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Coloring Books My mother never believed in coloring books. She banned them from our house, although there were always piles of blank manila paper, the thick yellow kind, and crayons. Even without coloring books, when we drew, we called it coloring. It was something I always loved to do. When I went to school, a disconcerting thing happened. No one recognized the images I colored with the classroom crayons. When I drew a large purple iris with sharp spear leaves like the ones in my mother’s garden, they asked me what it was. Next to it, I drew a group of jonquils , trying hard to make their orange ribbed cups stand out from the yellow petals behind. They fell over slightly, the way the ones in our yard did after a rain. Around the flowers I drew the crumbly brown leaves my mother spread over the surface of her flower beds. They looked at it in disbelief. That’s a garden? Oh, you want to draw a garden ? A garden looks like this. And they drew many green sticks in flat rows. Coming straight out of the green sticks were taller green sticks. On top of each of these there was a strange flower I had never seen, a bit like a daisy but with rounder petals. Its leaves stuck out from its thin stick stem and I wondered how it stood up. The green sticks were grass, I knew. But grass was something we carefully weeded out of our flower beds. My attempts to draw our small house with the concrete steps in the front were also unrecognizable to them. Their houses were always large two-story boxes with perfectly symmetrical windows and doors. Smoke always rose in a curling line out of a large chimney. This seemed odd to me. I had seen two-story houses, but there were very few of them in the new subdivision around the school where we all lived. And although we did have a fireplace, fires were a spe176 cial treat in Memphis. We had them only once or twice a year on the very coldest nights. My house did have a chimney, yet when I looked at the house from the front yard the chimney could barely be seen. Being a child who liked to blend in, I learned this drawing code and used it. Wagons were red rectangular boxes with two wheels and a line that slanted diagonally upward for a handle. Suns were yellow circles surrounded by an outer circle of yellow stick lines. Clouds were small things with protruding rounded knobs. A bird was a V in the sky. Now the other children and the teacher knew what was in my drawings. There were no more iris and jonquils and cannas and weeping willow trees. There were just trees and flowers. My house now looked like all the others. But everyone knew instantly what I had drawn. These drawings were much easier to make than the other drawings, with which I had struggled , trying to force the front steps to stick out, or the wooden fence to stay behind the flower bed. And everyone liked these drawings much better. When my family goes on vacation we often play a guessing game like charades in which you communicate a word to your team by making a drawing. One night when I turn over my card, my word is “Indian.” I don’t need to think. I know what I will draw—a man wearing pointed feathers that stick up around his head. I don’t even consider drawing a woman or a man dressed any other way. I trace the lines quickly. I have hardly finished the second feather when my team shouts, “Indian!” COLORING BOOKS 177 ...

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