One of the first things I learned when I was little was that I was "pretty". My hair, though thick and unruly and with a definite tendency towards a negro kink, was soft and long, almost to my waist. My skin was golden-brown, my lips fairly small and shapely, my hands dainty and well-formed. My feet were not too large for my height (although my Créole mother with her size 4½ shoe wasn't over-pleased at their size), and though they were on the flat side, they weren't pancake-flat. Most importantly (in my mother's eyes), they did not show a sharp division of color where the skin of the foot met the soles, but easily and seamlessly blended over into a lighter shade. My legs weren't particularly shapely, but they were not "black girl's legs" either. My brow was high and wide above symmetrical, well-defined eyebrows and large eyes, and my profile was straight -- or to be pedantic, orthognathous rather than prognathous. "Little Queen Cleopatra" my mother's cousin Arthur Lee always called me.
But there were other "pretty" girls at the predominantly black elementary school I attended for the first six years of my life. There was Cathleen, whose mother was Japanese and whose father was a mulatto GI from Alabama. Cathleen was a knockout. Even as a child, her long, straight, silky black hair and graceful little body, her tiny high-arched dancer's feet and her jet-black almond eyes could charm anyone. And there was Francine, who was my best friend, a tall, pale, elegant-looking, highly intelligent girl with a beautiful profile who hated not only the thick glasses she was obliged to wear to correct her myopia, but her kinky hair, which she always kept carefully straightened and coifed. Her mother was Portuguese, and her father, like Cathleen's, was a mixed-race GI.
Then there was Diana. Her family was kind of special (I was an adult when I first understood how special they were), because they were something nobody in our neighborhood had ever seen up close before: a so-called "black" family who were in fact the purest of white trash. They were all high-high-yellow, freckled, red-haired (their name incidentally was O'Brien), and totally lawless. They lived in a ramshackle house that the County had condemned as an unfit property, but -- given that the workings of municipal instances grind as slowly as God's mills -- the O'Briens had lived in the place as long as anyone could remember, and there was no sign of them quitting it. Like the white trash that they were, all of them were violent and generally hostile to anything that had to do with community spirit or law-and-order. They kept loaded weapons, and they let people know it. Everybody in the neighborhood steered clear of them, but I befriended Diana, because she was so sweet and funny, and her laughing green eyes were irresistible. She talked a drawling, colorful southern dialect all mixed up with curses and oaths and bad language that made me and Francine die laughing. As far as our mothers were concerned, Diana was strictly off limits, but we got together with her anyway on the sly.
When we were 10, Diana came down with tuberculosis (not so strange, considering that part of the O'Briens' roof had long since caved in). She was sent away to a Catholic sanitarium, and we didn't see her again until two years later. When she returned, both Francine and I were struck dumb by how mature she seemed, and instead of the bad English laced with profanity that she and her brothers had always spoken, she now was mistress of a poised and beautiful articulation as good or better than our own. She talked like a white girl with real class.
And maybe because of that, Diana could never fit into her own family again. Within a few months of her return to them, she was packed off in great haste to parts unknown, and it was rumored that her uncle had raped her. I wouldn't be surprised.
But there were "ugly" girls too. Phoebe, who at the age of 12 weighed 200 lbs. and had been left back twice in class. She was big and heavy and smelled unwashed, Her huge head was topped by an uncombed mass of knots, and her hand-me-down clothes were never really clean. When I was about 10, she singled me out as the object of her envy and hatred, and persecuted me for over a year, chasing me home, threatening me, egging on her lieutenants to humiliate me, etc., until the fateful day when I decided I wasn't having any more, and beat the living bejeezus out of her.
And then there was Beauty, a girl who might have had a future because she was, in fact, articulate and intelligent; but she went through school an object of ridicule because of her name; whatever else she might have been, she was not beautiful in any earthly sense. In fact, she was ugly as sin. She was muddy black-skinned (not the clear-black and beautiful complexion that is seen in some Africans). She had buckteeth, a huge flat nose, formless thick lips, and a sloped profile, not to speak of short, buckshot-and-peppercorn hair. Try bearing all that and being called "Beauty"-in the America of the 1950s-at the same time!
There was Rosemarie, who wasn't ugly at all, just fairly plain and dark-skinned and crippled, and kind-hearted almost to a fault. She had had polio a few years before I got to know her, and like Diana, she had won a lot of wisdom and good language from a year in an institution. Nevertheless, she too was erased from the neighborhood records when a family member got her pregnant at age 13.
It's hard being a girl. Girls are expected to be pretty, facile, charming, available, obliging and a host of other things that they themselves have no choice in or control over. Nevertheless, I am grateful that in the America of my childhood experience, I was considered a "pretty girl".
Men have always divided women into "pretty" and "ugly"; it is the eye of the beholder that decides which is which. And, assuming that this judgment is valid -- at least in the eyes of those who make it -- we are taught to sort ourselves docilely into the various categories in which they have placed us.
America is chock-full of ugly white girls. They are everywhere with their buckteeth, their acne, their ski-slope up-noses, their small, pinched little watery-gray eyes, their frizzy rat-colored hair and their shapeless behinds. But they do not have to be stigmatized by the idea that they represent a racial "type"; they don't have to hear that they are ugly because they are "white". Phoebe and Beauty were ugly girls, but they had to bear the double stigma of being "ugly" and "black", in other words, the blacker you are the uglier you are.
On the other hand, sometimes caste is even more damning than color. Cathleen, Francine and I -- pretty, light-skinned girls of mixed blood -- all grew up in tidy, middle-class homes; the success of our respective futures was pretty much assured. But the most beautiful of all of us, Diana, came back from an institution to her family, and found herself caste-less. To her family, she was suddenly an unknown quantity, an undercover agent from the world that they would never understand, accept or live in. Suddenly, pretty as she was, she became dispensable, a thing of no further use. And her kin relegated her to oblivion.
"Black" is not "ugly". But men have their preferences, and those preferences are dictated by custom and culture, by the fashions of the day (witness the 1880s when a woman like Claudia Schiffer would have been considered as attractive as a saw-horse), and by instincts that are not decipherable even to those who express them. For example, the pop-icon of the 70s, Grace Jones, would have been thought ripe for burning at the stake in the America of the 1700s.
In America, being black and pretty has always had its drawbacks. And most of all, every "pretty" girl who has a conscience has been keenly aware of what her "ugly" sisters have had to suffer, even in the cruel dimension of "race". Alas, there is no remedy for this. Some of us are considered handsome, some of us are not.
But that will always be. And "race", in this case, is purely an incidental factor-or should be. As we continue to mix among ourselves, these concepts will change. The other day on the street in Stockholm, I saw a tall girl with dark-brown skin, full, shapely lips, golden eyes, and oriental hair buying a hot-dog from a vendor. It is her beauty that we must begin to measure our own against. She represents tomorrow, and the beauty of our children's children. Let's go for it!
Also by Susanne M.J. Heine:
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