“What color your eyes now?” he mocked. He began to cough again.

Ignoring him, she went on. “When I was a babe, I would crawl to the edge of the crib to look up at the sky. Every shade of blue there is, I seen. Bright, fire, water, berry, midnight, new.”

I stopped her. “What is new blue?” I said.

“Mmm, a blueberry before it ripens.”

I pictured it.

“But, when I started in the field,” she went on, “I got no time—no time. I stop looking up.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “This is all very strange, but how else can I explain it?”

“Maybe you inherited your eyes from your sire,” I offered.

She shook her head vehemently, drawing her hand back from mine, as if my words were contagious. “You believe that?” she asked. She sounded incredulous, as if she couldn’t fathom why I didn’t know better. “And why do you think the Kongo got dark skin?” she asked. She answered her own question, pointing a convinced finger into the air. “This skin is our toil.” She slapped the table beneath her. “We got this skin working this earth. We put our whole head in the dirt. Our whole body. We got it all over, real bad, see?” She held up her forearm for my observation. “We been bent to toil so long; it be a fence, and we ’bout can’t get out.”

She was half sitting with consternation, and I patted her hand with my gloved palm to calm her.

“Listen to me, daughter,” she said, urgently. “Write this down.”

I positioned my quill to let her know I was ready.

“You don’t belong to that skin. You got to look up.” Saddened by her confusion, I nodded.

“You remember that,” she warned. “You still got time. Not like me. I dying.”

“Don’t say that.”

She placed a hand on mine, as if I was the one in need of comfort. She rubbed the fine bones of my hand and closed her eyes.

“Arika.”

I glanced up at William, then back at the woman. She was sleeping peacefully. “What is her name? I forgot to ask.”

“We call her Sky.”

I nodded and wrote her name above her story in elaborate cursive, letting the tail of the last letter wing out to the edge of the page.

“Come, Arika. We must do more.”

He nudged me on to the next table.

The Uncle, Kiwi

THE UNCLE, KIWI