Goddess Worship

Magnify

In high school they were older than me; thinner with lighter skin and longer hair. They were the most popular juniors and seniors. Goddesses. During my freshman year, when I wasn’t juggling my six classes, show choir, homework, and daily chores at home, I daydreamed about the beauties at my all-black school in southeast Atlanta. I studied every move, envied every perfectly curled strand of hair. I wanted to be each one of the group of five girls that I handpicked to be my personal idols. They were all my direct opposite.

Being a dark-skinned girl living and attending school in an African American-centered community would seem to be the ideal for nurturing self-esteem and belief in one’s own beauty, but when I entered high school in 1985, girls my shade of brown were not “in.”  I was ignored by all the boys in my age group and older during the first half of every school year. In the fall and winter my chocolate skin and thick mane, which never really took to hair relaxers, did not equip me with the tools to compete with the café au lait and ecrus who had long, thin hair that reacted enthusiastically to the chemical process and thighs that I would have to starve myself to obtain. When spring bloomed and coats and sweaters were put away, my curvy body attracted attention from boys that it took me years to understand. The goddesses always pulled the top quality guys as well as the wannabes. What I pulled was the occasional cute guy who was only looking to get lucky, the creepy guy no one wanted, and a few in between.

Somewhere in the middle of the spring semester of that first year of high school I decided that the key element of the goddesses that I had a chance at emulating was thinness. That is when I started on the bulimia-exercise track, followed by attempts at anorexia. Fortunately, my mother stepped in and forbade my daily hour-long workouts and shoved sandwiches in my mouth. I resented her, but I am so grateful that she intervened and stopped the full blown eating disorder I was developing.
As the high school goddesses graduated and I became an upperclassman, I gained my own brand of popularity. I was part of the academic achievers clique and I performed in every school program. After my senior year, still dark-skinned with only slightly thinner thighs, I was dropped off at a predominately black college in Alabama and found a replacement goddess within the first six months.