“Black, black, black is the colour of my true love’s hair”

“Black, black, black is the colour of my true love’s hair” is a recurring song fragment that gathers Molly Johnson’s family memories, grief, and hope into a single refrain. It surfaces while she is imprisoned in the Everton jailhouse and returns as she faces execution, connecting her thoughts of the children she has lost or left behind with her determination to imagine them surviving.

The Song in Molly’s Family Life

The song belongs to Molly’s personal store of family memory. At the jailhouse, she sings softly, “And still I hope that the time will come when you and I will be as one.” The narrative identifies this as her father’s favourite song, making the refrain a link to her father as well as to the family life from which she has been separated.

The song’s appearance at this point follows a period of exhaustion and distress. Two and a half days after the events preceding her imprisonment, Molly has visible bruises and cuts that have been attended to. She stands on a stool at the cell window and sings while looking out over the snow-covered land. Her song does not remove the immediate reality of confinement; it gives her a way to hold memory and hope within it.

The Jailhouse Refrain and the Children

From the cell window, Molly’s attention moves from the snow-covered ground to the distant mountains. She thinks of the children and wills them to survive the journey to Yadaka’s cave. The refrain “Black, black, black is the colour of my true love’s hair” accompanies this vigil, so the song’s expression of love is bound to a specific fear: the children are travelling through severe winter conditions, beyond her reach.

The scene sets the limits of what Molly can do against the persistence of her care. She cannot accompany or protect the children from the jailhouse, but she can keep them present in her thoughts and voice. The song therefore acts not simply as a remembered tune but as a form of attention directed toward the family whose safety remains uncertain.

Recurrence Before Execution

The song returns at the moment of Molly’s execution. As the snow beneath her feet begins to affect her, she again mumbles the line about hoping that she and her loved one will one day be as one. The repetition ties the final scene back to the jailhouse passage: in both moments, the song carries her toward an imagined reunion when the present has made ordinary reunion impossible.

Molly’s final thoughts turn into images of her children. She sees Delphi holding up a daisy-chain necklace, then Joe Junior and Henry James laughing and throwing snow at one another. These imagined family images transform the approaching execution into a scene of remembered connection. The song and the visions together sustain the children’s presence at the close of Molly’s story, while leaving their actual fate unresolved in this passage.

Narrative Significance

The song’s meaning develops through recurrence rather than explanation. First heard in confinement as Molly looks toward the mountains and hopes for the children’s survival, it returns as she faces death, carrying the same language of hoped-for togetherness into a radically altered circumstance. The refrain’s movement from private memory to final imagining gives it the force of a thread binding Molly’s father, her children, and her own last moments.

Its repeated promise of future unity stands in painful contrast to the separations surrounding Molly: she is confined while her children travel without her, and the song returns when she is about to die. The text does not make the song an assurance that reunion will occur. Instead, it preserves Molly’s hope as hope—an emotional bond sustained in song and memory when the story cannot offer her control over what happens next.