Mood 🎵 Indigo Charleston

Notes of HopeHistoryHateBeauty and... HIVES???

🐇🐇 greetings, and for now a mostly post-it-notes of a newShrink.

Images here point to just a few opening elements from the week’s rich, deeply informative and intense immersion-visit at the new International African American Museum (IAAM) at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston.

The now-astonishingly beautiful, architecturally stunning site was the entry point for some 260,000 enslaved Africans from 1670 until 1808, when Congress ended international slave trade. Over the next 50 years via domestic American slave-trade, the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled, reaching nearly 4 million by 1860. Surprisingly at least to me, just half of those, some 2 million, lived in the South’s cotton-producing plantation states. (Which begs the question of the other 2 million?)

Future full newShrink editions will feature more thorough accounts of the IAAM experience.

A logistical note: With an extended-family, triple-belated-birthday gathering hosted here at the lake next weekend, there will likely be no, or only a very abbreviated, October 8 edition of newShrink.

Meanwhile, from title themes…

… Hives???

Today’s edition has been erratically compiled — yet oddly soothing relief — between bouts of flaring-itch and Benadryl-loopy-ness. On an otherwise lovely Charleston trip I somehow managed to bring home an unwanted birthday surprise: My first, hopefully last, case of hives. Ultimately harmless and steadily improving, but meanwhile absurdly miserable. (And a mystery: No food allergies ever known or apparent here, no contact ones ever except poison ivy and one mild eye-itch from a detergent decades ago…)

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Here are some other title themes, images and connecting threads taken mostly in order.

Indigo: The plant, the colour, the mood

All imaginable forms of indigo have shown up all week (several depicted in the illustration above). This began most intensely with the IAAM tour and continued on signage and in pictures. Even just the word itself was in a dream-snippet. (Admittedly that might have been Benadryl-induced.)

To oversimplify a long and critically important part of the IAAM’s exhaustive exhibits, until the mid-1800s the plant indigo was for more than 50 years a “king” crop. Along with rice, indigo made Charles Town by far the wealthiest of the original pre-Revolutionary War-era colonies. Also like rice, indigo was enormously dependent on extensive labor, as well as skills that those forcefully enslaved had developed and brought from Africa. Like the area’s “Carolina Gold” rice, indigo was similarly horrifying for enslaved workers to produce and harvest, while soaked in malaria- and cholera-ridden muddy saltwater swamplands.

This article from the Charleston County Public Library describes this vital plant, its economic impacts and some of its many historic purposes: Indigo in the Fabric of Early South Carolina.

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Along with indigo, looking at the illustration’s quotes and the quilts at center, from Smithsonian Institute Folk Life magazine:

Movement and geography are broad themes inherent in the IAAM’s focus on the diaspora, worldwide dislocation, movement and dismantling of African cultures and peoples. This is expressed in the maps quote from the museum (at left). And photos of colorful quilts depict a kind of those maps: Enslaved people’s coded communications with one another, especially those in or fleeing from danger.

Underground Railroad quilt codes

Whether formally defined or developed over long intuitive practice, the visual images sewn into quilts carried great meaning in this way, as described in vivid accounts in the IAAM exhibit. Works such as Jaqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard’s 1999 book, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, also explore this.

As confirmed through oral-tradition research on indigenous peoples worldwide, particularly those oppressed and endangered, across millennia enslaved peoples have survived by “mapping” their lives, movements and often their safety through landscape markings on trees or stones. Many traditions in music, hymns, spirituals, drumming as well as pastimes such as games and rituals have served similar purposes.

Meanwhile, here is a teacher-newspaper columnist’s account of the practice involving Harriett Tubman: Quilts Were Once Signs Of Safety On The Underground Railroad

(On the Smithsonian’s coded-quilts pictured, an accompanying article, with needed further discussion about oral storytelling as essential in historic scholarship, will be included in a later more detailed closeup about IAAM topics.)

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Both the indigo plant (samples pictured above at bottom left and right) and its use in dyeing fabric arts and clothing are again trending today, according to this National Geographic feature: Indigo is making a comeback in South Carolina—here’s where to find it.

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Then aside from its vast economic, historic, practical — and even Biblical — associations there is the colour indigo itself (depicted in images at bottom left and right above). For me it’s a colour, meriting the elegant-British-spelling“-u” perhaps even more than regal purple.

As you might perhaps have noticed if you’ve known or been reading me awhile, this is rather obviously my signature kind of blue. (That’s with sheepish apologies to my many fellow, paler-Carolina-blue favoring fellow UNC alums. It is more like Penn State alum-son’s Nittany Lions; other university-regalia within its color family more offensive to Tar Heels will remain unnamed here.)

This piece from an art-medium website has details I found interesting about the color-spectrum, color delineation and pigmentation itself: On the Colour Indigo. It seems Indigo is the perfect almost-purple shade of navy or royal, and the almost-navy or royal shade of purple.

My mind’s ear likes even the sound of the word.

As for indigo the mood, original and most literal was the 1930 Duke Ellington Jazz classic. Most recent, also literal, is an annual cultural and signature festival of the Institute of Technology in Bombay.

In its soul/psychological aspects mood indigo might be recognized by how it holds both light and shadow, contradictory elements at once — mystery or melancholy alongside joy and vitality. It’s a colour pretty fitting for a depth-psychology perspective, also for this week’s vibe in Charleston.

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Geography & hauntings…

This couple of days’ birthday-treat stay in historic downtown Charleston brought the museum, and its obviously much-developing wharf-side area, into focus. That was starkly alongside the multitude of still-painful contrasts and contradictions of this charming magnetic city.

The majestic museum-complex site is no back-alley destination. It is near city heart along a main historic-district thoroughfare. IAAM is what’s normally for many an easy half-mile walk from tourist-landmark City Market area known for lovely boutique-hotel lodging, fine dining at eateries like High Cotton or Magnolias, and photogenic horse-drawn carriages full of tourists even on an off-season Tuesday. (Not surprisingly, most of them white, middle-aged and older.)

At least so far — and one hopes still a work very much in progress — these two historic-Charleston-tourism worlds might well be separated by miles… or centuries. On the route between them, broken-pavement sidewalk narrows to barely single-file with cars rushing past perilously close in too-narrow lanes. In this city of tours advertised in every way visible and imaginable, both by land and by sea, no directional signs, or ads for tours including the IAAM, connect these two areas. Never mind even finding such a huge and glorious complex without smartphones and Uber.

Online and kiosk scans of the voluminous tour options available offer many and varied slices of Charleston (and Charleston-area plantation) history… or a search turns up the IAAM and other experiences with African-American or Gullah Geechee cultural history. A couple of the tourist- and event-site plantations also have exhibits of at least one or a few slave quarters and tours that include more factual, contextualized looks at life under slavery.

Here is a good history and overview of the IAAM’s location and historic site, Gadsden’s Wharf - 340 Concord Street from the Preservation Society of Charleston.

As with elsewhere, Charleston tourism is still emerging from the COVID pandemic with pent-up energy — and that’s intensified for long-delayed plans, and planners, for weddings. Many of the issues addressed in this 2020 New York Times piece still apply: Despite Everything, People Still Have Weddings at ‘Plantation’ Sites

This well-pondered post by a white blogger poses some of the issues directly, and based on rethinking of prior personal visits: Magnolia Plantation: Is Plantation Tourism Ethical?

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Immediately after the still-undigested hours-long IAAM intensity, our browsing stroll through raucously retail Town Market’s fair-like mix of open stalls and classic-Charleston specialty shops was predictably jarring. Underscoring that for me was the gift shop “history” bookshelf, when I went for a quick look for granddaughter-gift-possibilities.

Pretty sparse overall, it at least featured S.C. Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, subject of the extensively sourced, 886-paged unabridged version and definitive history — Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Civil War. The work won C. Vann Woodward the Pulitzer Prize for history back in the ‘80s. To my surprise and dismay, this slim “sweet-cute”-covered paperback wasn’t even a condensed version of the historically accurate Vann Woodward work. This other book, Mary Chesnut’s Diary, is a Penguin reprint, in recent years retitled to replace the the dated and controversial Diary from Dixie. It’s an otherwise unedited piece of post-Reconstruction/Lost Cause Daughters-of-Confederacy propaganda. It was published as the Jim Crow era surged in 1908, Chesnut’s in name only and decades after her death. Woodward describes and documents how her once-best friend, who long outlived her, had orchestrated its first publishing with huge omissions and dramatic alterations. The publication added material aligned to a cause that didn’t exist when Chesnut was alive, much less appear in her diary of the Civil War fought and ended more than 40 years earlier.

As described in newShrink previously, Chesnut is a long revered and closely studied historic figure for me. Her life, voice and amazing intellect were in the best of times difficult, complicated — and short — enough during her historical period as an educated and vocal Southern woman. The least reputable publishers and her supposedly history-loving home state might do to honor her storied South Carolina pedigree is a truthful and accurate portrayal now, when history itself is so under fire.

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Along with the rich first history-foray, as birthday destination Charleston was amazingly beautiful lodging, several great meals well-served and fun, a dash over to see the ocean. And man, do I want to run over that amazing bridge just once sometime!

For me first returning after more than a decade, the overwhelming impressions were:

• So much hopeful progress, prosperity and building underway, with so much visible investment of all kinds. And yet,

• Still also so much yet to be done, separate elements and threads to be re-woven into a coherent grand fabric, from so much that is still so… segregated.

Today as always there is long-traditional Charleston History on vast display and every menu.

Now available, and thankfully so, if you want and so choose, you can also order-up and add, or substitute, African-American/Gullah Geechee History. That is deeply researched, beautifully presented and meaningfully contextualized for today’s culture and world.

I just want to imagine, and hope for, how, and when, it might look and feel for Black history to be history — no longer optional, an alternative or extra (at best.)

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My state of mind and mood those days might surely have been affected by awareness of Donald Trump’s presence just up the road at a gun dealer and other stops. He was in town to rally his anti-woke MAGA-crowd messages in the hometown of a couple of his Republican primary opponents. (In The Charlotte Observer columnist Issac J. Bailey made some disturbing factual connections about this: Trump’s visit to SC gun shop was a message, not a mistake ).

Now, I’m not saying holding all of Charleston’s vast contradictions, light and darkness at once directly caused my hives — not even Donald Trump nearby on my birthday! From a psychologist standpoint I will note that at times things not-quite-conscious that are contradictory or needing attention — when our “inside-out” is at odds with the “outside-in” —will evoke a somatic response (in the body). For me it may appear like vertigo, usually when perceived with or about a person or biographical figure. Or more generally it can be sudden, unexplained inflamed itching (though never before in hives lasting days!)

I share this by way of illustrating a psychological phenomenon I find important and useful: That psychosomatic does not mean not real, but more like, pay attention!

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Now with a case of hives having been the year’s worst birthday-surprise, in closing I’ll leave you with what’s been quite entertaining: My favorite annoying-pundit-whom-I-can’t-quite-leave-alone has outdone himself. In case you haven’t seen or heard this, I can’t possibly add or improve on what’s here in the X/formerly-Twitter posts below and the classic Brooksian “aw shucks, I made a naive-stupid-boo-boo” quotes in the linked WAPO story.

For me it was a well-timed reminder of how and what not to write and publish when under the influence of Benadryl — or at least one bourbon on the rocks, photographed with your airport cheeseburger! (And by the way, if you enlarge the X image, his signature photo is promotion of the cover of his new book, How to Know a Person. His agent and publishers must be delighted.)

It is one for the can’t-make-this-stuff-up file.

David Brooks and the $78 airport meal the internet is talking about

(From The Washington Post and X, formerly known as Twitter)

And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon.

🦋💙 tish

•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”