Not all black people wanted to go to the moon. But some did. Aunt Haydee had gone to the moon a lot. She’d told Indigo about the marvelous parties there were in the very spots the white people put flags and jumped up and down erratically. They never did learn how to dance. Been round black folks all these years and still don’t have sense enough to keep in rhythm. But there they were walking on the moon, like nothing ever went on up there. Like women didn’t sidle up to lunar hills every month. Like seas of menses could be held back by a rocket launcher. Like the Colored might disappear with the light of the moon.

“We ain’t goin’ anywhere, are we?” Indigo sat some of the dolls on the inside of her thigh. Her very favorites she sat in her lap. Indigo had made every kind of friend she wanted. African dolls filled with cotton root bark, so they’d have no more slave children. Jamaican dolls in red turbans, bodies formed with comfrey leaves because they’d had to work on Caribbean and American plantations and their bodies must ache and be sore. Then there were the mammy dolls that Indigo labored over for months. They were almost four feet high, with big gold earrings made from dried sunflowers, and tits of uncleaned cotton. They smelled of fennel, peach leaves, wild ginger, wild yams. She still crawled up into their arms when she was unavoidably lonely, anxious that no living black folks would talk to her the way her dolls and Aunt Haydee did.