Ayana Byrd - Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts

Table of Contents

DEDICATION

We dedicate this work to our mothers, Rochelle Nichols-Solomon and Stephanie Williams; our grandmothers, Mamie Nichols and Carolyn Solomon, Florence Price and Geraldine Byrd; and to our godmothers, Rosemary Matthews and Karen Winston.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our families for their moral support; our contributors for giving their all; G. Giraldo for the beautiful portraits; Joicelyn Dingle for her tireless celeb-wrangling; Sonia Sanchez for her powerful words; Marie Brown for structure and encouragement; and our editor, Dara Stewart, for her unshakable belief in Naked.

Wed also like to thank Karen Addison, Jessica Chong, Santana Dempsey, Angeliq Turner, Raphael Romana, Shani Parrish, Mimi Valds, Karen R. Good, Margeaux Watson, Jevon Johnson, Willie Nattiel, Christian Bernard, Zurn Porter, Karla Radford, Shyne, Hilary Beard, Francesco Samichelli, Carole Hall, Julia Chance, Daniella Cobb, Alexis Bell, Jermaine Hall, Datwon Thomas, Kofi Taha, Ahmir Thompson, Margaret Prescod-Cisse, Shaun Gee, Jessica Cohen, Marsha and Len Burnett, Yvette Schure, Tracie Miller, Hillary Weston, Karen Taylor-Bass, Tim Murphy, Michele Pierce, Lil Mo, Louise Sloan, Jeannie Kim, Charles Bjorklund, Jordan Barnes, and Tanya McKinnon.

Finally, we must acknowledge some of the activists, artists, athletes, models, and writers who built the foundation for Naked: Debbie Allen, Maya Angelou, India.Arie, Erykah Badu, Sartje Baartman, Lisa Bonet, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett, Kathleen Cleaver, Cathy Cohen, Lucille Clifton, Edwidge Danticat, Julie Dash, Angela Davis, Althea Gibson, Nikki Giovanni, Eloise Greenfield, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Lauryn Hill, bell hooks, Hilda Hutcherson, Iman, Judith Jamison, Lisa Jones, Marion Jones, June Jordan, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Jayne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Audre Lorde, Annie Tunrbo Malone, Kierna Mayo, Joan Morgan, Jessica Care Moore, Toni Morrison, Nehanda Obiyodun, Suzan Lori Parks, Beah Richards, Faith Ringgold, Fatima Robinson, Tricia Rose, Salt-N-PEPA, Danzy Senna, Assata Shakur, Ntozake Shange, Nina Simone, Lorna Simpson, Yvette Smalls, Stephanie Stokes Oliver, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan L. Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Cicely Tyson, Linda Villarosa, Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker, Madame CJ Walker, Rebecca Walker, Michelle Wallace, Faye Wattleton, Carrie Mae Weems, Alek Wek, Serena and Venus Williams, Debra Willis, Oprah Winfrey, and Gail Elizabeth Wyatt.

FOREWORD

One night in 1984 I was leaving City Hall, coming from a late meeting in the mayors office. As I came outside, a man, a White man, drove up and yelled out to me, You want some of this? And as I looked towards him and his car I saw that he had his pants open and he was shaking his penis at me.

I had thought that with my coat and my purse and my briefcase, I would be seen that night as a professional, as the professor of English at Temple University that I was. But all he saw was a Black woman outdoors at night. He saw a prostitute. A streetwalker. An easy, available Black woman. He didnt see me.

Its always a shocker when you see yourself one way, but many people in the world view you very differently. I dealt with this particular shock by writing a poem that made a few people say, Sonia, I just dont understand why you write these really wicked poems. I told them, Because there are some really wicked mothers out here, and they need to be identified as such. Theres no nice language for that.

In this country, from the very beginning, the slave masters put these Black, often naked, women on auction blocks. What these White men saw was free accessa wildness, an exoticness in this very prudish society that was developing.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent recalled how at age eleven or twelve, the men began to whisper vulgar things in her ear, preparing her for her eventual rape. So they wanted to begin the process of familiarizing her with the language of sex, the language that removed her from becoming a decent young girl.

Some enslaved women would be forced to sleep at the foot of the bed so that it would be convenient for the master to take his pleasure. When masters saw us, they saw rape, they saw possession. They saw ownership. They saw beauty. They saw vulnerability. They saw women uncovered and unprotected. There were no Victorian women here.

So the bodies of Black women have written a history and a herstory in America. A herstory that has placed Black women not just as enslaved women who hated slavery, but as women who supposedly enjoyed the rape and pillage by their slave masters. We cant change the past, so our words become our best defense against its legacy.

One of the things that we did as African women in the 1960s was to put ourselves on the world stage. We demanded to be taken seriously and insisted that people see us as human beings who had something to say, who werent just there to satiate sick sexual urges or to fulfill domestic demands.

Wed say simple things like, I am a beautiful Black woman. That meant many things. It meant, I like my body, if its big or small. I like my face, whether Im a raving beauty or not. I like my nose, whether its narrow or flat, flat, flat. I like my big lips. I like my eyes. I like my hair. Since some women then did not like their full lips or their nappy hair, or their wide noses or even their Blackness, this affirmation of love for self and body was a revolutionary action.

And yet today, women are still looked at as body, not as mind. And many Black women still dont consider ourselves beautiful. Were so inundated with certain kinds of beauty on the television and in the world, with certain hair, and bodies that have to be a certain color, and that are thin, thin, thin and curvy, curvy, curvy in all of the right places.

Many of us know that we are smart, but we do not believe that we are beautiful. But if we are going to go out and change this world, we cannot be crippled on that level. We must go out whole, knowing that we are beautiful and Black; that we carry all African women with us; and that we are able to defend ourselves against anyone who regards us as prostitutes and whores and who try to convince us that we are who they think we are.

Every one of us has to look in a mirror and see herself as beautiful before other people will. You cant rely on a man or woman to tell you, because if he or she disappears youre lost again. You have to see your beauty behind your eyes. You must make it real with words. You must say, This is who I am forever, and I am indeed beautiful and smart.

As a girl, I was like everybody else. I looked at my breasts; they were small and I didnt like them. I looked at my hair and it was curly, curly, curly, and I didnt like it because it wasnt straight like my sisters. I didnt expect the things that pretty girls got. This lasted until I was a young woman, when I decided that I was beautiful and smart.

One day after my graduation from Hunter College, I was on the Number 2 train going home to Harlem. I missed my stop and wound up having to get off at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Above ground, I passed this building Id never seen. It was the Schomburg Library. I went inside and asked Ms. Jeanne Hudson, What kind of library is this? She said it was a library that had books only by and about Black folks. I said, with my smart nineteen-and-half-year-old self, There must not be many books in here. She smiled, sat me down and brought me three books: