How I Picture Mae Madison

For the characters I put in the stories, as much as possible, I do not describe how they look. I concentrate on their speech pattern and cadence and on how their personality comes across in their words and their actions.

Mae started out as a name in a list. Later on she gained a last name and details of her life and family came to light. Connie Neiland is the central character in The Seven Second Kiss but I had the most fun writing Mae Madison.

I didn't describe her but I did picture her. If you plan on reading The Seven Second Kiss I will be grateful but you might want to stop reading this little essay right now so you can form your own impression of what Mae looks like. I'm about to describe how I see her.

Before I get to that, to me Mae is the epitome of revenge on the stereotyping of black women, especially in media produced in the era of the novel, which is the 1930s. Mae is smart. She can be feisty in every sense. She speaks her mind. She is courageous. Sometimes she's domineering. She is a good friend. She is dependable. She is hard working. She is certainly street wise.

Physically I see her at about five foot four and just ever so slightly over her ideal weight for her height. She is dark brown with an olive tinge to her complexion. She keeps her hair relatively short and she does not do anything at all to straighten it.

She is beautiful but not by the standard of a white person's aesthetic. Mae is a black woman and very proud of her lineage and her heritage.

One aspect of the way she looks does come out in the dialogue in the story. Mae is curvy. Connie needed a nice dress in a hurry. Mae's dress was commandeered and had to be drastically altered because Mae had a much more developed figure than Connie did.

I really like Mae. I plan on writing a sequel to The Seven Second Kiss. I expect it to have a much darker tone to it. The Seven Second Kiss resolved with an ending that seemed happy. But it left Connie with a set of very real problems, one of which is that she will soon give birth to a mulatto child. The people close to her are loving and understanding. The society of the day outside her circle of family and friends will not be so kind.

Mae, of course, will be there with Connie. She would have it no other way.

The Seven Second Kiss is available from Smashwords.