Indigo

Once, I went to a plantation outside of New Orleans some years ago. They were having a festival about plantation life and this particular place happened to be an indigo plantation.

The main house sat down in a boggy location; certainly not a place I would pick to live. It was brick, had a basement storage area that would be the equivalent of a first floor and the main living level was one floor up. There were two wings branching off from the main 3 storied building.

One side was for the daughters; the other for you sons of the family. The reason this was done (aside from limiting the male man-cave messiness) was to collect prepubescent urine in chamber pots to use in the processing of indigo. Uck! Evidently, this (pinch-nose, pinch-nose) liquid had just the right kind of acidity to break down the plant fibers and speed the chemical process of transforming the plant. Smelly vats of the stuff was allowed to 'fester' for a specific amount of time until the dyeing process was done.

It is a wonderful thing to see pure white fibers being lifted out of a colorless vat and see the indigo appear magically when exposed to the air.

Another time I was involved with indigo, I was lucky enough to visit a paper-making factory in Japan. I don't know how they did it, but there was no smell from the dye process.

After the tour of the process, we were invited to dye our own piece of indigo cotton.* Since we didn't want to spend the rest of the visit in Japan with blue hands, we wore transparent plastic gloves.

I elected to fold my square and control the amount of dye that could penetrate the fiber, much like the tie-dye process, but this was more geometrical.

I still have a small packet of the plant kernels for making the dye.

Japanese indigo plant workers didn't have it so good. They lived a very short life in virtual slavery, sleeping on mats in what nearly amounts to a crawl space located above the kitchen--the warmest place in the factory/estate of the owner. They toiled in the fields using simple tools like rakes and sickles, winnowed and crushed the plant fibers with flailing and muscle. Tread the noxious mixture using vats and their feet. They were given the bare minimum of clothing and a diet of rice.

They fried in the summer and froze in the winter, all under the watchful eye of the family who lived on and sold from the estate. Traditional Japanese houses were not long on insulation nor were they very air-tight. Believe me, I lived in one.

When we visited the museum and estate of an indigo factory, I certainly felt sorry for those poor souls. Beside living in awful conditions, their health was affected by the constant exposure of their skin to the dye.

Until I looked it up, I didn't realize how wide the use of indigo was and is even today. From India, the supposed origination of the dye to the Taureg in north Africa to the imperial courts of China and Japan, indigo cloth has been treasured by these cultures since ancient times.

*True plant-derived indigo only works on natural fibers. Cotton or silk are the best choices. Today, however, most of the modern 'indigo' dyes are synthetic chemical dyes.