Everybody said she was just too ornery to hold a decent conversation. But that wasn’t true. What was true was that Indigo had always had to fight Cypress and Sassafrass just to get them to listen to her. They thought they were so grown. So filled up with white folks’ ways. They didn’t want to hear about the things Aunt Haydee knew. Indigo watched her mother over huge vats of dyes, carrying newly spun yarn from the pots to the lines and back again. Sassafrass, throwing shuttles back and forth and back and forth. Cypress tying off cloth, carrying the cloth to the stairway where she began the appliqués the family was famous for. There was too much back and forth going on for anybody to engage little Indigo in conversations about the haints and the Colored. If the rhythm was interrupted, Sassafrass would just stare at the loom. Cypress would look at her work and not know where to start or what gauge her stitches were. Mama would burn herself with some peculiarly tinted boiling water. Everybody would be mad and not working, so Indigo was sent to talk to the dolls. All the dolls in the house became hers. And the worlds Sassafrass wandered in her weaving, and those Cypress conjured through her body, were lost to Indigo, who handled three-way conversations with her cloth companions all alone.

A girl-child with her dolls is unlikely to arouse attention anywhere, same as little boys with footballs or Davy Crockett hats. So Indigo would sneak from the place she’d been put (the corridor around the back porch), and take her friends out visiting. Old ladies loved for Indigo and Company to pass by. They would give her homemade butter cookies or gingerbread. They offered teas and chocolates, as well as the Scriptures and the legends of their lives. Indigo only had colored dolls and only visited colored ladies. She didn’t like Miz Fitzhugh, who fawned over Cypress and Sassafrass like they were ’most white. No, Mrs. Yancey with the low, secret voice and seventeen million hundred braids was Indigo’s friend. And Sister Mary Louise who kept a garden of rose bushes and herbs was Indigo’s cut-buddy, down to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

Streets in Charleston wind the way old ladies’ fingers crochet as they unravel the memories of their girlhoods. One thing about a Charlestonian female is her way with little things. The delicacy of her manner. The force of ritual in her daily undertakings. So what is most ordinary is made extraordinary. What is hard seems simple. Indigo listened to their tales, the short and long ones, with a mind to make herself a doll whose story that was, or who could have helped out. When her father died, Indigo had decided it was the spirit of things that mattered. The humans come and go. Aunt Haydee said spirits couldn’t be gone, or the planet would fall apart.