Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

A Black Rainbow

For years now, the incident of. the Black Rainbow has haunted me. And worried me.

At the time it happened I wanted to grab the woman involved, shake her till her teeth. rattled and tell her she knew absolutely nothing about what mothers should teach little children.

But you just can’t grab people and shake their teeth loose, no matter what they say or what you think. (If we could, the dentists would never catch up with their work. And some of us wouldn’t have a tooth left in our mouths.)

Now, to explain the Black Rainbow episode.

It happened here at Ft. Rucker back in the seventies, or perhaps even earlier. (I’ve been around the Wiregrass area so long and have seen so many people come and go that many of them -- and the things they did and said -- are now just a pleasant blur. But the memory of the Rainbow Lady stays with me.)

Ten or twelve of us had assembled one morning to start plans for a party for a group of girls. And, as such sessions normally go, we talked about decorations and refreshments and entertainment.

Then somebody brought up the idea that we should have something for the girls to do before the festivities proper got underway. Somebody else suggested that since the children were quite young they might enjoy sitting at small tables and drawing with colored crayons.

That sounded like a fine idea; so we agreed to get plenty of paper and a box of crayons for each girl.

“But what will they draw?” one mother asked.

“Let’s let them draw rainbows!” another mother suggested.

“Oh, that would be sweet,” I piped up. “Pretty too. But shouldn’t we give them some sort of pattern to go by? They’re little. They don’t know all the colors in the rainbow. Why, they might draw black rainbows.”

“So what?” said my unforgettable friend. “If those kids want to make black rainbows, let ‘em make black rainbows.”

That was when I had the almost-overpowering urge to give that woman a genuine good shaking. But then I thought: poor thing. When she was a little girl nobody had time to take her by the hand after a rainstorm, lead her out in the yard, and show her the rainbow and explain how it contains all the colors and how the whole world is beautiful because of color and how it is great fun to mix two or more colors together to make still another.

Later, no grownup took time to hold her on the knee and read for her those Wordsworth lines that say:

“My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die.”

Poor thing. She has never heard the rainbow called “that smiling daughter of the storm.”

She doesn’t know that many a rainbow is made up of tears and light.

Probably all she was ever told about the rainbow was the old folk saying that “there’s a pot of gold buried at the end of the rainbow.”

She doesn’t know how to teach a little child about the rainbow in all its beauty because no person ever taught her. And she doesn’t realize that children must be taught. Everything. Not one child comes into this world knowing a blessed thing. All knowledge must be acquired. But she doesn’t know. Poor thing.

So, I didn’t shake the Black Rainbow Lady.

(Published March 1985. Click your browser’s :Back” button to return.)