At the Foot of Sugar Hill – Leyelle Mesa-Graham

There are coloured girls dancing on the peak of Sugar Hill/ Caramel queens and cinnamon sisters swaying like palms in the vapour of the wasted night/

Meltingly lovely marshmallow sweeties/ Princesses in shades of maple and praline/ Sing into the blackness like nightingales/ 

But at the foot of Sugar Hill/

The rest of us are still weeping in the dark/

*

‘It won’t be the same. Her complexion is an intentional and BEAUTIFUL choice.’

But someone brings up Mr. Popo.

Am I the problem, or are they?

*

My black woman’s significance does not find its foundation in these pointless comparisons. She does not exist just to be darker than your white woman.

*

The mermaid’s eyes were like great lakes of icy blue fire, and her skin glittered like Caribbean treacle in the warmth of the summer sun.

But her identity begins to fade into obscurity. The lines are washed out by her blackness.

*

While I would like to consider myself fairly proficient in a number of skills, I have to be honest and admit that I’m not very good at drawing or painting. Yet.

Sure, with a pencil and paper, I can sketch some decent enough flowers and sea creatures (even when the marine animals have very little in common with each other, somehow), but when it comes to drawing humans and details like lighting, depth, and contrast, my skills are severely lacking.

It’s a process. It’s a process. It’s a process. I know.

But one of my recent goals as I begin my, more or less self-taught, digital art journey has been to strengthen my weaknesses, so it should be of no surprise to anyone that I occasionally have to swallow my pride and go online to forums of artists more experienced than I am to ask for advice on improving my craft.

But it seems that the very idea of a woman’s blackness is immediately controversial.

I reach into the pandora’s box of an art thread and ask if anyone knows how to draw a very dark-complected character without having her features, which I drew with black lines, get washed out in the sea of her face. 

I am greeted with some helpful advice and some less than tasteful two-cents from a certain white man who makes me see red when he tells me I can still maintain the ‘essence,’ (written in air quotes,) of my dark ebony female lead by lightening her up to a more easily ‘readable’ milk chocolate skin tone and simply lightening up the rest of the characters as well to maintain the contrast.

I love how our individuality has become a joke. 

Our ‘essence’ becomes something to say ironically and sardonically, as if the identity of my black heroine is trivial or basic enough that it can be maintained even if I draw her into somebody else.

As if she has no identity and all variations of ‘black’ are exactly the same.

Well yes, it may be easier to lighten her skin.

But we never asked to be easy.

This has never been easy for us.

It isn’t easy for a girl like me to find myself on a screen – to dream and write and paint my people into a universe that does not care to accept us if we are not comfortable and convenient. So excuse me as I insist on being difficult for a minute because I do not WANT to be conveniently rewritten into a homogenous wave of identical cliches people will use as a stand-in for all black women because they are ignorant or lazy.

My plethora of queens will insist on being their own distinct selves. With wavy hair and coily hair and curly hair, Caramel-coloured cartoonists, coffee-coloured mermaids, and carob-coloured bookworms will grace the pages of my creation instead of the same trope-y, reused roles we have played for ages on TV since they decided it was not okay for us to be people, only tokens.

It is a process.

But maybe my heroine wants to be dark.

It might sound crazy to some ears, as it seems some people just cannot wrap their heads around the fact that she’s not gonna be the same girl if you abracadabra her into a lighter hue.

This is not Cinderella.

You aren’t her fairy godmother, making her ‘Prince Charming approved.’ Disney princess approved – beauty pageant – cover girl of a magazine approved.

Our value is not based on how easy it is for the world to represent people like us. 

If it were easy to give us the time of day, we would already have it.

Instead, we have to work our fingers to the bone for a single chance and grab it.

For one moment, let us let a woman be a woman and realise that she does not have to lighten herself to be allowed to stand in the limelight –  to have centre stage and be applauded – to be told that she’s more than just ‘good enough’ – that she’s beautiful –

Without fear of being subjected to somebody’s glib opinion that she should lighten her skin for everyone else’s sake.

Maybe right now, my heroine’s nuances and features are hard to see in the face of her beautiful blackness, but settling for a light-washed recreation of her true self is absolutely unacceptable.

I do not understand why this is so hard to understand.

We are individuals, and every detail of who we are makes us a story worth telling. A DIFFERENT story. A SPECIFIC story that cannot be conventionalised.

I am so tired of my queens being beaten and broken down until we can all fit into the same African-American girl ‘essence’ that someone other than us chose to define: The same look, that same talk – gingerbread-colored, coloured girls playing cookie-cutter parts.

Maybe it is hard to see the dark side through white eyes.

The black heroines are still crying.

Because we cannot BE dark.

And they will automatically rename us a bitter shade of black if we are anything but chocolate milk or whiter. Lighter. Shades of peanut butter and almond.They are beautiful. But we are beautiful too, and it is long past time somebody said it, because I am going stir-crazy in the silence.

Yes, he is right. It is too hard to be dark in this world.

So we lighten up, straighten up, and whiten up in an attempt to be easier on the eyes instead of highlighting and helping our girls shine so we can maintain our places without having to redraw our faces into something the masses say is more pleasant.

It gets darker.

Because our identities are trivial enough from their points of view for us to be typecast and cast aside. We are diamonds left in the rough, and we’ll have to wait another 100 years to see ourselves as gems and know our own value –

If someone does not start speaking out now.

So I will.

I am long past done waiting for my dark-skinned queens to get a chance under the spotlights. I am tired of ebony being pushed into the shadows or identified with racist stereotypes as if the state of being black, Deepest Black, automatically turns a body into a mockery or a joke.

What do you want us to do?

Be angry?

I am tired of having a reason to be angry. So stop giving me a reason to be angry, and listen when I tell you that this isn’t ‘good enough.’ 

It is not the same. It is not too much work to give us a chance, after all this time, to be told that we matter just as much as our lighter-tinted sisters.

My darlings, we were made for this moment.

So I fight this fury and look to makeup tutorials, models, photographs, old comic books and the like, searching for any resources that can teach me how to express our beauty, rather than regressing us into a carbon copy cut-out labelled “black woman” to paste onto a page or a TV screen whenever someone wants to insert some ‘diversity.’

Give us a chance to be real people. Please.

Give us a chance to have identities beyond the ‘need’ for some cocoa in your cast and let the richness of this diaspora become a living, breathing mass of FACES. 

Tell me honestly, can you see me or just the colour of my skin?

I am more than a number. More than a statistic. More than a marketing agenda or a pacifier to get the other coloureds crying their eyes out to be quiet for an hour or two.

If they do not believe we can be beautiful, then we will prove it to them. We will make it undeniable.

And when all the stars fall out of the heavens to land on our shoulders, we will make them believe that black can be every bit as radiant as the summer night sky.

*

She danced in the darkness, and nobody noticed her. She danced from moonrise to another infinite moonrise without light and faded into the ether, forever unseen. The sun does not shine on us, and she was like a daughter of Diana and Nyx wrapped up in the warmth of an early autumn breeze.

She sang, though she knew no one would hear her.

The weary bodies are climbing their way up Sugar Hill. All in shades of feminine black, they stretch across the grass in wailing, shattered shadows – get to the top – only to tumble back down, breaking their crowns.

In the midst of it all, she’s still dancing/ At the foot/ At the foot of Sugar Hill/

Leyelle Mesa-Graham is an African American and Dominican author and poet from Maryland, USA, raised in part in her ancestral home of the Dominican Republic. She’s the author of the Turnill prize-winning short story “Rain Dance” and the novel Damsel in the Red Dress.

*Image by Jay Soundo on Unsplash