- Have you ever looked
up at a porch ceiling
and wondered why it's painted
a light shade of blue?
That color is called haint blue
and there is a story behind it.
Well, a few stories.
(energetic rock music)
Haint blue is rooted in
the African oral tradition
of the Gullah/Geechee.
The Gullah/Geechee people are
descendants of African slaves,
brought to Charleston in the late 1500's.
And today, nearly 500,000
Gullah/Geechee people
inhabit the 500 mile stretch
between Jacksonville,
North Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida.
Many Gullah traditions and beliefs
are still being practiced today,
and one of them is painting their doors
haint blue in order to
warn off evil spirits,
also referred to as haints.
We talked to Kim Johnston,
author of Haint Blue:
The Rockford Haunting,
to find out more on the
spiritual aspects of haint blue.
- A haint blue color of paint is one
that is particularly prevalent
in the southern history,
the folklore of the area.
A lot of people think
this is a misspelling
of the word haunt, but it's not.
Haint is an actual word
that they came up with
in their language to describe this spirit
that was in between the
world of the living and dead.
Something that was very angry.
But their belief was
that they couldn't cross
water though, so this
particular blue color,
it's many different
shades of color of blue
but anything that
appeared to be water-like
in its color would be used
to paint the windowsills,
the doors, the porches,
to prevent the haints from coming in.
- [Lisa] But as the haint blue tradition
made its way from the low country
to Alabama and the rest of the South,
it evolved into something else.
Here, haint blue was not just a repellent
for evil spirits, but rather
had more earthly applications.
We traveled to Greensboro, Alabama,
where we met with Ian Crawford,
to learn more about porches,
paint, and the practical uses
of haint blue.
- One of the key things to understand
is what people had when they
were building and paints
in the 19th century were
different than the paints
that you get at Lowe's, Home Depot today.
They would have used lime-based paint
and there's a range of hues and pigments
that were available.
One of the stories of why
ceilings are painted blue
is for insects and they
said, well, it would confuse
the insects, because
they'd think it was the sky
and they wouldn't build
their nests up there,
they wouldn't go up there.
And in a sense, that that seems to work,
because a lot of people say, oh, I painted
my porch ceiling blue and
I didn't have the insects,
but insects see color in
a different wavelength
than we do, so I don't
think that they thought
it was the sky so much as the
lime in the lime-based paint
is poisonous to insects.
- Ooh.
- So if they did go up
there, they didn't stay there
for very long.
- So it was accidental
bug repellent.
- Exactly.
It was 19th century insect repellent
and so it protected the wood,
and even years later
after that paint has gone,
it's still in there.
- Hm.
- And so it's wonderful preventative.
You'll find a lot of old
houses that have a lot of coats
of lime-based paint protect from termites,
from all sorts of other insects as well.
- Hydrated lime is also
called calcium hydroxide.
This substance was mixed with water
and sprayed over plants
as a basic pesticide
for many years.
And for a time it was used in paints.
In The Natural Paint Book by Lynn Edwards
and Julia Lawless, lime
wash and lime paint
are both described as
having "mild antiseptic,
"and insect repellent qualities."
They also provide a
"vapor-permeable finish that lets
"buildings breathe, preventing
dampness, condensation, and mold growth."
In other words, a perfect
and very practical paint
to use in the extreme
humidity and bugginess
of the South.
But what's keeping this old
porch folk practice alive?
Paint isn't made with lime anymore.
And for better or worse, pesticides
have come a long way since
this tradition began.
Yet the practice continues.
And it seems as if many
don't really know why.
But who's keeping this
story going and how?
People like Keith Sherrill at
Haint Blue Brewery in Mobile.
- I'm a Alabama native.
I was livin' in Washington,
I was in the army
for a very long time and there came a time
when I wasn't gonna do that anymore,
so I had the idea of openin' a brewery
and movin' south.
Top five houses I was lookin' at had
a haint blue porch ceiling.
And my wife actually
mentioned that it had a story.
Sometime that evening I was trying
to find the end of the
internet and figure out
why these porch ceilings were blue
and came across haint blue.
And that led into some later
eureka moment of, that's it.
When I was trying to figure
out what haint blue was
and how colloquially Southern it was,
it had to be the name of this brewery.
In true folklore fashion, it came
with the people.
- It traveled, yeah.
- In storytelling, and this story,
the conversation we're having now,
would almost ensure that it outlives me.
- Yeah.
- It's this elegant color
that everyone puts on their porch,
but it's more than that at the same time.
It's multidimensional, the
same thing is for the South.
It's elegant, it's romantic,
but just under the surface,
there's a lot more to that.
There's a lot more stories.
And haint blue is the same way,
and it doesn't make sense anywhere else.
I think Southern people
are the only people
that would latch onto
this story in this way.
You know what I mean?
We're kind of suspect of outsiders
and other things, and
that's what this haint is.
It's like unwanted spirit
that we didn't invite
and we keep 'em away with
a beautiful, elegant color
on our front porch.
There's nothin' more Southern than that.
- Like so many things in the South,
haint blue has a story that's complex.
A spiritual practice of
a once-enslaved people
has now become a folk
practice of an entire region.
And while some may or may
buy into one story more
than another, there's no denying
that a haint blue ceiling
makes a sit on the porch
much more pleasant.
(gentle music)
