The Dyer's Hands

The market closed early because of the rain, which was fine because Mariama had sold everything anyway. Fourteen lengths of indigo cloth, six of ochre, two of a deep red that had taken her three days to get right and that a woman from the hotel district had bought without negotiating, which meant Mariama had priced it too low. This bothered her all the way home. Not the money. The principle. The red was difficult. It came from kola nut bark, boiled for hours, strained through cloth, boiled again. The colour was not red exactly but the memory of red, the idea of what red would be if it had been buried in earth for a century and then brought back to light. It deserved a negotiation. It deserved someone leaning in, touching the fabric, naming a price that was too low, hearing a price that was too high, and arriving eventually at the place where both people walked away slightly dissatisfied. That was how you knew the price was right. Satisfaction meant someone had lost. Her mother had taught her this. Her mother's hands had been blue for as long as Mariama could remember. Not metaphorically. Literally blue. The indigo settled into the skin and stayed there, dyeing the creases of her palms, the beds of her nails, the lines that fortune tellers would have read if fortune tellers could get past the colour. Mariama's hands were the same now. She was thirty-four, and she had been dyeing cloth since she was twelve, and her hands had not been their original colour in over twenty years. She did not mind this. Her hands were a record. The blue was proof of work the way a carpenter's calluses were proof, or a cook's burns. You could read her profession in her skin. The workshop was behind the house, a concrete room with a corrugated roof and three large pots set into a brick stove. The pots were old. The largest one had a crack that had been repaired with wire so many times it looked like it was wearing a net. It held the indigo. The indigo was alive. This was not a metaphor either. The fermentation vat was a living thing, a culture of bacteria and chemistry that had to be fed and monitored and spoken to, according to her mother, though Mariama was not sure the speaking was strictly necessary. She fed it anyway. Ash, honey, sometimes a handful of dates. The vat responded. The colour deepened or paled depending on temperature, humidity, what you fed it, how long you waited. Every batch was different. You could follow the same process exactly and get a different blue, because the vat had its own opinions. Her daughter, Aïssatou, was eight and interested in the way children are interested in things: completely, and then not at all. She helped sometimes. She stirred the ochre pot. She hung cloth on the line. She asked questions that were either very simple or unanswerable. "Why is indigo blue?" "Because of the chemistry." "But why is the chemistry blue?" Mariama did not have an answer for this. She had looked it up once, something about molecular bonds and light wavelengths, and it had explained everything without explaining anything. The indigo was blue because it was. Her hands were blue because she put them in the indigo. Her mother's hands had been blue, and her grandmother's before that, three generations of women whose handshakes told you everything. That evening, after the rain stopped, she hung the morning's cloth on the line behind the house. The sun came out low and orange and hit the indigo fabric so that it glowed. Deep blue, almost black in the folds, almost purple where the light caught the edges. It was good cloth. She knew this not because anyone told her but because she could see her mother's blue in it, and her grandmother's blue beneath that, all the blues layered like years. Aïssatou came outside and stood next to her. She looked at the cloth, and then at her mother's hands, and then at her own, which were still their original colour, still unmarked. "When will my hands change?" she asked. "When you're ready." "How will I know?" Mariama looked at her daughter. The question deserved a negotiation — an answer that was neither too easy nor too complete, that left both of them slightly unsatisfied, which was how you knew it was right. "You'll know," she said, "when you stop wanting to wash it off."