A Mother's Voice.

The pressing comb a mother's voice

its hot breath.

The scorching guilt of having

a daughter that nothing will straighten.

But she tries,

a mother always tries, taking

her daughter's life in her teeth,

applying love's heavy grease,

its thick pomade, pulling

hard against frail roots.

Mothers and daughters twisted

as bad births or bad hair,

reverting, emotions turning

back, locked womb and womb.

A mother's voice a pressing comb

a mother's tongue, like hot iron,

singing of good hair and good daughters.

Its hissing disappointment,

the stench of feathered desire,

and smoke rising

from a daughter's scalp.

Color

My mother taught me to color.

Her first lesson:

to hold the crayon in small fingers,

to move it round, around in small circles.

The way color moves, always in circles,

itself, itself, itself: always

coming back to the beginning.

Second lesson:

how to match them.

The darks and lights for washing,

the careful separation--lest they bleed.

I understand segregation, the space between black and white.

Third lesson:

never color outside the line,

outside the boundaries where color

does not belong, making something larger,

changing its definition.

My mother colored everything, neatly.

I found it hard, at first,

this deconstruction: what is apple

or not apple? On what side

of the line do things begin?

Self-portraits require boundaries;

so do colors. Colors need spaces where things are

brown or black. I understood color,

but could not do it.

Always some color skipped across the line,

as if escape were possible, as if

in space it could find

something more.

Janice N. Harrington is a librarian and professional storyteller who lives in Champaign, Illinois. Her story 'The Devil's Dulcimer' appears in Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African-American Storytelling.