by David Kastan
FIGURE 27: Indigo cakes
The fermentation of the plant material releases a chemical compound, which must be separated from the plant material and then aerated to produce what is in fact the coloring agent (“indigotin”). The plant material is therefore removed and the remaining liquid churned to mix it with air. The oxidized colorant eventually settles to the bottom of the vat. The liquid is then drained or allowed to evaporate, leaving the colorant as a muddy residue. This sludge is heated to stop further fermentation, and then collected and dried to produce an easily stored or transported dye. About one hundred pounds of plant material is necessary to produce a single pound of the dyestuff.
One further step is necessary in order to turn the dried dyestuff into a usable dye. The powdered indigo has to be dissolved in an alkaline solution, usually consisting primarily of urine (ideally, as early manuals specify, to be collected from boys who have yet to reach puberty). Whatever its source, according to a contemporary craft dyer, “the more concentrated the urine you start with, the better,” though the indigo must often be encouraged to its “reduction” by rubbing it by hand as it sits in the liquid.13 In Sonnet 111, Shakespeare worries that he has been corrupted by the environment in which he earns his livelihood, afraid that his “nature has been subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” But the more one learns about what the indigo dyer “works in,” skin discoloration seems to be the least of its risks.
And sometimes it was worse. A French traveler in Persia in the seventeenth century records that “the Dyers of that Countrey make a most excellent blew dye,” whose quality seems to depend upon a “particular secret.” As he writes, “They put no urine to it, using Dogs-turd instead of it, which they say makes the Indigo to stick better to the things that are dyed.”14
The disquieting aspects of producing and using the dye, however, go beyond some understandable squeamishness about the very hands-on repurposing of human waste products, especially as the scale of manufacture increased from craft to commerce. In 1775, the naturalist Bernard Romans, in his Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, warned that the site of indigo production “should always be remote from” any living area “on account of the disagreeable effluvia of the rotten weed and the quantity of flies it draws.” Clouds of insects make it “scarce possible to keep any animal on an indigo plantation in any tolerable case, the fly being so troublesome, that even poultry thrive but little where indigo is made.” There is “scarce a possibility to live in a house nearer than a quarter of mile to the vats,” Romans concludes, since “the stench at the work is likewise horrid.”15
All of this “is certainly a great inconvenience,” as Romans admits, but the good news was that it is “the only one this profitable business is subject to.”16 And the profits easily outweighed the inconvenience, especially as the landowners were not the ones to experience it.
Someone, of course, did. In Florida it was slaves, as it was in the West Indies and in the other indigo-producing colonies of North America. “The primum Mobile of the welfare of these countries and of the wealth of their inhabitants are the African slaves,” Romans says of the plantations of East and West Florida; and he enthusiastically points to the positive economic effects that the lifting of the prohibition on slavery had on neighboring Georgia. Alone among the North American colonies, at the time of its founding Georgia had barred slavery (though less from any principled opposition to the practice than because the colony had been founded in the hope of providing a place of employment for the English poor). In 1751, however, bowing to continued pressure from its farmers, Georgia at last began to allow “the importation and use of Negroes,” and then, according to Romans, it “flourished”—though not of course the newly imported slaves.17
Labor-intensive cultivation of various crops seemed to demand slaves to work the land, though for Romans, it must be said, slavery was justified not only on economic grounds but also on what he saw as moral ones: “The very perverse nature of this black race seems to require the harsh treatment they generally receive,” he writes. Although he realizes that the tide of opinion on the topic of slavery is slowly turning against him, he is dismissive of the opinions of Enlightenment “philosophers,” like Montesquieu, who “restrain us from properly using this naturally subjected species of mankind.”18
On the topic of the local indigenous populations he is even worse. His detailed account of the various Native American tribes in Florida ends with a prediction of the inevitability of the British taking “the disagreeable step of realizing our mock authority, by extirpating all savages that dare to remain on the East of the Mississippi.” It is only the realization that is “disagreeable” to him, not the proposed action.19
Slavery brings out Romans’s softer side. Among his justifications for the institution is that it is a kindness to the transplanted Africans. As most had been captured by other Africans in war, the trade in slaves, according to Romans, keeps alive those who otherwise “would be murdered; did we not induce their conquerors by our manufacture and money to shew them mercy.”20 The “manufacture” for this mercy was likely to be indigo-dyed cloth, and the “money” the profits made from the indigo trade. “African men, women, and children,” as the brilliant anthropologist Mick Taussig has sharply observed, were being “bought with color.”21
There is something shocking in reading Romans today, especially the blatant and unapologetic racism that irrupts from the pages of remarkably alert and detailed observations of natural history. But arguably this is preferable to the many other early accounts of indigo cultivation in which passive verbs erase the reality of the labor altogether. In most accounts of indigo production, indigo-bearing shrubs are “planted” and “grown”; sheaves are “harvested” and “fermented”; the dye is finally “extracted” and “dried.”
Romans, however uncomfortably, reminds us of who it was that performed these arduous tasks. Some of his verbs are also in the passive voice, but the agents of the production are at least named, even if his verbs sometimes fail to disclose how little freedom of choice they had: the work was “performed by Negroes.”22
No one involved in the business side of indigo cultivation was at all ambivalent about this fact. Plantation owners worried only about the supply of slaves. As a Georgia merchant wrote in 1784, “New Negroes from Africa, are, & will be for a very considerable time to come, in great demand with us.”23 The demand for slaves and indigo went hand in hand, even to the point, as another planter matter-of-factly reported, of having “changed off indigo pound for pound of negro weighed naked.”24
In the new world, the blue dye was always dependent upon enslaved Africans. In 1757, a poem printed in the South Carolina Gazette celebrated the dye with gentlemanly Virgilian pretensions: “The Means and Arts that to Perfection bring, / The richer Dye of INDICO, I sing.” Amid its awkward versification of various aspects of the plant’s cultivation and the dye’s production, it finally gets around to the need for slaves to perform the actual work. The poem acknowledges the existence of ships continuously sailing up and down “Angola’s Coast and savage Gambia’s Shores, / In Search of Slaves,” but there is nothing at all predatory as the poem imagines these voyages. Indeed the poem is (momentarily) concerned about the difficult working conditions the slaves will encounter. But immediately it reassures its readers that African slaves are uniquely suited to “bear the scorching Suns, and rustic Toil,” since they have been “temper’d to the Heat / By situation of their native Soil.” Africa has prepared them perfectly for what they will experience in the new world; such, the poet says, is the “wise and providential Care” of heaven.25
So much of this is appalling, but what is most offensive might be the seemingly innocent phrase “rustic toil,” which is used to turn the grueling activities of the plantations into an innocent pastoral fantasy. The words completely erase the social, psychological, and physical violence of chattel slavery, even as they ignore the qualitative difference between the always ardu
ous agricultural work depended to grow rice or cotton plantation and the still harsher activities demanded to produce indigo.
But indigo cultivation seemed to encourage idealization, as in the seventeenth-century French engraving depicted here (Figure 28). In the center, elegantly dressed in white, is the plantation owner (implausibly tall), strolling down a path with his broad hat and walking stick, as black slaves, naked to the waist, purposefully go about the master’s business: cutting indigo sheaves, delivering them to the fermentation vats, churning the mixture in the vat, and carrying sacks of the still-muddy colorant to the shed, where the drying process will be completed to produce the cakes of dye.
There is work that is visible but almost no exertion; there is efficiency but no obvious coercion. The only groups of people whose effort shows at all in their movements are the two pairs of men (one set almost invisible on the far left) cutting sheaves of the indigo plant and carrying them to the vats, but they are buried in shadow, so any physical strain is impossible to see. Everyone else seems to be comfortably occupied, though the heavily muscled shoulders and arms of the churner might be less part of an idealized body than the evidence of the exhausting muscular effort that must have been demanded daily. But the eye is led from the white plantation owner down the white diagonal of the path to the solitary indigo plant just to the right of center at the bottom, which grows untouched and unobserved.
FIGURE 28: An indigo plantation in the Antilles, in Jean Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, vol. 2 (Paris, 1667)
Nothing is visible here of Bernard Romans’s account of the difficulty and “inconvenience” of growing, cultivating, and processing indigo as it is turned into a dye—and there is no sign of intimidation, except perhaps for the owner’s walking stick, which could so easily be turned into a switch. The engraving gives no indication of the overwhelming stench or swarms of insects that Romans mentions, no suggestion at all of the oppressive “fatigue of a southern plantation” that Romans had noted, even if in this case Romans has silently transferred that “fatigue” to the plantation from the bodies of those who actually endured it. He does admit that it is an exhaustion that white men could not tolerate, but he seems certain that slaves do not feel it, as they are accustomed to the “similar work in their own sultry country”—two related “facts” he musters as part of his defense of the logic of slavery.26
Romans, even in his overt racism, is so much more honest than the engraver. Indigo plantations were punishing factories, not serene farms. The slaves lived in squalor and were often malnourished. The work was taxing and unsafe. What was most dangerous was encountered mainly in the production of the dye rather than in the cultivation of the plant. Slaves would sometimes be forced to stand in the pools of fermenting plant matter, agitating the mixture with their hands or their own marching. They were exposed not only to the extreme heat from both the sun and the fermenting material itself but also to the harmful fumes that were released. The vat was, therefore, sometimes known as the “devil’s tank” (and indigo itself had been called by many the “devil’s dye,” although this was a name earlier given to it by European woad producers mainly to discourage the foreign competition from indigo—but the shoe fits).27 Even when the indigo residue was at last removed from the bottom of the vat and set out to dry, then “young Negroes,” as Romans says, often girls, were “employed in fanning the flies out of the drying shed, as they are hurtful to indigo,” though he is unconcerned that the great swarms of disease-carrying insects, which he had earlier acknowledged were also “hurtful” to the farm animals, might in any way be hurtful to the slaves.28
What was true in Florida in the middle of the eighteenth century was true wherever indigo was produced on any scale. In the Caribbean and the American colonies, it was the enslaved Africans who made possible the production of the dye; in Central and South America, it was the indigenous inhabitants who worked under various regimes of harsh regulation. And later in India, it was peasants who were abused and sometimes starved by wealthy British planters, who often forced them to plant indigo instead of food. There are lots of stories from around the world that can be told about indigo production, all different in their details but somehow all the same.
In whatever system of oppression, workers’ lives were shortened—and while the workers lived, they often suffered from crippling physical ailments and severe sickness brought on by the work. Men often became impotent and women infertile. In 1860, a civil servant, testifying before a commission established to investigate the practices of indigo production in Bengal, notoriously claimed that “not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood.”29
There is an often-repeated anecdote about a friend coming to visit the English artist and designer William Morris at the dye works Morris had established at Merton Abbey in London in 1881. The friend announced his arrival and heard Morris’s “strong cheery voice call out from some inner den, ‘I’m dyeing; I’m dyeing; I’m dyeing.’”30 But the slaves who worked on the indigo plantations in the Americas really were dying. A soldier who had served under George Washington in the Revolution afterward wrote about the “effects of the indigo upon the lungs of laborers, that they never live over seven years.”31
Nonetheless, the worldwide desire for the remarkable blue dye allowed indigo plantations to thrive anywhere the conditions of climate and soil permitted indigo-bearing plants to grow. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the plantations of the New World satisfied most of the world’s desire for natural indigo.
It is, however, worth reminding ourselves that much of the demand for the dye was driven not by the indigo craze of fashion-conscious Europe but by the need for a standardized and stable color for military uniforms. It is just one of the many harsh ironies of indigo’s history that Napoleon’s troops, which ultimately failed to put down the slave uprisings (1791–1803) on Sainte-Domingue (the western third of the island now split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), wore uniforms dyed with the very indigo that had helped support the island’s economy and whose cultivation had given rise to many of the intolerable conditions that provoked the revolt.32
However, with the loss of the colony and the supply of indigo it had provided, it became almost impossible for the French army to find a reliable source of the dye, especially after 1806, when British ships began regularly to intercept colonial imports intended for France.33 Although the eighteenth-century British army wore red coats (dyed with madder), the British navy that ruled the waves officially dressed in blue. Its officers, from commodores to petty officers, wore indigo-dyed frock coats with differentiating forms of gold braid ornamentation as they successfully fought to keep indigo from the Grande Armée of France (Figure 29).
In 1880, a synthetic form of indigo was finally developed by a German chemist Adolf von Baeyer (a discovery that would later help win him a Nobel Prize, making him the first Jew to be so honored), and within a few decades synthetic indigo was being produced industrially. Quickly the large-scale cultivation of indigo came to an end.34 But until then it was the natural blue dye that had come to color the clothing of both the poor and the wealthy, commoners and aristocrats, the subjugated and the free on every populated continent. In its synthetic form, indigo is still ubiquitous, mainly as the colorant for blue jeans.
But today a rich tradition of craft dyeing survives, which often allows us to be sentimental about indigo, a sentimentality no doubt encouraged by the subtle, soulful beauties of the dyed cloth. The dispiriting history of the indigo trade is, however, an irresistible reminder that Newton’s immaterial color was actually an all-too-material dye and that its commercial production was always dependent upon coercive structures of power. And it is also significant that almost no one in the eighteenth century called the color the dye produced “indigo.” In England, in fact, they usually called it Navy Blue.
FIGURE 29: James Northcote, Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, 1804, National Portra
it Gallery, London
CHAPTER SEVEN
a once-cold
arbitrary violet reveals itself
as radiance, a defining halo.
DENISE LEVERTOV, “Living with a Painting”
AT THE
Violet
HOUR
FIGURE 30: Claude Monet, Water Lilies (detail), 1919, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
English-speaking schoolchildren nearly had to remember the order of the rainbow colors with the mnemonic ROY G. BIP. When Newton first began his optical experiments seeing the sun’s white light scattered by his prism, “purple” was the name he used for the color he saw at one end of the spectrum. Later he called that color “violet-purple.” Then just “violet.” ROY G. BIV it became.
It was not that Newton’s color discrimination became sharper over time. In fact it was never very good. It was that purple didn’t fit comfortably into his theory. Purple is a color that has to be mixed from blue and red pigments, but blue and red, as colors of light, are on the opposite sides of the spectrum and so never overlap when white light gets separated into its component colors. For Newton, purple then posed a problem. Enter Violet.
Maybe it doesn’t matter much what we call the colors we see. It isn’t clear, in any case, that any one person sees exactly the same color another does, and all our color names are merely tentative and approximate labels for complex visual sensations. One person’s violet might be another’s lilac or lavender or amethyst or maybe just purple. And though industrial color manufacture has provided us now with an impressively differentiated color vocabulary, there are still many more colors, at least shades, tones, and tints, than we have words for them. The French word violet is often translated into English as “purple,” but pourpre often gets translated as “purple,” too—although for French speakers pourpre usually names a purple closer to red than violet does. Burgundy perhaps.