What the Color ‘Haint Blue’ Means to the Descendants of Enslaved Africans

[xoxodede]

Bottle trees are from the Bakongo people that were brought to the USA as slaves. It all the fault of African Americans that we don't learn or want to know our history. When our folks decline to learn it then White people will claim that history as theirs.

Bottle trees' lineage traced to Africa
Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan

Published 4:00 am PDT, Sunday, May 10, 2009

Bottle tree on a rebar frame in a south Berkeley yard.

Bottle tree on a rebar frame in a south Berkeley yard.

People in the Bay Area have remarkable things in their front yards: baroquely pruned trees, topiary squirrels and kangaroos, sheet-metal dinosaurs. Bottle trees are rare, though. We knew they had to be out there somewhere and, sure enough, one of Ron's Flickr contacts located a fine specimen - a living tree, which is unusual - in Albany, just off Solano Avenue.

We didn't want to disturb the resident, but we have to wonder if he or she is an expatriate Southerner, bottle trees being a Southern thing. A traditional form of African American yard art, the bottle tree has been embraced by Southern whites as well. The basic idea is to festoon a dead tree with cobalt-blue bottles. Variations include the Texas bluebonnet tree, with green bottles standing in for foliage and blue ones for the flowers.

The bottle tree has deep roots in Africa. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson traces it to the Bakongo people, whose homeland is near the mouth of the Congo River. Many of their customs survived the cruel filter of slavery and took hold in the Caribbean and U.S. South. The crossroads as a place of power and danger, where bluesmen went to have the devil tune their guitars, is straight out of Kongo cosmology.

Thompson writes in "Kongo Influences on African-American Artistic Culture," his essay in "Africanisms in American Culture," that a French priest reported a Bakongo custom of attaching broken pots to tree branches "to drive away sterility and the evil spirits" in 1776. Later, containers called nkisi were placed in trees around Bakongo homes as protection from thieves.

The bottle tree tradition traveled to Trinidad, the Bahamas and eventually to the American mainland. In "Bighearted Power," his essay in "Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground," Thompson says the most important bottle tree clusters today are in east Texas, southeastern Arkansas and southern Alabama.

Eudora Welty documented them in Mississippi and incorporated them into her story "Livvie": "Coming around up the path from the deep cut of the Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue." Welty's character Livvie "was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house - by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again."

There were other beliefs about bottle trees. John Biggers, quoted by Thompson in "Bighearted Power," was taught that the noise of the bottles would scare birds away from fruit trees and that "if you put pots on the trees at the right time of the moon the bottle-tree would bring rain."

Thompson writes that Southern whites adopted the custom, with variations: They were more likely to use cedar trees, with upward-reaching branches, than the traditional crape myrtle.

The tradition thrives in Texas, where Brenda Beust Smith passes on tips from bottle tree gurus: Some use PVC pipes to attach the bottles to the branches.

Smith recommends leaving the branches long enough to hold entire bottles so they won't fly off in the wind. She advises making sure they're far enough apart that they won't clang together (unless, of course, you're trying to repel birds rather than spirits). Wood posts with large nails or rebar rods can stand in for trees. There's an artificial bottle tree in a South Berkeley yard near the Ashby BART Station.

And although it's not in the front yard, we have to salute Berkeley artist Marcia Donahue and the blue vodka-bottle tree in her yard. She says she was inspired by an exhibition of art of the African diaspora at the Berkeley Art Museum.

We've never encountered evil spirits in her yard, so the nkisi must be doing their jobs.

Bottle trees' lineage traced to Africa

On the bolded - I totally agree. We have to figure out ways collectively to share our history.

 

[Samori Toure]

Bottle trees and just bottles themselves were used by the Bakongo and Angolan to decorate graves.

To the Grave and Beyond:
A look at funeral rituals and traditions from various West African cultures

Kongo Style in the US

*In creating this page, I consulted two references: Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit and Paul and William Arnett's Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South Vol. II. Robert Farris Thompson is an art historian and professor of African and African-American history at Yale. Paul and William Arnett study African American folk art in the South. In their book, they focus on several African-American artists they have met through their travels and describe the roots of their unique and beautiful work.

"The African American tradition of hanging bottles on trees to trap or repel evil forces has parallels all over Africa, where charms, plates and bottle-like gourds perform similar functions. They are also used to scare off trespassers. This art is not only used to embody aesthetic values, but also to honor and communicate with the supernatural" (Arnett 40).

Bottle Trees: Kongo and Angola traditions of grave decorations have carried over to the western hemisphere. The tradition of tying bottles and other objects to trees serves to protect a house or one's property from evil spirits. Kongo-derived bottle trees for example are trees “garlanded” with bottles, vessels and other objects for protecting the household through the "invocation" of the dead (Thompson 142). Most Kongo-influenced bottle trees can be found throughout the South in Texas, South Carolina , Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. Bottles, containers, and everyday objects used by those who have died are hung from trees in the yards surrounding the home. Other than serving as protective charms, the hanging of objects owned by deceased family members send the message that death isn’t the end. The plates and cups of the dead are believed to preserve the power of the spirits of those who have died, and glass bottles preserve their talents and skills from fading away.

Nkisi: Kongo-Angola influence is also seen in the New World in traditional black cemeteries in the southern United States. In the Kongo belief system, the tomb is a "charm for the persistence of the spirit" (Thompson 132). Minkisi (plural of nkisi) are charms or strategic objects that are said to affect healing, bring luck to the owner, and house people’s souls. A nkisi is said to contain a spark (soul) giving it life. Minkisi come in various forms, such as leaves, shells, packets, and ceramic vessels. Each one contains medicines (bilongo) and a soul (mooyo). Together these medicines give power and life. In Kongo vodun practice, these packets have mystical power to turn deities in favor of their owners.

Grave Decoration: At a Kongolese burial site, the coffin is the container of the charm and the soul of the deceased is the spark. Therefore, Kongo and Kongo American graves are seen as nkisi charms. Grave decorations used both in Kongo and the Americas, honor the spirit and guide it to the ancestor world, thus preventing it from wandering and returning to haunt the living. The decorations serve as the bilongo medicines. Both Kongo and Kongo-American tombs are covered with the last objects touched by the deceased. In Kongo-inspired America, the last-used objects are also supposed to satisfy the spirit and keep it from following the family back to their home.

"Spirit-directing medicines" are marked on many graves in both Kongo and America, specifically the image of the white chicken (Thompson 134). The color white is associated with the dead. The powers of the spirits are released by the sacrifice of the chicken, whose placement on the grave honors the dead. Another prominent object used in the Kongolese grave decoration is the seashell, which is believed to contain the soul's eternal presence. Trees also are sometimes planted on graves to represent the spirit, with their roots going down into the other world. In this context trees are symbolic of life extension and the undying spirit.

Kongo-American graves are often decorated with other symbolic objects such as clocks, lamps, pots, pitchers, headlights, wheels, mirrors, tinfoil and other things similar to African grave decorations. In Arnett's book he describes the Cyrus Bowens family burial ground in Sunbury, Georgia, which includes crooked trees and gnarled roots. The Bowens graveyard contains decorations including a clay marker decorated with a hand holding a mirror-a sign of the ancestor world. The graves are also decorated with spirit jugs that contain charm-like inscriptions, which also stem from Kongo funerary arts and grave decoration.

Kongo Influence in the Americas
Bottle Tree Origin | History Surrounding Glass Bottle Trees

 

[Cadillac]

You would enjoy this book.

It's one of many that describes our ancestors folklore beliefs. Many we still practice/do without evening knowing it or why.

Folk beliefs of the southern Negro : Puckett, Newbell Niles : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

thanks im a fan of southern lore, southern gothic, etc. so i always like stuff like this.

I also been trying to look for a good black southern gothic author. As most novels/writers are white(Flannyer o Conner, William faulkner etc)

 

[xoxodede]

thanks im a fan of southern lore, southern gothic, etc. so i always like stuff like this.

I also been trying to look for a good black southern gothic author. As most novels/writers are white(Flannyer o Conner, William faulkner etc)

Gloria Naylor and Gayl Jones.

I am sure you know about Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler already.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator:"Naylor,+Gloria"

Mama Day is a classic.

By Mrs. Jones -- The Healing, Corregidora and White Rat were all good reads.

Also check out : African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places

 

[Cadillac]

Gloria Naylor and Gayl Jones.

I am sure you know about Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler already.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator:"Naylor,+Gloria"

Mama Day is a classic.

By Mrs. Jones -- The Healing, Corregidora and White Rat were all good reads.

Also check out : African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places

oh I heard of them and read their works. But i never considered some of them southern gothic. I'm a fan of them, but some of those espescially Morrison and octavia I never considered southern gothic.

Now Gayl Jones I agree, going off what I was told(havent read them yet) Corrigidora and White Rat seem to have elements and story formats of the southern gothic type of them. And I plan on checking them out.

Mama Day? I mean it has the supernatural elements that root back to the south. But idk. I just see it as a supernatural novel.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Do the Guallah have a language or just a dialect?

it's both

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I have noticed some Whites trying to claim Bottle Trees as their folklore traditions -- but they know it's not true.

Like many of the South’s oldest and most colorful customs, the bottle tree tradition was brought to this country by African slaves and continued by Southern African American families and white rural folk.

What is now more of a decorative yard or garden feature was created for a paranormal purpose. According to legend, colorful bottles were talisman worn by trees. Once the spirits ventured inside the bottles they were trapped and then destroyed by morning sunlight. It’s told the howls and moans of the despairing ghosts can be heard when the wind blows through the trees. A variation of the legend tells that the people would cork the bottles in the morning in order to trap spirits who slipped inside during the previous night. Then, they would throw the bottles away.

Blue was the favored color of the original bottles—more specifically “haint” blue, which is close to the cobalt blue of Milk of Magnesia bottles or the Blue Nun wine many of us Baby Boomers drank in the ‘80′s. The history of haint blue is said to come from the Gullah/Geechee people, a community with ties to the enslaved Africans from the sea islands off South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. According to the Gullah/Geeche culture, this shade of blue represents water, which spirits can not pass over.

Even in Alabama and other Southern states, if you take a drive in the country, you are liable to see haint blue paint used on doors and porches for the same reason it’s used on bottle trees—to keep those scary spooks, hags and boogers at bay. It supposedly has the added benefit of repelling pesky insects (perhaps blue bottle flies?).​

they tried to claim the southern face jug tradition too

https://www.postandcourier.com/free...cle_d266e5ef-4556-5376-8a6b-4ab4d5727496.html

Civil War: Face Jug | History Detectives | PBS

 

[Ezus Jezus]

When I was in high school I used to date a chic and we went to her grandmas house often. Her granny used to always talk about ghosts or what I thought she was saying “Hanks”. Her house was that color too. The moment I saw the color and the word “Haint” I knew exactly what this article was gonna talk about. Crazy.


Side note: I’m 100% sure that I saw a ghost in her house. Maybe she trapped it in there by accident when she painted her house

 

[xoxodede]

When I was in high school I used to date a chic and we went to her grandmas house often. Her granny used to always talk about ghosts or what I thought she was saying “Hanks”. Her house was that color too. The moment I saw the color and the word “Haint” I knew exactly what this article was gonna talk about. Crazy.


Side note: I’m 100% sure that I saw a ghost in her house. Maybe she trapped it in there by accident when she painted her house

She must have said "Haint" -- which means ghost, lost or evil soul or even witch.

Not sure about her trapping a ghost -- but one may choose to stay there or won't or can't leave for one reason or another. May be a family member or ancestor.

 

[staticshock]

thought about this thread today while I was doing some driving and saw a few homes with the blue bottles on branches. pissed me off cause those were white ppls homes and thats another thing they took from our ancestors

 

[IllmaticDelta]

thought about this thread today while I was doing some driving and saw a few homes with the blue bottles on branches. pissed me off cause those were white ppls homes and thats another thing they took from our ancestors

 

[get these nets]

Short film 10 minutes long

July 28, 2022

Denim Tears x Levi’s Season 2 is an exploration of Gullah Geechee culture​

Denim Tears x Levi’s Season 2 is an exploration of Gullah Geechee culture


Fashion is, very often, a creative discipline preoccupied with surfaces – with how things appear, rather than the complex stories and histories that underpin them. An exception to this rule, however, is Denim Tears, the label founded and headed up by Supreme creative director Tremaine Emory. Committed to interrogating America’s tumultuous past with respect to race, his work demonstrates how fashion can be used as a means to revisit overlooked histories – as well as the role that fashion has played within them.
One of the most notable projects that Tremaine has initiated through Denim Tears is a wildly popular collaboration with Levi’s.

For the second chapter of the collaboration, Denim Tears x Levi’s Season 2, Tremaine takes his excavation of the intersection of fashion and African-American history a step further, drawing on the history of the Gullah Geechee of coastal North and South Carolina for inspiration.


As the descendants of Africans that were enslaved on the rice, cotton and indigo plantations along America’s lower Atlantic coast, these three crops continue to hold deep relevance in contemporary Gullah Geechee culture. In the collection, the significance of the latter two is brought into relief through bleached denim Levi’s 501s, trucker jackets and plantation hats printed with indigo handprints. Elsewhere, shirt jackets, jeans and tote bags in bright quilts – another mainstay of Gullah Geechee cultural heritage – tell the story of the Gullah Geechee’s enforced voyage across the Middle Passage, while also highlighting their legacy of impeccable handcraft.


Here, Tremaine discusses the rich network of references behind the new capsule, how his work serves as a conduit to new forms of knowledge, and how he hopes people will react to his politically potent work.

What was the jumping-off point for this second iteration of Denim Tears x Levi’s collaboration?
It was really when my friend Arthur Jafa told me about a film he was the cinematographer on – Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash. It was actually the first major Hollywood film directed by a Black woman. It’s about a Gullah Geechee matriarch and her kids and grandkids living on the islands off the coast of the Carolinas post-slavery. They kind of end up frozen in time, but the kids want to matriculate into regular society — they want to go to college, things like that – which the matriarch warns against. One of the notable things about her is that her hands are permanently dyed with indigo, as, when she was a slave, she made indigo at the behest of the United Kingdom – the biggest buyers of indigo due to the colour’s symbolic associations with royalty. After watching the film, I started doing further research into the history of indigo production during slavery, but there was only one book on it. It stated that slaves were specifically brought from parts of Africa where indigo dyeing was a part of the culture.


So that’s what led to the indigo-dyed handprints we see across the capsule?
Yes, but there’s actually a double meaning to them — it represents how the residue of slavery is embedded in these people’s skin, while also harkening back to the fact that slavery is embedded in America and wider Western culture. It’s not something you can wash away.

The film aside, what else was it that prompted your interest in the Gullah Geechee people?
Well, I’m really obsessed with Black indigenous cultures that have their own world and own systems of validation that are independent of Western culture. For many Black city folks, indexes of success might be things like going to an Ivy League school, having a Mercedes, or having a big house in a nice safe neighbourhood. To the Gullah Geechee people, however, they have their own cultural ecosystems and indexes of validation. There’s a real sense of dignity there which comes from having a rooted understanding of where you’re from and a sense of self-understanding.


The capsule’s other main motif is a colourful, printed quilting fabric. How did that come about?
Well, as I learned more about the Gullah Geechee people, I discovered that one of the ways they’ve traditionally used to communicate their stories and histories was quilting. To bring that story to life, we created a short film in which we went down and interviewed this amazing woman named Queen Quet, the Chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation, and basically just let her tell her story. Even though I’m Black, I’m still a voyeur, whereas she’s a part of that community — she makes quilts, she knows the story of indigo dyeing — so we decided to let her tell this story. With what I do, I never want to assume the role of teacher; rather, I want to act as more of a bridge or a conduit.

And what’s the story behind the symbols on the quilt?
There’s the African continent, a woman making indigo, the plantation slave masters house…. there’s even a slave ship and then there’s the church. I’ve always included religion in my work, which is something that people often don’t notice. It’s the thing that always placated slaves – It allowed them to believe that they could endure servitude in this lifetime as they’d eventually end up in heaven.


The sociopolitical context into which this second iteration of Denim Tears x Levi’s is arguably even more precarious and heated than it was when you released the first one. How do you hope it will resonate?
I think on a selfish level, I just like to make clothing and I enjoy doing that most when the work has some soul to it. For me, the primary intention is to express a story that matters to me. I can’t really control how people are going to receive that, though. For example, a very popular musician hit me up the other day, and said ‘Hey, I was wearing your jeans the other day, and my cousin asked me what kind of flowers were on them’. He didn’t realise that they were cotton flowers — and that’s not a bad thing, because it starts conversation. You don’t need to know the whole story behind something to be able to engage with it — but if someone finds it beautiful and wears it, the message is still getting out there whether they know it or not. When you make something, though, it’s kind of like opening up a pillow on a roof — you can’t really control where the feathers will go. I know my intentions when I create, and that’s ultimately what I’m most focussed on.

Denim Tears x Levi’s Season 2 pop-up shops will be taking place on the following dates: July

 

[KingsOfKings]

Rep