Book description
For almost five millennia, in every culture and every major religion,
indigo -
a blue pigment obtained from the small green leaf of a parasitic
shrub
-
has been one of the world's most valued dyes.
Indigo
is the story of this precious dye
and its ancient heritage: its relationship to slavery as the
'hidden
half' of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its profound spiritual
(African, Islamic, Christian, Amish) and sartorial significance that is
little recognised but still alive today (blue jeans, anyone?). It is
a heretofore untold story, surviving in footnotes and brief mentions in
popular and
scholarly records, and in this rich, electrifying book Catherine
McKinley brings thrillingly to life the tales of those who
shaped the course of twentieth-century colonial history and a world economy.
But Indigo
is also the story of a personal
quest: McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo
tartan as their virile armour; the kin of several generations of Jewish
'rag traders'; and a descendent of African slaves who were traded along
the same Saharan routes as indigo, where a
length of blue cotton could purchase human life.
McKinley's journey in
search of beauty and her own history began with a Fulbright fellowship
to research indigo, and ultimately leads her to a new and satisfying
path, to finally
'taste life'. Catherine McKinley is the author of The Book
of Sarahs
. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where
she has taught Creative Nonfiction, and a former Fulbright Scholar in
Ghana, West Africa, where she began her research on indigo. She lives in
New York City.
