Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair

Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair is a lament inherited by Molly Johnson from her father, a song through which love, bereavement, and the absence of her mother recur across her life. Its black-haired beloved gives Molly an image of the woman she never knew; its melody also records her father’s tenderness toward her. When Molly later sings it while caring for her children, the song becomes a thread joining maternal loss to the home and affection she has made for the next generation.

A Song Inherited from Her Father

Molly remembers her father singing the lament, particularly when he was drunk. His Scottish accent grew thick, but the song emerged in a beautiful voice that could be heard; he sang established laments and made up songs of his own. The performance did not leave him untouched: he would break down crying, and Molly would cry with him. The song therefore enters her life not as a detached tune, but as a repeated scene of shared feeling in which her father’s sorrow becomes perceptible even though its cause remains largely unspoken.

The words that stay with Molly are, “Black, black, black is the colour of my true love’s hair.” She wonders whether her father was singing about her mother. That possibility is sharpened by the difference between the image in the song and Molly’s own hair, which is blondish brown with a tinge of red. The beloved’s black hair offers Molly a clue to a woman absent from her life, but it is not a complete account of her mother: Molly can speculate about the song’s meaning without knowing the person to whom it may refer.

Maternal Absence and Inherited Grief

Molly describes not knowing her mother as an emptiness, a hole in the soul, rather than simply as pain. There was no shared path or direction to recover, because her mother had never been present in her life. Molly and her father did not speak of the absent woman. At times, when drunk, he would utter sentences Molly could not understand and then break into the song about black hair. His singing thus becomes one of the few signs that he, unlike Molly, had known her; the lament carries his grief into the silence surrounding her mother’s identity.

As a little girl, Molly dreamed of a woman with long, flowing black hair. The song’s repeated image gives that dream a form, but not a resolution. It helps Molly picture an absent mother while preserving the distance that made such imagining necessary. Its emotional force lies in this double function: it transmits a trace of a relationship Molly cannot remember, and makes the incompleteness of that inheritance audible.

From Remembered Loss to Maternal Care

The song’s meaning also emerges through what Molly does for her own children. She recalls longing, as a child, to see affection in her father’s gestures. At church she watched mothers touch their children or place an arm around their shoulders, and sometimes took Miss Shirley’s arm and put it around her own. She wanted her children to receive the love and physical tenderness she had missed, and hoped that if anything happened to her, they would still know they had been loved. The song belongs to this wider effort to make care present and memorable rather than leave it unspoken.

In a later scene, Molly sits in her weathered, homemade rocking chair, humming the old lament while rocking her dead newborn daughter. The chair, recovered in pieces from a wagon and repaired by Molly, has held her five earlier children and now the sixth. Her worn hand taps the beat against the cloth bundle across her lap; she stares ahead without tears. The song returns at the point where maternal love meets bereavement, its familiar melody sounding against the loss of the child she had hoped would be a sister and playmate for Delphi. Its recurrence does not erase grief; it gives grief a form already bound to family memory.

A Lullaby Shared with Danny

The lament recurs in a different register when Molly mends her husband’s old wool vest beside the fire pit. She sings softly as she inspects her stitching, then ends with the refrain about black hair. Danny, sitting near Yadaka as he shapes a bone against a rock, listens to her voice amid the night sounds. The moment is intimate without being elaborate: Molly’s singing soothes Danny, and he claps when it ends, telling her he loves hearing her sing. She blushes and teases him for making fun of her.

Across these scenes, the song changes its immediate setting—from a child listening to a father’s lament, to a grieving mother rocking a stillborn baby, to a mother singing while Danny sits nearby—but retains its connection to love made vulnerable by loss. The same refrain that once led Molly to imagine her unknown mother can now be heard by her son as an expression of her presence. In that movement, the song becomes more than a clue about the past: it is a piece of maternal memory Molly can pass on through her own voice.