Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life

Chapter 2. South Carolina Indigo in the Dress of Slaves and Sovereign Indians

27 chapter 2 S South Carolina Indigo in the Dress of Slaves and Sovereign Indians two later eighteenth-century images of African and American Indian women—the former visual and the latter textual—provide glimpses of how black and native people adopted and adapted English cloth to suit their needs and interests. The first image is an illustration by English artist and poet William Blake for John Stedman’s Narrative of a Five-Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1772–77 that depicts largely African females and their children about to be sold into slavery (illus. 1). The second is a description of Cherokee women by Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, an English soldier who spent three months living in a Cherokee town and who accompanied three important Cherokee warriors to London in 1762. Blake’s picture shows five African women wearing strings of beads at their necks and just below their knees and floral printed cloth wrapped around their waists to make short skirts.1 Given the date, it is safe to say that the material is English calico.Timberlake similarly describes calico and beads in the dress of Native American females: the cloth is fashioned into “a little short waistcoat,”decorated by the beads. According to the soldier, Cherokee women also wore long skirts of fabric wrapped around their waists and dressed their hair “with an incredible quantity of silk ribbands, of various colours.”2 These portrayals of black and Native American women show similar materials employed differently and indicate that while both Africans and Indians valued foreign trade beads and cloth, they used these manufactured goods to express unique, indigenous sartorial values. Other visual and verbal records suggest that the natives of Africa and North America’s Southeast, like their white contemporaries, used adornment to cover what should not be seen and enhance what should. Unlike the orphaned girl represented by a swatch of blue floral cloth in the London billet book, who would have been covered from 28 Chapter Two neck to ankle, African and Cherokee women were not completely obscured by British calico. Nevertheless, notions of modesty and beauty and the use of fabric in dress link these disparate people, all of whom might have worn a sign of plantation culture in the form of blue flowers colored with South Carolina indigo. South Carolina indigo–blued cloth operated not only as an index of Britain’s conquest of plants, people, and place but also as a space of pleasure and power. This chapter investigates this phenomenon by considering how clothing functions as a means of social control as well as a form of agency, exploring sartorial expression among eighteenth-century Africans, African Americans, and American Indians, for whom blue possessed positive symbolic meanings. Dress in the British Financial and Moral Economies Whites involved in trade with Africans and Indians were often puzzled and sometimes disturbed by how those native to Africa and the Americas adorned themselves. In addition to shock at the degrees of undress among Africans and Native Americans, whites also expressed alarm at the corporeal decoration favored by these other peoples: African scarification and teeth filing as well as Indian tattooing and face and body painting. Further, when exchanging manufactured goods for slaves or when trading other commodities with Africans and Indians, European and British explorers and merchants were regularly confounded by the value their clients placed on beads, trimmings, and other items of ornamentation. For example, Dutch arrivals on Africa’s Gold Coast, like their predecessors the Portuguese, were surprised to find that the Akan people equally valued the figurative trinkets they made and wore whether they were fabricated from precious metal or wood, leather, and beads. These worn objects, called fetishes by Europeans, disgusted and intrigued whites, who linked the power Africans ascribed to the items to idolatry and ignorance.To foreigners in Africa, gold held supreme value, and people who attached anything but secular significance to it and any other earthly substance were backward. Westerners disdained Africans’ devotion to things but benefited from what were perceived as black people’s misguided attachments: such individuals were easily “fooled” into exchanging supposedly worthless objects such as beads for “valuable” gold. A similar financial and moral economy prevailed in Europeans’ dealings with Indigo in the Dress of Slaves and Indians 29 North American Indians, who also accepted beads, among other goods, for something else whites greatly valued: land.3 The value...