The section begins with Aminata finding out she is pregnant with Chekura’s child. She meets Solomon Lindo, the state indigo inspector. He offers to buy her, but is refused. Aminata decides she wants to get married to Chekura, since she’s carrying his child. Robinson finds out, and forcibly shaves her head in the middle of the yard as punishment. She still has the baby, though, and names him Mamadu, after her father. When Mamadu is around ten moths old, he is stolen, and sold so far away even the fishnet can’t reach him. Afterwards, Aminata retaliates against Appleby by doing nothing, and he eventually gets so fed up he sells her to Solomon Lindo. She moves to Charles Town with Lindo, where she eats far better, and has less work. Lindo teaches her to read more, and she becomes a midwife-for-hire in Charles Town. She learns to barter and about arithmetic, and begins doing Lindo’s books. She does errands and writes business letters for Lindo. She catches the babies of Dolly and Mrs. Lindo. Lindo gives her a gift, the knowledge of where she came from, and is taken to the Charles Town library, where she sees a map of Africa, which confuses her, as there is little information about where she came from on it. Smallpox sweeps through Charles Town, and most of the household dies. Lindo leaves for New York City, and Aminata is somewhat lost in the time he’s gone, but Chekura reappears. He quite quickly disappears, though not before telling Aminata Lindo sold their son. They don’t speak aside from a fight when he returns until they leave to New York at the end of the reading.
I know how she felt when Mrs. Lindo died, because Mrs. Lindo was like a mother to her, and my own mother died rather unexpectedly three years ago. I know how she grieved, and I recognized a lot of the patterns in my grieving in hers. We both lash out at those close to us, and felt alone afterwards, because someone important had been wrenched away from us. It was also different, though, in that I kept my feelings far too bottled up, and she let them all wash out in a torrent. I busied myself, like Lindo did. I feel like this was one really effective area, where I could empathize and not have it ripped away immediately, and this really propelled me through the rest of the book. I was asking questions for once, and not just reading it for the sake of reading it. It made the book fun for me, though it wore off by the end.