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109 conclusion S South Carolina Indigo A History of Color in addition to coloring cloth, eighteenth-century indigo was used to make ink and in bluing (the process of whitening paper or fabric).Making ink was a rather straightforward process: ground indigo was added to lampblack (the chief ingredient for eighteenth-century ink) to produce an ink with rich, dark color. However, the overriding effect was black rather than blue, and over time, the color fades to brown, meaning that extant documents written with such ink now bear no visible link to the dye plant.1 Paper was made from rags during the eighteenth century, and a dingy, yellowish cast to both paper and cloth could be corrected with an indigo wash, creating a bright white appearance.2 Despite its name, bluing is a kind of bleaching. These two uses indicate that indigo can be found in paper and ink records of the period as well as in eighteenth-century clothing that does not itself seem blue, an idea that I find marvelous. But its invisibility in these instances is also somewhat disquieting. There is no easy way to see and experience the dye in many artifacts from the time that concerns this book. Such ghostly traces do not clearly index the widespread use of the dye. I started this book with my fascination at the lush blue in a beautiful dress at the Museum of London, a garment displayed with hidden supports that made it seem both full and empty. The book also concluded with a garment—Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s white wrap decorated with indigo plants—and the unseen. I think of the beautiful white textile as a tabula rasa on which another fabric can be viewed: the social fabric comprised of the red, white, and black peoples who made indigo culture in colonial South Carolina. Both the dress and the wrap remained ever present in my mind as I began learning about indigo and its uses; so too, was a sense of wanting to see—to see 110 Conclusion the indigo I was reading about,to see the indigo that had faded from period texts I studied, and especially to see invisible histories in indigo’s rise to prominence in eighteenth-century South Carolina. To assuage that feeling, I began a project with ethnobotanist Karen Hall and costume historian and designer Kendra Johnson, both of whom have great expertise with plants, dyes, and clothing and share my interest in varied South Carolina histories. We sought to grow indigo, make dye from it,and color a garment with that dye.At the same time,Karen was also in the midst of a long-term project in which she, Cherokee colleagues, and landscape architects were collaborating to create a Cherokee Worldview Garden at the South Carolina Botanical Garden, and Kendra was involved in creating reproduction eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave garments to exhibit locally. The two projects shared the goal of creating highly visible and very beautiful tributes to the lifeways of Native Americans and enslaved Africans and African Americans, creating living histories for these peoples in South Carolina. One of our joint endeavors was to dye a portion of Kendra’s reproduction eighteenth-century slave skirt with indigo (illus. 10). Kendra had made the skirt with the heavy and coarse wool that slaves of the period would have worn in colder months, and when we submerged the garment in the dye, it drank the liquid like a sponge. Repeated dunking saw the material absorb even more of the color until it reached a warm, deep blue. The skirt took a long time to dry and colored a bit unevenly because of its thick folds and the relatively small size of our vat. Nevertheless, I found it as beautiful as Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s wrap and the London silk dress. I thought the skirt lovely not only because I admire Kendra, who made it, as well as Karen, who prepared the indigo vat that dyed it, but also because helping to color the item gave me a small but significant way to see the blue I had researched, thought about, and written about. When we swirled the skirt in the rich,greenish liquid,it seemed incredible that the wool would ultimately become blue. When we pulled the skirt from the vat and the garment came into contact with oxygen, the glorious transformation I had read about in books unfolded spectacularly. I found it magical that something invisible could have...

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