Indigo

by Catherine E. McKinley

  Nearly everyone despised the Blue Men: “Ach, these people! We don’t like them. So many of them white like that, but they are not civilized! They come here in December begging, looking for Christmas money, but they are not Christians. Then too, they are not Muslims. Well, some are Muslims, but no be proper-proper ones.”

  “They are bush people. See how they come to beg, wearing no shoes, their women walking bare-breasted! Even my own grandmother in the village puts on cloth and slippers.”

  “These people are witchcraft-o! Take care.”

  They lasted in Accra for a short season—during Christmas and Ramadan, when benevolence and trade were at their greatest flows—then Ghana’s government routinely ran them out.

  One day Eurama wanted to help a friend with preparations for a wedding, so I offered to go to Makola to buy rice for her shop. “Can you do it?” Eurama said. “They will cheat you because you’re obruni. Anyway, you can try, but I beg, don’t spoil my money-o!”

  I felt a tingling pride as I made my way easily to Insurance and priced bags of rice, haggling until I paid no more than Eurama would. I let a kayayo girl take the lead through the crush of Friday shoppers as we worked our way back to the taxis at the edge of Rawlings Park. At one moment I looked into the crowd, and there in the sea of vying, brightly tied heads moving toward us, I saw one that stood high above the others, wrapped with mounting precision until it resembled the funnel of a small cyclone. It was luminescent, with a purplish-metallic shine over inky dark cloth, flashing like a fish’s scales in the sunshine.

  I felt a kind of burning in my heart. I was looking at the King of Cloths, the prestige cloth of the Blue Men. It had been traded for centuries from Kano, a legendary center for indigo dyeing in northern Nigeria that had first been established in the fifteenth century by the concubines of a Hausa emir. It was built into an enduring dynasty and is now the last active, large-scale dyeing center in West Africa. Kano indigo was the most prized for taglemusts: the narrow, five-meter-long gauze-thin strips of hand-spun cotton—each strip a measure of prestige—were joined together up to a yard across then dyed the deepest blue. It was then beaten on a wooden board with indigo powder mixed with goat fat, giving the cloth a flinty shine like fresh pencil lead.

  As the man came closer, I saw a deep blue-stained brown face, covered with wide, gold-rimmed dark glasses. The blue bled onto a sky-blue damask robe. He stood more than six feet tall, and the folds of his clothes added to his enormousness. The man’s face was impassive; he did not look left or right but moved through the crowd with quiet force.

  I walked as fast as I could behind him, trying to keep him in my eye amid the traffic of head loads. But I lost him within a hundred yards, interrupted by a truck pushing into the crowd to make a store delivery.

  At Rawlings Park I paid the girl and crossed the street to stand in the shade beside the suya sellers who had gathered along a fence, roasting spicy meat kebabs, hoping the man might return.

  I found a spot against a low wall and settled into watching. A group of kayayo girls played ampe, a child’s game of jumping and hand-clapping. A boy rested nearby, twirling a stick with light, papery yellow flowers attached to it, sending them floating. A dream reader called out to the crowd. I got lost in the moment of surreal pleasures, until I felt a man standing a breath away from me.

  I kept my eyes averted, not wanting to encourage an interaction. From the corner of my eye I saw knock-off Adidas rubber surf shoes too close to my own feet, the spindly calves below the hem of a parchment brown silk robe. The robe was worn, but with very fine hand embroidery along its edges. A goatskin bag hung at his waist, with the animal’s legs and tail intact—ubiquitous fashion in the northern villages.

  I realized that he was only seeking shade as he waited for his suya to roast. I met him with a full gaze and saw a gentle face, with thin lines at the corners of his eyes, and then, as I raised my eyes, the dark indigo taglemust. He bowed slightly and raised his clasped hands to his forehead—a greeting of deference, sig­naling peace.

  I felt almost giddy, greeting him in my broken French. We struggled through a few sentences of the customary greetings, and then he sat down a small distance away, and we kept company in a kind of anticipatory silence.

  Finally I spoke, motioning to his head. “I am looking for this kind of cloth. Do you know where I can find it?”

  We struggled with the question over and over again, until he took a pen and wrote “350,000” on the greasy newspaper that held his suya. Three hundred fifty thousand Ghana cedis. This was more than a junior professional’s monthly salary. Good cloth could easily cost this much: kente and fine laces and other prestige cloths could cost hundreds of dollars. Indigo taglemusts too were prestige items.

  “I would like to buy some,” I said.

  He reached up to the small storm on his head and started to unwind the cloth. My heart burned with surprise and desire. People were now watching us. Two conspicuous strangers; the man baring his head in public; it just wasn’t done. The women selling dish towels and cheap cutlery on mats nearby suddenly started talking excitedly. I could sense traffic slowing around us.

  A woman called out to me, “Obruni, why? Do you need something from this man?”

  “Sister,” someone called, “be careful of these people. If you mix up with him, or allow him anything, he will catch your spirit. You will wake up in the night and walk-o! You will walk to Niger if you have to because you have made yourself amariya—someone’s wife! Can you walk to Niger? You are obruni. Even me, an African, I cannot walk to Niger, Papa!” she said, entertaining the crowd. There was laughter and more jokes. I could sense the jokes turning to insults.

  “Money will fool your hand!”

  “This man is a witchcraft! Take care-o!”

  But I was possessed already. Unwrapped, the man’s taglemust was old and worn, soaked with his sweat, yet I felt such a desperate, mercenary desire for this one dirty, brilliant cloth.

  The women’s attention felt like rising heat. We were both losing our respect, and I wanted to walk out of the scene, but I felt obligated now, oddly protective of the man, and bound by my hunger. He and I rose and started to walk to a quieter corner of the park, but it only drew more attention as some of the people followed and others joined. I hurried to count out 350,000 cedis—several bundles of 5,000-cedi notes that bulged wider than my hands—under the shelter of my handbag. Small girls hawking plastic bags gathered around us, pressing for a sale. The man dropped a coin in one of the girls’ hands.

  “Obruni sikaaatchey! Obruni millionaire!” someone from the crowd laughed, as he wound the taglemust into a ball and put it in the bag.

  “Donnez chapeau,” the man said, smiling, patting his goatskin. He loaded the cedis inside it and took out a bright orange baseball cap embroidered with the logo of a hotel in St. Bart’s, bowed, and kissed my hand. Then he turned and walked across the park and back toward the flow of the market, appearing tiny, suddenly almost frail, as he moved away.

  I could still hear people’s jokes and excited laughs. My face burned with shame and a strange excitement. I had one of the Kings of Cloth.

  When I arrived home, Eurama was waiting for me at the compound gate. “Dondo! Happy marriage!” she cried as I stepped from the taxi.

  “Look at your face! You are smiling! So now, when we cannot find you, we will know your juju has sent you to follow this Niger man.

  “You this girl—you are strong! This your juju—hmmmm! Aunty Ama, the egg seller, said she saw you in Makola. Shame! I hope it was not my rice money you spent.”

  I showed her the sack in the trunk of the taxi. She went to the wall at the side of the house and called to her son in the neighboring yard. “Kwesi-o, come! Carry this rice to the shop and then get a bucket and bring Catherine seawater!”

  “Why do I need seawater?” I protested.

  “Hummm,” Eurama said. “We have to remove this man’s spirit from the cloth—so the spirit doesn’t turn you mad
der than you are. We will wash it three times and pray over it. Tomorrow morning I will call my pastor to also pray.

  “Blue! Blue! Is there nothing else in life that matters? Or what? You are a witch? I just don’t understand. You want every beautiful thing! And you want the ugly ones too.” She turned her nose to the cloth. “Not your juju alone that needs devotion! If you are going to spend your money, you could get a cat to feed, or a dog at least! I won’t mention a human being. Then God’s blessings would come because you’re caring for His creation. But cloth? Is this the only thing you know?”

  I followed Kwesi to the beach, Eurama’s words echoing. I didn’t want to argue with her, and I didn’t understand her wild quarreling. It was usually full of a kind of humor. The ongoing refrain that I was chasing folly, and the mere vessels of life’s beauty, was spoken even as she helped me. Today what I had done had really disturbed her and some balance in our understanding. I felt a kind of melancholy as I dropped the taglemust into the tide, watching the sea swell and open its folds to their five-yard length. The cloth was the shade of the sea at the line of the horizon.

  Was it Eurama’s misunderstanding of me that hurt? Or my own sense of having acted like a stranger, like someone who had become the collector and sold their stake at being a citizen?

  Every visit to that beach filled me with pleasure and an old feeling of gravity. I grew up spending summers on Cape Cod, and it had been a place of intense joy, a kind of psychic emblem of my childhood. In my early teens I became fascinated with the idea that there was a straight pull in the tides that ran from there to Africa, a place that occupied a large part of my consciousness even then. Because my mother is a historian, and she taught history everywhere we went, I began to piece it all together: the nearby Cape Verdean community; the shore from Massachusetts to Connecticut; the clothing mills that were part of the landscape of my childhood, where I would later discover my Jewish family legacy of mill owners and “rag traders”; the community of the Moses Brown School and Brown University, which she and I both attended, founded on the wealth of the Providence Brown family, who were Quakers with shipping and cotton concerns. It all had something to do with the transatlantic slave trade, a history that was very present if unseen. I began to feel disconnected from Cape Cod and resentful of my darker figure in the frame of a Waspy Eden. But when I first encountered the tides of the Guinea Sea, the African Atlantic, I felt those currents between the two shores mixing in ways I could contain.

  The beauty of the taglemust moving in the tide, knotting and unfurling, was mesmerizing. Indigo was a part of that Atlantic. If there was a spirit at work, or an act of devotion to be made, mine would be bound to history—my own and that of the people I was seeking.

  I hadn’t made this journey simply to be a collector, but I needed indigo in my eye. I wanted to make something of history’s wild skein, starting from just its literal bluest threads.

  I’d do what Eurama asked, and let the ocean cleanse the cloth and me, and let her prayers clear my path.

  Later that night, in the quiet of my room, I took the taglemust and spread it in the moonlight to dry. The ocean’s roar blended with the gentle rhythms of my landlord’s family turning in. I went to sleep with the cloth, briny with seawater, waving above me, a shrine to my devotion.

  The next morning the power was back on and stable after days of sporadic current. Everyone was in a better mood.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Eurama said. “Forgive me, eh? You see, my pressure was up. My husband promised me money, and Christobel’s school fees are overdue—I’ve had to borrow from a friend, and now she needs her money. We are in need of a lot of things in this house, and he seems to just use it up with the lotto and drink—buying this ticket and that, at the bar all day and all night, paying for drinks for friends. He is even buying drinks for the woman who owns that bar at the top of the road, and she is playing him like a fool, making him think he has a girlfriend! All the area people are laughing about it. Everyone thinks it is witchcraft. How else can you explain what has happened to a man who used to be a big manager, with servants and a big car and nice house, who could feed and educate his five children? You have been here for some months now. How many times have you seen this man? Always at the bar, only coming home to sleep like a goat. Would you even think I was married? Did you know my children had a father?”

  For the first time I saw Eurama’s cracks. She always seemed to be making order of the world for everyone around her. She ran her shop and cared for her children and the many neighbors who came for credit and advice or a meal with the ease of a stateswoman. I’d only seen her husband, Mr. Ghilchreist, when he passed drunken through the gate at the side of the shop. The few times we’d spoken, his words were so garbled I could only look at him, pretending to understand.

  “I can help you if you need me to,” I offered gently.

  Eurama made a gentle click with her tongue. “I didn’t want to bother you. And I don’t want to borrow from you or anyone. But really, if you can help me, with even fifty dollars, I want to buy into Lever Brothers and sell soaps and cooking oil—they have the best. People buy them! I’ll split the profits with you starting off and pay you back small-small. We will be partners for a while.”

  The shop was suddenly choked with bodies. The radio had been buzzing all week with talk of Baby Ocansey, an Accra businesswoman who had allegedly gone into cahoots with government agents and defrauded a local bank of millions. People stopped at Eurama’s and at the electrician next to Senam, where they spilled out into the road watching a TV hooked up to a generator and set out for sale next to the gutter, happy for news of any kind.

  “Ah, I should send you to this woman!” she said excitedly. “Mercy Ocansey! She is a very fine dyer. She and Baby will be from the same family. They are Adangbes —from Ada, a town where the Volta River and the Atlantic meet. Ocansey means ‘House of Money,’ so you know them already. They are strong—a strong family! Anyway, never mind!” she continued cheerfully. “You are also strong. With a very powerful juju. She doesn’t make proper-proper indigo, but she will teach you a lot of things.”

  Eurama was back to her old self now, making order of the world. She called Kwesi and sent word to Aunty Mercy at her place at Kuku Hill on the far side of Osu: I was a “student” doing research on textiles, and I would like to visit her factory and get help with my schoolwork. In less than an hour, Aunty Mercy sent her houseboy to us with a message: Madame says that if you want to learn, you should come and make yourself an apprentice. She knows Aunty Eurama is sending you, so you must be a brilliant and worthwhile girl. Aunty Eurama is dear to us; Aunty Mercy will take you like family.

  Eurama smiled. “How much money does she want?”

  “You come and discuss it with her.”

  “This woman is serious-o!” Eurama said. “Aunty Mercy will eat you like an Accra rat! You see our rats—they slip into your room and blow sweetly on you, then chew, blow sweet, and chew, until they have removed all the skin on your feet! But she is one of the only dyers left in town who really knows cloth.”

  I wondered about the Ocanseys. Ada had been a place of great value to the transatlantic slave trade and other commerce, like textiles—especially indigos, which were used as a form of currency. Adangbe families had profited alongside European traders from their control of the mouth of the river and route into the interior. What might Mercy teach me?

  When Eurama and I went to Aunty Mercy’s place the next morning, she was just waking. We were called to a bedroom in the back of her large compound, in an old colonial house heavily shuttered and dark inside, so that it was cool but stuffy. The bare, hanging fluorescent bulbs glared against a turquoise wash on the walls and French-made Louis XIV furniture replicas upholstered with pink velvet, a style that was popular among the francophone African elite. Mercy sat on a couch fashioned from the seat of a minivan covered with a patchwork of her batiks.

  Aunty Mercy looked eerily like Miles Davis—the same lar
ge, intent eyes; mouth taut like a bow; the deep, muddyish olive-brown-black skin pulled tight over elegant long bones; a wavy mane falling from an oddly high hairline. Even inside that dim room she wore vintage 1970s dark glasses with gold rims, wide windshields on a face ready to strike.

  “Ah, so you’ve brought this your obruni! Welcome!” she said.

  Eurama and I sat with Aunty Mercy for the whole of the morning, as the various house girls came and went, calling her for her bath, bringing a steamed fish breakfast, showing her samples of cloth newly sent from her factory, serving her beer, ushering the yam or tomato or bread seller to the door so she could survey what had been purchased for the house. The seamstresses, who worked in the courtyard behind Aunty Mercy’s shop at the front of the compound, would appear in shifts with a newly sewn dress, needing her approval.

  I tried not to betray my passion for the brilliant tie-dye and batik cloths being shown. Aunty Mercy’s blues were not indigo, but they were brilliant. I saw a parade of her reds and oranges and browns: a peach-and-wine-colored cloth stamped with the Johnson Wax logo; another in orange and pink for Faytex sanitary napkins that had been commissioned for the local plant workers to wear.

  I sat on her bed, watching, surprised by her informality, not at all typical of Ghanaian social exchanges. I loved the intimacy of the household and the way every transaction required so much contact. I peeked at the wigs and scarves and cosmetic bottles stuffed into the space between the wall and the mattress, hiding my voyeurism behind Aunty Mercy’s stack of ancient style books. Welcome Abroard [sic]. Masculine Dress Styles. Lagos couture of the late 1980s featured short-haired women wearing longish tunics and wide-legged trousers, like a classic West African man’s suit, called an up and down, complete with spats and a walking stick. The older Abidjan books showed women in full boubous, with sacrilegious bell-bottom trousers showing at the hem where delicate pagnes, traditional two-yard cloth wrappers, should have been.