"Good. And this?"

"Pennyroyal, for insects."

"Don't tell no buckra about how fast your head work, girl," she said. "They take you straight to the river and drown you."

Not long after we planted the indigo, Georgia announced that she was going to make me very sick, but only to ensure that I wouldn't die later. She said we needed time, and that this was the good time to do it. There was sickness going around the country, she said. In Charles Town. In the low-country. In crowded areas. The sickness came and went, she said, and when it came it took many lives. Georgia said she had learned from an old low-country woman how to prevent the pox.

"I fix you up so it don't kill you," she said.

I told her that I didn't want a knife touching any part of my body.

"Just a little piece of your arm," she said.

Still I refused.

"Look here," she said, baring her shoulders and back. I saw numerous pockmarks. "That's all you get. Some of these marks. I make you sick so that you don't die."

"When?"

"Now. You got time to get better before indigo harvest."

"But Mamed will beat me if I don't work," I said.

"Mamed knows. Years back, I done fix him up against the pox."

I started to cry. She grabbed my jaw.

"Stop that now. I fix you up like you my own family."

Using a sharp knife, Georgia made a cut in my forearm. I was expecting the worst pain imaginable, but it was a quick cut, only an inch long and not too deep. Into the cut, she pushed a bit of thread that she said had come from another man that she had made sick in the very same way. She closed up the cut and placed elderberry lard over it.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"For now," she said.

"No more cutting?"

"No more cutting. But sickness comes soon."

"When?"

"'Bout seven days."

Georgia made me stay put in her little home. I could not go out. I had to eat inside, and use the waste bucket inside. I nearly went out of my mind with boredom. I was feeling fine, and there was nothing to do. I argued with her about sitting all day in the dark, damp hut, but she insisted. Then the fever came. My bones and back felt like they were splitting. It subsided quickly.

"Now can I go?" I asked.

"You not done yet," Georgia said.

The fever came back. I had a headache so bad that I had to lie down and cover my eyes against the light. When I leaned over the bed to vomit, I saw one of my teeth fall into the pail. Within a day, sores began to fester in my mouth and nose.

"It will smell so bad that you hate yourself," Georgia said, "but don't worry. It will pass. The smell will go away. Don't you pay it no mind."

Sores started breaking out on my body. The ones on the soles of my feet stung the most. They gave off such a stench that I was ashamed to be near Georgia. I couldn't bear the smell of myself.

"I knows the smell. I am used to it. You got good sores," she said.

"What do you mean, 'good'?" I asked. My voice was barely a whisper. I could not get out of bed. I wanted to die.

"The sores are apart. One here. One there. Not together. Not touching. And you only have ten of them. Ten is good."

I remained sick for nearly half a cycle of the moon. The blisters turned to scabs. I promised myself that if I ever got better, I would never complain- not even to myself-about having to work hard in the sun, or having to work for the buckra. My strength began to return, and eventually turning in the bed became less painful. Then I was sitting again, moving around the cabin and able to eat a bit of dinner. When the last scab fell off, Georgia said I was better.

"Go out and get some respiration," she said. "You be working again soon enough."

She checked me over and over that summer. "You got off easy. Just a few pockmarks and none on your face."

I said I was relieved about that.

"Pockmarks on your face a good thing, chile."

"Why?"

"You need something to ugly you up. You're like a flower now, and that ain't good."

GEORGIA WAS RIGHT. I was well in time for the indigo harvest. The night before it began, Georgia and I lugged buckets from a storehouse and set them outside the other Negroes' doors.

"What is that for?" I asked.

"Piss," Georgia said.

That night, all fifty slaves on Appleby's plantation stood or squatted over the buckets to urinate. And the next morning, Georgia and I hauled each stinking one down to the vats that I had scrubbed so carefully in the spring. By the time we were finished hauling, Mamed and all the others were assembled. Mamed gave orders, but everyone but Fomba and I knew exactly what to do. Mamed set Fomba to chopping down the indigo plants close to the ground. Fomba couldn't follow the instructions. Mamed pulled him to the side, put another man in his place, and then told me to bundle the indigo stems and leaves in my arms and put them in the vats.

"Not so fast," Georgia said, panting to keep up with me. On the outskirts of our busy group, I saw Appleby. He had been gone for a few months, and I had stopped thinking about him.

"Master Apbee watching," I whispered, "and Mamed said hurry."

"Not that much. It too hot. You got to last all day. You got to do this nice and easy."

The indigo scratched my arms badly. I was in a hurry to get it away from my skin, so I dumped it quickly into a vat. Mamed's cane crashed across my leg. I was furious that Mamed had hit me again, especially after I had worked so hard to clean the vats earlier in the spring. In that moment, I wasn't afraid of him. I was only angry.

Mamed grabbed my arm. "Smooth walking," he said. "Hurry, but don't run. The indigo is like a sleeping baby. Walk smooth, so it doesn't wake."

I tried to shake loose of his grip, but he held on to me.

"Look," he said, pointing to the leaves in Georgia's arms. "See that fine powder?" I saw the trace of dust on the leaves. "You shake the leaves, the dust falls off. We work for the dust. The dust is what we want. Smooth walking. Gentle with the plants."

I looked fiercely at Mamed, but then I noticed Appleby watching carefully. The flies and mosquitoes buzzed around us, getting into my ears and hair. Two Negroes used the cedar boughs to fan Appleby, and four more fanned the vats to keep the insects from landing.

"Gentle," I repeated. "Gentle."

Mamed let go of my arm and I slid back into the flow of work, moving as he'd told me. An hour later, Appleby pulled me aside.

"You. Meena."

I was surprised that he knew my name. I gazed down at my feet, as Georgia had taught me.

"You sensible nigger?"

"Yessir."

"You learn fast," he said.

"Just sensible, Master Apbee."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve years," I said.

"What can you do?"

Georgia had prepared me for this question. "Make soap and slop hogs," I said.

"Is that all?"

"No, sir."

"What else can you do?"

I saw Georgia watching. "Hoe fields," I said. "Clean vats, catch babies."

"How you learn that?"

"Done learn it from Georgia," I told Appleby.

"Girl, what are these marks on your neck?"

"Dunno, Master."

"Girl, you had the pox?"

"Dunno, Master."

"Keep working and listen to Georgia," he said.

"Yes, Master."

Appleby turned away from me and back to Mamed. "She'll turn out fine next season," he said, and left for the big house.

Returning to work, I helped let the stinking liquid run into the second set of vats, to which were attached long, forked poles. At the end of each pole was a bucket with the bottom cut out. Georgia showed me how to use the pole to stir the liquid. I had to stir violently and consistently. I stirred one vat, and right next to me Georgia stirred another. My arms burned with fatigue, but Georgia stirred on and on. When I had to rest, Georgia stirred her vat with one hand and my vat with the other. I slapped at the mosquitoes and resumed stirring. Eventually the liquid in the second set of vats began to foam. Mamed added oil from a separate leather bucket. When blue mud formed at the bottom of the vats, the water was drawn off into a third set of vats.

"This here is what we want," Georgia said, pointing to the mud in the second vat.

While the mud dried, Georgia and I waved the cedar boughs to keep the flies away. Mamed and the men scooped the mud into heavy sacks and hung them up so the liquid could drip out. Then we used wide, flat paddles to spread out the mud in a drying shed. It was hard to keep from choking on the stink when we formed the mud into cakes and loaded it into wooden casks.

We worked from darkness in the morning until darkness at night. In the yard outside our home, Georgia and I kept a fire burning under a huge cauldron of water. Before we went to bed, no matter how late it was and no matter how much our arms ached, we scooped out buckets of water, carried them off to the woods, and washed ourselves clean under the stars.

"What they do with all that mud?" I asked.

"Turns the white man's clothes blue," Georgia said.

"That mud is for their clothes?"

"Last time he came by, Master Apbee was wearing a blue shirt. Ain't you seen it?"

I told her I didn't remember.

"Fifty niggers pull piss out of mud for Master Apbee's shirt," she said.

Georgia grumbled about all the hard work during the harvest, but she too was drawn to the indigo. Because Georgia tended to Mamed's sores and cuts, he let her take small quantities of indigo leaves and one or two pouches of mud. Georgia could make a paste from the leaves to ease the hemorrhoids that women developed while straining to push out their babies, but she also used the mud for her own experiments.

"Here I is, a grown woman messing with mud," she said, snorting and laughing.

I sat on my haunches and watched as Georgia stirred water into indigo mud in a big gourd. "Can't say why I like it so. When I was just knee high, I had a blind dog. He was a pretty dog, never bit a soul, and stone blind. Couldn't see a thing. But I didn't know any more than that dog. Stick in the mud was all I saw. I just loved to poke that stick in the mud."

Georgia left some cloth to soak in the gourd. By the next morning, the cloth had turned a light shade of blue. When she pulled it from the gourd and held it up in the sun, the cloth looked like it had been cut out of the sky. While we worked, she set the cloth back in the liquid. When she stretched it out again it was darker, more purple, like my favourite flower in the woods-blue-eyed grass. Georgia shook her head and dunked it again. This time it turned the colour of a night sky with a full moon glowing.

"There," Georgia said, and set it by the fire.

When Georgia's hair was finally covered by the dried, dyed cloth, I paused to admire the shade of indigo above the wrinkles by her eyes and the corners of her mouth. It seemed that both the scarf and the face had soaked up the wisdom and the beauty of the world.

For weeks we harvested and processed indigo. On the last day of our work, I dropped a sack of indigo mud. It fell onto the ground and was completely spoiled. Mamed grabbed my arm fiercely, his fingers pushing into my tired muscle.

"Allahu Akbar," I cried out without thinking. I feared Mamed would beat me for uttering a trace of the forbidden prayer, but he released my arm and stepped away. "Allahu Akbar," he murmured so that only I could hear.

He motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the woods.

"How did you learn those words?" he whispered.

"From my father."

"He spoke Arabic?"

"In prayer." I watched his cane, which was still by his side. "Are you going to beat me again?"

"For what?"

"For saying the words. For saying I had a father."