Haint Blue

Porch ceilings in the American South are traditionally a pale blue green and they have been for centuries (which is amazing since our nation has barely even been around that long).  The evocative name of this traditional color is “haint blue” and the roots stretch back to before the revolution when pigments choices were limited.  In the Gullah culture of low country South Carolina (a culture created out of West African tradition, colonial greed, New World wetlands, tropical disease, and rice), blue was a special color which was anathema to spirits or “haints.”  According to tradition, ghosts either thought it was the sky (problematic) or running water (impassable) and left it alone.  There was plenty of indigo pigment to tint the whitewash, and so doors, casements, window frames, and ceilings all became haint blue.  And even robust materialists inured by reason against the perils of the supernatural can still agree it is a lovely & calming hue.

But the use of haint blue didn’t stop along the Florida and South Carolina coast.  The tradition was admired and emulated throughout the south, and it has even continued to spread beyond North of the Mason Dixon Line and west of the Mississippi in the modern era.  I wish I had the time to select a whole “Southern Living” pictorial spread of exquisite southern porches (for, although we are better off without the ways of the old South, those porches are delightful and should be adopted everywhere), but I think these pictures convey the idea.

 

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