I Thought Having Lighter Skin Would Make Me Easier to Love

Growing up, I faced a lot of ridicule at home. Whenever my grandmother wasn’t around, my two light-skinned siblings would bombard me with violence or insults or both, seemingly out of nowhere. My skin complexion was their all-time favorite target. Though I can’t tell you exactly what was said. Those memories are somewhere hiding, and no matter how much I called out to them while writing this, they wouldn’t come out. I buried them well.

Here is what I do remember: “black, black, BLACK.” It was never beautiful coming from their mouths. It was always filthy. They’d raise their upper lips and nostrils. Sometimes they appeared to be disgusted. Other times, they appeared to be surprised as if they couldn’t believe someone as “black” as I was even existed. BLACK made ugly sound pleasant, but they seemed synonymous anyway.

I can’t say for sure why I faced any of what I faced at home, but I can make assumptions. I believe what I endured was my siblings’ way of coping, terribly, with their own experiences. I won’t write about what they went through, but they had every right to their anger, sadness, and confusion. They didn’t have the right to take any of it out on me though. Their near constant torment led me to believe I didn’t deserve to be alive because I wasn’t beautiful.

They made me feel like who I was wasn’t enough, so after a while I found other dark-skinned people to be. In elementary, I watched my dark-skinned classmates very carefully. Some of them were confident and warmhearted. I studied their gestures, their laughter, their handwriting, their posture. When I went home, I performed, but I wasn’t successful. I still failed at being treated with kindness even when I wasn’t myself. They didn’t even notice.

By the time I began sixth grade, there were two versions of me. Although Monterica at school wasn’t exactly uninhibited, I laughed more often than I did at home. I felt connected to my friends and teachers. Everyone, for the most part, was kind to me. At home though, I was someone else. I was more withdrawn. I wanted to shut everything and everyone out.

At home, I began to have suicidal thoughts.

When I think of middle school, I’m able to draw a more concrete line between what I experienced and why; I can make better assumptions. I went to school outside of North Memphis and I think my siblings were probably annoyed. Envious is a better word, but I cringe at using it to describe them. They must have thought that I thought I was better than them. I didn’t. I’d always been a part of the Memphis City Schools’ optional program. Based on my performance in school, I had the option to attend the school I wanted to attend despite my address.

Maybe they weren’t mean to me because I went to school in a nicer neighborhood. Maybe it was because I read more often than they did and I enjoyed writing short stories; a lot of the ridicule I faced at home between sixth and eighth grade began after I’d been reading or writing for pleasure.

One night, after being relentlessly insulted and then punched in the face, I couldn’t hear anything beyond the ringing in my ears for several moments. I knew I had to tell my grandmother about what I’d been feeling. Until then, I hadn’t wanted to be a snitch. Not snitching wasn’t a conscious decision. For whatever reason, we just never told our grandmother anything. This was different though. I needed help. The constant emotional and physical violence I endured motivated me in the worst way. If I didn’t reach out for a hand to hold, I was going to take my own life. When my grandmother came home, our duplex was quiet. The chores had been done. Everyone had gone to bed.

I pleaded, “Can you take me with you from now on when you leave? I don’t like the way they treat me. They make fun of me. They hurt me. They just won’t leave me alone no matter what I say. Please, just let me go with you.” I cried.

My grandmother tilted her head and sighed. She said, “Brothers and sisters fight. That’s what families do.”

Her response deflated me. I cried even harder than before. I wanted to give up. I wanted to let go.

I wondered, briefly, if there was violence in her home everyday when she was a child, but I didn’t ask. She never talked much about her childhood.

She’d been at the mall and asked me to bring her the scissors from the kitchen so she could remove the tag from a skirt she’d bought me. In the kitchen, before I went into a drawer to grab the scissors, I paused. I stared at a knife in the cutlery holder on the dish rack. I imagined the look on my grandmother’s face when she found my lifeless body on the kitchen floor and realized she should’ve helped me when I needed help. I sighed, grabbed the scissors, continued to cry silently, and left the kitchen. The walk back to my grandmother in the living room was long.

I knew if my grandmother couldn’t help me I would have to find a way to help myself. It didn’t take long to figure out what I needed. I needed lighter skin. If I looked like my siblings, I could be beautiful and I could be happy. More importantly though, they could be happy with me.

I decided I wasn’t dark-skinned after all. I was just dirty. I was determined to wash away the filth hiding my light skin from me. At night, I scrubbed my skin raw in the bathtub. My grandmother became concerned with what was taking me so long in the bathroom at night and eventually asked my sister to sit with me while I bathed. She told our grandmother that I was bathing but just took a long time in the tub. My grandmother must’ve been satisfied with the report because I wasn’t supervised anymore after that.

If I was still dark-skinned after I finished bathing one night, I tried harder the next night and the next night and the next night. I thought the painful redness in some places meant I was getting closer to revealing the lighter skin complexion I just knew I had. I gave up after a few weeks. The thoughts of suicide persisted.

After countless failed attempts at cleansing away my darkness, I searched for answers in novels when I noticed Maleeka Madison’s face on the cover of The Skin I’m In by Sharon G. Flake on a teacher’s desk at school one day. I tried my best to pay attention in class, but I kept thinking about the book. I wanted to know everything about the girl on the cover. I wanted to know if she felt like me. I wanted to know if she hated her skin too.

It didn’t take long for me to find Tangy Mae Quinn in The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips and Odessa Blackburn in Fifth Born by Zelda Lockhart. Their dark-skinned faces on the covers invited me to find myself in them. I did. Their sensitivity and love of learning granted me a kinship I didn’t share with my siblings. When I read their stories, everything around me fell away for a little while. Their pain helped me forget my own. It wasn’t enough though. I could step into their worlds for a little while, but their worlds didn’t change mine at all.

I began to ask girls at church if I was ugly or not. I don’t know why I chose them. Maybe it was because I knew I wouldn’t see them everyday or even the following Sunday. They were usually visiting their grandparents and didn’t attend our church regularly. When the last girl stared at me and blinked slowly without saying a word, I knew she’d be the last girl.

In ninth grade, my grandmother bought me a tube of Black and White bleaching cream for the darkest parts of my face. I don’t remember if I asked for the Black and White, but I was excited. The label told me I’d have a smooth, even complexion after using it. The Black and White didn’t help at all though. For weeks, my dark spots still stood out horrendously against everything else. I wanted to hide.

I tried to find what I needed online, and eventually I began to catfish. It wasn’t called catfishing then though. I decided to do so after I saw the number of likes and comments a light-skinned girl garnered with just one picture. By that time, my siblings were no longer making fun of my darker skin, but my self-esteem had been destroyed.

I used pictures of a light-skinned Black girl who lived a thousand miles away from me. Her hair was long and always perfect. Her body was curvy. She was a senior in high school. She never had the same clothes on in any of her pictures. She wore Jordans, but that wasn’t all. She wore everything. With her pictures, I was admired. With her pictures, I was respected. The charade didn’t last more than a few months though. The people I encountered online weren’t my family and as much as I enjoyed chatting with them, I knew we’d never meet. If we did, I knew they wouldn’t want anything to do with me because I was nothing like the girl in the pictures.

In college, I saw a counselor and talked openly and honestly about how I felt my childhood affected me. I cried a lot in the beginning. Crying is what I remember most about my first semester of counseling sessions. After a few months, I noticed a change in myself. It wasn’t gradual at all. It happened suddenly. I looked up from washing my hands one day and saw myself for the first time. From then on, when I looked in the mirror, I loved what I saw. I was even startled sometimes at how stunning I was, and I would study my face as if I’d never seen it before. Who was the beautiful girl in the mirror? Where had she come from?

For nearly twenty years, I believed what I’d been told about my complexion. I believed I was ugly. It wasn’t until I began to peel away at the layers and layers of pain I’d endured in my childhood that I finally started to see myself for who I was.

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