“Show me too. I wanta know too.” Indigo stuck a needle in the bosom of the dollie & stood up, ready for her first lesson at the barre.

Hilda wisht her husband Alfred could see the girls lined up by the kitchen sink, taking a ballet lesson from Cypress, while Sassafrass recited Dunbar. They were so much his children: hard-headed, adventurous, dreamers. Hilda Effania had some dreams of her own. Not so much to change the world, but to change her daughters’ lives. Make it so they wouldn’t have to do what she did. Listen to every syllable come out that white woman’s mouth. It wasn’t really distasteful to her. She liked her life. She liked making cloth: the touch, the rhythm of it, colors. What she wanted for her girls was more than that. She wanted happiness, however they could get it. Whatever it was. Whoever brought it.

“Oh. I can’t imagine how I forgot. I think that Skippie Schuyler boy is having a party on Christmas Eve. & I do believe there’s an invitation on the table by the front door.”

“Skippie Schuyler, the doctor’s son, invited us, Mama?”

“Well, I don’t see why not. You’re getting better training & education than anybody else in Charleston. You certainly are the prettiest girls I’ve seen round here for a long time.”

Sassafrass ran to get the invitation. Firm white paper with gold printing.

Eugene Alphonso Schuyler, III
invites
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
to a
Christmas Eve Wassail
Six to Nine O’Clock     Chaperoned/R.S.V.P.

Indigo jumped up & down. “Mama, Mama, he invited me! Me! He doesn’t even know me!”

“No, but he might have heard there was a beautiful child gone astray with those Geechee Capitans,” Hilda remarked.

Sassafrass & Cypress looked hard at Indigo. “You’ve been being a what?” Cypress screeched.

“A Jr. G.C., but I resigned. I resigned.”

“Well, I don’t see anything so bad about it, Mama. She’ll never meet those kinds of fellas at Eugene Alphonso Schuyler III’s house. Thank God for the colored people.”

“Sassafrass, are you crazy? Indigo can’t be runnin’ the streets with those hoodlums.” Cypress was incensed with her sister’s cavalier attitude. Those kinds of fellas killed people, maimed people. She’d seen it where she lived on the Lower East Side.

“Look, Cypress, except for some rich little colored boys just like Skippie at our ‘Brother’ school, I haven’t seen any Negroes in over 5 months. Any Negro whose color don’t wash off is a treasure now. Believe me.”

“But, I said I had resigned. I want to go to Skippie’s party. Really I do.” Indigo couldn’t understand the tension between her sisters. What was the matter? They were all going. Then Indigo remembered the Wheeler girls. Those skinny yellow girls.