Post Date: 9/29/30
By: Miriam Rieck
There is something almost magical about indigo. The plant itself is green, the liquid in the dye vat can look yellow-green, and cloth pulled from the vat does not immediately emerge the deep blue we recognize as indigo. The color develops as the fibers meet the air, transforming through oxidation until blue appears. It is an extraordinary process, but in the Carolina Lowcountry, the beauty of that blue carries a complicated history. Indigo was botanical knowledge, textile technology and artistic material, but it was also a commodity that generated enormous wealth through the forced labor of enslaved people. To tell only one side of that story is to misunderstand the cloth.
Long before indigo became a profitable crop in colonial South Carolina, people in West Africa cultivated dye plants, produced textiles and maintained sophisticated traditions of cloth making and dyeing. When Africans were kidnapped, transported across the Atlantic and enslaved in North America, they did not arrive without knowledge. They carried agricultural practices, textile traditions and technical expertise with them. The people whose descendants became the Gullah Geechee were primarily West and Central Africans enslaved along the coastal areas and Sea Islands stretching from North Carolina through South Carolina and Georgia into Florida. They labored on plantations producing rice, Sea Island cotton and indigo. Because many of these communities developed in relatively isolated coastal environments, African traditions remained unusually strong in language, foodways, spirituality, crafts and other cultural practices. That makes the history of Lowcountry indigo part of a much larger story about knowledge surviving displacement.
During the eighteenth century, European demand for blue cloth helped transform indigo into one of South Carolina’s most profitable crops. Beginning in the 1740s, indigo became second only to rice among the colony’s major cash crops, and by the years leading up to the American Revolution, South Carolina was exporting enormous quantities of processed dye. Historical accounts frequently center Eliza Lucas Pinckney, the young plantation manager often credited with helping establish successful commercial indigo production in South Carolina. Her experiments were important, but stopping the story there creates a familiar historical problem: the plantation owner becomes visible while the people performing much of the labor disappear. An African indigo maker assisted with the processing of Pinckney’s successful crop, yet his name, like those of so many enslaved craftspeople and agricultural workers, was not preserved with the same care as the names of those who owned the plantations.
Indigo was not simply planted, harvested and thrown into a pot. Producing dye required knowledge, timing and physically demanding work. Plants had to be cultivated and harvested at the proper stage, then soaked and fermented in vats. The liquid was transferred, agitated and processed so the pigment could separate, and eventually the concentrated pigment could be dried into cakes and shipped to textile markets. This work happened in the heat and humidity of the Carolina Lowcountry, and the labor belonged overwhelmingly to enslaved people. Plantations such as Snee Farm near Charleston produced rice and indigo using enslaved workforces, and enslaved people performed agricultural work as well as highly skilled trades including carpentry, barrel making, gardening and crop processing. Plantation wealth was not produced simply because someone owned fertile land. It was produced because someone else was forced to work it.
That is the part of the story that cannot be softened. The wealth created by indigo did not primarily flow to the people who planted the crop, cut it, fermented it, worked the vats and prepared the dye. It flowed to the people who owned them. Indigo became valuable enough to function as a major commercial commodity, and the dye’s economic importance existed inside the larger system of Atlantic slavery. So when we admire that remarkable blue, we should understand what financed it.
One of the recurring problems in textile history is that the person whose name survives is often not the person whose hands knew how to do the work. Indigo is a powerful example. European colonists participated in global networks of botany, commerce and experimentation, but enslaved Africans also brought agricultural, textile and dye knowledge from parts of the world where indigo traditions had existed for generations. African labor was therefore not simply muscle supplied to a European industry. Knowledge mattered. Timing mattered. Understanding plants mattered. Knowing fermentation mattered. Recognizing when a process was working, or failing, mattered. Yet plantation owners received the financial benefit and much of the historical credit.
That does not mean every indigo practice used in South Carolina can simply be labeled “African,” nor does it mean there was one uniform Gullah Geechee indigo tradition. Cultures meet, change, adapt and borrow from one another. What we can say is that the Lowcountry indigo economy cannot be separated from enslaved African labor and knowledge, and that the descendants of those enslaved communities became part of the distinctive Gullah Geechee culture that continues along the southeastern coast today. The blue and the people cannot be separated.
Today, indigo is being grown again in South Carolina. Farmers, dyers and textile artists are returning to the plant, sometimes carrying the process all the way from seed to finished cloth. That revival raises an important question: How do we reclaim an old craft without sanitizing its history? Some contemporary makers are confronting that question directly. South Carolina textile artist and indigo grower Leigh Magar, for example, has described her work as “seed-to-stitch,” growing and processing indigo before creating finished textile pieces. African American growers and artists are also reclaiming relationships with the plant. Farmer Sheena Myers has spoken about growing indigo as a tangible connection to African American history, while artist Arianne King Comer has worked extensively with indigo in contemporary art, connecting material, landscape, history and cultural memory in the Lowcountry.
Perhaps that is where this history becomes particularly relevant to fiber artists today. Materials have histories. Cotton has a history, wool has a history, silk has a history, and indigo has a history. Sometimes learning those histories makes the work in our hands more meaningful rather than less beautiful. Fiber art has never existed outside economics, migration, labor, technology or culture. A skein of yarn, a piece of cloth or a vat of dye can carry generations of human knowledge. Indigo simply makes some of that history visible in blue.
If You Want to Keep Exploring
Read: Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life by Andrea Feeser
Feeser examines how indigo became embedded in colonial South Carolina’s economy and culture, connecting the dye with slavery, land, commerce, clothing, status and the people whose labor and knowledge made the industry possible.
University of Georgia Press — Red, White, and Black Make Blue
https://www.ugapress.org/9780820338170/
Smithsonian Libraries — Red, White, and Black Make Blue
https://www.si.edu/object/red-white-black-make-blue-indigo-fabric-colonial-south-carolina-life-andrea-feeser%3Asiris_sil_1030423
Maker to Explore: Arianne King Comer
King Comer is a contemporary artist whose work with indigo includes dyeing, indigo ink and work on paper. Her practice connects the material to landscape, history and cultural memory, particularly within the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Smithsonian Magazine — “Indigo Is Making a Comeback in South Carolina”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/indigo-making-comeback-south-carolina-180980987/
Instagram to Follow: Fiber Art by Carola — @fiberartbycarola
For a contemporary look at fiber, color, materials and the process of making: https://www.instagram.com/fiberartbycarola
Additional Background and Further Reading
National Park Service — Gullah Geechee Communities
https://www.nps.gov/timu/learn/historyculture/gullah-geechee-communities.htm
National Park Service — Gullah Geechee Culture
https://home.nps.gov/fofr/learn/historyculture/gullah-geechee-culture.htm
National Park Service — Charles Pinckney National Historic Site: History & Culture
https://home.nps.gov/chpi/learn/historyculture/index.htm
National Park Service — Historical Research Related to Indigo and Plantation Life
https://parkplanning.nps.gov/showFile.cfm?projectID=62162&sfid=407681
Smithsonian Magazine — “Indigo Is Making a Comeback in South Carolina”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/indigo-making-comeback-south-carolina-180980987/