I picked this prompt for us to think through because the use of imagination and magic in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo are some of the most fascinating aspects of the text. Throughout the novel, the recurring motifs of magic and child-like discovery of the world serve as points of access into the minds and lived experiences of the three daughters we follow through the pages. Indigo portrays the most obvious instances of child-like-ness and imagination throughout the earlier chapters of the book; her connection to her dolls and her use of them to express her emotions serves as a vehicle for freedom to her. Indigo’s creation of various Black dolls — “African dolls filled with cotton…Jamacain dolls in red turbans…” — helped her to explore her own blackness in a way that felt safe and free, especially since she felt like she was not experiencing being a Black girl in the ways her sisters and mother did (4). They helped her when she was “unavoidably lonely, anxious that no living black folks would talk to her the way her dolls and Aunt Haydee did”, and so Indigo’s use of her imagination to navigate her cautious exploration of her own Blackness does a lot of work to support her journey throughout the text.
Although the sisters do not all feel the same child-like-ness Indigo does, they do all have one thing in common: expressing their own magics through art. Indigo with the fiddle, Sassafrass with her weaving, and Cypress with her dance; they all find their easiest avenues towards their expression of self through art and harness their womanliness through the magic of this self-expression. At this point is where I’d like to pose a question for discussion:
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo all take up fairly traditional art forms and handicrafts for women, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a traditional woman. How does this juxtaposition of passions and personal philosophies serve to illustrate how the three sisters each carve out their own identities?
My final point about how the magic in this text helps us to imagine blackness in this text is through the inclusion of spell-like recipes intermingled with clearly non-magical recipes for dishes the women cook and eat throughout the text. The similar formatting and inclusion implies an equal reverence for both the magic and the food discussed, signifying to me that the magic handed down through generations of Black women in Indigo, Sassafrass, and Cypress’ family is just as important as the recipes that are handed down too, and that the recipes themselves contain some magic. The inclusion of the recipes, for spells and food alike, implies that both magic and cooking are integral parts of the lived experience for the Black women in the text, and also offers an additional connection between Indigo and her older sisters. My final question is this:
How do the recipes included in the text offer us insight into the hearts and minds of the characters of the text? How does the centering of food in the novel support the text’s imaginings of blackness, femininity, and family?