A Second Glance

When I was five years-old, my grandma and I moved to her childhood home in Columbia, MO. Her father, my great-grandpa Morris, still lived in the farmhouse he built with his own hands. Although the farm was no longer active, he still had a goat, and they eventually bought me a German Shepherd that I promptly named Betty with no regard to his maleness.

My favorite thing to do on that farm was to lay in the grass in the front yard with my books and pretend that when the sun shone on me, if I was smiling, I was shining right back. I always felt like I was shiny, not like oily, but like people noticed me. That they could see how happy I was on the inside from the outside.

Grandma enrolled me in Kindergarten and an after-school program at a local daycare center. As far as I could tell, the center was run by two women, both middle-aged and black. They weren’t very nice, and seemed to have a rather healthy distaste for children. I can’t truly remember their smiles, but I remember their scowls vividly. However, what I remember most often, and with stunning clarity, about these women is their preference for the children with lighter skin. My skin isn’t particularly dark, but it’s definitely not light. I wouldn’t pass the brown-paper-bag test.

The center was made up of black children almost exclusively, and we had been very carefully categorized, and in some cases, pit against each other. These women didn’t just prefer lighter skinned children, they also terrorized the children with very dark skin.

I had a friend at the center named Olivia. She had the kind of dark skin that I dream about having now. It was blue-black and soft like a pearl. One day, Olivia got into a fight with a lighter-skinned girl and when our “caretakers” saw this, one of them held Olivia’s hands behind her and let the other girl get her “hits back”. Then they told Olivia not to cry because they didn’t want to look at her ashy face.

Now, I wasn’t the one being terrorized here, but this was the first time I thought about the way I looked and realized that I’d never be called beautiful, but I’d never be called ugly either. I was just…invisible. And maybe, invisible was better than beautiful, or even better than shiny.

Through different educational moments, I’ve learned about self-hate and where the light-skin/dark-skin good hair/nappy hair dichotomy comes from and how it is perpetuated. I now realize that these women were kinda sick. I also realize there are still a LOT of black people for whom light-skin/good hair will always be superior to dark-skin/nappy hair.

At this time in my life, I’m so happy to say that I am no longer content to be invisible. The more I learn about beauty—REAL beauty—the more beauty I find in myself, inside and out. My kinky hair, the sole dimple in my left cheek, my brown eyes, my comedic timing, my love for children, and my passion for social justice are all very, very beautiful things about me, and I don’t want to hide them. I want to let them shine.