by Donna Britt
Easter was a big deal at Saint Timothy’s Community Church, the creamy brick edifice where Mom, my brothers, and I were fixtures. A block from our house, Saint Timothy’s was the domain of the Reverend Robert Lowery, a lion of a pastor whose pomaded mane glistened as he prowled the pulpit, roaring his sermon. Easter at Saint Tim’s was exciting—the lilies! the eggs! the hats!—yet the holiday confused me. I’d seen King of Kings so I knew Jesus had piercing blue eyes and had died on the cross for my sins. But my Sunday school teacher insisted Christ’s huge sacrifice did nothing to cancel out my everyday sinfulness in yelling at my brothers and coveting my friends’ record players. More frustrating was my teacher’s response to a nagging question: Where did this hard-to-please God come from? “He didn’t come from anywhere,” she offered, sounding somehow unconvinced. “God was always there.”
“But everyone comes from someone!” I countered, stunned that she couldn’t see the obviousness of it. “I came from my Mom, Jesus came from Mary.” The more my teacher explained God’s omnipresence—insisting that “God existed before time began”—the crazier she sounded. When I added her ravings to my nightly prayer’s hair-raising suggestion that I could “die before I wake,” religion became a very tough nut. Maybe only grown-ups got it.
So Easter was all about the outfit. It was the one time a year I was guaranteed a whole new ensemble, and in 1961 mine was perfect: a daisy-colored dress, matching jacket and hat, and—this part snatched my breath away—yellow patent leather Mary Janes. The shoes’ beauty made them like jewels or a rare painting. Reverently, I removed them from the box to marvel at them. But they were works of art for my feet—feet that jumped rope, ran from boys, and walked on sidewalks bent on scuffing unwary footwear.
So on Easter, I slid on my new shoes last. Walking normally would invite creases, so I lumbered flat-footed toward church. When Mom asked, “Why are you walking like that?” I said, “I don’t want my shoes to bend!” Uselessly, Mom said, “All shoes get creases!” Not mine. A canary-colored mummy, I walked locked-legged to church, where I modeled my glass-smooth shoes for friends.
Back home, I was horrified to find my treasures marred by several inexplicable scuffs. After a few more black marks, I downgraded my magical shoes to mere footwear. Yet I never forgot how futilely I contorted myself to preserve their perfection.
I’d had a master role model. From the moment my mother, Philadelphia-area native Geraldine King, said “I do” to Thomas Elwood Britt, a lanky sailor turned bricklayer whom she barely knew, she’d toiled to keep agonizing childhood memories from marring her shiny, new life. The new Mrs. Britt moved briefly with her husband to Berkeley, California, where Daddy, a former high school basketball star, played semipro hoops for the Oakland Bittners. A year later, she gave birth to a honey-skinned baby boy, Steven Elwood. Returning with her husband to Gary, my mother bore a second son, Darrell, and three years later, a girl: me. I was four when Mom gave birth again. My much-anticipated younger sibling turned out to be the last thing I needed: another boy.
It took me all of two seconds to fall in love with my baby brother, Bruce. Besides, in one way, his gender hardly mattered because it soon became clear that no two Britt kids were remotely alike. I was the brainy people-pleaser, which repulsed the rebellious Steve, who responded by teasing me nonstop and telling me grisly tales of “The Green Man,” a local ghoul that snatched little girls off the street. Once Steve was jokingly waving a kitchen knife at me when he inadvertently jabbed my knuckle. The resultant gush of blood brought such horror to Steve’s face that I forgot my pain in my astonishment that he might actually care about me.
Calm, funny Darrell and I were each other’s instant favorites. I loved being privy to his secret joys and fears; his trust contributed hugely to my healthy self-regard. I gave him a respite from Steve’s mischief and egotism; he offered me a break from keeping a close maternal eye on Bruce. While pregnant with my youngest brother, Mom had hoped to avoid sibling rivalry by telling me, “This baby will belong to you.”
I believed her. But my adorable baby brother belonged to no one. At fourteen months he was a diapered freedom fighter, running back and forth across the length of his wooden playpen, banging his head in painful protest at being caged. I’ll never forget accompanying Bruce and Mom to the doctor’s office so he could be immunized before kindergarten. Instructed to drop his drawers, Bruce obliged—until he saw a spectral figure in white holding a long, sharp needle moving silently toward his rear.
Howling, Bruce leapt free of his pants and dashed bare-assed into the waiting room, jumping over tables, weaving his screaming way through glaring moms and panic-stricken kids. By the time the nurse caught him, his shrieks could be heard in Chicago.
Two things bound the four very different Britt siblings together: drawing and music. My brothers and I were enthusiastic artists, consuming so much expensive drawing paper for our cowboys and ballerinas that Mom finally demoted us to paper towels. We were equally passionate about pop and R & B on the radio. Memorizing every lyric, we treated hot new singles like the elegant houses we fancied in white neighborhoods, claiming them as our own as we screamed, “That’s mine!” In 1963, Darrell grabbed an oddly catchy number before the rest of us could decide if we liked it. The British artists’ corny name, the Beatles, didn’t prevent “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from catapulting to number one—or Darrell from lording it over us for hesitating.
Except for Steve’s needling, life was peachy; its ongoing pleasantness was the closest thing I could conjure to the always-there God my Sunday school teacher described.
So you’d think I would recall the moment everything changed. When I realized that one immutable part of my existence—my innocuous, nut-colored skin—was irrevocably wrong. When the dissonance between my full-bodied existence and the limited one society had prescribed for me crystallized, revealing a stunning truth: my pulsing reality and everyone in it was invisible to the white people who ran the world.
Negroes—black people embraced the term’s hard-won capitalization—barely existed in the pop culture I adored. Take movies. The heroes and heroines of the biblical epics, Westerns, and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals we absorbed were all white. Yet it was years before I worried that Shirley Jones’s Carousel ingénue and Ann-Margret’s Viva Las Vegas hottie looked nothing like me. They felt like me, and that was enough. Black kids were nonexistent on TV, so I identified with Patty Duke playing mischievous twins, and the blond globe-trotter Jonny Quest. My life seemed as limitless as theirs.
The nightly news shook me out of my reverie: Brutal images of Negro men in pressed slacks and women with hushed hairdos being cursed, sprayed with hoses, and attacked by fang-baring German shepherds. Their harassers’ rage turned their faces into snarling masks. Those poor people, I thought, until it hit me: if I were in Birmingham, Mobile, or Selma, those monsters would direct their water blasts, hurl their dogs, blow up a Sunday school around me. I imagined reasoning with them: “You don’t understand. I’m nice! I get good grades and try hard to be well behaved so I can go to heaven.” But I’d still be Negro, still have my telltale nose and skin. And they’d hate me.
It was so unfair, there had to be a way around it. I thought and thought. I’d seen ads in Ebony for skin lighteners. But even if my almond coloring faded, no amount of Royal Crown hair ointment would make my hair lie flat enough to fool anybody.
I was a permanent Negro.
Heart pounding, I understood for the first time that I didn’t have to do anything wrong to be wrong. It was like realizing that one day I would die.
I was petrified. But there was no way out.
Growing up with so many guys gave me a terrific excuse for developing a penchant for giving to men. Yet I can’t remember when I wasn’t drawn to boys, often in very unsisterly ways. Local ten-year-old hunk Marty Jackson, the son of Mom’s best friend, was my first crush. Unless you count second-grade dreamboat Hobert Goode, about whom I told Mom, “I’ve got my man.” Or thick-l
ashed third grader Dale Johnson. Or…
From day one, I loved boys: their smiles, voices, and sturdiness, their different-from-me boyness; I couldn’t get enough of them. Yet my girlfriends were precious, too. Validating the femininity for which there was little echo at home, each in her way made up for what I bitterly lacked: a sister. I yearned for the everyday presence of someone like me. Mom was a busy adult who found my insistence on wearing her clothes and begging her to buy mother-daughter outfits from the Sears catalog baffling. I craved a close-at-hand female, someone for whom sharing feelings, magazines, clothes, and insecurities felt as necessary as it did to me. I shared what I could with Darrell. But he was a boy.
So I studied girls. I marveled at how my friend Arlene’s feet twirled when she walked, how tomboyish Carolyn threw rocks as far as any boy. After I’d had a searching phone chat with my friend Mitzi, Mom found me staring moist-eyed from our picture window. “I’m sad because one day Mitzi and I won’t be friends,” I explained. Unlike boys, of whom I had plenty, girls seemed scarce. Sometimes I worried that my female buddies were more important to me than I was to them.
An incident a few years later seemed to prove it. My family had moved across town into the spacious brick ranch home Daddy had built with his friends. Overnight, I went from being the fourth grade’s best-liked girl to being nobody. My first day at Ernie Pyle Elementary School, I stood nervously by the desk of my teacher, Mr. McCloud, who stared long and hard at my admission slip.
Mr. McCloud pointed at the page. Someone had written the “r” and “i” in my last name in such a way that the worried-looking teacher whispered, “Is your name… Butt?” “It’s Britt,” I hissed. Relieved, Mr. McCloud assigned me a seat.
I felt accepted by my Pyle classmates—until I entered fifth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Lewis, was a gem, but her class had an established clique of smart girls, a few of whom seemed wary of their new classmate. Typically, I offered myself to them by having them over, sharing my artwork, whispering my secrets. Just when I thought I was one of them, several decided to remind me who was boss.
The plan: Be Dirty to Donna Day.
On BDTDD, girls I’d thought were friends decreed that no one was to acknowledge me. The page bearing my name in a “slam” book circulating around the class was scrawled with details of my flaws, including “Round toes,” thanks to the babyish shoes Mom had insisted on buying, and “Wore the same outfit two times in a week!” When an embarrassed nonparticipant explained what was up, I retreated to the bathroom in tears.
Then Claudia (or was it Claudette?) of the quick-fisted twins whom nobody at Pyle messed with announced that she liked me and was going to kick the natural asses of whoever made me cry. When more sobbing ten-year-olds fled to the restroom, Mrs. Lewis brought all the girls together. Be Dirty to Donna’s creators confessed, insisting they’d planned to dedicate similar days to other girls. Mrs. Lewis told them cruelty is always wrong. The girls apologized. The crisis was over.
Except that it wasn’t. Hurt and astonished that my female friends—my ersatz sisters—had turned on me, I absorbed an unshakable sense that girls—unlike boys, whose behavior was familiar—could be dangerous. Some smirked in your face while snatching out your soul. The easy confidence with which I’d walked among my own sex vanished.
Making me more comfortable with, and more dependent on, guys.
By junior high, I had enough trusted girlfriends to focus on the people whose affection really mattered: boys. A vague sense that had begun in early grade school now felt concrete and undeniable: Beauty was the most important thing a girl could offer. It was a gift—not just for the girl who was born with it, but for everyone blessed to lay eyes on it. An unerring attention magnet, prettiness gave a girl the opportunity to share her deeper qualities, like her personality and humor. Beauty is tricky for every girl, but black girls’ complex relationship with their bodies can make it downright calamitous.
In seventh grade, I was bused to Emerson, the mostly white high school to which scores of black Ernie Pyle graduates had been transferred for “racial balance.” Each morning as we boarded the bus, I watched girls whose best features seemed luckier than mine: Shawn had satiny gold skin. Willowy Gayle flaunted a fashion model’s grace. Sharon’s hair was a wavy waterfall.
I had a big butt.
An ass is an asset too primitive for sonnets and too sexual to sentimentalize, especially if you’re thirteen and sex is the scariest thing in the world. Even the hunched-over girls whose slumping couldn’t hide newly prominent boobs were better off. It’s easier to respond when whooping boys are in front of you than when they’re behind.
Or so the yellow dress—whose swingy skirt barely hid the obstreperous rear beneath it—taught me. That day, I’d put on the dress, topped my ponytail with a bow, and felt as fresh and charming as a princess in a Disney movie. Grinning in the mirror, I imagined some dashing boy toppling into love with me.
Walking to school, I saw an appropriately aged boy approaching. I smiled as he walked past. He smiled back.
Then he patted my behind.
I froze. By the time I gathered myself enough to turn around, the boy was far away. But his message was clear: my “beauty” was a booty, a coarse attention-grabber that brought out the beast in boys and seemed to offer what I had no intention of giving.
“Donna Butt” indeed.
It would be decades before pop culture—via Sir Mix-A-Lot’s seminal rap “Baby Got Back” and such proudly bootylicious babes as Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez—acknowledged what boys’ reactions showed me every day: my big behind had at least as much impact on boys as other girls’ more lauded eyes and hair and breasts. But this was the 1960s; top-heavy sirens—Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, the recently departed Marilyn Monroe—reigned. Flattering, body-focused adjectives—stacked, buxom, voluptuous—were usually bust-related. My most noted feature never rated public mention; having a great ass by black standards seemed shameful.
But even in middle school, I saw an irony: of the half-dozen Caucasian features Negroes had been brainwashed into worshipping, small booties weren’t among them. I knew dozens of black boys who admired “redbone” black girls whose tiny noses, long locks, and golden skin were reminiscent of white girls’.
I didn’t know one who preferred a tiny white-girl butt.
Was a well-rounded rear the one African feature so profound in its effect that even racism’s scalpel couldn’t excise it? Or was booty-love like real estate: location, location, location? Unlike her hair and skin, a woman’s behind is irrevocably tied to sex. Black women’s generous lower-body upholstery gives them a nature-provided cushion for life’s most powerful act. Even when I was in junior high, boys and men responded with everything from whispered suggestions to shouts from across the street.
A romantic who longed to offer boys the quiet beauty of my face and heart, I was stuck with a butt whose swaying—behind my back, literally—shouted all manner of luridness. What’s annoying for a woman is terrifying for an inexperienced girl, especially one already grappling with the enormity of black folks’ hair issues.
In all of human history, only a handful of women of any color have actually loved their hair. But for kinky-haired black girls in the 1960s, the time and energy required for fighting, taming, and despising their hair was a full-time occupation.
I realized this at Emerson, where my white classmates’ carefree attitude about their hair floored me. After gym class, I marveled at the fearlessness with which white girls swam and showered. Some even proceeded wet-haired to class! With the exception of wavy-haired fortunates like Sharon and Gayle (who dodged the jealous fists of girls eager to make them pay for their luck), black girls routinely wore two swim caps into the pool and showered with head coverings impenetrable enough to pass federal hazmat requirements. We’d seen photos of “Afros,” proud, nappy halos worn by women in major cities. But seeing a smattering of sisters embrace their kinks was like being a 1903 buggy driver hearing that the Wright b
rothers were flying “airplanes”: it made little sense and had less impact on your life.
In the real world, hair meant trouble. Most black girls had two painful options: a press-and-curl or a perm. Though many got their hair done in neighbors’ kitchens, Mom took me to a “beauty parlor,” a smoky establishment presided over by “beauticians” who had ultimate power over their clients: life or death—or cute or ugly, which was the same thing.
For a press-and-curl, my beautician swathed me in a plastic drape, washed and dried my hair, and set a heavy brass comb, or “pressing iron,” over an open flame. When the comb started to smoke, the beautician grabbed a section of hair, greased it, and—as I sat as stiff as a mannequin—pulled the comb through to straighten it. When my whole head was straightened, she fired up a clattering curling iron and created rows of tight curls she combed into a style that lasted as long as I avoided rain, humidity, or sweating. Fidgeting during the process resulted in a forehead burn and a week of inventing hairdos to hide it.
Perms held other risks. The beautician applied gobs of harsh chemicals—amusingly called “relaxer”—to my hair, combed it through, and watched me sit, grimacing, as she calculated how long she had before the increasingly hot glop on my head ignited (or just felt like it). Dashing me to the sink, she’d wash the stinging goop down the drain—hopefully without clumps of my hair clinging to it.
Six weeks later—or two weeks with a press-and-curl—I endured it all again. When I griped, Mom shushed me with her favorite black-hair maxim: “Beauty knows no pain.”
Except for the psychic kind. Life shrinks when water is your sworn enemy. The briefest rain shower could flatten your perm, leaving you to resemble the sodden ghoul that emerged from Naomi Watts’s TV in The Ring. Minutes of humidity morphed the sleekest of press-and-curls into a pickaninny’s mop. No wonder huge numbers of black women never learned to swim.