ON THE DAY OF THE PARTY, THANDI IRONS A MODEST GREEN dress that falls below her knees. With a big white collar, white buttons, pleats and a bow in the back, it’s a perfect cover for the daring dress she intends to change into once she gets to the restaurant. Grandma Merle had sewn the green dress for Delores when she was Thandi’s size. Delores kept the dress so that it could be passed on to Margot, then Thandi. In the mirror above the vanity she spies her clear complexion; the lightness has come into her skin like a slow-moving mixture of condensed milk and Milo. Truth be told, she hasn’t given much thought to the party, medical school, or her bleaching regimen since Charles. But after seeing Miss Violet, the ugliness of being black and poor remains like intaglio on her mind. It’s the one thing that connects her to Miss Violet’s sickness, Margot’s restlessness, and Delores’s intermittent wrath. After being inside Miss Violet’s shack, she saw, with overwhelming dread, what might become of her. That day she rushed home to the shack, and there, before the mirror, rubbed her skin with the Queen of Pearl and Miss Ruby’s concoction mixed with hydrogen peroxide until it was raw and tender. But no matter how hard and how frequently she rubs, the imprint of Charles’s mother remains, for it’s indelible.
Delores comes in from the outhouse and sees Thandi looking at herself in the mirror.
“Is where yuh going?” she asks, putting a roll of toilet paper on a small table.
“They having last minute extra lessons today at school, remembah I told you? Since the exam started this week.” She returns to ironing the dress.
Delores nods. She’s filling up a basket with souvenirs to sell at the market later. Delores is in high spirits today. A big ship is coming into Falmouth, though it’s Saturday. Thandi looks at the rag dolls and the coasters and key chains and handcrafted jewelry that Delores delicately places inside the basket. How would visitors know the real stories behind the faces of the wooden masks they’d buy to hang on walls; the rag dolls they’d use to decorate unused furniture in their houses; the figurines they’d place on mantels that they can marvel at then quickly forget? The smell of something burning brings Thandi’s attention from her mother’s basket to the brown outline the iron has branded into the dress. Thandi quickly removes the iron, but pieces of the green fabric have attached themselves to the hot metal surface. She gasps, looking both ways for a solution, as though one would materialize out of the steam. Delores runs over to the board when she hears the hissing sound of the iron. “What yuh do to di dress?” she yells, surveying the damage—the burned spot, ruining the polyester fabric that had survived years of washing and drying in the sun, and the hems that had been stitched with the care and precision by Mama Merle’s then-abled fingers. All gone.
“Sorry, Mama. Ah wasn’t paying attention,” Thandi says.
They haven’t said much to each other since that night when Thandi showed her the drawing and told her that she wants to be an artist. When Thandi looks up again, Delores is regarding her closely. Thandi lowers the dress. “What?”
“Don’t what me.” Delores is stepping closer. “What is it yuh using on yuh face?”
“Nothing, Mama. I wash it wid soap. That’s all.”
“Yuh t’ink me is a eeediot?”
“No, Mama.”
“Then be honest wid me, Thandi . . . how come yuh look like yuh a spar wid di dead?”
Thandi touches her face, pretending to not have noticed the change. Miss Ruby was right. Her skin has lightened to how she wanted it by today. Just in time for Dana’s sweet sixteen party tonight. “It’s how me skin stay,” she says. “I’ve not been in the sun, since I’ve been studying so hard.”
“Don’t romp wid me, Thandi.” Delores puts her hands on her hips, her chest swelling.
“I’m telling the truth.”
“You been going to dat Miss Ruby?”
“No, Mama.”
“Tell me di god truth!”
Thandi beholds her pale hands. She can actually see her veins. How green and expansive they are; the sight of them inflating her lungs. She wants to show off her new skin so she’ll be like the others, the ones who don’t have to sit patiently, looking forward to the Day of Judgment, expecting its sweet relief. For heaven is right here, in her lightened skin. See? See? She got what she wanted; and she doesn’t have to wait until she gets to someplace in the sky.
“Why, Thandi?” Delores’s hands drop to her sides. “Lawd Jesus have mercy pon me!” She whips around to face the shadows perched nearby in the early morning before the sun scatters them. Like little black birds that crowd the branches of the pawpaw trees by the foot of the river, the shadows seem to descend with Delores’s presence. “Yuh see me dying trial?” she says to them. “Di chile bleaching har skin, tun white woman undah me roof!”