Have a look at the man page and my .Xdefaults[1]...
Thank you for the suggestion.
I'm currently using the bare cmd.exe of Win2k and didn't want to have
to start X11 just to get a terminal emulator. It seems heavy - is
this really necessary? There is probably some magic thing to say in
inputrc or terminfo to specify these colors but it has been 20 years
since I waded into termcap/terminfo. The manual mentions
set_foreground and set_background but it requires a lot of digging to
sort out. I was hoping someone could point the way or say "there be
dragons".