Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  The guards pressed against the crowd again, and we were the ones now being hurried. Lady Diana pulled me along as Eurama’s family and the area women rushed to find seats on the bus, leaving space for the next clan of mourners to enter the yard. A coffin lay uneasily propped at the back of the bus, and I was relieved to see that it was still half-covered in brown paper. The body was not there.

  But new shrieks erupted, and Mr. Ghilchreist’s body, laid on a woven mat, the blue and white kente cloth covering him, the weight of his body causing unsteady hands, was lifted through the back door of the bus onto the last row of seats.

  Mr. Ghilchreist’s oldest aunty and one of the male elders took posts over the body as we rolled across the yard out into lunch-hour traffic.

  We spent two hours on the road from Korle-bu, traversing a wide, stinking sewer, watching men and women urinate there while sheep and goats fed alongside, and traders hawked fruits and bread and plastic wares on the overpasses that straddled it. Enormous oxen en route to the market were herded there to drink.

  Eurama rode ahead of us in a car with the aunties. Lady Diana and Kwesi and Christabel rode with me, their foreheads creased with worry and fatigue, their eyes glassy from lack of sleep. The driver had forced everyone to sit and then laid planks across the aisle, creating middle seats. I felt trapped, as sure as the tomb, in this mass of bodies, one dead, the others suddenly revealing the tolls of living and our own mortality. I knew that I could get off the bus, but I was being pulled by a strange momentum, started with my poking into indigo and Eurama’s call to me that rainy night.

  I was reminded again of the real power of the metaphor of cloth and especially indigo: that it merely materializes the very thin layer between what is seen and unseen, between what can be grasped and what can only be suggested, between the living and the spirit world. I was for the first time not able to assume my own protection. I was not the stranger with the notebook. I was no further from death than anyone.

  It took us five hours to travel to all the significant places in Mr. Ghilchreist’s life, the places where his spirit was said to linger: the two State Transport Corporation (Ghana’s Greyhound) offices in Keneshie in Accra, and Tema, the port city to the west, where he was management; and the Ghilchreist family’s modern ancestral homes. At each landmark, the band played louder, the bus and tanker roared from corner to corner of the yard blaring its horn, signaling Mr. Ghilchreist’s arrival. Everyone stood crying in the yard as the STC employees filed from their offices to receive schnapps and walk through the bus, paying their respects to the body, while we feasted on oranges and cold drinks and meat pies from the girls selling in the yard.

  Finally, we blasted into Osu with the funeral band playing, horns blaring, and a second bus of STC workers. We had to compete for road space with two other area funerals. People had arrived by the carload, and they were making a weekend of it as they went from yard to yard. From my elevated seat I could see over the compound wall into Eurama’s house. Eurama was sitting low on a stool on the veranda, dressed now in a flint-black kaba and slit. I had been invited by the aunties to help choose it, as well as an anchor cloth for the family, and I’d selected it from the towers of mourning cloths at Makola because it was dark and layered like indigo and its sheen reminded me of the taglemust. Something gave way in me when I saw her—an aching tenderness for her body, made vulnerable in the burial rites; the dress, a symbol of my blue passion and the place she’d made for me; and my desire to give her back a dignity and a beauty.

  People fell to the ground in grief as the body was taken from the bus. I found myself wailing too.

  When I saw the body, laid out in the living room, I was shocked. Mr. Ghilchreist was so bloated that he now looked obese. The autopsy incision curled from his spine to the hairline at his brow. Cotton filled his nose and ears to stop the odors. His lips were sewn, his eyebrows and hair were blackened, and heavy makeup made him appear waxlike. As the body defrosted, his tuxlike suit had been padded with newspaper to absorb the water and to add volume, as ones does when dressing in cloth, to signal prosperity, a body well fed, well clothed. He wore white gloves and jewelry, things he never would have worn alive. The jewelry, which once would have been pure gold—transit expenses to the other world—was made of fool’s gold bought at Makola, imported from Dubai or China like most of the mourning cloths.

  Beneath him, on a rented brass bed, were layers of expensive black and blue and white cloth, once sure to have been indigos—displays of a well-lived, prosperous, respected life. These cloths lined the bier while the wax cloths Eurama had chosen were tucked beside him, along with cedi notes. The living hall was transformed with lace hung from the ceiling, sheets of lace covering the walls where hand-woven prestige cloths would have once hung. There was a red rented floor carpet and plastic flowers in gilded plastic vases. No expense had been spared, relative to Eurama’s daily struggle for necessities. To cut back would have jeopardized the dead man’s connection with the ancestors; it would have been akin to cutting off some of his air supply.

  The man who dressed the body and the room came from a house on Teshie Road. WHATEVER YOU DO. DEATH AWAITS YOU. CONTACT SWEET MOTHER & CO. FOR YOURBEREAVEMENTS. WE UNDERTAKE THE SALES OF GOWNS, SUITS, WREATHS, MATERIALS, GLOVES, LACE, ETC. the sign board in front of his place read. The dressing had been a task once done by family elders. Ghana indeed had modernized its cult of death; the undertaker had arrived as sure as kente had given way to Lurex threads.

  At sundown, people filed into the room to pay respects to Eurama and the aunties before they approached the coffin. The deejay and his sound system orchestrated our grief, playing plaintive dirges, mournful highlife, and American Christian rock. Some of the tears were for hire—women who knew the appropriate gestures, the old dances and postures of mourning, stirring the appropriate drama for a man of Mr. Ghilchreist’s stature and for his family, exhausted by more than a month of public grieving.

  For hours I sat in the dark in a plastic lawn chair, the ocean breeze blowing cool. A French newscast broke through the pauses in the deejay’s playing. I listened to wailing and long conversations with the body:

  “Kofi, my dear! You know justice—help me to also know it!”

  “You know prosperity. Bless me with the knowledge to also find some.”

  “Kofi, you were a loving husband, so send a husband to me. I am your daughter-o!”

  “Thanks for money still owed, for help in times of need, guidance.”

  All brought new cries from the mourners.

  “Abussuafo aye ade paa! The family has tried! Yen were mfi, Mr. Ghilchreist da. We will never forget you.”

  “Be off! Leave your wife and stay in your world! Do not trouble her! Protect her and your children!”

  “Kofi! Kofi wou ye ya! Your death is painful.”

  “Aunty Eurama! Tie my cloth to your cloth and forget!”

  Until the next afternoon, when the body would be laid in the cemetery, the mourners danced and sang, spoke out-sized testimonies in a grand dramatization of Mr. Ghilchreist’s life. And there, in a riling sea of decorated darkness, was cloth to help us cope, to comfort our bodies, to summon beauty, to mark our sure existence. I understood now Eurama’s riddles: Blue is black. Blue is life, mourning, joy, all at once.

  Life and death have exquisite symmetry. The symmetry is held in the color blue. In another time Mr. Ghilchreist’s blue kente would have been given to him at the time of marriage, when he became a man and “started life.” It, and not the coffin, would have held the body in the grave. The enormous burial customs, the costs, the obsession with beauty and the portage of the corpse are meant to reflect the beauty of the living—the anxieties and dreams and yearnings when life can in fact be so ugly. We are born, we face mortality. What are the mysteries and yearnings in between? Cloth is the portage, the vehicle for the spirit on the irreversible, unsettling march from birth to the grave.

  At the center of this grand drama, as we laid Mr. Ghilchreist to
rest, I truly learned to see in blue.

  After Mr. Ghilchreist had been buried ten days, his soul, it was said, no longer lingered near the body—it had broken free to wander for a year. Eurama’s family had packed off, leaving the house in quiet. It was time to venture out. I went in search of Alhaji Ibrahim, one of the well-established antiquities traders in Nima, an old Muslim quarter.

  A girl sitting on a stool under the corrugated tin awning of his shop offered her seat to me. “Please, miss, wait small. He dey go come from mosque.”

  She settled on a mat in the shade, alongside a woman and a bruised and dirt-stained Barbie. Like Barbie, the woman was striking in her improbable build. Her enormous body was neat and surprisingly shapely under her well-starched pink damask boubou. The woman didn’t seem bothered at all by her heft; she lay there dramatically at ease. Her face was as large and round as a serving plate. Her head, covered with a sequined blue scarf, lolled in one hand.

  The girl began to play. “Rap-unzel, Rap-unzel, drop that your long golden hair,” she cooed, twisting Barbie’s matted head.

  “Ashawo!” The woman sucked her teeth.

  “Ma!”

  “But she is a prostitute! Do you think that the prince would bother to climb something so tall like that and not jiggy her?” She spat the skin of the kola nut she chewed and laughed, eyeing my too-short dress.

  One of her sherbet-orange mules shoes dropped off, revealing a foot decorated with blue-black geometry. Henna and indigo.

  I stared at her foot, and she sucked her teeth and reached for the shoe, letting the plastic snap back against her sole.

  A stream of men filed from the mosque into the passageway alongside Alhaji’s antiquities shop. Soon Alhaji was standing before me, a tall, broad-shouldered man. His beard, the same white as his fulan, hung down to touch the breast of his deep indigo robe. The dye from it leached beautifully into the scarf.

  “So you are the obruni who killed someone’s husband,” he said. “I see! And you are done mourning now?” There was a glint of a smile in his eye. “Your friend Ray has told me everything.”

  Uncle John Ray, an old friend, was an African-American sculptor and photographer who had made his home in Ghana for more than thirty years; he had led me here.

  “It is good,” Alhaji continued, “because my brother dey go for Mali this week. You dey join; he will take am to Burkina Faso—as far as Ouagadougou. You go find plenty dyers there. See Ray and tell am go call Mrs. Dagadu. My brother has something to give her; some warthog teeth she wanted. Maybe she go travel with you? I’ll expect you both at the STC yard for the Friday bus.” He called the girl to serve me a Coke and went to unlock his shop. Men filed in behind him to discuss business, and I left with a nod from him from the door.

  Kati Dagadu—I liked her upon meeting her. She had come to Ghana from Hungary before she was twenty, newly married to an older Ghanaian student who was returning home with a degree in petroleum engineering. She had taught herself English in Ghana, had raised two daughters, and had become a master jeweler, running a fashionable boutique, and an expert on the Africa bead trade. Beads and indigo shared a close history and a vernacular, and so we had an immediate bond.

  Word was passed back and forth between Uncle Ray and Kati and me. She had decided to accompany me, taking advantage of the chance to travel with a companion while searching for treasures for an exhibit she would curate for a Hungarian foundation.

  I said good-bye to Eurama, sad to be leaving her in her quiet house, in the wake of so many hard changes, but she reassured me, “It is time for you to do this now. But be careful of your impatient heart and that stubborn spirit. Don’t go by car or lorry. Take STC. Mr. Ghilchreist’s spirit will guide your road.” She touched the torn strip of one of his burial cloths, tied at my wrist on the day of the wake-keeping for blessing and nearness to him.

  When Kati and I went to buy our tickets, a poster in the terminal shed read WE ALWAYS TAKE YOU THERE ALIVE-TRAVEL BY S.T.C. I felt oddly assured. But on the day we departed, a tall, slender, humorless man arrived. Alhaji’s brother seemed displeased, and I wondered if he resented having us along. Then I realized that the boy, no older than fourteen, trailing him too closely, was bound to him at the wrist. His upper-right earlobe had been roughly clipped—the telltale punishment for thievery and a sign to others of a person’s bad character.

  “Awo!” Kati said. “Indentureship, slavery—it hasn’t died here-o! Isn’t this part of your indigo story? The cloth of royals and slaves. Now you are going to see something! Don’t worry-kra. You will surely meet your desire.”

  It was nearing noon, and at the muezzin’s call to prayers, most of the other passengers sank into the dust and prayed with the brilliant sun behind them. Kati and I walked to the edge of the yard to rest under a lone cocoa tree. Its leaves were falling, sounding like paper being crumpled and dropped to the floor. The bus yard quieted.

  When it was time to board and we took our seats, I knew that I would hold the feelings and memory of Mr. Ghilchreist’s corpse in my own body for a long time. He was my unwitting guide.

  Part II

  Finders

  Four

  The Road to Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso

  We drove through the night, fifteen hours north, to the frontier between Ghana and Burkina Faso, and then on to Ouagadougou to rest before continuing our journey. Bathed in starlight, we traveled long stretches of uninhabited road, interrupted by a few passing vehicles and the occasional glow of lights from low, gentle domes of painted or whitewashed adobe houses that I imagined nested perfectly with the terrain of the moon.

  Even at its most desolate, this landscape is ghosted by passages of merchants and traders and people set flowing by centuries of dramatic upheavals—the consequences of wars and extraditions, the sweeping Islamic reform movement, European colonialism, and the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades.

  It only took a few hours, the sharing of food, and a stop for prayers to discover that our bus told a modern chapter of this story. There was the boy with the clipped ear and his old Hausa master. Two women with an easy agreement in their bodies—the rare intimacy of co-wives—sat in front of Kati and me in elegant contrast: one was middle-aged, wearing the black cloak of purdah, while the other was in her thirties, her hair fashionably braided, a gold wedding scarf falling loosely over her head and her purple boubou. Their husband sat across the aisle from them, tall and elegant in taglemust and a finely tailored blue wool bush suit; a fancy silver pen fastened his UN identification card to his breast pocket. Two teenage girls were traveling home with bright enamel cooking pots, part of their dowry, nested and tied and carefully stowed beside them. A man who had crossed the desert from northern Ghana to Libya, mostly on foot, hoping to find passage to Europe, was now home on leave from college in Egypt and was traveling to see his brother in Ouagadougou. Another who posed as a cattle merchant and had gained entry to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of Ghana’s government, for trade hearings, was going home escorted by a customs guard. A woman was traveling in search of artifacts to take to her native Hungary; at a road stop she was met by a trader whom she had summoned with her cell phone; he offered rare Venetian beads and rusted slave manacles. And an American stranger was there, in search of a luminous blue.

  I stared into the night, imagining scenes of the past. Indigo had literally helped to pave our road. As early as the fourteenth century, according to Arabic sources, cotton had circulated widely as currency in West Africa. Cloth was measured out and valued in units of length. The practice persists in the taglemust and other hand-woven prestige cloths, where strips are made in conventional measures, purchased in a small wheel, and then joined and tailored, their value known and displayed the way Westerners show off luxury labels. From the seventeenth century, caravans traversed the land, one or two thousand persons strong, made up of traders and militia; rich merchant families; pawns, apprentices, and captive persons. Camels carried households, food, and ammunition, ostri
ch feathers, salt, and gold. On each side of them, in wheels larger than their torsos, dropped below their bellies, was strip woven cloth for dyeing. Indigo was the most valued dye. The caravans often led as many as five hundred slaves at a time—they would become the estimated sixty million humans shipped to the United States, the colonies, and Europe, or to the royal farms of the Ashanti and other industries of African kingdoms and ruling states. In the colonial era, textiles—and particularly indigo cloths—became the largest commodity sold and traded on the West African coast. The colonialist records bear witness: In the 1749 registers of the Dutch West India Company—the largest colonial trade concern for Africa and agent in the slave trade for the Americas—a healthy male slave purchased in Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was worth six ounces of gold, payable in equivalent goods, like a length of cotton cloth.

  During the late colonial era and early African independence movements—ushered by Gold Coast in 1957—with the end of interior wars and improved security, transportation, and communications, large caravans slowly became obsolete, and individual traders predominated, using their clan and family members for financing and labor. Yoruba traders from western Nigeria settled in places like Tamale and Yendi in northern Ghana and became dominant in trade by the 1950s. They were often the only resident full-time traders in rural areas neglected by Ghana’s southern centers of commercial and political power. Renowned for their quality and beauty, Yoruba indigo woven and resist-dyed cloths circulated widely there, selling for double their Nigerian value.