Color as a concept wedges itself into his peripheral when he’s too young to understand shading between the lines and too imaginative to bother with peach or coffee brown or the soft shades of ivory cream. Rather the people who occupy the pages of his drawing pad are striped like tigers and spotted like leopards. They’re orange or bright pink and sometimes biracial tones of purple and red split right down the middle. Under the tutelage of tiny hand and waxy crayon, color is not something shaped by the division of territories and greedy splitting of natural resources but an explosion of What If courtesy of a mouthy five year old.
He stuffs his mouth with Cocoa Puffs as he works, splayed like a tiny crab on his grandmother’s living room carpet. Cheeks full and one hand sticky with chocolate residue he looks up at a strained for patience
“Joseph…”
to see a worry line between his mother’s eyebrows and her mouth pinched to twist. She’s meant to say something. He can tell by the line of her body. From the way she holds the laundry basket. But at the last moment she changes her mind with a breath of a sigh.
“Don’t color on the walls again, okay?”
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