COLORS
Title: Colors
Fandom: Kinda, sorta PATF related. Delves into the background of my character, Lee.
Rating: T. for teen.
Notes: A gift for mel, to show my appreciation to his reply about Manon, I wanted to share a little bit of background with one of my creations. I hope it's as good as yours, mel!
While I was writing, I listened to this:
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She never saw her mother’s real hair color. Analee realized this only a mere month before her death. She wondered how this went by her. This was her mother, after all. All of those empty bottles of black hair tonic that she carelessly left in the open were a sight that was not uncommon but, it was rare.
There were times when the color faded and Lee would take notice of this strange change in her mother’s appearance. Sometimes, her hair became a light brown, not as red as Auntie Aggie’s, but Lee would find it pretty. There were times when it did come out as red as Aunt Aggie’s and then Lee would comment on how her mama looked like the mermaids in her books. But, the rarest (and the most beautiful of her mother’s discolorations, in her opinion) was whenever it became streaked with a honey-yellow hue.
Lee could easily pick out it when she hung out the laundry during the summers. And every time Lee commented on how her hair’s raven hue would change, her mother would quickly drop what she was doing and run to the bathroom with a bottle of, “Dr. Sutherland’s Hair Potion” and refused to come out until an hour later.
After that hour, her mother’s hair was black again. And for some reason, the young girl felt some remorse at the thought of her mother doing such a thing to herself. Silently, the girl buried that feeling within herself. She was already picked on at school for having a mother that could pass for white already (not that her own skin tone helped with that notion).
Her mother had blue eyes and skin that was the shade of wheat during the summer months and paper white in winter. The fellow black ladies of Biloxi, who could afford to put on airs and look down on the poorer blacks and their families, chit chatted about her mother’s background and how her actions in public (she was usually quiet during Church services and listened whenever gossip was spread) deemed her as an “uppity, yellow-boned bitch” and “Do not get me started on that ol’, crazy ass husband of hers! He and them voodoo remedies, I bet he done sol’ his soul to the devil hisself!”
Once their children got a hold of these talks, they used this as ammunition to break the Pontelier siblings’ self-confidence.
The first (and last) time that gave Lee an idea of her mother’s hair color, was when she gave birth to Bernard. Bernard was originally a fraternal twin; his sister (who was christened Bernadine) was a stillborn. On a below freezing night in February, it was too late to find a midwife to tend to her mother, so Father tried to help with her delivery. And after a few hours, Bernard was born, cooing and tiny (Lee commented that he smelled funny), but Bernadine was silent and still. Mother was heartbroken, but she allowed her older children (Lee and her three older brothers) to see the babies.
Bernard’s hair was an inky black, like all of mother’s children, but when she saw Bernadine, there was a tuft of blonde curls nestled on the infant’s head. After some tears and hugs, father sent them all away to bed. In the morning, Bernadine’s body was gone (she was sent to a local funeral home to be embalmed) and mother sat at the breakfast table nursing a healthy, baby boy who was named Bernard, “bear hardy”, after a relative that had passed when she was a little girl.
During Bernadine’s Wake, she noticed that her little sister’s hair changed from blonde, to deep black. Lee looked to her mother, who used her solemn, blue eyes to answer her confused, pleading, brown ones.
She said nothing and ran outside to play with the neighborhood children.