Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur Read Free Book Online Page A

She has straight hair, so she was impatient with mine. When she combed my hair she always remembered something i had done wrong the day before or earlier that day and popped me in the head with the comb. She would always tell me during these sessions, "Now, when you grow up, I want you to marry some man with 'good hair' so your children will have good hair. You hear me?" "Yes, Grandmother." I used to wonder why she hadn't followed her own advice since my grandfather's hair is far from straight, but i never dared ask. My grandmother just said what everybody knew was a common fact: good hair was better than bad hair, meaning that straight hair was better than nappy hair.
    When my sister Beverly was little, i remember teasing her about her lips. She has big, beautiful lips, but back then we looked at them as something of a liability. I never thought of them as ugly-my sister has always seemed very pretty to me-but her lips were something good to tease her about. I once told her, "With those big lips, the only thing you've got going for you is your long hair; you better never cut it off." I will never know how much damage all my "teasing" did to my sister. But i was only saying what everybody knew: little, thin lips were better than big, thick lips. Everybody knew that.
    There was one girl in our school whose mother made her wear a clothespin on her nose to make it thin. There were quite a few girls who tried to bleach their skin white with bleaching cream and who got pimples instead. And, of course, we went to the beauty parlor and got our hair straightened. I couldn't wait to go to the beauty parlor and get my hair all fried up. I wanted Shirley Temple curls just like Shirley Temple. I hated the smell of fried hair and having my ears burned, but we were taught that women had to make great sacrifices to be beautiful. And everybody knew you had to be crazy to walk the streets with nappy hair sticking out. And of course long hair was better than short hair. We all knew that.
    We had been completely brainwashed and we didn't even know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty and, at times, we accepted the white man's view of ourselves. We had never been exposed to any other point of view or any other standard of beauty. From when i was a tot, i can remember Black people saying, "Niggas ain't shit." "You know how lazy niggas are." "Give a nigga an inch and he'll take a mile." Everybody knew what "niggas" like to do after they eat: sleep. Everybody knew that "niggas" couldn't be on time; that's why there was c.p.t. (colored people's time). "Niggas don't take care of nothin'." "Niggas don’t stick together." The list could go on and on. To varying degrees we accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them true within ourselves because we believed them.
    I entered third grade in P.S. I54 in Queens. The school was almost all white, and i was the only Black kid in my class. Everybody in my family was glad i was going to school in New York. "The schools are better," they said. "You'll get a better education up North than in that segregated school down South."
    School up North was much different for me than school down South. For one thing, the teachers (they were all white-i don't remember having any Black teachers until i was in high school) were always grinning at me. And the older i got, the less i liked those grins. I didn't have a name for them then, but now i call them the "little nigga grins."
    My third grade teacher was young, blond, very prissy, and middle class. Whenever i came into the room she would show me all thirty-two of her teeth, but there was nothing sincere about her smile. It never made me feel good. There was always something unnatural and exaggerated about her behavior with me. On my first or second day in class she was teaching us penmanship. "Does anyone know how to make a capital L in script?" she asked. Nobody raised a hand. Timidly, i did. "You know how to