Natasha Trethewey - Blond lyrics

Certainly it was possible — somewhere in my parents' genes the recessive traits that might have given me a different look: not attached earlobes or my father's green eyes, but another hair color — gentleman-preferred, have-more-fun blond. And with my skin color, like a good tan — an even mix of my parents' – I could have pa**ed for white. When on Christmas day I woke to find a blond wig, a pink sequined tutu, and a blond ballerina doll, nearly tall as me, I didn't know to ask, nor that it mattered, if there'd been a brown version. This was years before my grandmother nestled the dark baby into our creche, years before I'd understand it as primer for a Mississippi childhood. Instead, I pranced around our living room in a whirl of possibility, my parents looking on at their suddenly strange child. In the photograph my mother took, my father — almost out of the frame — looks on as Joseph must have at the miraculous birth: I'm in the foreground – my blond wig a shining halo, a newborn likeness to the child that chance, the long odds, might have brought.