How Many Shades of Gray

Twelve year old Willy Wonka stood in front of his door and looked up and down the street. The gray sky lit the gray cobblestones of the street that separated the gray buildings on one side from the gray buildings on the other.

To say everything in his neighborhood was the same color would be unfair. The soot from the factories and the wood and coal fires of the houses mixed with nature to make shades and hues that were simply variations on the gray palette. The few trees around had leaves that were gray-green, any snow in winter started out white but lost its luster in short order, and even the brick of the buildings would show a red-gray tone where recent flakes had been knocked off by contact.

Even the people were gray. Their clothes were all drab material whose only variation was the change in the number of layers worn as the seasons changed. There would be moments when a smile would cross a face, and he even heard laughter once coming from a window high in a building; Willy would bet his money (if he had any to spare) that the laughter was from madness and not simply from mirth. His family rarely smiled too; it wasn't from lack of love but the love in the household was a deep, somber type that was like a seed waiting for the spring to bloom into laughter. It had been winter for as long as Willy could remember.

Willy didn't feel gray. Even when he sat down to eat his gray porridge for breakfast and gray cabbage or parsnips for dinner (and if he was lucky, skim milk that was so thin it too was gray) he felt like inside he was all sorts of different colors trying to get out. He would stand in front of the largest part of the broken mirror and open his mouth wide, looking for any traces that might be peeping up out of the back of his mouth or from down his throat. He knew there was color somewhere in there; he had skinned his knee when he had fallen down and saw the small droplets of red blood before they were wiped away.

Willy shook himself out of his thoughts and scanned down the street again. There was a person coming, gray of course but shorter than the others and pulling something. As the person got closer Willy could make out that it was his friend Sir Lucid Truus.

His friend was almost his own age, and certainly hadn't been knighted. He had been named Sir by his parents in an attempt to give him something nice that no one could take away. The Truss family didn't have money either, but they were practical. And Sir was the most practical of them all; it was said that he could repair anything, even something he hadn't seen before, if he only had the time and the tools. Fair praise indeed for a boy of eleven. Maybe it was this skill that drew Willy to Sir; or maybe it was that both saw things as they should be and not necessarily as they were.

"Hello Willy!" called Sir. "Look, I fixed it! As good as new. Well, as good as old anyway; it never was new."

Behind Sir was Willy's wagon. Cobbled together from various scavenged parts from all sorts of things, Willy used it for odd jobs to pick up the occasional coin here and there. The rear axle bracket had broken and Willy feared its days were over, but Sir drug it home and worked on it.

"I found a brace from an old iron fence that was just the right size after I bent it. I made a hole where the rust was eating through it and put the bolt in. It should work fine now." The wagon eagerly awaited its next job; it only slightly leaned to the right from the mismatched wheels, but then again it did that even before it broke.

"Thanks Sir. Bang up job again. Here," Willy said as he handed him a coin "for services rendered. Looks like I'm back in business." Sir took the coin and shined it up; it was gray of course, but the best kind of gray there was around. "Wait 'till I show Bob Wilkinson this!"

Later that day Willy was pulling around the wagon as he walked the streets looking to hire himself out for chores. As he was walking past a clothing shop that had closed due to a fire, he saw the owner sweeping out the ashes onto the sidewalk. It didn't make too much difference, Willy thought, the sidewalk was just a darker gray where the ash was swept to the gutter. Willy asked if there was anything the owner needed to have hauled away.

"No, these burned shelves are too long and heavy for you to handle. Wait, there may be something…" he said, disappearing into the store. He returned with a cardboard box that was charred. "This got burned in the fire, and the stuff inside must be ruined. If you happen to pass a rubbish heap throw in on the top, would you please?" He placed the box on the wagon and gave Willy a small coin. "I'll be moving away after I clean this up, I think that coin was the last thing in the cash box. Good luck to you, son."

Willy moved on down the street, knowing that there was a place to dump the box up ahead in an empty lot that already held a pile of debris. He backed up his wagon to the pile and tipped it, dumping the bulky box. Curiosity got the better of him and instead of walking away he opened the box and looked inside. There were quite a few clothes that had been packed inside; the ones around the edges of the box were burned and unusable. But in the center of the box, protected by the burned clothes, was a large brown object. Willy uncovered it and pulled it out of the box; it was a felt top hat. Excitedly, Willy put the hat on and it immediately fell down over his eyes. Undaunted, he stuffed some of the less-burned clothes into the top of it until he was able to rest in on his head and still be able to see; he barely even noticed that it smelled of smoke. It took a bit of practice, but he was able to walk without it sliding down one side of his head or the other and he continued on his way.

When the winds would blow between the buildings, occasionally a whirlwind would develop and swirl little bits of paper and ash around and around until it was extinguished when it came up against a wall. Young children sometimes played a game where they attempted to stay the longest in the center, trying to guess which way the wind would shift. As Willy watched just such a whirlwind, something glittered as it spun around the ground near the bottom of the miniature cyclone. Setting his new hat carefully in the wagon, he ran over to the swirling wind and snatched at the object several times before finally catching it.

In his hand was a wrapper. An empty wrapper. An empty CANDY wrapper. Willy wasn't disappointed that it was empty because that isn't what set his mind racing. It was the colors on the wrapper itself. Greens, blues, reds, yellows, oranges and all the colors in between that he didn't have names for blazed in a living prism of life itself from the picture on the front. The spectrum almost pulsed in his hand as he moved it around and the colors played in the light. Willy was transfixed; this was what was inside of him and couldn't get out no matter how big he opened his mouth. He looked around him at his surroundings, then back at the wrapper again. This was the what the world should look like, not what was around him. He folded it up carefully and put it in his pocket before retrieving his hat and wagon.

This was it, he thought, this is what I'm meant to do. Bring color to people's lives, and do it through something everyone can have. I've got to tell Sir about this; we have some plans to make and it is going to take a long time to get there.

And with that thought Willy walked back home, practically floating down the sidewalk. He could feel the colors in his pocket and he smiled to everyone and anyone.

The End

A/N: I got this idea for a prequel to explain Willy Wonka's penchant for bright colors in the 1971 film before I got around to watching the 2005 version. In that context it fits in with the earlier film and my sequel What Goes Up that also mentions Sir Lucid Truss as an OC who implements Willy's ideas. For the sake of this story we'll ignore the later film which actually had a Willy backstory.