>A while ago, I wrote a poem called ‘Color’. It’s about a young girl and her pretty blonde doll that she keeps locked in a closet, for fear it will fly away. The girl in the poem is a little brown girl, and as she grows older, the doll changes in her image: it transforms; its whiteness is destroyed. As I illustrated it, I noticed (for the sake of convenience, I’d begun with the white doll and overlaid its features with brown paint, black hair) that the smiling expression of the doll in the first frame was rapidly disappearing. It wasn’t that I was erasing her smile, it was that her smile was naturally eroding under the weight of the red lips, the dark skin I’d drawn on. The more color I added to the frame, the unhappier she grew.

>As color seeped into her world, so did pain. Awareness of beauty hurts, but not as much as the awareness of ugliness, the awareness of lack. In Toni Morrison’s tale, Pecola longs for blue eyes so much; suffers so much as a little black girl that “the matrix of her agony” is filled with death. The awareness of our lack of beauty forces us to strip away skin, to bleach it, to cover up darkness. Beauty is a construct, but who will tell that to those who deconstruct themselves in the search for beauty?

>Like Pecola’s friend, I scanned my own doll as a child for the signs of the beauty that had escaped me. I tried to dismember it, to find the secret of the desirability that had not escaped me. I locked my doll in a cupboard, because her beauty hurt me. She was a doll, she decayed. I remained.