Colors

Colors

Black

Black is the color of his baby brother Ben’s hair and eyes. Even Ben’s skin is so dark it is almost black, like that of his mother and his sisters and his other brother Joshua. His own skin is lighter: the shade of coffee with a generous splash of cream.

He draws Ben many times over the summer: Ben sleeping with the corner of a frayed blanket in his mouth; Ben wide awake and bouncing in his baby swing; Ben pulling himself to his feet and clinging to a corner of the sofa. Camille and Rae and Joshua and Marianne run in from the park, licking their ice cream and laughing, and beg him to draw them too. He does, but mostly he draws Ben. He wants to do this because his littlest brother was nine months old before he got to know him, and he worries that Ben might never get to know him in turn, might grow up hardly remembering that he had a brother named Dean.

The others have grown up listening to his stories and fighting over who gets to open his letters. He writes good letters, illustrated ones that show his family the places they will never see for themselves: the towers of Hogwarts and the cobblestoned streets of Hogsmeade and the shining gold walls of the Quidditch World Cup stadium. But as the years go by, there are more and more things that he does not show them.

Black is the color of home, of too many children in too small a house, of the taste of his mum’s cooking and his stepfather’s Marvin Gaye CDs on the stereo: Mama, mama, there’s too many of you cryin’ / Brother, brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dyin’ ...

Dean hasn’t felt completely black since the day he found a copy of his birth certificate in a drawer and learned that his birth name was Dearborn and not Thomas. He was twelve years old then, home for Christmas after a year and a half of school, and suddenly everything made sense: the reason he was so much lighter-skinned than his siblings, the reason his mum had made him promise not to let them get their hopes up about Hogwarts, even though everyone knew plenty of Muggle-borns had brothers or sisters who were wizards too.

He asked his mum about it, and she put Marianne in her cot and cried a little, and finally said that his stepfather was a good man, and she hoped Dean would always think of him as his father.

Dean said he always would, but four years later he does and he doesn’t.

Red

Red is the color of his girlfriend’s hair. Camille and Rae are curious about her, so he captures her for them with his colored pencils: Ginny leaning forward to catch the Snitch, her arms bare and her hair streaming behind her in the sunlight. He reckons most guys would wonder why he didn’t draw her lying on the lake shore in a swimsuit or gazing up at him in admiration, but he prefers to think of Ginny doing things. It suits her, as her freckles and temper suit her.

If his sisters are surprised that she is white, they don’t show it; but his mum gives him a searching look and says “Don’t you let her trifle with you,” which he understands to mean Your daddy was a white man, and he trifled with me.

He wants to say it isn’t so. He wishes he could tell her what he discovered among the fifteen-year-old newspaper clippings in the Hogwarts library, but that would mean explaining about the war and the Death Eaters and a world where the color of your skin doesn’t matter at all and the purity of your blood matters so much. He decided a long time ago that he wasn’t going to bring any of that home. Too complicated.

Red is a Gryffindor color. He is sixteen years old and brave; he can handle the truth by himself. Besides, if his parents knew everything they wouldn’t let him roam around Diagon Alley alone. Ginny is only a year younger and her parents are keeping her practically under house arrest. But there is no one to order Dean into hiding, and so he goes to Diagon Alley most days, wandering about with a sketch pad and drawing the people he sees as they go about their business. He wants to capture his world while it lasts.

Grey

He runs into Professor Lupin early one day in Diagon Alley. His old teacher’s face is weary, and he blinks sleepily in the morning light, as if he hasn’t been to bed at all that night. He is vague about where he has been, and Dean wonders if he might be part of that small army of irregulars whose activities are only whispered about, but who – some people say – protected the wizarding world for a year while the Ministry slept.

Tired as he looks, he smiles at Dean and suggests that they have a cup of coffee somewhere. They go to a café at the far end of the Alley, and Dean has the feeling his companion is relieved to sit down. Two years ago he would have said Come back to us. Today he isn’t sure what to say, so he lets Professor Lupin flip through the sketch pad instead of talking.

He hasn’t realized until this very moment that most of his pictures show Diagon Alley not as it is now, but as he remembers it two summers ago, when the people dressed in brighter colors and let their children run around in the sunshine. Lupin turns over a page and spends some minutes studying a portrait in charcoal of Cedric Diggory as he might look today: a little older and surer of himself than he was in life, beginning to come into his manhood.

Dean fidgets, wrapping his hands around his coffee cup, and mutters, “It’s not really a true picture, but I wanted to draw it.” And Lupin replies that he supposes all artists have to be liars, just a little.

Dean thinks of sketching his former professor as he sits there sipping his coffee, sunlight filtering through the dusty windows onto his greying hair, and then suddenly he has a better idea and asks Professor Lupin what color he is when he’s a wolf. Lupin stares at him for a long moment as Dean squirms, wondering if the question was tactless; and then he laughs and says that he honestly doesn’t have the slightest idea, because all colors are grey to a wolf. But he rather thinks he has white paws.

Later, Dean draws his favorite teacher the way he imagines him on a full-moon night: a strong proud wolf, grey with white paws, standing firm on a rock and guarding his territory. Perhaps it isn’t really a true picture. But he is pleased with it.

Green

When he returns to school in September, he writes to his brothers and sisters. He encloses views of the Forbidden Forest through the castle windows, the Gryffindor team practicing on the Quidditch pitch, and something that might be a sea monster rising from the murky waters of the lake.

Green is the dominant color in these pictures: the varying shades of grass and trees and water, now under sun and now under cloud. Green is a peaceful, remote color; it never reveals too much.

He doesn’t include any portraits of people in his letters this year, unless you count the Quidditch players, and they are only blobs of red and gold against a sunny sky. His family sees nothing of his schoolmates’ subdued faces or of the House tables with several faces missing altogether. The Death Eaters made their first strike against Muggle-borns in August. Dean didn’t know any of the victims very well, but two of them were second- and third-year Gryffindors, and one was a Hufflepuff girl he used to flirt with in Arithmancy. Ravenclaw House has lost none of its current students, but the older ones have draped their table in black in memory of Penelope Clearwater. Brother, brother, brother, Dean hums under his breath, there’s far too many of you dyin’.

Only one angle reveals nothing of the turmoil outside the castle walls. Only one table, beneath the green and silver banners, still looks as it always did, with its full complement of students. Dean does not draw the Great Hall from that angle.

Green was the last color his father ever saw, and he is beginning to hate it.

Purple

Ginny lies on the castle lawn, painting her toenails purple. It’s a tiny act of rebellion, and when she puts her shoes back on it will be invisible to Professor McGonagall and to Ron. Dean thinks of the girls in his neighborhood in London, with their pierced navels and tattoos, and smiles to himself. A very tiny rebellion. But he likes the way the sparkly nail polish looks on her small toes, and the way she rests her head against his chest and wiggles her feet as they dry.

She leafs through the sketches on his pad as he begins another letter to his family. Ben taking his first steps; Diagon Alley in the summertime; a great grey wolf on a rock; Penelope in her school robes and prefect badge. A young, dark-haired wizard dressed in the style of fifteen years ago.

“Who’s that?” asks Ginny. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“I haven’t either, but he’s my father. I found a photo in an old copy of the Prophet.”

He tells her the whole story. She’s the first person he’s ever told, and she shades her eyes and listens as the sun sinks lower and the shadows of the castle walls grow longer.

“That’s amazing,” she says. “He must have been so brave, and nobody’s ever heard about him ... That’s what I like about your drawings. They show the people who aren’t exactly heroes. Or anyway, not the flashy sort of hero ... You have this way of showing how the rest of us matter too. You know?”

He wonders if she will still feel that way in a year or two, or if she will have changed her mind again. When the time comes for them to join the war, will she be standing with him or with Harry?

He reaches for a purple pencil: the shade of the heather on the mountains, of distance and space and the thin haze where the autumn sky meets the horizon. In Dean’s mind purple is the color of uncertainty. It is the color of the future.