Purple, Yellow and Green

"When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil'ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that streak of green them june bugs made on the trees the night we left from down home. All of them colors was in me. Just sitting there. So when Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them berries, that lemonade, them streaks of green the june bugs made, all come together. Cholly was thin then, with real light eyes. He used to whistle, and when I heerd him, shivers come on my skin." (Morrison 115)

      Toni Morrison creates an undeniable sense of beauty and wonder in Pauline's recount of her first time seeing Cholly. Her entire life she "never felt at home" (111), in a constant state of feeling left out and isolated.  Cholly comes into her life and not only fills the role of a lover she never had, but welcomes her insecurity: the foot.  Her crippled foot created and held the isolation she felt, and by him being welcoming of, even treasuring of the injury, she finds the person she always wanted.  Pauline associates Cholly with vivid memories of color, and when he meets her, they all come together.  He made her happy-- a feeling foreign to her. Throughout the novel, colors are associated with happiness, and this stream of shades shows her unmistakable glee.  Eventually, the reader knows that this fades to the "peeling gray" (34) found in the "cell" (34); colors of her old life turning to black and white and eventually to a shade exactly between them. Her happiness, her fulfilled self, her new lover, her hope for her future, her memories of "purple","yellow" and "green"(115) are the "paints and crayons" (111) that she missed without knowing.  Pauline missed this memory.

Here, the three colors: lemonade yellow, June Bug green, and berry purple, are mixed together; this is what Cholly did to her--made her associate all of the colors together.  I used a website to show the shade left after combing the three.  Mixing them leaves an undeniable gray. (http://trycolors.com/)