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.