When It Gets Hot in the South, Staged Desegregated Beauty Pageants Protest against the Chocolate Cinderellas
A short story by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Honey, Mississippi
August 1970
Stage One: Talent
The committee told Mama that she could not have the blue.
That she bet not dare touch the white.
Not even the eggshell-white or the blue-jay-blue.
Baby-iced-blue fabrics are for Cinderellas, and Cinderellas are milk-soft and silk-cream smooth.
Eggshell eyelets are for innocent and delicate girls, from innocent and delicate upbringings.
Deep blue-jay-blue is too close sounding to deep black ‘gal’ breaths.
Mama and Daughter are allowed to be here, by law, and as they walk by, the other’ed folks demonstrate their talents by holding inside their inhales.
Stage Two: Evening Wear
Mama was given a dusky brown cotton to make formal evening wear from. When she unfolds it, whips it up and down to test its heft, it is so bedsheet-thin that it does not even make a breeze. So dull, the light just rolls right off, and scatters to the kitchen.
Light and scent form a kind of kinship in the place where canned goods make beds beneath the cabinetry, and where a triple-layered cake has been baked to celebrate a victory that has won them a right, but has not guaranteed them the crown.
For the crown, they will have to work even harder, prepare themselves for a different kind of fighting against the finest frilly-lace gloves.
___
A misted wall of gray fuzz covers the yards—dusty dew settled on bed-blades of grass. Yards, nearly acres of it because nobody likes a brown. Brown is for the tilling, to drop down seeds in a wailing well-mouth made willed to be open at the sharp edge of a hoe.
Brown is a hue of hardship.
Draped across the dress form, the fuzz does not sparkle like raindrop danburite; instead pewter parasites puncture the surface with their stylets. Withdrawing from the should-have-been eyelet. Sucking so awfully much from the surface that it cannot stunningly sweep along the floor.
___
You gone be the Chocolate Cinderella, Mama speaks from inside the kitchen. Her voice is subtle, velvety, but even so, and just as a ghostly sweet scent does, it sneaks around to Daughter offering its sugar when she needs it the most.
On a saucer, Mama delivers Daughter even more of that sweetness with a slice of her victory cake. She is supporting the sugar high, cheerleading the upping of her spirits by serving the thickest of slabs.
The sliced slab stacks.
Sheet after sheet.
Staircased near ‘bout to the top of their heads.
Mama’s chocolate cake is not just any kind of chocolate cake, but a double chocolate one that has chocolate on it, in it, and in-between it. A Hershey’s Prize Chocolate Cake recipe that she took and made all her own by swapping this for that, and that for this. More butter. More tablespoons of the good vanilla to really taste it in there. When Mama sifted the cocoa powder on top of the flour mountains, it looked like a reversing of the way things were supposed to be. Snow fell on the soil, not soil on the snow. Just the tiniest touch turned all the dry contents to the color of Daughter. Even the vanilla had been similar to a soot shade.
Every crumb of the cake was brown. The edges, vibrant and not ashed down from a white flour’s corpse-chalk dustiness.
Mama: Take a bite of this.
Daughter: Ooowee, it’s rich.
Mama: Rich! Mama rejoices, and hands her a glass of cold milk. Takeasipofdis to calm through the taste.
Daughter: Ooowee, I’m full.
Mama: Full! She praises. Set it on down and save it for later. See, that’s what chocolate do. It cut out all the other cravings you had before, makes you too filled to want anything else, afterwards. Ain’t no needin’ nothin’ else once you done had a taste of chocolate. And that’s what you gone do—full and fill the judges’ eye. ‘Make them hunger for no other contestant ‘xcept you!
___
A heaping of folks stop by the house to share in all the sweetening of Daughter.
Teachers and mates from school.
The Passa from the most prestigious church in town.
Mama and Daddy and nem’s family from up north who’d come all the way down to show up and show out. ‘To share in securing celebratory cake cuts, saved in Styrofoam containers to take back home with them, too.
And they all tell her how she already did it, and how they so proud of her, and how she gone be the one to win the whole thing.
Stage Three: The Interview
Daughter: What if the other’ed folks ask me what’s the best bit about being a brown ‘gal’?
Mama knows that you have to build a brown girl up with goodness to make all the layers of herself settle nicely. Just as to a cake, you can’t go about building her with a whole lotta shouting in the room. You gotta talk tenderly. Handle her gently. You gotta let her cool down all the way first before you can even begin the topping on. And when she do, then you can spread all the sweet stuff on her thickly, spackling and filling to every part that may have been cracked during the baking, and under the blistering hateful heat. You gotta tower a brown girl up and up and up, bit-by-bit, to make her strong on the stage-stand.
Daughter: Brown! Daughter moans. Brown as to dirt! Brown as to bowel movements! Brown as to nothin’, negro, nigger!
Mama: Brown! Mama matches. Brown as to God’s Earth. Brown...she pauses, as to the hot caramel eye of a Tiger’s. Brown as to me, and your grandmama, and the many mamas before her.
Stage Four: Physical Fitness
On the platform, press-packaged blank-skin baby dolls pose outside of their boxes—all the same, the same, the same.
Daughter has been made to stand out like a manufactured mistake-stain, made to be ripped from the conveyor belt of beauties by a white gloved hand because she does not physically belong.
That color just won’t do! Oh, no! Oh, no! That color just! Won’t! Do! Ewws added to their do, to stress their dramatic disgust. They holler—
A violent violation!
An irregular runway rebel!
A Miss Misconduct, is what you are!
The endless earth of the brown fuzzy cotton, under the Godly-mothering of Mama’s tailored-touch, had become a fudge-icing ball gown, fitted to Daughter as to a fluffy frosting.
As Daughter is escorted to the exit, her train luscious and long and moving like the melting of a hot chocolate river, the other’ed folks mumble about it looking muddier than the Mississippi.
Stage Five: Coronation Day
Outside of the segregated setup, unparalleled presences—a salt chuck of bold-skins, of infinite kinds of browns. It is a breathtaking sight that shakes away the shame felt just a few seconds before, where all the stark stares of other’edness chilled Daughter’s eyes.
While the other’ed stares stung, the brown stares soothed back. The brown, warming those eyes from the tears that had been set and ready to bow down to them and their secular power, now made impotent by the boundless brown sea-stage.
The Beautiful Brown Crowd: You did it, baby!
The Beautiful Brown Crowd: We so proud of you!
The Beautiful Brown Crowd: You may not have won with them other’ed folks, but you shoal done won with us!
A crown descends upon Daughter’s cumulonimbus afro cloud, caviar black as it strikes out and so highly up to take up space, all the space in the heavens, all the space it could ever want or need.
The crown is just as brown as to the crowd, as to Daughter, as to Mama, and Mama’s mama, and the many mamas before.
In the August sun, captured by Mama’s hugs, summer-storm-showered by Mama’s kisses, by Mama’s diamond-shaped tears now broached to the bodice of her gown, Daughter says:
Mama, brown as to gold.
The featured image is of the author’s cousin, Gillian Hallmon (center), and her fellow W.C. Williams Elementary School classmates at a parade in Greenwood, MS in 1990. Gillian is dressed as Toni Seawright, who made history in 1987 as the first African American woman to be crowned Miss Mississippi.