-sitting in the backseat of his old Volvo sedan, wearing a handsome suit. He reminded me of older African-American men at home who dressed formally for the bank or the doctor—an assertion of dignity and a wearing of armor that had been a legacy of American colonialism. He was ashen, and his hair seemed to have whitened overnight. His legs were shaking, and he tried to get control over them, finally grabbing his knees and lifting his feet in behind him. He sat childlike as we rode, Eurama’s nephew driving, across the city to a special new “big man’s” clinic.

  “Don’t you have a beautiful wife and five children, a good job? Shame on you!” the doctor said to Mr. Ghilchreist as Eurama and I were called into his office. The formality and distance between the two of them was startling to me, but it said as much about male and female spaces in Ghana as the fact that it was assumed I would join them because I was the attending obruni.

  Three nights before, the power had been cut, and I had sat with Eurama, selling by candlelight, when two young men appeared in the darkness. I didn’t understand what was happening until we were halfway down the road, where the mechanics at the fitter shop behind Togetherness Bar stood with Mr. Ghilchreist. They had been working under torchlight when they saw him walk out of the back of the bar to urinate and fall into a ditch. The ditch was an artery for the city’s refuse, deeper than two men, and as wide as a lane of a city street. The alcohol had seemed to rubberize him; he barely had a wound. But for the next two days he sat at home, not moving from a living room chair.

  “He isn’t sick. He is totally ashamed!” Eurama quipped. “Otherwise he’d be right back there at Togetherness Bar spending the water money.”

  The doctor watched us over the top of his glasses. “I don’t see anything obvious here besides what drink is doing to him, but I want him to go to Korle-bu Hospital for more tests. Our ambulance driver has not yet reported for work—an ambulance would be best because traffic is so impossible. I hope you have a private car?”

  He shook Eurama’s hand. “Be patient, madame. God will help.”

  After packing them into the car, I had said good-bye, glad he’d escaped the worst. Then I’d gone to see if the rumors were true and the university library had indeed reopened from the strike. As soon as I returned to Eurama’s, I knew that something was wrong. The metal shutter was pulled across her shop. When I entered the yard, things seemed to have been hurriedly packed up. The peanuts or palm kernels, the giant wooden mortar and pestle for pounding yam and plantain into fufu, which would ordinarily be spread out drying near the gate in the last powerful glare of sunshine, were not there. The clotheslines, which usually created a wonderful, perfumed cloth maze between the shop and the house, had been stripped of everything.

  I saw Eurama’s frame just above the veranda wall. She was a dark silhouette, in a dark sheath, her head tied simply with a black crepe scarf. Her gold earrings and necklace, always flashing against her skin, were removed.

  There were three women beside her. They studied a large X-ray film against the sunlight.

  I moved toward them, my heart racing, instinctively wrapping my arms across my chest to soothe the ache. Kwesi emerged from the side of the house holding an enamel pan. Everyone stood frozen as he walked to the clothesline and pinned first a man’s white undershirt, then a pair of gray socks, and then the gray bush jacket and trousers that Mr. Ghilchreist had worn that morning.

  They hung dripping from the line, a desultory waving flag.

  While they sat in traffic on a stretch of less than five miles of road, Mr. Ghilchreist had died. Eurama sat in the front seat of the car, not understanding when Kwesi had asked for directions to the mortuary at the hospital gate.

  Heavy drops of water fell from Mr. Ghilchreist’s clothes onto the ground, marking our silence.

  Shango is the death that drips to, to, to

  Like indigo dye dripping from a cloth

  I had encountered these lines of a Yoruba praise song, or oriki, in a collection of Yoruba poetry long before, and the reference to indigo intrigued me, but the words hung without context, without bearing. Hearing the cold certainty of it now, they suddenly had a terrible meaning. To, to, to. It was sound, not words—the bleeding of a freshly dyed cloth into the red laterite earth. The words were meant to summon the power of Shango, the thunder god, the meter of justice: his ineffability, his unending force, the terror he inspires.

  Indigo has an exquisite symmetry with death. It covers everything; its dark, inexplicable power will reach into every fiber, catch every hair, grab the skin. Its print is sure and indelible. Its stain transcends everything.

  To, to, to. The drops marked my steps. When I stood in front of Eurama, I looked plainly at her, but she did not meet my eyes.

  Suddenly a tiny, birdlike woman pushed open the gate with the force of the wind. She stumbled toward us, her wailing like a song:

  Sister-o! Sister! This man did not tell us he was going!

  God too did not tell us!

  Have courage! God will explain it all in time!

  Kofi Ghilchreist, why did you leave us with sorrows?

  Why did you leave our sister crying? With worries?

  The other women erupted with a low humming. Eurama’s body shook with her crying; her body buckled, and she fell into me. Someone pushed a chair beneath me, and she lay across my lap. The woman bent down and took the wrapper tied at Eurama’s waist and dramatically wiped Eurama’s tears with it. Then she took the edge of the cloth and tied it to the hem of her own wrapper.

  “Oh, my dear!” she wailed. “We are here with you. We are here! We are here! Tie your cloth to my cloth. Forget everything. We are here! We will carry this sorrow with you!

  “Twenty-eight years! Even if it is a bad marriage, you will feel it—paaaaaaa!” she said quietly to me.

  I didn’t understand all that was being said, but the absolute power of her promise—that this pain could be bound, that others could carry it, that cloth, the body’s second skin, could bear its weight, protect her and us—that, and the fear possessing Eurama’s face, convulsed in me and I started to sob.

  After a long time, when we’d all fallen again into silence, I heard Eurama’s faint voice, teasing, “Kafo, kafo! Don’t cry, Catherine! Didn’t Aunty Mercy say it? And didn’t you tell me that you wanted a funeral? And you—you say you’re not witchcraft!”

  I sat with Eurama and the area women until it was nearly midnight, waiting for Maa Gladys, Eurama’s eldest aunt, to arrive from their hometown in the hills beyond Accra. She appeared at the gate in dark mourning cloth, a tall, muscular, black-skinned woman, who despite her age balanced a suitcase and a basket heavy with yams on her head. Others had joined us, sitting in dark-colored kaba and slit, black head scarves, and simple slippers, their ubiquitous gold jewelry removed or exchanged for black beads. The power was out again, and we sat under the light of a single kerosense lamp. There was an astounding beauty to the night, with only a small sliver of moon and infinite layers of darkness: skin, cloth, sky, grief manner, death colluding. The world felt steeped in extraordinary power—the depth and the suggestion of somet
hing unreachable but elemental to all things. I let the feeling in the yard, the waves of grief, and the power of all of that encircling dark mystery carry me.

  A funeral had always been such a vague proposition, even as news came regularly to the shop of people dying. First, it was news of strangers. Then a few weeks before Mr. Ghilchreist’s fall, the young man from the house next door had drowned at sea. He had a girlfriend, and his family wanted her to marry the corpse before the burial. It was said that the ghost wouldn’t allow her to marry again if she did not prove her love and left his spirit unsatisfied. After weeks of quarrels, and bitter accusations that it was a ploy to get the girl’s family to help pay for the burial, he was put in the ground quickly, with little pomp.

  Then an old lady began to appear at Eurama’s each day dressed in the same mourning cloth, without shoes, her back bent, with hooded eyes. She stood silently at the gate in the mornings until a bowl of rice or kenkey, a thick corn paste, was sent to her. She did not appear to be poor; her cloth was clean and neatly pressed, and it was costly. This woman, who I was told was the head of an esousou, a traditional women’s banking system, was ending a year of widow-seclusion after burying her husband. Custom demanded that she display her grief by putting away worldly things and that she go house to house and accept tithes in her final days of mourning.

  “All of the showbiz is over now,” Eurama said. “Next two months you will see her walking gorgeously! The first thing she will do is buy blue and white Holland and make a party for thanksgiving.”

  Mr. Ghilchreist’s death seemed almost to have been ordered. Obruni, you will meet your indigo. I felt a pang of guilt, a fear that I had unwittingly summoned or colluded in a sacrifice.

  But as the days marched on and the Ghilchreists made plans, there was no sign of blue anything, and my disordered sinking into a shopkeeper’s life again seemed to be taking over everything. For the next several weeks, as Mr. Ghilchreist lay in the mortuary, the family consulted those abroad who would send burial money and the senior family members in surrounding villages and towns to set a burial date. Eurama’s yard filled with neighbors and others to whom the news had slowly filtered, women from Eurama’s and Mr. Ghilchreist’s families who out of respect to him, and custom, had closed their shops, handed their children to caretakers, and come to do the work of mourning. With each new presence, Eurama’s senior sisters sat reciting the long narrative detailing his death, taking care to show X-rays and lab receipts, to assure everyone that he’d died of pneumonia and not his shameful fall, or the witchcraft of an angry wife or obruni who would covet the blue mourning cloths. I would serve drinks to the visitors and nod solemnly when the aunties who passed around and around the X-rays passionately insisted, “Catherine, you are her witness—you were there with the doctor before the man died.”