Color symbolism in some form has existed in many world societies. Many a royal family had certain colors or combinations as its signatures. The ruling clan of Byzantium, for example, was distinguished for a shade of purple once called “Tyrian.” Named after the Phoenician citizens of Tyre who produced the color from a certain type of snail, the shade is also called “royal” or “imperial” purple. Its elite reputation could also be related to the expense of producing the needed dye.
Colors have often been associated with principles of life. Each of the four elements in the Greek system had traditional colors. Some Native North American societies gave color associations to the four cardinal directions of the Medicine Wheel. With the Ojibwa and Cherokee the assignation has been said to be: east, red; north, blue; west, black; south, white.
Color associations are with us today. How often have you heard someone say, “You’re golden”? “Why so blue?” “He turned green.” “He’s yellow.” Who would have thought that any color should have some effect on ghosts?
Charleston, SC, is a town I visit at least once a year. They call Charleston “The Holy City” for all its monumental churches, many of them in a Gothic style. Before the skyline thickened in the 20th century the streets must have been dominated by steeples. Charleston in fact is strongly represent a couple major styles of architecture. Georgian and Victorian come to mind, but there is a good bit of Federal (Yankee Classical) and Palladian (another Classical variant). Many of the very recent public buildings in Charleston, like the Public Library on Calhoun Street, are Palladian. Another of Charleston’s trademark building styles is often called “Antebellum” meaning, before the Civil War. It’s exemplified in those grand old homes with building-length porches and high columns, like Gone with the Wind’s mansion Tara. That, too, is a wooden, American variant of Greek temple architecture. You see all those types now and then in my native northeast. Only the concentration of them is remarkable about Charleston.
My parents had a retirement condo in Charleston, and I used to visit them on spring break back in my days of teaching at the Gow School. I didn’t know the city well after my first few stays, but whenever my memories went back to it, I saw buildings done in stucco. I know it was because of the haunting effect of the colors. I’m not the only one who feels that way. One of the city’s most-photographed images is “Rainbow Row” on East Bay Street, a line of 1700s stucco-fronted rowhouses, each done in a different shade.
Stucco is a gritty plaster-like layer, basically a type of concrete with lime and sand in it. I gather that you swab it on as a heavy, gritty paste that dries fairly quickly. You almost never see it on wood-frame buildings, but it holds well to brick and stony surfaces. When stucco cracks and peels away, you usually see red brick under it.
You see stucco buildings now and then in the Northeast, usually in the Tudor style with the dark wood beams spaced by the creamy white panels. The old Park Lane restaurant at Gates Circle in Buffalo was one of them. A conspicuous stucco house in Buffalo on Park Place between Allen and North is reminiscent of the Tudor style. It’s usually called “the Rohlfs House” after its owner/builder, Roycroft designer Charles Rohlfs.
Charleston’s stucco comes in all shades. The ones that stood out in my recollections were hot and earthy: reds, peaches, browns, and apricots. But on my last visit in the early summer of 2011, I really studied the matter, and there were quite a few aqua shades, blues and greens, each with its grounding charm.
I’ve been trying to figure out for awhile now why stucco color would have such an impact on me, and why it would be different from an identical tone applied to other materials or on two-dimensional images in books and photographs. I could only conclude that stucco color looked “realler,” and that it must have had a bit of grey in it. That figures. Stucco’s natural color is cement-like. Whatever paint you put onto stucco, even an apricot-orange, it’s got an earthier tone. It looks duller but richer.
The analogy comes to me: I remember a late-summer wildflower bouquet I saw once in someone’s house. I remember staring at for a long time, trying to figure out why it grabbed me. It was beautiful in a different way than an arrangement of hothouse flowers. Centuries of horticulture have seen to it that our usual blooms are more billowing, bright, and neon-like than the originals they came from. There' something unreal about them. Many of them, I gather, can't even reproduce without human help. But something has also been lost, and those wild flowers can be mighty fetching. I see a lot of them on my offroad rides or runs in spring and summer. Usually the vivid flecks of color are pretty well spaced in the green and brown that dominates the trail.
On my last visit to Charleston I started noticing a funny, earthy shade of blue painted under the ceiling of some of those porches. Like a mural of the bare day sky, it’s a heavenly blue, often at a total clash with the scheme of the rest of the house. This, or at least one precise shade of it, is called “haint blue,” and there’s a reason people put it up there, even at a loss to their color coordination.
In the old days of the Colonial and Plantation-era South, the African American servants and slaves believed that a certain shade of blue had an effect on ghosts and negative spiritual influences. It must have had some origin in Africa. African descendants on this side of the pond called all such forces, “haints.”
The point to doing your porch ceiling in haint blue right now would be maintaining tradition, of course. How African-American supernatural belief got into plantation-era house-painting is a question.
Maybe the 18th and 19th century whites went along with the superstition of their servants and slaves. After all, they certainly had their own supernatural beliefs. They might have figured, "What is there to lose?" There could have been another possible motive: pest control. The impression is out there that haint blue has an effect on bugs.
Negative spiritual influences have long been associated with noxious bugs–think of the Exorcist’s flies–and it’s no stretch to consider that something that operates on one will do for the other. Even Southern whites would have been eager to keep out the Southern bugs. If they could be persuaded that this exact hue might keep out the stingers… The prevalence of haint blue was assured.
There are a number of different shades called haint blue today. They range from sky to aqua, and they can’t all be the original. I would think that only the precise one would be effective. For those who want to be sure of their haint blue, I have obtained the authentic formula through a source that ought to know. (It is an old Sullivan’s Island, SC, paint store whose next-door neighbor is a shop famous for root medicine.) It is:
BLK OP2
TBL OP14
GRN OP12
You will see the touch of black in it, which accounts, perhaps, for my impression of the hue and, in a roundabout fashion, my association of it in this piece with stucco.
The logic behind haint blue probably derives from the idea that the color of the porch might look like water or sky and deter the evil spirits–haints–from crossing the threshold, the symbolic entrance. The author of an internet article on haint blue–one who goes by the name of Funcolors–noted no direct preventive effect, at least not at a fine Dresden, Ohio, Italianate structure known for its use of that color. Painted by many runaway slaves, Prospect House may be one of the more haunted houses in the Buckeye State. And so many of those old Charleston homes have their ghosts. Really! The Holy City is notorious for them. Let’s hope haint blue has more clout with the bugs.