True Colors: A Novel

“But years later, when she looked back on that week of her mother’s death, Winona saw how that single action—the handing over of a lead rope—had changed everything. From then on, jealousy had become an undercurrent, swirling beneath their lives.”

Winona retrospectively understands that Henry handing Clem’s reins over to Vivi Ann was the first crack in her relationship with her sister. This introduces the theme of The Effect of Insecurities on Personal Relationships, as Winona feels deeply insecure about a number of things when she compares herself to Vivi Ann; Henry’s easy approval of Vivi Ann as opposed to his constant dismissal of Winona is one of them. This undercurrent of jealousy influences a number of events that take place going forward.

“Dad and Vivi Ann might worship at the altar of their land, but Winona had a broader religion. For her, it was the community that mattered and the people who lived here. It was okay that Vivi Ann was the beautiful heart of town; Winona strove to be its conscience.”

Winona acknowledges that Henry and Vivi Ann treasure the land of Water’s Edge far more than she does. Her identification of herself as the “conscience” of the town is telling: Winona believes herself right about most things. While this proves problematic when she assumes Dallas’s guilt, it serves her well when she fights to free him from prison later. Viewing herself as the “conscience” of the town motivates Winona to keep working the case even when everything moves against her.

“It was important to their father, crucial even, that the Greys be respected in town, that their contribution to the creation of Oyster Shores be remembered. So they walked to church once a month to remind people that their family had been here when buggies couldn’t navigate sawdust-covered winter roads.”

Henry’s show of family unity is rooted in the pride Henry feels in his family’s history. However, Henry’s idea of family loyalty overvalues the status of his family in society while harming the relationships within the family over time, as explored in the theme of The Bonds of Sisterhood and Family Loyalty.

“Winona’s favorite flavor wasn’t there, so she took a pint of rocky road out onto the porch and stood with her sisters. […] ‘Hey, who ate my chocolate cherry?’ she asked. Vivi Ann answered, ‘Luke Connelly dropped by.’”

Winona looks for her favorite flavor of ice cream only to discover that Luke ate it when he stopped by to see Vivi Ann. Ice cream is an important motif in the book. Despite Luke and Vivi Ann connecting over ice cream, they are not right for each other, and ice cream hints at this. He chooses chocolate cherry, which is Winona’s favorite flavor, and wrongly guesses it to be Vivi Ann’s. This suggests that Luke is taken with who he thinks Vivi Ann is, whereas the person he is actually more compatible with is Winona.

“She’d always imagined love to be turbulent and volatile, an emotion that would sweep her up and break her to pieces and reshape her into someone she couldn’t otherwise have become. Was she a fool to believe in all that?”

Vivi Ann reflects on how she doesn’t feel any tumultuous passion for Luke. Vivi Ann dreams of a kind of love that she has not experienced yet and wonders if she ever will. Her dream is fulfilled when she later meets Dallas, and their relationship stands as a testament to The Enduring Power of Love.

“‘I’m ashamed of you,’ her father said. Vivi Ann was shaken by those hard words. She’d never heard them from him before, never imagined it to be even possible that she’d shame him. Years of connection seemed fragile; for the first time she wondered if his love was as conditional as her sisters always said it was, and that frightened her.” 

Henry is furious when he hears of Dallas kissing Vivi Ann at the tavern the previous night. Vivi Ann, who has never been on the receiving end of her father’s disappointment, sees for the first time that her father’s love is in fact conditional. This is reiterated time and again as Vivi Ann’s relationship with Dallas progresses.

“Vivi Ann looked in her husband’s eyes, and saw how damaged he’d been by his father, and how scared he was about being a father himself. There was so much about him she didn’t understand, like what you were left with after being beaten with electrical cords or locked in a dark closet or after watching your father murder your mother. But she knew about going on, and she knew about love.”

Vivi Ann recognizes the fear Dallas feels at becoming a father, which prompted him to turn to violence the night Noah was born. However, rather than perpetuating the cycle of shame and blame that has shaped Dallas’s perceptions of himself in the world around him, Vivi Ann responds with love and understanding. This heals some of the trauma Dallas has experienced and helps him be the father he has the potential to be. Vivi Ann and Dallas’s dynamic is an example of how insecurity impacts personal relationships, but it also reveals how the latter can help heal the former.

“Vivi Ann had assumed back then that they would always be connected, she and Win, that nothing could rend two sisters apart. That was before she’d known about passion, of course. And though Winona wouldn’t admit it, Vivi Ann knew that their reconciliation was imperfect.”

Vivi Ann begins to see that sisterly loyalty is not as ironclad as she always believed. Her love for Dallas means that she will continue to choose him over her family, and though Vivi Ann doesn’t know it yet, this ambivalence goes both ways; Winona’s jealousy of her sister means that she finds it difficult to support Vivi Ann’s happiness. Vivi Ann’s position underlines the power of love, whereas Winona’s signifies the theme of insecurities and personal relationships.

“She wondered now if she’d ever be able to laugh again, and then, in the stall with this horse that was somehow her childhood and her spirit and her mother all wrapped up in one, she cried.”

Vivi Ann seeks comfort with Clem when Dallas is sent to prison. Vivi Ann’s assessment here sums up what the horse symbolizes: her childhood, spirit, and her mother (i.e., a source of familial love and comfort). Clem’s eventual death coincides with Vivi Ann’s loss of optimism and vitality.

“In the eleven months since Dallas’s arrest, she’d learned a little something about optimism. It was an acidlike emotion, eating through everything. To believe in hope meant she had to hang on to that alone. There was no room inside of her to care about anything else.”

Vivi Ann, who is an inherently optimistic person, comes to experience the flip side of hope after Dallas is arrested: Because she cannot stop hoping, she is disappointed and heartbroken repeatedly when doors to his release close one by one. Vivi Ann’s inability to stop hoping also leaves her with little energy to devote to anything else, including being a mother to Noah. It is the latter realization that finally allows her to let go of hope so that she can live in the present again.

“I don’t know who I am and I don’t care. Why should I? No one else in this town does. I eat all my lunches alone at the table with the other dorks and losers. No one ever talks to me. They just laugh when I go past and whisper shit about my dad.”

Noah responds to Mrs. Ivers’s prompts in the summer journal by venting about how he doesn’t know who he is. These journal entries are the only time the narrative shifts to a first-person voice, and they offer a glimpse of another character’s perspective. Noah’s feelings and experiences point to how the damaged relationship between Winona and Vivi Ann has spilled over into the next generation. His entries also offer a relative outsider’s perspective on the Grey sisters, their father, and the dynamics between them.

“Winona’s life was proof positive that if you got a good education, worked hard, and kept believing in yourself, you could succeed. She gave this inspirational speech—the story of her triumphs—all over the county, to church groups and classrooms and volunteer organizations.”

Years after Dallas’s arrest, Winona is a wealthy and successful lawyer. She has come to see her professional success as self-affirming and derives self-worth and satisfaction from these accomplishments. This helps ease some of Winona’s insecurities about herself and allows her to let go of some of her bitterness toward Vivi Ann.

“My mom just got home from the Outlaw and she was laughing and happy. I haven’t seen her look that way in a long time. She even sat down with me on the couch and put her arm around me and told me she was proud of me and that she was sorry. […] I know it was dumb, but I liked it when she said she was proud of me. It was kinda cool.”

Noah journals about how it feels to see his mother happy. For years after Dallas’s arrest, Noah was parented by an emotionally absent mother; coupled with the physical absence of his father, this has contributed to the loneliness and rootlessness he feels in his adolescence. It means a great deal for him to hear his mother tell him that she is proud of him, particularly as his self-esteem has suffered due to his peers’ bullying and ostracism. This exemplifies how positive and loving relationships can help address insecurities.

“No one gets how I feel when Brian calls me injun boy. It’s like that time I was riding Renegade and we turned a corner and saw a cougar. Renegade spooked and reared so fast I was lucky not to fall off. That’s what happens when I hear shit like that—I spook. And instead of running, I fight.”

Noah describes how he feels when people call him names and racial slurs. This is an experience that Noah cannot share with anyone else in his family; the one person who would understand his plight firsthand is Dallas, with whom Noah has had no contact since the arrest. While Hannah underlines that the racial prejudice Dallas and Noah face is wrong, the characters themselves rarely address it explicitly, and the narrative itself engages in some racist stereotyping.

“I thought talking about my dad would answer my questions, but all it did was make more. I kept remembering that carving in the tree. I know how he felt when he did it, so it’s like I know a part of him now and it makes me want more.”

Dallas’s tree carving for Vivi Ann gives Noah a fresh set of questions about his father. The carving is the first time Noah thinks about his father in a light other than that of the murderer he is painted to be. Realizing that his father loved his mother, and having experienced love himself with Cissy, Noah cannot ignore that his father and he now share common ground. This stokes his desire to learn more about his father so that he can perhaps understand himself better.

“Their reconciliation had always demanded a certain fiction, a tacit pretense that Dallas hadn’t really come between them. Now, of course, he was back, between them as clearly as if he’d been standing in the room.”

Winona taking Dallas’s case forces the sisters to address the unresolved issues between them: most notably, Winona’s refusal to support Vivi Ann in the past. Over the course of the book, the sisters learn the true meaning of family loyalty and how it differs from the standards that Henry always held the sisters to. Winona agreeing to take Dallas’s case is the first step in this direction.

“She couldn’t pinpoint the source of her obsession. Perhaps it was the mysterious tattoo […] or the way Noah had smiled when she agreed to take this ridiculous case, or the way Dallas had asked about Vivi Ann and his son. Or maybe it was what Vivi Ann hadn’t said and should have: I asked you to help him twelve years ago.”

Despite Dallas’s refusal to talk to Winona about the reason for her visit, Winona persists in trying to see him. Once Winona has seen that she was wrong about Dallas all those years ago, she cannot unsee it and thus cannot ignore how she let her sister down. Winona’s characteristic stubbornness, which failed her sister when Dallas was first convicted, will eventually save both Dallas and her relationship with Vivi Ann.

“‘Trust me, Dallas.’

He turned. ‘Trust you? You must be kidding.’

‘I misjudged you. I’m sorry.’

‘It wasn’t about you misjudging me, Win. You were so jealous of Vivi Ann it made you blind.’ She swallowed hard, knowing that accusation would stay with her for a long time.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m here now. As atonement.’”

When Dallas points out Winona’s past jealousy of Vivi Ann, Winona is able to accept and beg forgiveness for it. Winona’s ability to see herself and her past actions clearly is a result of her improved self-esteem. She has moved past her insecurities enough that she can accept when and where she went wrong and work to fix things, underlining how insecurities and personal relationships affect each other.

“He got up so fast his glass fell to the floor and broke and he said you will not do this thing, Winona. Enough is enough. And then Aunt Aurora said he was a mean old man and he ought to be proud of Winona for being able to see a mistake and to want to fix it.”

Noah journals about what happened after Winona announced to the family that she was petitioning for a DNA test on Dallas’s behalf. Henry’s disapproval displays his continued prioritization of family pride despite having seen his youngest daughter suffer for years. Aurora’s response, by contrast, shows how the Grey sisters are rebuilding familial bonds among themselves. Aurora stands up to Henry and supports Winona unabashedly.

“That would be what you care about. The great Grey family and our precious reputation. You’d rather have an innocent man rot in prison than admit to making a mistake. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You never have.”

When Henry continues to disapprove of Winona’s involvement with Dallas’s case, it is her turn to stand up to him. Winona calls out Henry’s obsession with family reputation, which he places above even the well-being of his daughters. Her ability to stand up to him not only underlines that the sisters are united and loyal to each other now but also demonstrates her character growth. She no longer craves Henry’s approval, and his open displeasure does not sway her decision to do the right thing.

“We stood there for a long time and just stared at Renegade, who never even moved toward his hay. Why doesn’t he move? I finally asked. Why is he so crazy? He’s spent a long time waiting for Dallas to come home. It was totally bizarre, but when she said that, it was like I already knew it, and when I looked at the horse’s face, I saw something like sadness in his eyes.”

Noah and Vivi Ann discuss Renegade’s broken spirit, which they attribute to him still waiting for Dallas to come home. Like Clem, Renegade is an important symbol: The horses represent Vivi Ann and Dallas’s spirits, respectively. Just like Dallas, Renegade was abused in the past and was rescued by Vivi Ann. The horse is despondent when Dallas is locked up in prison and is magically rejuvenated upon his return home.

“She turned slightly and looked at him, really looked, and what she saw was a man she’d liked once, and wanted to love, but never had. It freed something in her, that unexpected realization. She’d seen love in that courtroom when Dallas looked at Vivi Ann, and Winona knew that was what she wanted. She wouldn’t accept a watered-down version ever again.”

Mark apologizes for his past behavior and seeks to reconcile with Winona. However, Winona now has enough self-respect not only to see that she and Mark didn’t love each other but also not to settle for this in the belief that she will not find love elsewhere. She is rewarded for her kindness to herself when Luke eventually returns to Oyster Shores and asks her for a second chance.

“All her life, people had said she barreled forward, her eyes always on the prize, her hands outstretched to grab hold of what she wanted. This year, however, had taught her caution. And humility. Even fear.”

Winona reflects on how working on Dallas’s case has shaken up her previous self-assurance. While Winona believes that the experience taught her caution and humility, the growth that Winona had already experienced leading up to the case allowed her to learn these additional lessons. She agreed to take Dallas’s case because she wanted to help her desperate nephew and still-grieving sister; she was able to do it justice because she allowed herself to look at it with fresh eyes. The characteristic persistence that Winona identifies in the first line of this passage allows her to succeed and help exonerate Dallas.