Wonder Tale

A decade ago my younger sister Natalie sent me an email message titled, “A Black Princess.” It was about a woman named Angela Brown who had married Maximilian of Liechtenstein and become Her Serene Highness Princess Angela, the only princess of African descent in a reigning European dynasty. I still have the email. Natalie, my pajama-clad co-spectator when Charles and Diana had wed, forwarded to me with no message appended; apparently, its significance was so clear that comment was unnecessary. There was a link to a picture of the bride and groom leaving the church in which they’d been married: she was wearing a gown she had designed herself and a tiara previously worn by several other royal brides in the family. She was from Panama originally, like my old college roommate, and was a few days shy of forty-two. Looking at this picture I felt happy, obscurely buoyed.

Princesses. Real or imaginary, why should they matter to me? Snow White, Maid Maleen, the Sleeping Beauty, the Goose Girl—I doted on these stories long before I knew Disney versions existed. I read them as a child in the Ladybird books that were published in England and sold in Trinidad, with their red-backed cardboard covers and their simple layouts: text on the left page, illustration on the right. I remember marveling that someone could paint satin, as on Cinderella’s three gowns, that looked so liquid and so real. I can still see the sticky shine of gold on Rumpelstiltskin’s bobbins.

When I was eight a cousin handed me down a yellow gauze dress. It was 1976, and folkloric styles were popular: the dress had long full sleeves that gathered into embroidered cuffs, with matching embroidery at the neck and waist. This dress was an immediate favorite. I especially loved wearing it when I was sewing. My grandmother had taught me to hand-sew years before, and I would make myself floppy-necked cotton bears with button eyes and then make little gingham dresses for them. As I sat sewing I pretended I was Snow White’s mother. The scene was sparkling clear in my mind: she at the ebony-framed window looking pensively down at the snow outside the castle, in her inattention letting the needle slip and pierce her finger. What had she been making?

She wished for a child of black, white, red. She never specified white skin, black hair, red lips. In that liminal moment before the turning of the page anything could have been, the three colors shuffled any number of ways. Ebony skin, white fingernail tips, red—what? The story is surreally unclear. She could have come out checkerboard, or plaid. They could have been meant symbolically—they were the colors of the Trinidad and Tobago flag, my flag, black for strength, red for warmth, white for purity and the cradling sea. For that one paragraph, that eyelash’s weight of time before the next page’s image of the young princess is revealed, everything is possible.

This then, is about pictures as much as words. Few of us since the 1800s have had the privilege of forming fairy tales entirely in our own minds. Someone steps in to supply the pictures for us: Arthur Rackham, Wanda Gág, Eric Winter, Trina Schart Hyman, countless unknown artists. The descriptive minimalism of folk and fairy tales is well known: they will say that a queen is beautiful, that a castle is old, that a wet girl is given twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds to sleep on. But it is the pictures that manifest the crumbling stone walls, the bed linens heaped to the ceiling, the pale skin that such beauty means.

African folktales have been compiled and published in the West for well over a hundred years. “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” for example, a retelling of a Kind and Unkind Girls tale from Zimbabwe originally collected by George Theal in his 1882 Kaffir Folk-Lore, has been hugely popular since it was first published in picture book form in 1987. But despite this trove of stories from which to draw, writers...