Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  I let the emotion-filled discussions, the bursts of prayer, the endless reciting of costs, wash over me. Each day I made records in my notebook, trying to convince myself that I had not forsaken my work, but the pages were filled with rule after rule directing the ever-tightening noose of Eurama’s widow-seclusion.

  Things a Widow Can Never Do:

  Eat with others; which is the only way a civilized person should eat. If a married woman eats from the same bowl, she will also lose her husband.

  Eat without a piece of charcoal on your plate. The charcoal ensures you are really alone. The spirits will never join you.

  Wear nail polish. Your feet, Aunty! O pe life! You like life! I beg you, remove it, or they will say you killed your husband.

  Touch money. Me, a widow, with these my five children and two dogs, and my obruni who eats meat with every meal. Close my shop for so many weeks?

  Eat for more than survival. See how your husband is dead and you are growing fat! You must be happy! Or it’s true what we hear, that you are making witchcraft?

  Cross the gate and enter the free world. My dear, don’t even sit at the entrance to the gate! Maybe the ghost has gone to Togetherness for a last drink. He will enter the yard, looking for his bed, and meet you there.

  Bathe alone. Sister-o! The spirit will meet you there! Let me join you in the bathroom so you can be safe.

  Sleep without “high tension” panties, a cloth pulled between the legs and fastened tightly with waist beads. If you don’t the ghost will come to visit that place at night!

  Sleep on your bed just how you like it. Better you dismantled it, put the mattress on the floor in another corner of the room, so that the ghost is confused and will find another sleeping place.

  The customs, postures of mourning, and labors were endless. But there was not a trace of blue cloth.

  “I thought you were studying our cloth,” people would say, unaware of the irony, “but it seems you’re studying funerals.”

  I was trying to understand why I felt compelled to stay as each hour marched along. I could beg out of it all, go on with my work, stop by in the evenings. It seemed it was time to step out of Eurama’s nest and depend more on my own wit. But a vague sense working through me said there was something important in just sitting still.

  One evening, like the first, when we sat in a sea of dark dresses in the yard, just as the night began to fall, I began to make sense of what Eurama and others were teaching me.

  “Blue is stronger than black,” Aunty Mercy had told me, holding the Dogon cloth against the arm of her house girl, whose skin was dark and poreless, like black porcelain. “One is darker, but in a very dark room, you still can reach out for the walls. The deepest night will be alive with light. The stars are more visible then. Blue-black holds infinity. Blue-black is never done.”

  “Ah, she is romancing you small-small!” Eurama said.

  I was frustrated with the riddle-making. There in the yard, in the encircling dark, as the last bit of daylight fell from the sky, two women plaited Eurama’s hair, each taking command over a different sphere, making beautiful order to her head. Others pounded fufu and fried fish, drinking Guinness beer. Children squabbled. Others made ready the sitting room where Mr. Ghilchreist’s body would be laid for the wake-keeping. An enormous woman entered the gate and stumbled toward us, moaning at the death, nearly tripping over a small child gleefully attempting its first steps.

  Indigo mimics and holds all that is in my eye: blackness and light, birth and death, the passages between them. Indigo is not really a color, it is not cloth, I realized. It is only the tangible intangible. The attempt to capture beauty, to hold the elusive, the fine layer of skin between the two.

  Death is a praising of life; death teaches us how to live. Color, cloth is simply the praise song.

  And so I embraced blackness as my route to blue.

  I went to Eurama’s house at dawn on the day of wake-keeping. She sat quietly on the veranda, her wrapper draped over her dark-velvet-wrapped head, covering her shoulders. The night before, while the area women had sat in the yard preparing food for the next day’s service, Lizzy Hairdresser, Eurama’s church sister, had come with a bowl of lalle, or henna, and covered Eurama’s head with it, dyeing her hair a deep black, appropriate for mourning. Darkened heads were also an ideal of beauty; in the market you could find men and women having their heads blackened for vanity. The thick paste on her head reminded me of an 1832 pencil sketch I’d seen, by the British commander William Allen, of a queen and her entourage in central Nigeria “calling on British visitors.” She was kneeling, with her handmaidens behind her, her head covered with a thick paste of indigo and wrapped in white.

  The cloth Eurama wore was decorated with a large oxblood-colored skull and bones. Owuo sei fei. “Death spoils a house.” I recognized it from the Dutch wax seller’s shops. Eurama had said it was one of the oldest Dutch wax cloth designs, which meant it could have been traded in West Africa as early as the 1880s.

  She seemed to be shivering in the already-rising morning heat. The yard was filled with area women, a somber but spectacular band of decorated blackness, like a flock of exquisite ravens.

  I was aware for the first time of Death as something you go and meet. Like a ship, it slips in, laden with its cargo. The band of mourners were like kayayo at the harbor, sent to retrieve the family’s totaling ache.

  “I’m so confused, I don’t know my left from my right,” Eurama whispered to me at the water pot near the kitchen, where she often went to escape. But during the six weeks since the death, she had run the funeral preparations like the head of a vast corporation. She had defied the restrictions of her seclusion and, because her children were still young, the customary laws that dictated burials as the responsibility of the deceased’s children. Everyone had been called from other villages and towns; family had come from Canada, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Lagos; the huge burial expenses had been raised; food cooked; funeral kaba and suits sewn for four days of ceremony.

  And now, hoisting baskets, balancing offerings—the costly items that Mr. Ghilchreist’s family elders had requested for the burial—cloaked, too, in blue-black factory cloths, reminding me of the indigo used to protect Eurama’s money box, her sisters were laughing beneath their still facades.

  “Six bars of Key Soap for one dead body! And how much cologne?” Eurama kept repeating as we followed them to the caravan of cars that would carry us to Mr. Ghilchreist’s family house, the expensive half-foot-long waxy yellow bars sold by Lever Brothers topping their loads.

  Mr. Ghilchreist’s mother’s house sat on the edge of Osu, in the old township quarter where Ga peoples had first settled after migrating from Yorubaland (in what is now Nigeria) in 1500. Family compounds sat shadowed by Christiansborg Castle, a former slave fort, now Ghana’s White House. We entered a courtyard to a two-story colonial house, its paint faded and peeling, ringed by tiny, single-story cement buildings with corrugated tin roofs and battered wooden doors. It was dawn, but the air was already thick with heat, charged with expectation and grief.

  The house had begun to stir. Women emerged in wrappers soaked with sweat from the night. Children stood watching shyly at the edge of the yard. A basket set down in the compound was overturned by a wild-eyed cat, who made off with a large smoked tuna until a shoe was thrown and the fish retrieved from the dusty cement floor. Eurama sat shrouded on her low stool, in a posture of total wretchedness, of inconsolance.

  As more of a crowd gathered, the eldest Ghilchreist aunty stood and began to pray. She poured large drops of schnapps onto the floor, calling to the ancestors. Their spirits should drink and be satisfied and smooth Mr. Ghilchreist’s journey to their realm.

  The baskets of offerings were placed before Eurama, and without warning the aunties descended on them. They clutched hold of the white dress shirts, the dark suit and underwear and T-shirts, the razors, the hair pomade and satin gloves, the handkerchiefs, the comb and brush, and
the large knot of shea butter, displaying them to us before laying them on the burial mat. Their work was exacting, with the vulgar matter-of-factness of a vulture’s feeding, their voices cooing, then admonishing, as their hands moved over everything. Eurama and her sisters began to weep as one aunty’s litany rose.

  She pulled a bowl of tiny, hard limes from the baskets. “Are these for washing the body?” she chided, squeezing one in her hand. She was as tall and cold as a park statue, with a broad, smooth face that seemed barely to move and that betrayed no feeling. She put the lime on the ground and rolled it under her shoe to soften it, then sniffed as she put it back into the bowl.

  She moved on to the stack of burial cloths, which would decorate the bed in the room where Mr. Ghilchreist would be laid out for wake-keeping—a display of his wealth and status and family line—before they accompanied the body to the grave. Others would be shared among the mourners.

  Eurama and her sisters had spent a few hours unpacking Eurama’s cloth boxes in the secrecy of her room. They emerged with some for the extended family to judge: which were appropriate designs, which had the right value to honor the man, which had too much value and should not be squandered. One of her sisters had said something disapproving about the cloths being old, but Eurama had packed them back into the basket with fiery eyes, muttering, “New cloth! With Lady Diana to marry soon and these my five children, a house girl, and two dogs to feed!” In the end, they selected from several of her old kabas. Lady Diana gently undid the stitching in the slits, which had elaborate folding inside so that the full two yards were preserved and sewn but never cut, and then carefully washed and starched and ironed each one with its matching wrapper so that they looked new again.

  They were packed into a basket and covered with a heavy blue and white kente, an expensive, elaborately designed hand-loomed cloth once woven with indigo threads and reserved for royals and—as it became a sign of not only prestige but national identity and nationalist pride—slowly adopted by the elite and later those who would afford the several-hundred-dollar cost. Mr. Ghilchreist’s cloth was machine woven, most likely produced in a factory in Kenya or China. I’d seen them in the market. They were still costly, but less so than the originals; they represented something modern and prestigious in their own right.

  The cloths seemed to meet the Ghilchreist women’s approval, and the knot in all of our bodies loosened.

  From silver trays we were offered Lipton tea and loaves of French bread slathered with margarine—relative delicacies. The sun was rising fast, and we were growing more uncomfortable under our dark clothing. Eurama sat hunched low, sweat pouring from her chin. There were nearly forty women in the yard now. The aunties were dividing up a bale of coarse fiber used like a loofah that would be used to wash the body. The air was filled with its hay-like dust. A pan filled with small plugs of it was passed among us; we were to take some to also bathe, an act of sympathy and a reminder of death’s nearness to our own bodies.

  You could feel the grief mounting in the air as the wind carried the threads. Despite the sun, the sky and sea were dark-gray-hued from the Harmattan dust and heavy rains in the night. On the road along the coast, the horizon had disappeared and you could not tell the boundaries between the land and sea and sky. The world became one eternal gray plane. I felt suddenly desperate, caught in the folds of a curtain that would not lift. It was not the curtain of darkness, nor death, nor even grief—these had contours and space and, however wild, a boundary fixed somewhere. The sky seemed to signal a revocation of something, and we were left to turn only to our own bodies, to their blackness, for a landmark.

  When we later drove from the aunties’ house to the mortuary at Korle-bu Hospital, I stared again, desperately trying to mark the horizon. Then a solitary figure appeared, a man dressed like many weekend funeral-goers in mourning cloth, wrapped in a voluminous togalike fashion. He marked space and then disappeared again, probably stooping at a place along the shore to empty his bowels.

  At the mortuary we walked through a sentry gate into a desolate compound. All at once, summoned by a terrible wailing from behind a cement wall, the yard filled with throngs of women dressed in mourning cloths. A man seemed to sweep the yard, herding the band. SHIT HAPPENS stretched across the chest of his T-shirt, over his rotund belly. Then, as quickly, the women vanished through the gate.

  We stood for an hour under a corrugated-tin-covered shed, watching the yard fill and then empty out with each emergence from the mortuary room: a body covered in cloth, carried plainly on a mat to a vehicle holding a coffin.

  “Look at your crying face!” I jumped, surprised to hear Eurama’s passing whisper. She looked back at me, her eyes twinkling for the first time. She was flanked by Mr. Ghilchreist’s aunties, carrying the burial offerings. They disappeared quickly behind the low cement walls of the mortuary building.

  The sun beat down on us. I bought chewing gum from the girls milling about selling from head pans and settled into waiting. A giant woman, her body as wide and square as an ice chest, was leaning over the compound wall above us in a frilly-neck funeral kaba; she seemed to be surveying the yard with excitement. Indeed, despite the terribleness of that yard, there was an air of spectacle, of morbid entertainment. Under a tree at the center of the yard, a man stood preaching. He moved between Ga and Twi and English.

  “Today you have packed your coolers with drinks and food! You are going to enjoy yourselves! See the dresses you have sewn! Ghana, you worship death! You go into a lifetime debt, you spend millions on your funeral cloths and on drink, and you say it is all because you want to see your beloved off, to ensure that their spirit is cared for. You will spend on a corpse, but when your beloved was sick, you waited to send her to hospital! Your own child is at home sick with malaria, and you will tell us that you could not afford to go to clinic, but you will spend your money today, to bury someone! What else is that but worship? And you call yourself Christians. God hates it, and those who do it! Ghana, you worship death!” he exhorted.

  A group of women had been huddled to the right of us in a tight circle. I barely noticed, and I missed the import of their gathering until someone moved, breaking the line of bodies, and I realized that they were standing over a small coffin—an unadorned box made from wawa, a wood as easy to splinter and pull apart as particleboard. The cover was ajar, and I could see a child’s face, smoothed with pomade, a long curl sprung from under a lace-trimmed white hat touching her eyebrow. One of the women standing over her began to wail as the others sent a fire of words to outer provenances, a violent entreaty, imploring the spirit to go and not return, to spare the mother its reincarnation—another pregnancy that might end again in death. The mother of the child lay grief-stricken on the ground at the coffin’s side.

  An old ambulance from the 1970s, with silver Korean lettering on the glass, was backing across the yard. As it neared us, I saw that it had been restyled as a hearse, with lace curtains hung in the windows. A security guard ran beside it, corralling the different throngs of mourners, hurrying everyone. The girl’s coffin was quickly covered and hammered shut—an act as rough as the woman’s exhortations—then was lifted into the hearse; the mourners piled in at either side as the guard barked orders to the driver. The car roared off, with singing and the clanging of a cowbell ringing in the air.

  I stood covered with goose bumps in the noonday heat. For several years in high school I had worked in a nursing home, and I was accustomed to death, proud of my command with the washing and dressing of the body. Proud that death did not rattle me. But I had never encountered the body of a child, and somehow the sanitized calm of the institution, the efficient procedure of death, the assumption of a role, helped me through. Here life and death was without boundary, and they seemed to tumble over each other so that I was not sure where one ended and the other began. The mother’s crying had stayed with me, and now it became another woman’s shrieks. I looked up to see Eurama, standing trancelike at the mortuary door. />
  The aunties who had followed her admonished her in harsh voices, demanding that she remain in the room, fetch water for his bath, as a wife should, and then hold his feet as the elder women bathed him.

  “Kafo! Kafo! Don’t cry!” one of the aunties barked words meant to soothe. Behind her stood a large public hall with cement slabs that bodies were laid on. I saw Mr. Ghilchreist’s bloated corpse being dressed, an open hand, a stiff arm in a black suit sleeve slightly raised, seeming to be waving as he was rocked back and forth with the pulling on of his trousers. A laugh rose in my throat. There was a comedic air about it, death as plain and unworldly as scenes from a Coen brothers film. But it was terrible because it was real.

  The yard erupted again as an oil truck drove through the gate, honking so loudly it pierced the ears, a funeral cloth tied across its nose, flags made of the same cloth tied to the antenna. A bus trailed it, the doors snapping open and shut, open and shut, rhythmically. A group of young men alighted. They were clothed in women’s dresses, worn inside out with mismatched shoes, dancing wildly as they sang. I’d seen these bands every Friday morning at dawn walking the road. They played cowbells and blew into horns, already drunk on akpateshie, a local gin. I was sometimes frightened by their lewdness, their aggression, but the area women all laughed at them. “ ‘Death has confused me,’ that is what they sing. That is why they are dressed baaajaa!” Lady Diana had explained to me. “They are there to honor death’s power over us.”