On the first of April, we began our Pox Party. The handsome equipages of the wealthy delivered them up to our doorstep — the Young Men, their spouses, their children, their friends. There was, first, a reception in the parlor, animated with the same frisson of excitement that accompanies the tumbling of acrobats in high spaces.

Well do I recall the finery. Men of business wore waistcoats trimmed with silver galloon. Boston ladies, their skirts all passementarie and furbelow, India silk and jaconet, crowded the chambers, swiveling their hoops and panniers like dames on clocks to navigate the doors. The arrival of their trunks and their servants was advertised by the clamor of feet, heavy-laden, in the hall.

Following light refreshment, we were asked to form a queue leading back through the passage to the newly appointed philosophical apartments. The queue was fairly abuzz with gossip and greetings, the pleasantries of long acquaintance or new. I stood silently behind my mother, where we had been directed, waiting just behind the white denizens of the house, just before the other Negro servants; and we listened to the glad hubbub of the meandering line, the cries of “Ah, sir!” and “Your most affectionate . . .”; inquiries regarding the whereabouts of aunts; rapid intelligences between the ladies respecting flounces, petticoats, and stomachers, the quality of the civic mud.

At the front of the line waited Mr. Gitney by a birthing chair, his instruments laid out before him. As each guest sat and presented a bare arm, he spoke briefly with them of some small matter, asking them of the welfare of their hound or the qualities of the wine they had brought; and then gouged them with a scalpel and inserted into the wound a length of hair wet with pus from a victim in Salem.

Once the corruption was deep within them, Dr. Trefusis and Mr. Sharpe bound their arms with cloths.

Two little boys, dressed in identical gowns, were hopping in line, piping, “Now me! Next is me!”

“Octavian,” said Mr. Gitney to me, full of cheer. “Know you that this remedy was first proposed by the inhabitants of Africa?” He rolled my sleeve to reveal my forearm. “It came hither by way of industrious slaves and Constantinople. As with so much medicine, the Arabs hath preceded us, know you . . . Averroës and Avicenna and such like. In Constantinople, too, they institute parties for the variolation against the pox. It is said that they —” He pierced me with the blade. I gasped.

I perceived a jolt — and trembled — as he laid the hair in my blood.

“Through corruption,” he said, “you shall be healed.”

Later that afternoon, servants unfurled great red silk flags from each window, on which were sewn, GOD HAVE MERCY UPON THIS HOUSE, as was statutory for a house infected with the pox; and as the banners snapped to their full extent, the company assembled all applauded with their fingers on their palms; for the pox party had begun.