FREE TO BE ASHY

A Black Eyed Anecdote

A typical way to advertise the effectiveness of soap during antebellum days (and after) was to claim it was soooo good it could turn Black people White. Another ad from Pear soap featured a drawing of a Black woman bathing her child with the slogan: “Golly! I B’leve PEARLINE Make Dat Chile White.”

For Black people, though I am aware that some of us,
Black and White do not know it yet, are very beautiful.

—James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in My Mind

You can roll your eyes. You can stomp your feet.
But this Black girl – you sho can’t beat!

—A Common Dark-Skinned Black Girl Proverbial Clapback from the 70s and 80s

Pulled Dove ad campaign showing a Black woman turning into a White woman after using Dove body lotion.

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Find an audio reading of this Black Eyed Anecdote above.

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My mother’s obsessiveness with ashy skin burned good daylight.

A layer of Jergen’s followed by a smear of cocoa butter on my sugar-molasses face followed by a hit of Vaseline to my knees and elbows borrowed time from heavy play outside, stole from me at least one turn at hopscotch, ate into a solid round of jacks on my best friend Yogi’s front porch.

But did my mother even care? Naw.

You can’t go out there looking ashy and dirty, she’d admonish my skin skirmishing beneath her fingertips.

I’d just gotten out of the bathtub. Just gotten into fresh clean clothes. And yet, somehow, the very air had sullied the morning’s ablutions and washed them down the drain because soap and water had left me ashy.

And in this world ashy meant “dirty.” 

Skip ahead. I am 50-plus-years grown. On the way out my front door with my White husband who is perpetually clean as well as perpetually ashy, I tell him, “Hold up. Let me get at my ankles right quick,” retrieving the jar of body butter I keep at the door – a habit I’m sure makes my mother smile and contentedly sigh in her grave. What a relief for her to know she raised me right, clean and glistening, Black and glorious, caressed and anointed.

But not every day…

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Another typical soap advertisement implying Blackness was dirty and should be washed and moisturized away.

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Once, just the once, I thought I could bop around the corner to the store and back home again before anyone could catch a glimpse of my crusty, watered but unconditioned ankles. I thought, at 50 plus years old, I had a right to be in a hurry, too pressed to impress, too preoccupied with life to bother with the details, and so I stepped out, as my mother would say, “unkempt.” 

At the end of my Chicago block, pedestrians zigged and zagged to avoid the bullhorn of the Nation of Islam calling out traitors and White-devils. My husband, white as the ash on my ankles, suggested we too make a wide berth, but I was booked and busy and annoyed with the extra time it would take to cross the street only to cross back again, and so I took a stand and walked cool as could be straight through their 15-20 gathering of men. 

The bullhorn called out to me:

Sista… sista… excuse me but is this White man your husband? With a grin I proudly answered, Yeah. Then he said, Don’t you know you’re his slave? To which I said, I’m not anyone’s slave. And then he quoted from a book like the Bible if not the Bible and then he called me a coon. To which I said Maybe I’m with him because he’d never call me a slave or a coon. To which he said With your ashy Black ass. To which I pulled up my pants legs and gave a little tap dance before throwing up both middle fingers and walking off into the sunset. 

Calling me a slave was preposterous. Calling me a coon was downright asinine. But calling me ashy hurt.  

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Pulled Nivea ad showing a clean-shaven Black man with a close cut haircut hurling the head of an unshaven Black man with a natural afro. It’s tagline: “Look Like You Give a Damn. Re-Civilize Yourself.” The company also pulled an ad for women’s deodorant titled “Invisible: “For Black and White.” Its tagline: White Is Purity.” Its social media campaign read: “Keep it clean and bright. Don’t let anything ruin it, #Invisible.” 

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To be clear, there was no racism here. Say we called the cops, as a Black woman of certain but modest means married to a White man, I would’ve (unjustly) found favor. They would’ve been cleared out even though their words were in no way threatening. So if you’re thinking reverse racism, let me assure you: there is really no such thing.

My husband, though the most uncomfortable in the situation, held the most power. In a sense, I usurped that power, refusing to follow his lead, refusing to listen to him and cross the street in order to give the gathering nation of men space to breathe, space to air their grievances without our intrusion. The bullhorn had only asked me a question and then read me for filth, neither of which was illegal.

But back to those ashy ankles though. Why I gotta be ashy? Why I can’t I be ashy? Will there ever come a day when I can just be ashy? I hear my mother’s voice calling from her grave, Ashy? No child of mine! Over my dead body.

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