Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  I brought my daughter to Abena and asked her to hold her, and she let me know she was annoyed by the interruption. She was tired and hadn’t eaten since dawn. She followed me to the porch with my daughter in her arms, not realizing what was happening, surprised the body could be removed so quickly, within a few hours of her dying, so unceremoniously, with no witnesses, no real sending off, just the smooth wheeling away of a trolley.

  Standing with her again, I was angry at my mother, for what I decided was her cowardice. She had not dropped everything and come as soon as I told her we were losing Grandmother. She had second-guessed me and said she would come the next morning, while I urged her to get right into her car. But then I thought, of course, perhaps she needed a community, midwives of death to pull her through to the burial, and later the labor of mourning, just as my grandmother had needed us to help hand her to death. Just as my mother had shakingly held my foot in the short-staffed labor room as my son was born, just as Eurama had uneasily held the foot of her husband.

  “I always thought this was the best way, without all the pomp and circumstance,” my mother said into the silence of the yard.

  Abena’s keening broke the calm. “Yei! Yei! Yei!” echoed down into the valley below the house, where you rarely heard any human noise except the occasional drone of a lawnmower. This was a place of retreat, of ex-communitas, the house my grandparents had built, where my grandmother never pulled the blinds to the dark forest around her but lived in solitude from her early forties until she was ninety-eight. Abena’s keening grew, and then was cut short, as if she became aware of its intrusion.

  Two weeks later, in a quiet ceremony, we laid her ashes beside her husband’s, eulogized her at the church, and went home for a meal with church friends distant to all of us, and that afternoon we began the task of dividing her things. We each supplied lists of what we hoped we’d take, and some began to mark art and furniture with Post-Its. The next morning most of us left, to mourn privately, to make meaning of the loss. African funerals were labored with meaning I decided; ours too often were devoid.

  When I had walked into my grandmother’s bedroom and encountered her body there, my first impulse had been to get my camera from my bag. I felt like a thief, nervously returning to the closet where I’d left my bag, hiding the camera after I snapped a photo of her. A few days before the burial I made a guilty confession to my mother and gave her a copy of the photo, offering to share it with the family. I wondered about this shame. My mother and I had been the only ones to witness the body; she had transformed from a person to a body longer and leaner than we’d known, her skin whiter, her features sharp and beautiful in a new way.

  I realized, having this photo, that I liked the corpse. I liked the reckoning with the body. I like that people can be as capable with it as they are with the body of the newborn.

  One afternoon many months later, I tied my daughter on my back, put on some music, and danced her to sleep in my living room. Both of us were tired from the work of bringing two continents of flesh together, of helping her to grow bone. Work done in the womb was now done on the outside; her face grew beautifully as we prepared for the surgeries ahead. Repairing cleft under treatment with her doctors at NYU Hospital was like indigo dyeing: more magic, more art, than science. Each day I molded her face, fastening to her skin an architecture of tape, fastening a prosthetic mouthpiece to it with rubber bands, and calibrating the pull on the bone. I became an Iyalaro, the Mother of Tape and Rubber Bands; I talked to the spirits of bone and muscle and cartilage, as my daughter’s face developed like a Polaroid photo each week for six months until her first surgery.

  My children are my toil and my earthly sublime. I understood now Eurama’s urging.

  The music was a CD I’d bought long ago in Accra and never listened to. I’d mistaken it for old highlife music of the 1970s, but the sounds of Ga funeral dirges—joyous, aching, rhythmic songs—filled our home. As we danced, the tears spilled out of me. The songs were surrogates and lubricants for my own mourning, as those Accra funerals had been. It is hard to mourn alone, to let yourself stand at the wide open door of death. But once you “taste life” and approach your fear, you allow yourself to turn in.

  I danced and danced, and when the phone rang, and I heard my mother’s voice, I let the music play a bit longer, hoping it might reach into her too.

  “Your grandmother’s bed belonged to her friend Helena. You know she has died, and the family has no use for it, but it is a very expensive bed. Can you think of anyone who can use it?” she asked.

  Helena had been my grandmother’s beloved friend. So connected were they that her son had lived for a time, with his Dutch wife, in my grandmother’s basement, as he worked to establish himself in business and start a family.

  “Her son is just retired as the head of Unilever Global, you know.”

  I started to laugh. Unilever. The king of soap and margarine in West Africa and former owner of Vlisco. Unilever, that had swallowed indigo.

  My grandmother, who had never understood my pull toward Africa or believed that its history was at all tied to our own, had died on a bed that Unilever had bought. When she died, a lot of her comfort—the bed and Abena—had come from Africa.

  How near our lives are to Africa; how strong and intertwined the threads. The world, and the history it makes, is really round, as the saying goes. And it is blue.

  Years after I’d done my journeying, I discovered a Liberian folk tale about indigo from a collection of stories by the American artist Esther Warner Dendel.

  In this story, the woman of legend is named Asi. Asi lived in a land of no hunger. Food was abundant, and when people were hungry, they could even eat the sky in little bits. With a scrap of cloud inside of you, a person could float and dream and find again the peaceful, joyous feelings that filled you, before High God left the earth to find peace from human comings and goings.

  The people, in their loneliness for God, made sacrifices to the spirits of the ancestors and gave them messages to carry to God. Asi was one of the water people, a seeress and medium. The water spirits wanted Asi among them, and to appease them and calm their powerful pull, she had to make sacrifices to them with each full moon.

  One day Asi went to the shrine at the bend of the river with her child tied at her back in a wrapper made of white cloth, a bag of rice balanced on her head. She would cook and eat some of her offering from the sacred spot and leave the rest to the spirits. She made a bed of leaves and laid her child there on her cloth to sleep. As she worked, she saw the color of the sky reflected in the river and felt hunger for that color. She imagined, as she ate a piece of the sky, that the color might come into her. She knew she was forbidden to ask for anything for herself alone, and not for the whole village, at the sacred pools. She knew she must beg forgiveness. But the feeling from the sky was so good, and she felt so drowsy and floating, that she ate more and more of it.

  Asi awoke to the smell of scorched rice. The spirits would be angry with her; she had spoiled the sacrifice she’d come to make. She looked for her child and she saw that she had wet the bed and rolled off into the tall grass that grew nearby. The grass had smothered the child. Asi knew that she had been punished for what she had done.

  Asi wailed in sorrow and covered her hair with ash from the fire, as is the custom for mourners. She picked up her child. Then she noticed that the cloth it had lain on was colored with a patch of bright blue. Just then she fell unconscious with grief, and in her dreams the water spirits came to her and revealed that the mixing of the salt of her tears, urine, river water, ash, and the wild indigo leaves that she’d plucked to cushion her child were the secret to God’s earthly blues. It had been necessary for the child to die to have had this secret revealed to her.

  The water spirits had taken her child; Asi was no longer held by them. She was ordered to guard her secret, to teach the old women how to make blue “go for down” and stay. She was to teach them the secrets of indigo. Only then woul
d she again conceive and have her child’s spirit returned to her.

  High God, hearing of this affair, pulled the sky up even higher, where no one could break it off. And people look to the blue of fine cloth and have less need for High God, though in their hearts they remain lonely.

  And indigo is here to stay.

  I live now in blue, with my children, in a life fashioned between New York and West Africa, learning, as Eurama insisted, to really “taste life,” through devotion to others, through the beauty of acts of sacrifice.

  Acknowledgments

  With very special thanks and love to my parents, Elizabeth and Donald McKinley, their eyes always turned to plants, and my mother’s, also, to history. And to my children, who serve me magic and beautiful chaos. To Nancy Miller, my wonderful editor, with whom I am so fortunate to have worked; Charlotte Sheedy, my agent, whom I deeply admire and thank for years of friendship; and Karen Shatzkin, whose support has been so critical. Thanks to Meredith Kaffel for her elbow grease and diligence.

  I would not have been able to do the essential groundwork for this book without the support of a J. William Fulbright fellowship. I thank Walter Jackson of the Institute of International Education, and the former staff at USIS, Accra, especially Brooks Robinson and Robert Arbuckle, for their support and kindness during the grant period. The Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library provided a desk and many hours of quiet. Sarah Lawrence College provided a faculty grant for travel to the Vlisco archives in Helmond, Netherlands, and the Sarah Lawrence College Publications Fund provided monies for other research. Frans van Rood and Ruud Sanders at Vlisco opened their doors to the company’s extraordinary archives. Thanks to Fariha Chowdhury for fine assistance with research. Emily Robateau was a smart, tireless reader who shared a magical bit of Ghana with me while she worked on her own book. Margo Jefferson, Retha Powers, and Carolyn Ferrell helped with early drafts and always with cheer. Kati Torda was always ready to provide a Ghana fact, a translation, or cloth.

  Andre Davis shared part of the journey. Nana-Ama Meri Danquah provided the first bit of backup vision when I doubted. Karen Hein and Sherry Bronfman offered inspiration and share my love of African blues. The historian Judith Byfield, who has written extensively about Nigeria and indigo, has been an inspiration, and her work means a great deal to me. Duncan Clarke shares my passion for indigo and has been a wonderful person to exchange ideas and knowledge with.

  And finally thanks to the countless people in Ghana and elsewhere who opened their homes and cloth boxes, but especially to my dear Eurama, Abusua.

  Bibliography

  Barkley, Susan. Adire: Indigo Cloth of Nigeria. Catalog, Museum for Textiles, October 1980.

  Beier, Ulli. A Sea of Indigo. Wuppertal, Germany: Edition Trickster/Peter Hammer Verlag, 1997.

  Byfield, Judith A. The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890–1940. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002.

  Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

  Hollander, Stacy C. “Blue,” Folk Art 29, no. 3 (Fall 2004).

  Kriger, Colleen E. Cloth in West African History. New York: Altamira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

  Kroese, Dr. W. T. The Origin of the Wax Block Prints on the Coast of West Africa. Hengelo, Netherlands: N.V. Uitgeverij Smit, 1976.

  Nast, Heidi J. Concubines and Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

  Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century. Legon-Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004.

  Polokoff, Claire. Into Indigo. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1980.

  Shea, Philip James. The Development of an Export Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century. Ph.D. diss. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1975.

  Taussig, Michael. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

  van Koert, Robin. Dutch Wax Design Technology from Helmond to West Africa: Uniwax and GTP in Post-Colonial Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Eindhoven, Netherlands: Stichting Afrikaanse Dutch Wax, 2007.

  Vaz, Kim Marie. The Woman with the Artistic Brush: A Life History of Yoruba Batik Artist Nike Davies. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995.

  Dahomey Amazons ca. 1890 in woven indigo cloths. Photo by Edward Foa, courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

  Nike Davies Okundaye. Photo courtesy of Nike Davies Okundaye.

  Indigo dye pots at Nike Art Center, Oshogbo, Nigeria. Photo courtesy of Nike Davies Okundaye.

  Malinke dyers in the Futa Jallon region of Guinea. The woman on the left is beating a cloth to give it a finished sheen. Vintage postcard. Photo by Edmund Fortier ca. 1910. Collection of Duncan Clarke.

  Jan Fentener van Vlissingen (right), then general manager and part owner of Vlisco, and Cees Krantz (leaning), head of design department, visiting traders in West Africa, 1964. Photo courtesy of Vlisco BV.

  A Mali woman in indigo finery ca. 1974. “Une Amoureuse de Thé” by Malick Sidibe. Courtesy of the Jack Shainman Gallery.

  A Wolof woman from Thiès, Senegal, ca. 1910, wearing cloth with a Wolof/ Portuguese/Japanese/Islamic heritage. Vintage postcard. Collection of Duncan Clarke.

  Aboubakar Fofana in his Bamako, Mali, studio, removing indigo cloth from the dye pot after several submersions and watching the color magically deepen as it is infused with oxygen. © 2003 by Francois Goudier.

  Young indigo leaves crushed in hand of Aboubakar Fofana, Bamako, Mali. © 2003 by Francois Goudier.

  Adire sellers at Oje Market, Ibadan, Nigeria. © 1971 by John Pemberton III.

  Mercy Asi Ocansey in her shop in Accra, Ghana, 1999. Photo courtesy of Mercy Asi Ocansey.

  Susanne Wenger (Àdùnní) at her home in Oshogbo, Nigeria, 2000. Photo by Catherine E. McKinley.

  Kaba and slit style chart, Accra, Ghana. Collection of the author.

  Detail, Vlisco wax cloth. Collection of the author. © 2010 by Michael Chuapoco.

  Detail of the indigo dye pot symbolizing the reign of Dahomey king Dako Donou (1620–1645) on a contemporary Fon appliqué cloth. Collection of the author. © 2010 by Michael Chuapoco.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  1 and 2. Details of vintage Yoruba adire cloth. 3. Detail of vintage cloth acquired by the author in St. Louis, Senegal. 4. Detail of Yoruba men’s shirt with embroidery. 5. Detail of vintage Yoruba adire cloth. Many women and girls who designed these cloths were illiterate and the meaning of the words inscribed here is unknown. 6 and 7. Details of a Vlisco wax cloth introduced for Mother’s Day 2010 that is a tribute to Mama Benz, the legendary cloth traders of Togo. 8 and 10. Details of a contemporary Vlisco print that has traces of the original patterning of cloths intended for trade with colonial Indonesia. “Java” prints are still beloved in Ghana and are an elite category of Dutch wax cloths. 9. Detail of vintage Yoruba adire cloth. 11. Detail of vintage Yoruba adire quilted by the author. 12. Detail of Yoruba men’s agbada, a robe, featuring embroidery and ikat patterning, both symbols of prestige. All cloths from collection of the author. © 2010 by Michael Chuapoco

  1

  2

  3

  1 and 2. Detail of vintage Yoruba adire. 3. Detail of vintage Yoruba adire brocade cloth. All cloths from collection of the author. © 2010 by Michael Chuapoco.

  Indigo dye pots and dyed threads drying in Madame Harouna’s compound, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Photo by Catherine E. McKinley.

  Fulani men in Agadez, Niger, wearing Kano indigo. Indigo-dyed ostrich feathers adorn the hat. Photo by Catherine E. McKinley.

  Tuareg woman in Kano indigo at a wedding in L’Aïr Massif, Niger. Photo by Catherine E. McKinley.

&nb
sp; A queen and her entourage calling on British visitors, Central Nigeria, 1832–33. “Her hands and feet were deeply tinged with henna . . . her hair—thickly plastered with indigo—was enveloped in a soft turban.” From William Allen, Picturesque Views on the River Niger, 1840. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Ohori-Yoruba woman with tattoo-scarifications wearing adire indigo wrapper. © 1973 by Henry John Drewel.

  A Note on the Author

  Catherine E. McKinley is the author of The Book of Sarahs. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught creative nonfiction, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, where she began her research on indigo. She lives in New York City.