Color: A Natural History of the Palette (47 page)

The reason for this disappearance was not because blue was suddenly bad—quite the opposite, it had never been so popular—but because the other Indies had started to grow it, and they could do it more cheaply and better. The European traders may have found a way around the legal injunctions against importing indigo, but this crop was to prove to have other tricks up its sleeve. It wasn’t so much about the sky blue being mixed with stars as about it being mixed with meteoric dust. Soot and dust were nearly the same color as indigo, and unless buyers were careful they found their “nil” (from the Sanskrit) was worth less than they thought. It wasn’t always the indigo farmers’ fault: some of the adulteration happened by accident. But by the seventeenth century Indian indigo had acquired a bad reputation for impurities and the industry had restructured itself for other economic reasons. Indeed, it is ironic that the point at which the English began calling this dye “indigo” from the Greek and not “nil” was when the supplies from India slowed down. In fact, if the dye was going to be renamed in the seventeenth century, it really should have been called “caribeego.”

The French started the West Indies indigo industry—on the islands of Sainte Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe. The climate was perfect, but that was not the only reason for indigo’s success. Indigo is a crop that has involved a great deal of misery—because it has usually relied on forced labor. In the West Indies this meant slaves. It was not only the Europeans who did it this way. The Yoruba slaves on the West Indian plantations may well have known indigo cultivation in their home villages in West Africa: there too, for the thousand years or so since it had been introduced by Arab traders, it had usually required slaves to grow it. It was used to honor the god of thunder and lightning, and even today the Yoruba of Nigeria are still famous for their indigo textiles.

By the 1640s Caribbean indigo was eclipsing Indian blue: in 1643 the governor of the East India Company
⁹
called the rival French product “deceitfull and counterfait,” although of course the real problem for him was that it was rather good quality. And then everything changed. By 1745 the English were at war with the French, and suddenly the French source of blue was lost. The English Admiralty started to look elsewhere for suppliers. They could never have expected that their supply problems would be partly answered by a small industry kick-started a few years earlier by a teenage girl with an absent father, a sick mother and a problem with agricultural saboteurs.

Eliza Lucas is a remarkable figure in the story of indigo.
¹⁰
She was born in Antigua, where her father was an officer in the English army. In 1738, when she was fifteen, she, her parents and her sister Polly went to live in Charles Town, which she described happily in letters as the “gayest” town in South Carolina (a reputation it maintained: it was to be the place where the scandalous Charleston dance was invented in the 1920s). The plan was to start farming the three plantations they had inherited from Eliza’s grandfather and to make a new life away from the battlefields. But in 1739 Lieutenant Colonel George Lucas was drafted back to Antigua, in preparation for what everyone realized was to be an inevitable showdown with the Spaniards. Eliza’s mother was ill, or at least hysterical, but for him to refuse the commission would have been treason. So he left Eliza in charge of the farms. Father and daughter would write to each other often, and their letters would become part of America’s heritage, but they would never see each other again. George would die eight years later as a prisoner of war in France, and Eliza would become one of the most famous women in early American settler history. This was partly because she was the mother of some of her country’s earliest political sons—Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. But it was also because of indigo.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney is portrayed in American history books as a certain variety of nation’s mother, an eighteenth-century example to her twentieth-century sisters. She is usually shown as an enlightened young woman who educated her slaves, put family duties first, and most importantly embraced with calm fearlessness those American virtues of risk-taking and hard work. Stories about Eliza make a great deal of how she—as she told a friend in a letter—used to rise at five, “read till Seven then take a walk in the garden or field, see that the Servants are at their respective business then to breakfast.” The first hour after breakfast was spent playing music, the next hour “In recolecting [sic] something I have learned least for want of practise it should be quite lost,” and the rest of the day was spent teaching her sister and two slave girls to read, and in what she called “scheming.” Scarlett O’Hara, eat your fictional heart out: this woman was the real thing—a Southern belle who controlled her life exquisitely. She was as spirited as she was devout,
and
she got her man—in the form of a lawyer called Charles Pinckney, the grandson of a privateer who had gone to Jamaica in 1688. Pinckney proposed to Eliza a scarcely decent four weeks after his wife died in 1744. They married four months later, when the bride was twenty-one.

But this was in the future. Eliza’s connection with indigo began in 1739 with the arrival of an envelope from Antigua, from which a handful of yellow seeds spilled out. While Eliza was a pragmatist, and her mother a doubter, her father was a dreamer. George Lucas conjured up images of lucrative crops springing fully ripened from the paper twists of seeds he would send tucked into his correspondence. One time he sent alfalfa, another time he believed ginger plants were going to solve the Lucas cash-flow problem. But the one idea that really triggered both their imaginations was indigo. “I have greater hopes for the indigo than any of the rest of the things I have tried,” she wrote.

The first harvests were wildly unsuccessful. For two reasons. The first was the weather: “we had a fine crop of Indigo Seed upon the ground . . . and the frost took it before it was dry,” Eliza wrote apologetically. “I picked out the best of it and had it planted but there is not more than a hundred bushes of it come up.” The second reason was more worrying: sabotage. In 1741 George sent a man called Nicholas Cromwell to help Eliza process the dye—to ferment it in vats and dry it into cakes for export. Cromwell, however, did not want her to succeed—after all, why should he compromise the value of his own family’s crop back home—and he deliberately ruined the vat. He “made a great misery of the process . . . said he repented coming . . . and threw in so large a quantity of Lime water as to spoil the colour,” Eliza recalled many years later in a letter to her son Charles Cotesworth. At the time she had told her father that Cromwell was a “mere bungler,” and had fired him.

The following year, she tried again—Eliza was nothing but determined. And to her dismay the crop was eaten by caterpillars and shrivelled by the sun. The fourth year was even worse, and it was only in 1744 that Eliza produced South Carolina’s first successful harvest of indigo. Later she gave seedlings to other plantation owners—on the theory that if they were going to grow enough South Carolina indigo to supply the needs of English dyers, then they needed to present a united front. By 1750 England was importing 30,000 kilos
¹¹
of indigo from the Carolinas, and by 1755 the export total had reached nearly 500 tons. This was not the first time that indigo had been grown in the Americas. There had been some attempts by settlers in the Carolinas before, and other indigo crops had been grown in other southern states. Eliza would have known about these, but perhaps she did not know that other indigo species had been used traditionally by native Americans, and that they might have withstood the weather and insects better than her imported seeds.

For centuries the Mayans in the Yucatán peninsula had made a vivid turquoise for their frescos by mixing a local species of indigo with a special clay called “palygorskite.” Europeans did not understand the way the pigment was made—by trapping indigo molecules in a lattice of clay, and imprisoning them—until 2000.
¹²
It was so bright—as intense as the copper-enamelled tiles on the most beautiful Persian mosques—that up until the 1960s people believed Mayan Blue was made from metal, not from a plant. The Aztecs went one step farther than the Mayans: they used indigo as a medicine as well as a dye, called it
iquilite
and worshiped it. They also, memorably, daubed their sacrificial victims with it before they pulled out their hearts.
¹³
When the Spanish arrived and conquered, they banned the death symbolism but kept the pigment.

MAYAN BLUES

The Dominican church of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya is one of the treasures of the Oaxaca Valley in central Mexico. From the outside it seems like a formal example of early Spanish baroque; but inside it is a sixteenth-century riot of painted flowers and tendrils making a joyful jungle over all the inside walls. It is a celebratory Garden of Eden, and is a striking contrast with the more orderly depictions of nature in most European churches of that time. The designs were painted by indigenous artists. They used their two main native pigments—indigo and carmine—and today the original paints are there, still bright even though they are largely unrestored. But if the colors did not fade inside the church, then they certainly faded from memory outside it. For almost the entire twentieth century, cochineal, indigo and almost all other natural pigments were scarcely even thought about in the Oaxaca Valley, or indeed anywhere else in Mexico. But then in the 1990s there was a change in European and American fashion for so-called “natural” things, and suddenly
everyone
started looking at the old colors.

It took me an hour to cycle from San Jerónimo church to the village of Teotitlán del Valle. Almost every village in the Oaxaca Valley seems to have its handicraft speciality—one does black pottery, another seems to make its living from beaten metal nativity scenes, while another specializes more modestly in tortillas (and those women walk for miles every morning with a hundred flat breads balanced in baskets on their heads). But Teotitlán is Rugsville, a village with three thousand souls and at least four times that many carpets decorated with Picasso doves, Zapotec zigzags or cute renditions of the Mexican countryside complete with big hats and donkeys.

Benito Hernández’s place is the first homestead I came to after I had turned off the main road. It was a hot day; I wanted a rest and some water before pushing onto the village three kilometers away, and what is more I could see a big sign outside advertising “Natural Dyes.” I couldn’t resist, so I dropped in to hear his story. A couple of bored-looking weavers were standing at two looms under a wooden shelter. I was disappointed to see that they were making cheap carpets, using thick synthetically dyed threads. But the sheds behind told a different story. In one corner there were cochineal beetles sitting fatly on prickly pears ready to give up their blood to the carpet cause.

Benito was away tending his fields, so his younger sons, Antonio and Fernando, showed me round. “
Pase por aqui
,”—pass this way—twelve-year-old Antonio said politely, with the well-practiced air of a tour guide. Together we poked our noses into terracotta pots that lay covered and half buried in the earth. They stank. Antonio took a stick and pulled out a soggy lump of wool from one smelly brew. The dye was from wild mangrove plants, he said, and would turn the wool into the color of coffee. They did not have indigo just then, but he told me that indigo (which his father was apparently cultivating in his own fields) smelled almost the same, although it was of course bluer. I remembered that the year before I had seen a similar pot—terracotta orange and with a heavy lid— in a weaving village on Lombok Island in Indonesia. Smeared around its lip, almost as if it had been caught in the illegal act of drinking the sky, was a light cerulean stain. The villagers would mix the indigo with ash, they told me, to make it alkaline. And sometimes they would keep dipping the wool in and out for a year or more, “to make it as blue as we can.”

In one part of the shed there was a battered wooden cupboard, full of intriguing pots and bags and smells. Antonio took out a pestle and showed me how his father rolled dried leaves from the indigo bush over a slab of volcanic stone. It was now stained blue, but it also contained husks of flour. It had been his grandmother’s, the boy explained; she had used it for making tortillas.

“It’s so expensive to use indigo,” said Benito, joining us just then, his fingernails dirty from the fields where he had been tending his dye plants. He explained how ten years earlier he had realized that the only way to embrace the future was to delve into the past. “The foreigners were asking for natural colors, and we had forgotten how to make them.” So he started asking questions. First he asked his hundred-year-old grandfather, “but he didn’t remember much.” Other old people could remember even less, so Benito did the research himself—learning how cochineal could make sixty shades of red, how yellow could be made from turmeric root from Chiapas, and how indigo could, with the right recipe, dye wool all the shades of blue, “from turquoise to sapphire.”

Benito explained how he did it. He took the plant then he dried it, rolled out the leaves on that heirloom tortilla stone, and fermented the powder in nopal juice—the juice of the same cactus leaf on which cochineal beetles live—which was like a natural sugar. “We do that for six months, and when we take it out of the pot it is green like clay,” he said. Like clay it could be molded in their hands, and when they left it in the sun it turned as blue as midnight. Did he use urine? I asked. Benito shook his head. “The old people told me to but no I don’t.” He paused. “It’s so hard to get urine nowadays.” I laughed, but he was being serious.

He was well advised, certainly, not to bother: the stench would frighten the tourists away, and today there are many more pleasant chemicals to use. But not so long ago stale urine, containing ammonia, was a standard addition to an indigo vat, as a reducing agent. It was one of the cheapest ways of casting the spell to transform indigo from a pigment into a dye. And it was perhaps one of the reasons that, where there was a caste system, dyers were usually among the lowest of the ranks.