How I Shed My Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

their discussions of the words of Stokely Carmichael I learned about the chant “power to the people,” about what it meant to stand with one fist raised, and about the revolution that was to come, when black people would take arms and fight to overthrow white people once and for all.
    When black people rose up to kill white people, there would be a list of those who would be spared. Rhonda said she thought she might put me on the list, one day when I was listening to their discussion, and Ursula agreed. By then we had become friends, or at least this was true from my side of the equation. Even Violet spoke to me with some freedom, though we had never warmed to each other. Since I had called her a bad name, albeit many weeks earlier, I had no idea how she felt about putting me on the list of those spared by the revolution, a time when most white people would die, or so the girls claimed. I was flattered that Rhonda and Ursula might want to save me. I hoped they might put Marianne on the list, too.
    Information of this kind, that black people had their own magazines and could create their own world independent of white people, that black people discussed a revolution in which they gained power, added further to the changes in my ideas about reality. The weeks of school wore on, and the presence of the girls inspired acceptance in some of the white students, anger and quiet resentment in others. In this we children echoed the world of our parents. We had been taught to look for inequality in the relationship of blacks to whites, but, faced with the facts, this was becoming hard to understand.
    We shared the issues of
Tiger Beat,
but never
Ebony
or
Jet.
Rhonda and I shared a crush on Davy Jones, but I stopped short of liking any of the black pop stars in the magazines, mainly out of fear. I do not recall even having asked to look at one of the
Ebony
issues, though I remember staring at the open pages whenever she brought an issue to school.
    Nevertheless these images began to change me. So did the fact that a kind of desegregation was in progress all around me, on television, in the news, in the pages of mostly white magazines, and in my schoolroom. The shell of the all-white world had cracked, and color had begun to spill throughout.
    I was supposed to be the member of the superior race, but my parents did not subscribe to
Look
or
Life,
or watch the news regularly, or discuss current events, or do any of the things that I imagine went on in Rhonda and Ursula’s house. I had no idea what the Civil Rights Act was, or what Jim Crow was, and I had only a vague idea of what the Black Power movement meant, or why people were becoming angry at the fact of the war in Vietnam. Perhaps the black girls had no real understanding of such forces either, but at the very least they read magazines in which these ideas were discussed. They had some idea of what was going on in the world outside Jones County. I on the other hand had little or none, unless it counts that I knew Davy Jones’s life story, or could give all three middle names of the lead singer for Herman’s Hermits.
    By then there was a group of us sitting in adjacent desks who felt an eleven-year-old’s version of friendship, or at least of cordiality, toward one another, and this included Rhonda and Ursula, and Violet to a lesser degree. Most of the white girls held themselves aloof from any conversation involving the black girls, but there were a handful who, like me, apparently felt no barrier between us.
    An optimist might have seen this shift as evidence that integration was beginning to work, that the girls were being assimilated into our class, but this would have been the wrong assessment. Our friendly relations were, if anything, an adaptation of courtesy. Our school was a microcosm of our sparsely populated county. Our community saw itself as a place that had no truck with fights, or with openly expressed hatred, and no room for public displays of