Chirlane McCray: I Used to Think
I Used to Think
©1983 Chirlane McCray
I used to think I can’t be a poet because a poem is being everything you can be in one moment, speaking with lightning protest unveiling a fiery intellect or letting the words drift feather-soft into the ears of strangers who will suddenly understand my beautiful and tortured soul. But, I’ve spent my life as a Black girl a nappy-headed, no-haired, fat-lipped, big-bottomed Black girl and the poem will surely come out wrong like me. And, I don’t want everyone looking at me. If I could be a cream-colored lovely with gypsy curls, someone’s pecan dream and sweet sensation, I’d be poetry in motion without saying a word and wouldn’t have to make sense if I did. If I were beautiful, I could be angry and cute instead of an evil, pouting mammy bitch a nigger woman, passed over conquested and passed over, a nigger woman to do it to in the bushes. My mother tells me I used to run home crying that I wanted to be light like my sisters. She shook her head and told me there was nothing wrong with my color. She didn’t tell me I was pretty (so my head wouldn’t swell up). Black girls cannot afford to have illusions of grandeur, not ass-kicking, too-loud-laughing, mean and loose Black girls. And even though in Afrika I was mistaken for someone’s fine sister or cousin or neighbor down the way, even though I swore never again to walk with my head down, ashamed, never to care that those people who celebrate the popular brand of beauty don’t see me, it still matters. Looking for a job, it matters. Standing next to my lover when someone light gets that “she ain’t nothin come home with me” expression it matters. But it’s not so bad now. I can laugh about it, trade stories and write poems about all those put-downs, my rage and hiding. I’m through waiting for minds to change, the 60’s didn’t put me on a throne and as many years as I’ve been Black like ebony Black like the night I have seen in the mirror and the eyes of my sisters that pretty is the woman in darkness who flowers with loving.