Indigo’s womanhood
We encounter an interesting character in the beginning of Sassafras, Cyprus & Indigo. Indigo is a young woman who is caught in a situation where she has an active imagination and childlike characteristics while beginning to mature physically into a woman. She enjoys playing with her dolls and visiting her neighbors to receive cookies and treats from them. However, her mother and sisters criticize her for holding on to this “childhood”. Indigo challenges the conceptions of what is expected of a woman. She does not care for the typical standards of womanhood that others want her to be held to. It challenges us to think of how these standards came to be and what it may mean for women of color who may be criticized even more harshly for not following them. These standards were usually propagated and enforced by men who expected a certain purity and calmness of women. The hippocracy is that many of these standards contradict themselves. They were built to try to pursue “whiteness” as closely as possible and try to refrain from anything out of that realm.