I Am Beautiful

By: Sherrie James

I learned that I am beautiful today! For the first time, this knowledge has sunk in and might take root - firm, strong roots that will not be shaken. 

I learned I am beautiful today! This girl, this woman- who grew up pulling her nose. First with a pinch at the point between my eyebrows followed by a slow tuck down my invisible bridge. Pulling my nose has become an enduring habit, a comforting one. And possibly in the recesses of my mind, I've come to believe in its effectiveness. 

As a little girl, I was encouraged to cultivate this practice. My fingers became pros at the task. My thumb and index finger would find their mark in the middle of a math class, on my walk to school, or while listening to music. No special occasion was warranted. They would find any moment to pinch and pull, pinch and pull, pinch and pull. I did it because I believed in the power of this act. 

I did not love my nose. It was a flat nose. It did not matter that my nose resembled that of the people around me. What mattered was that it could improve, be better and as a result I would be better. See, I was an ugly child. I was told as much. The bearers of this fact were people who loved me so it had to be true. It did not help that the occasional taunt in the schoolyard also targeted my ugliness. If pinching my nose could change my face, make me pretty then it was a welcomed solution. 

The pinching continued into my adolescence and my nose became straighter. I was also comparing myself to other girls at this stage, and my nose was not as big, not as flat as others. It had lost weight over the years. It was slimmer, thinner at its base and there was evidence of a bridge that seemed nonexistent before. And I was proud! I was not as ugly. What I heard now was, “You're getting cute! You're growing nicely!”  

I was never told explicitly that my nose had to look a certain way. I was not given a standard or a model I had to work towards. As a little girl, all I was exposed to was the knowledge that my nose could be improved and improving it would be better for me. But I eventually discovered the model. I can not pinpoint the moment when it hit me or maybe it was gradual like learning how to find pleasure in the morning when you hate any ray of light that dares to show itself before you're ready to wake up. There was no escaping that standard, that truth - the ultimate was the white nose, a narrow bridge, a narrow base, a long, slim nose with its protruding tip. The focus on the bridge, a nose being slim all stemmed from our history.

My home, my tiny island like all the others in the Caribbean, became home to Africans who were uprooted from their way of life to till the soil until it produced for the slave master. I now see that so much of my upbringing stems from inherent racism passed from generation to generation. It's the house slave versus the field slave. The straighter the nose, the lighter the skin, the softer the hair- the better you are. That untruth has lived as fact in our DNA. It is coded in our being so I can not blame my mother or my grandmother. I can not be mad at my cousins or family friends who felt the need to comment on my looks. Our standard of beauty whether we were willing to admit it was that of the white woman. It is devastating now to realize how the slave master still holds his power over us, that the damage to who we are as a people lives on, and hits us from different angles cutting away our existence. 

Looking back, I recall the moments that were often in the shadows but hinted at something universal, some unwritten understanding. The girls, who were more popular in the playgrounds. The students that were preferred by the teachers, given more opportunities to be public speakers, to serve as the stellar image of what we represented. They were never the girls with glowing, beautiful black skin or the girls with bold, shapely lips, or the girls with pronounced noses. I did not think they should be but my inner angel, the girl who was never accepted, felt slighted, felt injured in some way. If I was as smart why was the spotlight never on me? If I was as well behaved, as kind, as dedicated why was I not seen?

As a teenager, I was tempted to continue to alter my looks. I wanted my kinky hair relaxed so it could look straight and long. I wanted my skin lighter and so turned to creams that bleached, that literally stunted my blackness. It was never enough. All the effort did not change the way I saw myself or the way the world saw me. It did not change the self-doubt and self-loathing. The result, in the end, was me simply giving up. I couldn’t do it anymore, I didn’t want to do it anymore. 

I have been fighting for much of my adult life to not conform to society's ideas of beauty. Yes, there is no denying that this evolution stemmed from being told I was ugly in the first place. But I have been able for the most part to rise above it. I wear makeup sparingly, my hair is natural, and I’m working on changing that one, comforting habit of pulling my nose. I see my struggles show up in other ways, like the fact that I hate taking pictures or rarely looking at myself in a mirror for more than 20 seconds. I have work to do but it’s easier every day because I am learning that I am enough. 

I was told I was beautiful today! My 10-year-old daughter wrote about her family for a school assignment and she described me as beautiful! My 10-year-old with her innocent eyes, eyes that so far only understand our different shades but have yet to grasp the magnitude of racism, eyes that have seen the white standard repeatedly on screens and see so little of herself reflected back to her- those eyes that see me and do not find me lacking, they find me beautiful.