The Color of Secrets

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  The cool darkness of the cinema was a relief after the stifling jostle of the streets. She could take her hat off now. No one would see her hair. As she bent down to push the hat under her seat, something brushed against her face: the hem of the usherette’s dress as she guided people to their seats. A heady scent of poppies drifted in her wake. The red glow of her torch was like a magic wand pointing the way to a secret world.

  Louisa gasped when the pink satin curtains rippled back. She was transfixed by the enormous screen. A box of popcorn lay untouched on her lap as she gazed awestruck at Snow White singing into the wishing well.

  That night, when she was supposed to be in bed, she stood in front of the strip of mirror on her wardrobe door. She had rolled the long arms of her blouse up past her elbows to look like puffed sleeves and draped her blue bedspread around her waist to make a long skirt. An old black shawl of her aunt’s was pinned to look like a bodice and a red ribbon was tied hair-band-style around her head.

  Eddie caught sight of her reflection as he walked across the landing. “What are you doing, love?” He gave her a look that hovered between a frown and a smile. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Do you like me, Dad?” She glanced at him before staring back into the mirror. “I’m Snow White.”

  Chapter 23

  SEPTEMBER 1954

  On the first day at her new school Louisa was mesmerized by what met her eyes as she slid into her seat. It was the back of a neck, nestling in the white collar of a regulation shirt, as snug as a chestnut in its padded case. She couldn’t see the girl’s face. In fact she only knew it was a girl when the hunched figure raised its head, revealing dozens of tiny plaits caught up with shiny black hair clips.

  Louisa fingered her own hair, which her mother had fashioned into long, sausage-like ringlets by winding it in strips of rag the night before. “Who’s that?” she whispered to the girl sitting beside her.

  “Beverley Samuel,” was the hissed reply. “I don’t like her. She smells.”

  “Does she?” Louisa glanced sideways. Sylvia Barker was supposed to be looking after her. But the look in her eyes was like the farm cats back in Wales when a duckling strayed into the yard.

  “They smell too.” Sylvia jerked her head at two children sitting together on the other side of the classroom, both with their heads down, writing in exercise books. “Their dad’s got a shop round the corner, but it stinks of curry. I went in once and nearly puked.”

  Louisa studied the pair carefully. Their skin was lighter than Beverley’s: just a little darker than her own. One had a small bun with a white handkerchief twisted over it, and the other had a thin plait with pink ribbon woven into the end; the braid was so long that it snaked over the back of the chair. The one with the bun wore gray school trousers, while the other wore a tunic over what looked like shiny black pajama bottoms.

  “Are they girls or boys?” she whispered

  “Both,” Sylvia hissed. “They’re twins: Harjinder and Narinder.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “Pakistan,” Sylvia hissed.

  “And what about her?” Louisa’s eyes fixed on the back of Beverley Samuel’s neck.

  “Jamaica.”

  “Oh.” Louisa was confused. “Not America?”

  Sylvia gave her a patronizing smile. “America? Colored people don’t come from America!”

  When the bell rang for playtime, Louisa found herself shuffling along in a crocodile toward the school yard. As soon as they were out of sight of the teacher, Sylvia vanished. Louisa stood forlornly, bewildered by the screams and yells of so many children. It had been so different at Devil’s Bridge. Including herself, there were only sixteen children in the whole school. This playground was a blur of bodies, everyone running and shouting.

  At the far end of the yard she spotted Beverley Samuel. She was playing by herself, throwing rubber balls against a high brick wall and catching each one expertly before the next bounced back at her. Louisa wondered if she had any friends.

  “Do you want to play?” The voice came from behind her. A small girl in a green dress and a white fluffy cardigan was holding out the wooden handle of a skipping rope. “My name’s Gina. What’s yours?”

  “Louisa—but everyone calls me Lou.” She took the handle and stood awkwardly, unsure what Gina had in mind.

  “Do you know how to skip backward?” The girl had a strange lilt to her voice: not what Lou’s dad called a Black Country accent.

  Louisa shook her head. She felt awkward. Everything about the new school was making her feel stupid. She had a sudden urge to drop the rope and run home.

  “Want me to teach you?” Gina smiled. It was a proper smile, not a spiteful one like Sylvia’s. Her dark eyes crinkled at the corners and dimples appeared in her cheeks. Louisa stood like a statue as Gina wound the rope behind her legs and put the other end in her left hand.

  Half an hour later both girls were doubled up with laughter. “Where do you come from?” Louisa asked, panting as she handed over the rope.

  “Italy.” Gina flicked the rope into a loop and skipped through it. “I’ve only been here since Easter. What about you?”

  “Wales,” Louisa replied.

  “Is that in England?” Gina asked. “Only I thought you sounded like you came from somewhere else. Like me, I mean.”

  “Well, it’s next door to England,” Louisa said, detecting the note of disappointment in Gina’s voice. “But my real dad’s American.”

  “Oh! Like Frank Sinatra? My mum’s got all his records!”

  Louisa hadn’t a clue who Gina was talking about, but she nodded eagerly. “Teach me something else,” she smiled, picking up the rope.

  When the bell rang for the end of playtime, Sylvia reappeared. “Come on,” she said, marshaling Louisa into line. As they filed past Gina on their way back to the classroom, Sylvia nudged Louisa’s arm. “I wouldn’t play with her,” she whispered. “She’s an eyetie and they eat garlic all the time. Yuck!” She eyed Louisa suspiciously. “You’re not Italian, are you?”

  “No,” Louisa mumbled, “I’m Welsh.”

  “Is that why you talk so funny?”

  A loud scraping of chairs prevented any further conversation. The children scrambled to their feet as the teacher marched into the room. Miss Pudney reminded Louisa of the old ladies from chapel who had come to look after Uncle Dai. Everything about her was gray. Her hair, her eyebrows, and even her legs were gray in their thick woolen stockings.

  “Everyone—get changed for PE!” she announced, in the kind of voice a farmer would use to round up straying cows. “Boys: football. Girls: hoops. Not you,” she said, looking at Louisa. “Tell your mother she must buy you a pair of navy-blue knickers and black plimsolls for next week.”

  The word knickers produced fits of giggles among the boys as they dived beneath their seats to scrabble about in their bags. Louisa watched as everyone else got ready to go back outside. All except Beverley, who was sitting quite still, her head resting on her hands.

  “Beverley Samuel! Why aren’t you getting changed?” Miss Pudney barked, a deep line appearing between her whiskery eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your PE kit again!”

  Beverley said nothing, her head dipping farther forward.

  “Have you actually got a PE kit?”

  Beverley mumbled something Louisa couldn’t make out.

  “What did you say?”

  “No, Miss.” Beverley sounded hoarse and close to tears.

  The teacher nodded and cast her eyes over the rest of the class. “Put your hand up,” she said in an imperious voice, “if you have a television at home.”

  Three hands went up on the far side of the classroom.

  “Hmm.” Miss Pudney’s eyebrows arched like a pair of escaping caterpillars. “Now put your hands up if you’ve got a gramophone.”

  “What’s a gramophone, Miss?” one of the twins piped up.

  “A machine that plays records, Ha
rjinder,” she replied, enunciating each word slowly and deliberately. “Who has one of those?”

  A forest of hands went up this time, including Louisa’s and Beverley’s.

  “Ah, Beverley! You have a gramophone!” A treacherous smile played on the woman’s lips as the child nodded eagerly. “Your father has the money for a gramophone and yet he can’t afford to buy you a pair of navy knickers and plimsolls? Well, children, what do you think of that?”

  Louisa heard the sniggers. She couldn’t bear to look.

  “Go and stand outside the headmaster’s office, Beverley. And you tell your parents you’ll be standing there every Monday afternoon until they buy you a PE kit!”

  There was a loud scrape as Beverley pushed her chair back. Louisa heard a muffled gulping noise. She glanced sideways. Beverley’s face was half-hidden by her arm. As she loped across the room, Louisa saw that the sleeve of her sweater had two dark patches where it had pressed against her eyes. Her shoulders convulsed with sobs.

  “Silly nigger,” Sylvia muttered under her breath.

  When the bell rang for the end of school, Louisa hung back, lingering just inside the gates with Beverley Samuel in her sights. A woman in a flowered dress who was as dark-skinned as Beverley waved to her from down the street. Beverley ran to meet her, the flash of a smile transforming her sullen face.

  Louisa walked home alone. Her mother had wanted to come and meet her, but she had begged her not to, pretending that it was more grown-up to make the short journey on her own. But that wasn’t the reason. Her mother’s presence at the school gate would have drawn attention to their differences. Both of them knew that—but neither of them talked about it, the same way that neither of them talked about the reason for her new hairstyle.

  Louisa pushed open the kitchen door quietly and went to pour herself a glass of barley water. Balancing it on a tray with some biscuits, she tiptoed into the front room.

  “Is that you, Lou?” Eva called from the yard. “Aren’t you going to come and tell me about school? It’s lovely and sunny.”

  “I’m too hot, Mam,” Louisa called back. It wasn’t a lie. She had kept her long-sleeved sweater on all day even though it was as warm as midsummer. But she wasn’t just hiding from the sun. She put down her cup and knelt on the hearth rug.

  “Frank Sinatra,” she whispered, flicking through the dog-eared sleeves of the records that were still in the cardboard box they’d traveled in from Wales. She wanted to know what an American looked like. As she neared the back of the box, her fingers froze. She was staring at the smiling face of a man with skin the color of Beverley’s. His short black hair was combed away from his face, lying in shiny waves above his broad, smooth forehead. His lips were parted in a wide smile, and there were faint, curved lines above the sweeping black bows of his eyebrows, giving his eyes a mischievous look. He wore a white shirt with a narrow black tie and a houndstooth-check jacket, beneath which were the words “Nat ‘King’ Cole.”

  She slipped the disc out of the sleeve and put it very carefully onto the turntable.

  She was not supposed to touch it, but she knew how it worked. As the words on the label spun into a blur, his voice drifted from the Dansette box. Louisa closed her eyes, trying to imagine that he was in the room with her. She listened to the words. Something about love being too hot not to cool down.

  “Louisa!”

  Her eyes snapped open. Her mother’s face, pale and tense, was framed in the doorway. Eva ran to the machine, her hand trembling as she plucked the needle from the record, cutting the voice dead.

  “I’m sorry, Mam,” Louisa began, “I only put it on because he’s colored.”

  “What?” Eva’s head whipped around, the shiny black disc in her hand.

  “He’s colored. Like my real dad, isn’t he?” Louisa bit her lip, studying her mother’s face. “Is that what he looks like?”

  Eva’s legs seemed to buckle under her. She tottered backward into the faded blue armchair under the window. She was shaking her head, her lips opening and shutting like a goldfish but no sound coming out.

  “Mam?” Louisa knelt by the chair. “Please don’t cry! I just want to know what he was like, that’s all.”

  Eva buried her face in her hands.

  “What’s his name?” Louisa persisted, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Can’t you just tell me that? I promise I won’t ask anything else . . .”

  “No!” Eva mumbled through her fingers. “I . . . I can’t remember . . .” She pressed her hands into the sockets of her eyes, tears coursing down her wrists and dripping onto the flowered cotton of her dress.

  “Don’t cry, Mam.” Louisa pleaded again, “Please—don’t!”

  That night, when Louisa was getting into bed, Eddie appeared at the door.

  “Where’s Mam?” she asked.

  “In bed, love. She’s too tired to do your hair tonight.” He opened the chest of drawers and pulled out a bundle of rags. “I’ll have a go if you like, but you’ll have to tell me what to do.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, Dad,” Louisa said as she took a strip of white muslin and knotted it close to her head. “I only asked her his name.” She set her mouth in a hard line. “Anyway, I hate him,” she muttered to herself, twisting a lock of hair tightly around the rag. “He must have done something horrible to make her cry like that. I don’t want to know anything about him—ever!”

  Eddie reached across and stroked her hair. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we go into town on Saturday? I’ll buy you a new dress, like I promised.”

  Louisa looked at him. “I’d rather go to the pictures,” she said in a small voice.

  Eddie laughed. “Are you sure?”

  Louisa nodded. “It’s my favorite thing in the whole world.”

  “Okay. How about if we take one of your new classmates?”

  Louisa frowned. She thought of Beverley, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed her way out of the classroom; the twins, whose names she struggled to remember; and Sylvia, whose spiteful words had been echoing around in her head all day. “There’s no one in my class I really like,” she said, “but there is someone at school who’s nice. Her name’s Gina. She taught me how to skip backward.”

  “Good.” Eddie smiled. “Let’s ask her, then, shall we?”

  Louisa had been warned that the film was going to be nothing like Snow White, and it wasn’t. This time the people were real. Men in smart suits and long-legged dancing girls in sequined costumes. Eddie had told her that Scared Stiff was an American film. She wanted to ask him how it all worked. How moving pictures of people and boats and cars could appear on a flat screen. But she was worried she might miss something.

  “Look,” Gina said, passing her a toffee. “It’s Dean Martin. My mum loves him nearly as much as Frank Sinatra.”

  “Oh.” Louisa squinted at the singer in the tuxedo. Her eyes flitted from the screen to Eddie. He had settled back in his seat, and his eyes were closed. “He looks just like my real dad,” she murmured.

  “Wow,” Gina hissed back. “He’s really handsome! You’re so lucky!”

  “Yes.” Louisa’s lips curved in a smile that never reached her eyes. “I am, aren’t I?”

  Chapter 24

  DECEMBER 1961

  Louisa loved Saturday nights. In the seven years since the move to Wolverhampton, the only thing that had surpassed the thrill of visiting a cinema was working in one. She loved the fusty, sweet smell of popcorn that hit you when you walked through the doors; the warm, velvety feel of the seats as the darkness descended; and the figure-hugging red uniform—a vast improvement on the navy tunic and shapeless pullover she wore on weekdays.

  Her parents hadn’t been keen on her applying for the job, but they had been so desperate for her to stay on at school that they’d agreed to the trade-off. She had planned to leave at fifteen, like Gina, and take a secretarial course, but instead she was studying for A-levels in English, history, and geography. She was the o
nly colored girl in the sixth form at Wolverhampton Girls High School, but it didn’t matter because nobody knew.

  It was a lot of work, fooling them. She took hot irons to her hair every morning and wound it into a tight bun caught up in an invisible net. This and a liberal dose of extrastrong hairspray guarded against any frizz brought on by the weather. And although makeup was strictly forbidden, she had discovered a cream in the chemist’s that was meant for teenagers with acne. With a consistency like clotted cream, it gave her skin the desired pallor. As far as her classmates were concerned, she was as white as everyone else. But she kept them at arm’s length, all the same. She never felt quite at ease with these girls, who mostly came from comfortable homes in the leafy suburbs. Perhaps it was because she knew she was deceiving them. But she had deceived Gina too, so that couldn’t be it. Whatever the reason, she simply didn’t belong. She couldn’t wait to escape at the end of the week.

  On this particular Saturday night the cinema was packed, with only a handful of seats left. She was standing at the back, by the door, when she felt it push open. A couple of latecomers muttered an apology. She flashed her torch over a tangle of arms and legs on the back row. She hated it when people came in halfway through a film. As the couple scrambled to their seats, to moans and curses from the lovers, she turned her attention back to the screen. Rita Moreno was running up the steps to the roof of a tenement building in Manhattan. This was Louisa’s favorite part of the film. She had seen it eleven times, but it never failed to thrill.

  She slipped into the little alcove where boxes of sweets were stacked from floor to ceiling. There was a hard fold-up chair for the usherettes to sit on, but she pushed it against the wall. A strip of red velvet curtain screened off the alcove, with a mesh square halfway up that allowed whoever was inside to keep an eye on the audience. And the screen.

  They were all on the roof now, the Sharks and their girlfriends. Rita Moreno was strutting and swishing the full skirt of her pink taffeta dress. Her pointed satin shoes tapped out “A-mer-i-cah.” Louisa had each movement down pat. Her uniform swirling against the sweet boxes, she sang along in the certain knowledge that no one in the audience could hear or see her. Rita Moreno sashayed across the roof, magnificent in her contempt. Stamping her feet. Spitting the words at the light-skinned boys who danced in her wake.