Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is a novel by American author and playwright Ntozake Shange, first published by St. Martin's Press in 1982. Taking place primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, it is the story of three African American sisters—Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo—and their mother, Hilda Effania, as they each embark on their respective journeys toward fulfillment and empowerment. Because master weavers are part of the family's heritage, Shange creates a layered narrative that shifts in perspective among the principal characters, interwoven with correspondence, dreams, diary entries, recipes, and spells. The legacy of the women's Gullah ancestry and the memory of Daddy—the girls' father and Hilda's husband—also inform each of their movements through the world and their quests for identity and self-actualization.

The book opens in Charleston, South Carolina, as the family's youngest daughter, Indigo, plays with her dolls. These dolls have been lovingly made by hand, and each one has a specific name and accompanying personality; a deeply spiritual sense of make-believe permeates Indigo's entire life. One day, Indigo gets her period, and shortly afterward, her Uncle John gives her a fiddle. She teaches herself how to play, and her music triggers a strong response from two local boys, Spats and Crunch, who initiate her into their club, called the Junior Geechee Captains.

Throughout this section, Indigo shares her thoughts through "cartographies," little manifestos of magic and memory. By the end of the section, recipes appear as the family gets ready for the impending Christmas season, which sees the return of Indigo's older sisters, Sassafrass and Cypress, from their schools up north.



The next section focuses on Sassafrass, years later, in Los Angeles. A talented fiber artist, she lives with a fledgling and volatile saxophone player named Mitch and struggles to find the time and community necessary to nurture her art. She knows of an artists' colony in New Orleans and longs to move there but does not yet possess the determination to make such a change a reality. Instead, she moves to San Francisco after growing fed up with Mitch's abuse. This puts her in close proximity to her younger sister Cypress, who has moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in dance. Under Cypress's guidance and influence, Sassafrass seeks wholeness in writing and, like her sister, in dance.

Cypress's portion of the story centers on her attempts to find her niche in the dancing world. She abandons ballet out of frustration with its rigid rules and cultural insignificance. She then joins an African American dance troupe but does not make enough money to pay the bills. The financial limitations of her creative pursuit force her to start selling drugs to try to make ends meet. On tour with her dance troupe in New York City, where Cypress had attended school earlier in her life, she leaves the group and joins a radical feminist dance company called Azure Bosom. She moves back to New York City, and Sassafrass returns to Los Angeles.

In New York, Cypress embraces her body and her sexuality with the support she gets among her peers, who are mostly ardent feminists and lesbians. These characters shape Cypress's self-image and her understanding of herself as a woman. She has an affair with Idrina, a fellow dancer in Azure Bosom. When Idrina's longtime partner, Laura, returns from a long trip, Idrina calls off the affair with Cypress. The now-severed intensity of Cypress and Idrina's relationship leaves Cypress reeling and adrift. She takes solace in late-night visits to rundown bars. At one of these, she reconnects with Leroy McCullough, a musician acquaintance she knew in San Francisco. After spending the night together, they reignite one another's creative spark. Their relationship, too, is an intense one, fueled by mutual artistic passion. They share their lives with each other and love with a fierce abandon—until Leroy embarks on a tour to Europe for the summer. Again unmoored by the sudden undoing of a relationship, Cypress visits Idrina. She tells Idrina of a dream she had, set in a post-Armageddon world that imprisons men and punishes women for giving birth.



Later, Cypress regains her bearings after joining another dance company, one that raises money for civil rights organizations. With her political consciousness awakened, Leroy returns and asks her to marry him.

The narrative switches to Sassafrass, who has gone back to Mitch and joined the New World Found Collective, a religious, Afro-Caribbean-centric commune in Louisiana. As the group initiates Sassafrass into Santeria, Mitch descends into self-destruction. In an effort to get rid of Mitch's bad energy, Sassafrass performs a ritual in the hopes of essentially exorcising his demons. During this process, she realizes she must return home to Charleston without him.

The story then revisits Indigo, still in Charleston and now learning to play the violin. She is also a midwife. A pregnant Sassafrass comes home, and Indigo delivers her baby. With Cypress and Mama Hilda in attendance, the women welcome the new baby into life—life: with all its beauty, complexities, and inordinate joys.