THE WHITE ROOM
I had only ever seen my daddy laugh twice. Once when we were having a family portrait taken and the cameraman said, “Make it look natural!” He came alive then, talking and laughing with us. He threw me into the air and caught me while my brother and sister clung to his feet laughing. Just when the fun was ebbing away, he grabbed my mother, dipped her low and kissed her. It was the only time I had ever seen my parents kiss.
I was four then, every photoshoot after that we had to wear stuffy dress up clothes and our matching well-starched smiles. I really couldn’t bother with the whole thing. My joy was outside running through the banana bush then trying not to itch when Mommy ask where I coming from.
Her voice was pretty-pretty, even when she was vex with me it never sound so. I could answer “I been playing in the yard”; with Daddy my answer had to be well-starched, “I was having fun in the backyard Papa.”
My siblings didn’t have that problem. They were older and more “cultured”. Their tongue did not trip up over itself like frighten mongoose when talking to daddy. They got everything from their mommy and Daddy; I got my mother’s tongue.
I also got her kinky hair which daddy made me get permed when I was eight. I bawl for bloody murder the entire time and he tell me if I behave good we could go for ice cream and watch a movie. I was quiet for the rest of my colonization and the perfect little lady. The ice cream place was closed on Sundays and we didn’t see a movie.
My daddy was a lot more pleased with me when my hair was bone straight. He would pull it over my shoulders to frame my face and pat my head with a small smile. I thought of his fingers brushing my cheeks every time I battled my tongue to make the words come out proper.
I didn’t think about his fingers the day I went into the white room. My siblings suggested we play hide and seek, I was always the seeker even though they were older. Geneviève said it would give me practice with counting before she scurried off to catch up with Mark-Anthony. I was eleven then, and damn tired of trying to catch up with them- I never could. If I didn’t want to be found I would go to the one place we weren’t allowed, Daddy’s white room.
The day I cracked open the door I was no longer the same. Everything was completely white. I was the only object of colour but for once that excited me. I shut the door behind me and began to look around. There really wasn’t much to see, two white leather couches, white Persian rug, white statue of some naked man. It was boring, but new all the same.
And so I bend down behind the couch, let them come and find me for once nuh? I fell asleep and woke what felt like hour later. Not a soul had come looking.
“Just in time for dinner,” Mommy smiled when I came round the corner.
She looked and sounded perfect as usual but did not ask where I’d been. I suppose that’s why I returned to the white room the next day, and the day after that. I found things to do in my mind. It was so much easier to be creative when the entire room was a blank canvas. I splattered my thoughts everywhere until upon entrance I no longer saw white.
That’s why that day I did not hear him enter. I was so engrossed in my world that I didn’t see the new white addition to the room until I heard my name in a low whisper, “Ebony.”
I jumped as the venom in that one word coursed through me. Daddy stared at me as if my bone straight hair and well-starched smile could not save me. I wanted to ask him if he could not see the wonderful world I had created but the anger in his eyes violently snapped me out if it.
My world disappeared and was immediately replaced with the blinding white reality. The gravity of my situation sunk in as Daddy stalked towards me and I know he no longer saw me, only my mother when she arrived from St. Vincent, someone to be tamed…before she became his.
I knew he only saw a refractory element in his life that refused to fall in line. Then being the only ebony object in the room, no longer felt so sweet.