journal session 4
I think about color a lot. Even more now that I live in Edmonton, since the color of my skin marks me as different from most of the city’s population. When I was walking down the street, I would be one of a handful of black faces in a sea of white; there’s more salt than pepper here, if you know what I mean.
Home home, brown skin is the norm. Most of the people who live in my country have either African or Indian ancestors. Walk through downtown San Fernando, my hometown, and you’ll see a spectrum of complexions ranging from palest ochre to darkest ebony. It’s beautiful to me. As a child I took it for granted; my world was full of brown people, people who looked like me. They lived next door, loaned me books at the library, drove the buses I rode, read the news on TV, and ran my government. I hardly ever saw white people in real life. On TV sitcoms, yeah, all the time. But not doing ordinary stuff like taking out the garbage. Here, white people were my neighbors, my librarians, my bus drivers, the news anchors, the city council, even the garbage men.
Being black in a black country doesn’t mean race isn’t important, though. I grew up accustomed to people referring to me by the color of my skin: I was a dark-skinned girl. Not just me, either; so-and-so was a red-skinned lady; so-and-so was a brown-skinned fellah. I had a neighbor everyone called Blacks because his skin was so dark. Nobody said it out loud but skin color mattered. The lighter your skin, the more desirable you were for a job, for anything really. A light-skinned mixed-race girlfriend with long, wavy hair was the gold standard if you were a boy, no matter your race. Girls freaked out over light-skinned boys—“red man”—as though they were some kind of prize. Even Ki-ki said her grandmother wanted her to marry someone who would “add some milk to the coffee” and give her light-skinned grandchildren one day.
As a bony, dark-skinned girl with short, kinky hair, I felt I was nobody’s first pick. Matchstick. Charcoal. Bun-bun. Those were some of the nicknames the other kids called me. My personal fave was Corbeau, after the pitch-black vultures that lived on garbage and dead dogs in the dump. In my primary-school graduation class photo I was a dark, unsmiling smudge with huge eyes, hiding in the back row behind the lighter, smiling faces.
When I told Akilah the Cute Boy was light-skinned, she screamed. “You? I can’t believe you have a crush on a red man!” I rolled my eyes at that. I didn’t like him because he was light. He was super cute. Like super. Cute. And taller than me (how rare was that?!). Besides, I had never had a crush on anybody at all, red man or not. When I told her Josh’s skin color, describing it as caramel brown, she laughed at me. “He making you not only thirsty, but hungry, too! Caramel?” I knew she was only teasing but I seriously thought about what she said. Why not say caramel? I’m the color of dark cocoa. She was the color of milk chocolate. It wasn’t my fault all the good colors for brown happened to be named after food. Besides, I’ve read stories where white people were called “olive” or “peaches and cream.” Those are food, too, right?
Josh was smart and cute and so cool. He was a catch; there could be teenage girls all over Brooklyn swooning for him. Though Ki-ki always told me I was pretty, I never believed her. If a dark, skinny girl with picky hair was pretty, why weren’t there more people like me at home home in the advertisements on TV? Pale Indian faces adorned billboards for skin lightening cream, Bollywood movies, and rum. Light-skinned mixed-race people sold pretty much everything else, from car batteries to rum. (Everybody sold rum.) I have to admit they put a lot of dark-skinned soca singers on billboards. I liked Fay-Ann best of all. She had short hair, even shorter than mine!
My hair was another thing. It was never long to begin with, and the tightness of its curl made it seem even shorter. Every time she combed it, Cynthia wished out loud that I would straighten it like she did hers, and save her the ordeal of putting her hands through the thick coils. Every couple of months she herself went to the beauty salon and paid a lot of money for her hairdresser to put a chemical paste into her hair to take the kink out of it. The cream smelled like old pee and burned her scalp, leaving painful sores that scabbed over the next day, but when she walked out of the salon she had straight hair that swished past her shoulders, for a while, at least. When I turned twelve she asked me if I wanted to do the same to mine. I said no. She couldn’t understand why. The first week of the third term of school, right after Easter, I took a pair of paper scissors from my pencil case and cut my hair off. I don’t know why. I ketch a vaps, like we say home home. School had been agony that day; maybe that was it. At lunchtime I could barely stop myself from running into traffic if only I could make a dash past the security guards at the gate. At home, finally alone and away from all the noise of my school, I looked into the mirror and saw my picky hair. It was all I could see. Not my clear skin or my big black eyes or my full lips or my high cheekbones. I saw only the hair my mother hated. It filled me with frustration. I didn’t pause before I started to snip. Mom was blue with rage when she saw me standing in my bedroom with that little heap of black plaits at my feet. She marched me straight to the barbershop to get my hair evened out, because of course it was an awful cut, patchy and rough. I got a long lecture about making the best of my looks, and that included what little hair I had left. A woman’s hair was her glory, she said again and again. When it grew out enough, she said, I would get a weave. I sat in that barbershop chair, hearing the buzz of electric clippers and feeling the sting of the alcohol the barber sprayed on the back of my neck when he was done, thinking I would never want to stick someone else’s hair into my own. Why should I? There was nothing wrong with my own hair, was there? And if there was something wrong with my hair, was there also something wrong with me?
The morning of the barbecue was crisp and clear. Julie was up early, mixing meat, mushrooms, and onions into a slurry that, she assured me, would turn into the most delicious hamburgers I’d ever tasted. Jillian was out buying charcoal and paper cups and I was assigned to rake the lawn, clean the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels. I also had to change the sheets on the pullout sofa bed, in case anyone stayed over afterward.
It was about ten in the morning when I finished my chores and gave a thought to the fact that I had absolutely nothing to wear. Yeah, I had T-shirts, jeans, shirts. But nothing in my wardrobe was an outfit I considered worthy of the occasion. It had to be something really special.
“Uh, Julie?” I said weakly.
“Sugar? What’s up?” She was, by this time, vacuuming the living room. She switched off the vacuum cleaner and looked at me expectantly.
“I have…I have nothing to wear.”
Jillian chose that moment to walk in. She screeched. I wasn’t sure whether she was horrified that she was related to me, or thrilled that I was finally showing interest in something except the color and texture of the ceiling paint.
“That’s wonderful!” Julie yelled.
Jillian dropped her bags by the kitchen door and hurried out to the living room. “Oh, baby!” I was engulfed in a spicy patchouli hug. “Let’s go immediately. We can pick up some things at the mall in a hurry.” She turned to Julie. “You have—”