Buzzard (aka Stepney Robinson) was a fixture at the Beaufort County Courthouse, where he sat at trials “chewing the root” to sway a judge’s ruling. Yet within recent memory, Lowcountry root workers weren’t so hard to find. “I was 16 when I quit school to do voodoo full time.”) “I went to live with them when I was a year-and-a-half ,” he says. (There are a few, however, including a root worker in Atlanta whose grandparents chose him to train in their spiritual traditions. Buzzards left in South Carolina and Georgia. Florilegius / AlamyĪlmost 300 years after their arrival, there aren’t many Dr. Less than 30 years later, the colony was annually exporting a million pounds of indigo dyestuffs. Indigo was first planted in South Carolina in 1739. Buzzard, were among those forced across the ocean in bondage. Root workers, practitioners of these rituals who often go by the title Dr. Young’s book on African-Atlantic religion. Haints and boo hags, too, stem from African spiritual traditions-a spirituality in which conjure and color symbolism are essential, according to Rituals of Resistance, Jason R. In Blue Alchemy, director and producer Mary Lance’s film about indigo around the world, women at a Nigerian workshop are documented delivering a prayer to the Yoruba indigo deity Iyamapo. In some cultures, indigo itself has spiritual significance. “Fetishes,” powerful amulets made out of everyday objects, also often contained blue materials. In her book Red, White, and Black Make Blue, Andrea Feeser describes West African spiritual traditions that included wearing blue beads or clothing for protection. So “is the symbolic use of the color blue to ward off ‘evil spirits.” “Indigo dye is deeply rooted in African culture,” says Heather Hodges, executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor National Heritage Area. Paint companies such as Sherwin-Williams market haint blue to well-to-do Southerners, as a pretty color for porches. If that was true, all the houses on the island would be painted blue.” Nevertheless, the museum-once the home where her father lived-is painted blue. “People are saying that we paint our houses blue to ward off the evil spirits. “Haint blue was never mentioned in my family on Hilton Head Island,” says Louise Miller Cohen, founder of the island’s Gullah Museum. Oral histories recorded as late as the 1930s and 40s mention haint blue, but a lot was lost when the community became less isolated and more spread out during the mid-20th century. Yet not all Gullah Geechee identify with the color’s use. In Rantowles, a hamlet 14 miles south of Charleston, Gullah families like Alphonso Brown’s painted their homes in haint blue not just because it is customary, but because they fear the havoc that evil spirits might wreak if they abandoned the tradition. While “haint blue” has taken on a life of its own outside the Gullah Geechee tradition-it’s currently sold by major paint companies such as Sherwin-Williams, and marketed to well-to-do Southerners as a pretty color for a proper porch ceiling-the significance of the color to the descendants of the Lowcountry’s enslaved people remains. Blue glass bottles are another haint deterrent. Blue glass bottles were also hung in trees to trap the malevolent marauders. The color was said to trick haints into believing that they’ve stumbled into water (which they cannot cross) or sky (which will lead them farther from the victims they seek). This “haint blue,” first derived from the dye produced on Lowcountry indigo plantations, was originally used by enslaved Africans, and later by the Gullah Geechee, to combat “haints” and “boo hags”-evil spirits who escaped their human forms at night to paralyze, injure, ride (the way a person might ride a horse), or even kill innocent victims. The ceilings of their broad summer porches are painted almost universally in just one color: a soft, robin’s egg blue. Heather Hodges / GGCHCĭozens of antebellum mansions still line the streets, restored to the opulence of their plantation days. Natural indigo dyes are having a resurgence in Beaufort, South Carolina. The elegant riverside town was one of the South’s wealthiest before the Civil War, and one of the few left standing by the Union Army, which set up a base of operations here after its residents skipped town in the Great Skedaddle of 1861. The town of Beaufort, the county seat of the eponymous Lowcountry district, is accented in blue.
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