Striped Dresses
by Karlene Kolesnikov, Fairhaven College

The summer that I turned four, my favorite dress was a beautiful cotton with a wide twirly skirt and stripes the color of Necco candies, pleasantly muted hues of chocolate, berry, banana and vanilla. These stripes ran vertically from neck to hem, powdery pastels that blended into one another at watercolor edges. This dress was summer. Mama washed it and hung it on the line outside next to her striped dress that was just like mine. Mama and I wore our dresses that smelled like sunshine and wind; when I wore my dress and Mama wore her dress we knew that we belonged to each other and that everyone who saw us knew that too. We told each other how pretty we looked; I told Mama that I loved her “this much” stretching out my arms as wide apart as I could, straining my fingers to indicate the widest space possible.

The striped dress was a Sunday dress; I wore it to church, and after church, to visit Grandma and Grandpa who lived in Tacoma on South G Street. Grandma and Grandpa Martineau were the only white people on their block except for Mr. Sullivan who lived in the house next-door. Mr. Sullivan sometimes visited Grandpa and Grandma. He spoke to us children when we were in the yard picking Grandma’s raspberries along the fence between his house and Grandpa’s. Mr. Sullivan was old, even older than Grandma and Grandpa; he was small and thin and had white fluffy hair and pale-almost transparent-skin. We children knew Mr. Sullivan, knew that he lived alone in his house next-door, that he tended a big garden, that he had trouble hearing, and that he went to the same church that Grandma and Grandpa Martineau did. We didn’t know anything about Grandma and Grandpa’s other neighbors. They weren’t like us.

Once, when my sister Kathy and I were playing with three of Grandma’s neighbor’s children on the sidewalk in front of the house, Grandma called us in and explained to us that those children were Negroes, Coloreds, that we shouldn’t play with them. We had been having fun; I was ashamed to explain to the children that we had to go in the house now. I thought that they probably knew that we had discovered that they were Negroes even though Grandma said to tell them that the reason we couldn’t play was that we had to come in to eat. For a long time I didn’t understand how you could tell if people were Negroes or not, but one day Grandma explained that Negroes were colored people with dark skin.

There was a lady at our church who had kind of dark skin; her skin was dark, but not real dark. She wore big hats and a lot of jewelry to Mass on Sundays. I wondered if she was a Negro. I wanted to ask about the lady who wore the hats but I felt kind of ashamed when I tried to talk to Mama or Daddy or Grandma about Negroes, who was one and who wasn’t, so I just kept quiet and watched to see if there was another way to tell besides skin color. The lady with the big hats draped her rosary over her folded hands just like the other ladies in church; she took communion along with everyone else, so I figured that she was either not a Negro or that she was really good at pretending to be white.

My own grandpa was almost as brown as the lady with the hats, only his skin was brown like walnut shells and hers was a pale purple brown. Maybe the kind of brown color that a person was made a difference. I knew that Grandpa couldn’t be Negro anyway though because Grandma wouldn’t have married him if he was. Grandpa said that his hands were brown from working in the woods so many years; it wasn’t just a person’s color but the reason that a person was that color that made someone a Negro.

It was easier to tell that some people were Negro. The children who lived down the street from Grandma had skin the color of the chocolate stripes in my dress; I recognized that they were Negroes although I still wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. But by my fourth summer when I saw the little neighbor girl and her mother walking down G Street in striped dresses identical to the dresses that my mother and I were wearing, I knew that the little girl and her mother were Negroes and that we were not. I didn’t understand how we could have the same dresses. I was holding my mother’s right hand; the neighbor girl was holding her mother’s left hand; we could have stepped forward into one another, two children and two mothers merging on a Sunday walk in our striped Sunday best. My brown curls would have tightened and darkened; my fingertips would have merged with those of the child facing me; my skin, our skin, would have become a creamy blend of her dark and my light. One skin.

And then I knew that something had been explained to me wrong because, if a little girl living just down the street from my grandma wore the same favorite dress that I did, and held her mama’s hand the way that I held my Mama’s hand, I should be able to play with her and her older brother and share her tricycle and the cookies her mama made that she carried from her house in a little paper sack.

Karlene Kolesnikov says, “I graduated from high school in 1965 in Tacoma Washington. I returned to school forty years later, to Northwest Indian College at Lummi where, with the kindness and support of the people there, I earned an AA degree. I am currently a student at Fairhaven College where I designed a concentration, In My Grandmother’s House, which incorporates both the necessity to research history and the opportunity to write creative non-fiction.”