The Indigo Blues
By Jean West

Overview

"The Indigo Blues" is a lesson plan for use in conjunction with studying about slavery in the United States or as a culminating activity. Consumers' demand for exotic fashion fueled the expansion of indigo cultivation, but at a substantial human price. Slaves cultivated indigo, processed into dye, and then dyed fabrics an amazing shade of blue. Students will read the essay The Devil's Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery to understand the hardships faced by slaves on indigo plantations and investigate gaps in the historical and scientific record that leave our understanding of their lives--and deaths--incomplete.

National Curriculum Standards met by this lesson

For a list of standards that this unit addresses, click here.

Time required

One 50-minute class period, if the readings and note sheet are completed outside of class

Materials

• Essay, The Devil's Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery
• Indigo Blues Note Sheet (located after Assessment)

The Lesson

Anticipatory Set

1. Ask students to read the "Slavery on the Indigo Plantation" segment of the essay, The Devil's Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery either in class or as homework.


2. Advise students to draw on their senses to answer Section One of the Indigo Blues Note Sheet.


3. Ask students which sense they weren't asked to draw upon for the note sheet. (The fifth sense, taste.) Explain that in contrast to life on cotton, rice, and tobacco plantations, there is little written about slave's lives on indigo plantations.


4. Direct students brainstorm a list of at least five items about what is missing from our understanding of slaves' lives on an indigo plantation and to suggest, for each item, where we might find answers. Students should record this list on the reverse side of their Indigo Blues Note Sheet.

Procedures

1. Direct students to read the "Health Issues" segment of the essay, The Devil's Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery either in class or as homework. Ask them to complete the chart about health risks in Section Two and the question in Section Three of the Indigo Blues Note Sheet.


2. Discuss as a class the following issues:


1. What evidence exists that slaves who worked on indigo plantations were exposed to greater health risks, due to the chemical processes or additives involved in making indigo dye or dying cloth with indigo?


2. What evidence exists that slaves who worked on indigo plantations were not exposed to greater health risks, due to the chemical processes or additives involved in making indigo dye or dying cloth with indigo?


3. What evidence exists that slaves who worked on indigo plantations may have had health benefits, due to the chemical processes or additives involved in making indigo dye or dying cloth with indigo?


4. What evidence is based on eyewitness accounts? What evidence is based on statistical studies of historic documents? What evidence is based on scientific studies?


5. Which single piece of evidence about health issues on indigo plantations is most persuasive or reliable, and why? Which piece of evidence seems weakest, and why?


6. How would information about health risks on sugar, rice, tobacco, or cotton plantations impact our understanding about the relative health risks faced by slaves on indigo plantations?


7. How would information that slaves may have worked on dual-use plantations (indigo-rice, indigo-timber, or indigo-corn) impact our understanding of the health risks faced by these slaves?


3. Direct students to write a letter of advice, "How to Avoid the Indigo Blues" to historians and scientists who would like to write an accurate account about the health risks faced slaves working on indigo plantations in the colonial era.

Assessment

The students' papers may be evaluated on a twenty-point scale (which may be multiplied by five to convert to 100-point scale or for conversion to letter grades) using the following rubric:

Name: _________________________________

Indigo Blues Note Sheet

Section 1

Answer the following questions:

a. What are the colors of work for a slave on an indigo plantation?

b. What are the sounds of work for a slave on an indigo plantation?

c. What are the smells of work for a slave on an indigo plantation?

d. What work-related things does a slave touch on an indigo plantation, and how do they feel?

Section 2

Complete the following chart:

Section 3

Answer the following question:

Lime water, tannic acid, wood ash, and urine were ingredients added to indigo during the processing or dying phase. Might any of these have had health consequences? Explain.

Sources

Books and Articles

Adrosko, Rita J. Natural Dyes and Home Dying. New York: Dover, 1971.

Balfour-Paul, Jenny. Indigo. London: British Museum, 1998.

Byfield, Judith A. The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890-1940. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002.

Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Hagy, James William. This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

Holmes, Jack D. "Indigo in Colonial Louisiana and the Floridas," Louisiana History, VIII, 1967.

Johnson, George Lloyd. The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736-1800. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Pettit, Florence H. America's Indigo Blues. New York: Hastings House, 1974.

Pinckney, Elise, ed. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Van Stralen, Trudy. Indigo, Madder and Marigold. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 1993.

Internet Resources

"Agricultural Labor Productivity in the Lower South, 1720-1800," by Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss:
http://people.ku.edu/~jrosenbl/workingpapers/aggprod.PDF

"Born in Slavery, Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, Florida Narratives"
http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/2/2/9/12297/12297-h/12297-h.htm

"Chemistry Triggered the First Civil Disobedience Movement in India," by Gopalpur Nagendrappa:

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar2003/pdf/Mar2003p42-48.pdf

Documenting the American South:

Narrative of James Roberts, 1858:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/roberts/roberts.html

Resources of the Southern Fields by Francis Porcher, 1863:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/porcher/porcher.html

Economic Botany: "Woad is Me," University of California, Los Angeles:
http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Isatis/

"Eliza Lucas Pinckney,"
http://www.enterprisingwomenexhibit.org/farm/pinckney.html

Ibile Indigo House, Indigo Studio, Beaufort, South Carolina:
http://www.ibileindigo.com/index.html

Immigration: Africans in America, Library of Congress American Memory:
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/alt/african4.html

"Indigo in the Early Modern World" by Anne Mattson for the James Ford Bell Library:
http://www.bell.lib.umn.edu/Products/Products.html

Jean Lafitte National Historic Resource Study, "Settlement and Occupation of the Chalmette Property" by Jill-Karen Yakubik:
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/jela/hrs11b.htm

"John Perceval, Second Earl of Egmont: Amelia's Indigo History" by Mary Beth Litrico:
http://www.amelianow.com/spring02-perceval.htm

"Legacy of Leadership: Eliza Lucas Pinckney," biography and video segment by the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame,
http://www.myetv.org/television/productions/legacy/laureates/Eliza%20Lucs%20Pinckney.html

"Mysterious Dye--Indigo" by Dr. Gary Noel Ross for the Louisiana Environmentalist, May-June, 1995:
http://www.leeric.lsu.edu/le/special/indigo.htm

"Processing by Hand of Indigo Plants and Maize, 1805" from collection of Flinders University:
http://www.lib.flinders.edu.au/resources/collection/special/hitchcock/app_4.php

"Quaker Activists, Achievements, and Impending Revolution":
http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_1/p_8.html

"Riika's Nigeria Story: Indigo Dyeing":
http://media.urova.fi/~rkorpela/story/indigo.htm

"Rice and Indigo in South Carolina" by Victoria Proctor
http://www.rootsweb.com/~scmarion/state/sc_rice.html

"Rice, Indigo and Fever in Colonial South Carolina" by Jennifer Payne:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7023/indigo.html

"Slave Labor on an Indigo Plantation," images from map:
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/slavery/plantation.html

Virginia Tech Image Base, documents relating to the slave ship "Elizabeth" and the sale of indigo:
http://imagebase.lib.vt.edu/index.php

West Africa, 1808: European Trade and Expectations:
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob61.html

Interdisciplinary Links

• Chemistry: Ask students to learn more about the chemistry of the indigo story.
  1. One of organic chemistry's most dramatic reactions occurs when a dripping piece of yellow-green cloth emerges from its indigo dye bath and transforms into blue. Investigate the chemistry involved in producing indigo and in dying cloth with indigo.
  2. The 1905 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to von Baeyer, in part for his work in identifying the structure of indigo and creating synthetic indigo. Examine the von Baeyer's pioneering synthetic sequence.
  3. Learn how a broken mercury thermometer and coal tar's nuisance naphthalene enabled BASF scientists to develop an economical method for producing synthetic indigo.
• Music:
  1. Slaves used work songs (call and response) and field "hollers" (solitary shouts from one laborer to another, or to the water carriers) to help set the pace, pass the time, and cope with the physical and mental stress of slavery. Improvisation from printed hymnal scores during church services helped to created the gospel blues. These traditions joined as African Americans sang "folk blues," that were picked up by performers of medicine shows and vaudeville, and became the "classic blues" in urban areas. Ask students to investigate the history of "the blues" from the first recording (in 1895) to the present.
  2. Some of the greatest names in African-American entertainment have performed the blues, from Muddy Waters to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith to Ethel Waters. Create a musical biography of one of the artists, collecting samples of the blues performed through their careers.
  3. Economics:
     1. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) refers to the indigo bounty while discussing means of encouraging and discouraging imports in Chapter 8. Read the chapter to determine what Smith thinks about such mercantile subsidies and whether they are appropriate in a free-market economy.
     2. An estimated billion pairs of blue jeans have been manufactured. Examine the history of Levi Strauss or the story of how this U.S. product became a global fashion.
     3. Abolitionists such as Levi Coffin created "Free Labor Stores" where those who wished to boycott products made from slave labor. These stores stocked only items made by free labor, substituting maple syrup or maple sugar for cane sugar, and cotton produced by free people. Investigate the history of these stores and other abolitionist boycotts and evaluate their effectiveness in combating slavery.
  4. Art/Home Economics:
     1. Ask students to use indigo dye to create a batik, tie-dye, or other fiber or textile project.
     2. Ask students to investigate the history of indigo and blue-jeans, examining the different finishes used with jeans such as sand-blasting and stone-washing.

     Mathematics: Direct students to examine the two tables in the essay, The Devil's Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery. Ask students to create two graphs (either bar or line) to express the data contained in the tables. Remind students that their graphs should include a key, if appropriate, and titles.

     This lesson was submitted by Jean West, an education consultant in Port Orange, Florida.