Color's Strife

The poem White Lies by Natasha Trethewey is a heartbreaking poem about what it was like to fight one’s own color just to find acceptance. Trethewey tells the story of herself as a young girl hiding her true skin color as a means of finding acceptance. The use of vivid imagery and colors throughout the poem allows Trethewey to paint us a melancholy picture of not only the shame and fear, but also the courage and determination that guided the life of a young African American girl growing up in Mississippi.

White Lies is a personal poem written about Trethewey’s childhood. Her parents had interracially married, which was against Mississippi law at the time. Trethewey was born with skin light enough that she could pass for a white girl, and she spent her youth lying about her heritage and where her family came from. Her feelings of shame toward her background are evident when she writes, “I could easily tell the white folks / that we lived uptown, / not in that pink and green / shanty-fied shotgun section / along the tracks” (7-11). Though driven by shame, however, that shame led to a strong sense of determination, one that inspired her to make her own dresses so that she could pretend “came straight out the window / of Maison Blanche” (13-14). Every young girl dreams of fitting in—Trethewey learned that pretending to be white would win her friendship and love. In the lines “I could even keep quiet… like the time a white girl said / (squeezing my hand), Now / we have three of us in this class” (14-17), we begin to understand how lonely this poor girl is. Unable to identify with either race—white or black—and hurt by a divorce between her parents, Trethewey’s desperate need to belong is understandable.

The most striking feature of White Lies is Trethewey’s use of colors. In the first ten lines alone, Trethewey mentions a color eight times. By introducing the poem this way, Trethewey imprints the importance of color into our minds, making us aware throughout the poem. She plays around with a double meaning of the word “white”, used not only to signify what she views as the superior race, but also to place less weight on the lies she has told. We view lies very differently from white lies—the former is something we’ve known is wrong from childhood, and the latter is a little fib told to avoid hurting another’s feelings or to hide something trivial. Ironically, Trethewey uses the word “white” to mean both important and unimportant. Her reference to color in the very last stanza, however, is the one that leaves the biggest impression on us as readers. Unlike the first stanza, the last contains only one mention of a color, signifying the importance of this final image. Trethewey says that whenever her mother caught her lying about her heritage, she “washed out my mouth / with Ivory soap” (23-24). In a sense, Trethewey’s own tongue is stained white from all the white lies she’s told, and yet her mother is using white soap to wash out all the white lies. Trethewey, rather than resisting, “swallowed the suds / thinking they’d work / from the inside out” (26-28), a symbol of how desperately she wants to identify with only the Caucasian side of her background. She believes that white is pure, and therefore must wash out all the blackness inside her with the Ivory soap in order to find her place in the world.

White Lies is a sad poem of yearning and loneliness. Trethewey is caught in a life where her friends only accept her because she is living a lie, and her mother does not accept her for who she wishes she were. Though the title of the poem at first seems to suggest that the lies Trethewey told were trivial, a deeper reading proves that they were anything but. (669)