How I Shed My Skin Read Online Free PDF

inferior, and my limited exposure to the new girls in school had so far made only the slightest dent in my attitudes. Black people were like Miss Ruthie who lived behind my house, worn and stooped, almost weathered to blankness. They were never so smoothly urbane as these people in Rhonda’s magazine. I was simply amazed.
    The cover of
Ebony
was designed to resemble
Look
or
Life,
the defining photojournalism publications of the time.
Ebony’
s logo was similar in design, and there was a full-page color photograph on the cover. The paper looked to have the same gloss. All in all, this was a slick piece of work, but I was amazed. I had never dreamed that black people had their own magazines.
    Pollocksville’s one drugstore featured a stand of magazines and comic books, and I had become familiar with Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Fantasic Four, Captain America, Spiderman, and Dr. Strange during my visits to this shrine of publications. I had also glimpsed
Time, Life, Newsweek,
and
Look,
official adult magazines for news. I walked to the drugstore whenever I had a couple of quarters to spend.
Ebony
was nowhere to be found on those shelves, and black people were absent from the magazines and comic books I saw there. Superheroes, like lawyers, doctors, senators, governors, presidents, were white.
    Nor did these professional, citified black people appear on television, with the exception of Bill Cosby in
I Spy
and, with the coming of the new television season, Nichelle Nichols in
Star Trek.
I never knew much about
I Spy.
I devoured
Star Trek,
however, starting in September of the year our school was placed under the Freedom of Choice program, and I watched Uhura, the black communications officer, with fascination. Unlike the images in
Ebony,
Uhura occupied a role that had no parallel in my world, and since I had no prejudice as to what a starship lieutenant should look like in five hundred years or so, she was fine with me. Watching her place the silver earpiece of the subspace communicator to her ear, I accepted the picture without any resistance. She was simply part of the crew, an equal with the others. I could accept this equality when presented in these terms, as something from the future.
    But when I looked at the pages of
Ebony,
I could only see the black skin, and was amazed at the fact that these were Negroes appearing in advertisements, sitting at desks, sipping cocktails, wearing fine clothes, laughing in restaurants, discussing important issues. Black people had created a world within my world, and all the categories of my world were repeated there. (It had to be “my world,” you see, and their world had to be contained in mine.)
    Another magazine Rhonda and Ursula brought to school was
Jet,
containing articles like, “How Dispute About Making Eve Black Almost Scuttled Bible Movie,” and showcasing pretty women like “Peggy Fino, Chic model,” both featured on the cover of October 27, 1966. The look of
Jet
gave me a different feeling than
Ebony,
as if I were gaining access to information that was not meant for me. Given its smaller format, it resembled
Guideposts,
the Baptist prayer magazine my mother picked up at church, but it featured pretty women on the cover and so had a bit of a lewd feeling. Mine was a world of Baptist morality, in which dancing and drinking were forbidden and women who graced the covers of magazines with their glamour were most likely bad candidates to be witnesses for Christ. The three black girls at school shared
Jet
as if it were private, passing it from one to the other, adding to my suspicion that it was a magazine I ought not to read.
    So I learned about the pop culture world and its boy bands with Marianne, and became acquainted with the Black Power movement through Rhonda and her friends. They read articles in the pages of
Ebony
and
Jet
and discussed them quietly. Maybe it comforted them to bring these pictures into that hostile white enclave. From