The Skin I’m In

Day in and day out Kinjari eyes me, staring like he sees the sun rising in my eyes. I want to ask him why he looks at me that way. Am I something so beautiful he can’t help but stare? I keep quiet. Beauty is where one finds it, my father used to say. […]

I was sick, bad, for a long while. When I woke up, Kinjari was gone. Dead. “He had the mark. The pocks,” the girl chained to me said, sucking her front teeth like they was soup bones. “The slavers tossed him over the side,” she said.

But this one, she steals my food. Can I trust her with the truth? I don’t know.

I jump off the sink and lean close to the mirror on the wall, and think of Daddy. “Maleeka,” he used to say, “you got to see yourself with your own eyes. That’s the only way you gonna know who you really are.”

I reach down into my bag and pull out the little hand mirror Daddy gave me and look at myself real good. My nose is running. I blow it and throw the tissue away. I splash some water on my face and pat it dry. I reach deep down into my pocketbook and pull out the little jar of Vaseline and shine up my lips. Then I ball up my cap, stuff it in my backpack, and walk right on out of there.

The class gets so quiet, it’s scary. “I was ten years old and brushing her teeth, feeding her oatmeal like a baby. She cried all the time. Last year, she finally came to. Got up one day, went and bought a sewing machine, and started making clothes. Ain’t never sewed nothing before. Just started, day and night, sewing.”

Some kids at the back of the room start to snicker and make smart remarks. Shut up, I’m thinking. Just shut up.

“The more she sewed them clothes, the better she got. She started picking up after herself. Got a job and all. No, ain’t nothing good come from loving somebody so much you can’t live without ‘em,” I say. “No good at all.”

The words is written out real neat and straight and strong.

Brown
Beautiful
Brilliant
My my Maleeka
is
Brown
Beautiful
Brilliant
Mine

Momma is calling me. I can’t answer. My mouth is full of Daddy’s words, and my head is remembering him again. Tall, dark, and smiling all the time. Then gone when his cab crashed into that big old bread truck. Gone away from me for good, till now.

“All I done for you,” Char says. “You gonna leave me out to dry like this. Wait till later, you ugly, stupid black thing.”

Call me by my name! I hear Akeelma say, and I scream it out, too. “Call me by my name! I am not ugly. I am not stupid. I am Maleeka Madison, and, yeah, I’m black, real black, and if you don’t like me, too bad ‘cause black is the skin I’m in!”

Would you be my Almond Joy
My chocolate chip, my Hershey Kiss
My sweet dark chocolate butter crisp?

Caleb’s poem makes me cry. It is so sweet. I look at my face in the mirror and smile. I promise myself to hang Caleb’s poem on the wall with Daddy’s and the one from the library.