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Mood Indigo by Priscilla Long

March 16, 2023

Creative Nonfiction by Priscilla Long

Mood Indigo

To say that indigo is just a color would be like saying that diamonds are just a stone. A deep study of indigo—the plant—based blue dye—would give you a pretty good window on the history of the world. The origin of working the tropical bush Indigofera tinctoria to get shades of blue, from pale blue to a luscious blackish blue, goes back in time too far to be known. The first extant recipe appears in the Near East, in cuneiform. It was inscribed on a Babylonian tablet in the seventh century BCE.

Indigo is an old, old thing.

And it’s a recent thing. Consider its blue jeans moment. After World War II, blue jeans saved the indigo industry (today largely but not entirely synthetic) just as it was on the verge of going into a steep decline. For, no other dye can make blue jeans look like blue jeans. The indigo–dyed blue threads in denim are the warp (long vertical threads) while the weft (shorter horizontal threads) are white. Today more than a billion pairs of jeans are manufactured each year. On any given day—it’s estimated—half the world’s population is wearing blue jeans.

Indigofera tinctoria is only one of several indigo–producing plants. The genus Indigofera is a legume with almost 800 species. Only a few of them contain a high content of indican—the colorless substance that in a dye—makers alchemical vessel turns blue.

Indigo is indigenous to India. The word itself comes from the Greek word idikon, literally “blue dye from India.” But it’s also indigenous to Africa, the Americas, and Asia. In West Africa indigo dyeing is ancient and it continues. Excavations in central Mali, the region of the Dogon people, found indigo—dyed garments and textile fragments woven a thousand years ago. In Mali today, the Dogan dyers are women, the weavers, men. In ancient Mesoamerica especially in Peru, "woven textiles were an absolutely fundamental part of life," according to Jenny Balfour-Paul in her book Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans. Later, the Incas "are said to have valued textiles above gold." Indigo was part of it. In China the production of indigo dye and the weaving and dyeing of blue cloth goes back millennia.

Indigo catalyzed some of the cataclysms of history. In the 1600s, the industrial production of the blue dye was at the bloody core of colonialism. Notorious rivals—the Dutch East India Company and England’s East India Company—traded in enslaved Africans and in “spices,” which included indigo. “Indigo cargoes alone became massive,” writes Jenny Balfour-Paul. “According to one source, seven Dutch ships in 1631 carried between them a total of 333,545 pounds of indigo worth five tons of gold.” Producing indigo is a grueling, labor-intensive, and exacting process; but the “problem was solved” with the use of “coerced local labor” and slave labor. “Not a chest of indigo reached England,” a commentator stated in 1848, “without being stained with human blood.” (p. 41)

In 1917 Mahatma Gandhi undertook his first act of nonviolent civil disobedience in India in support of indigo workers. Not only were their working conditions atrocious, but British colonial rulers had enacted laws to prevent food crops from being planted on land that had ever before grown the cash crop indigo. The workers were increasingly unable to grow their own food. It took thirty more years of political action and struggle, but here was the beginning of India’s independence from the British Empire.

Indigo production was brought to the American colonies by Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722?–1793). The daughter of British parents who lived in Antigua (in the Caribbean), she came with her family to South Carolina at the age of 15, in 1738, to take possession of three plantations owned by her grandfather. Her mother was an invalid and her father left South Carolina the following year to undertake military duties for the British government. Pinckney obtained seeds of Indigofera tinctoria from Antigua and proceeded to purchase enslaved persons and to produce and export indigo dye. She was at once resourceful and plucky and a slaveholder, an agent of colonial conquest and oppression. The enslaved laborers were African-born, likely from Angola, with a few brought from the Caribbean. Some arrived possessing skill in indigo production. These skilled craftsmen were bought and sold for higher prices. It is not known whether any of Pinckney’s enslaved laborers participated in the uprising known as the Stono Rebellion of 1739, which occurred nearby in South Carolina.

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How was indigo dye made? First, the leaves were harvested. It could take tons of leaves to get a few pounds of dyestuff. Second, the leaves were placed in a vat to rot anaerobically—to ferment. This took many hours. Then the leaves were removed and the liquid was placed in a second vat in a new batch of water and beaten and stirred to oxidize it. As the particulate matter—the dye—separated out and sank, water was drawn off.

In traditional contexts, the leaves could be composted for months, fermenting. The fermented liquid would be poured off, stirred and beaten to oxidize, and the dyeing would begin. The cloth drawn out of the dye bath would turn blue only when hung out to dry—and oxidize. Because this dye was weak, it could take hundreds of dippings and airings and as long as a year to arrive at that rich blackish blue.

In making indigo dye, timing and temperature is everything. The growing of the plants could be a tricky process. Not enough or too much water or sunlight affected dye quality. The leaves could be harvested more than once in a season, but the best dye came from the first harvest. Harvest at the wrong time and the color was ruined.

In the industrial process, the leaves in the fermentation vat, perhaps mixed with urine to aid fermentation, was pounded for eight to twenty hours, all the while being carefully watched. When it thickened and went bubbly and blue, the fermented liquid was transferred to another vat. There it was churned with lime, stirred, and beaten to make it oxidize.

In some places the churns were the workers themselves. They would stand in the huge vats for hours stamping and beating. This job could cause headaches, cancer, and early death. The stench was revolting and drew clouds of insects.

The precise time to halt oxidation was critical. When the blue dye particles began to separate, water was drawn off. The substance was dumped into a third vat, where it sat for eight to ten hours, additional liquid gradually drawn off. The paste was then strained, cut into squares, and put to dry in the shade until hard. The squares were protected and turned several times a day. A mistake in timing at any point could ruin a batch. Sun could ruin a batch. Insects could ruin a batch.

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The difficulties presented by indigo could be enough to put you in a mood indigo. What is that? It’s that feeling “goes stealing down to my shoes, while I just sit here and sigh.” It’s “bluer than blue can be.” It’s the feeling that came on “since my baby said goodbye.” This according to the great jazz number composed by Duke Ellington and sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and even Doris Day.

Mood indigo also a book. I am holding it in my hands, a book-length poem by Jeanne Heuving. “To begin with indigo,” Heuving writes, “I repeatedly dip cloth into the indigo vat so that with each immersion a small quantity of dye attaches to the fibres and the blue particles accrete….” And: “An indigo bath is almost a living creature and reacts swiftly and implacably to any disruption that may occur during the dyeing process, a fact that makes considerable demands on those in charge of it…” Heuving’s Mood Indigo is printed in stripes, each stripe consisting of a line of print, each page containing a paragraph made up of seven or so widely spaced lines printed across the center of the page so that the book itself with its indigo cover could be a patterned fabric, a wide stripe folded into pages.

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Mystery, magic, and alchemy reverberate around indigo. In 2021 Aboubakar Fofani, a Malian artist, textile designer, and advocate of preserving the traditional craft skills of indigo dye-making and dyeing techniques, exhibits and lectures around the world. On his website he writes,

Held in the leaves of the indigo plant is a blue pigment that can only be made visible under certain conditions. The magic of how green leaves can make so many shades of blue is a tangible example of how plants nourish us on so many levels, not just providing food and shelter, but even clothing us in their fibres and colours, and linking us spiritually with the natural world (https://www.aboubakarfofana.com/artists#/abres-a-bleu).

So, indigo holds nature, the arts, the ancient weaving of textiles, and a spiritual connection to the natural world and to ancestral crafts handed down for thousands of years.

I look down at my blue jeans. They connect me to the whole convoluted, mystical, alchemical—and yes, bloody—history of indigo.

Sources

Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (London: British Museum Press [1998] 2011.

Catherine Legrand, Indigo: The Color That Changed the World (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013).

Eliza Layne Martin, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Indigo in the Atlantic World,” https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/f/482/files/2017/08/SocialBiog.Martin.pdf.

Graham Keegan website. https://www.grahamkeegan.com/indigo-vat-basics

Jeanne Hueving, Mood Indigo, selva oscura press, 2020.

Aboubakar Fofana website https://www.aboubakarfofana.com/.

Read more about Priscilla Long