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The Value of Cocoa Butter

By Kellye Whitney

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I like old stuff. Classic movies, vintage clothes and cars. There’s something so solid about things that have aged and had a chance to ripen, develop a few character wrinkles. I even like old clichés: make love, not war, a penny saved is a penny earned. Don’t judge a book by its cover. That old phrase has been around forever, but nowadays folk don’t want to use it or believe it. Like when some people look at my face, I know the first thing they see is a black girl. And then they see that I am also a bit of a hippie, as I’ve thoroughly rebelled against any notion of perm, content to let my naps fall (or not fall) where they may, and am partial to loud colors, bell-bottoms, and blasting Maroon 5 and Evanescence at stoplights.

But, even as a hippie, I’m still a black hippie. It’s like this odd echo that won’t fade away. Then, there’s my suburban-influenced speech. Confusion sets in, especially among my own race as I’m seemingly the only black hippie girl in Chicago who still says dude in every day conversation. tee-hee. I admit, sometimes I just do it to fuck with people. Like this guy I met at a gas station once, a walking stereotype, he was. Thugged out to the nth degree and oddly impressed by my smooth, unscarred skin. “Did you have a sheltered childhood?” He asked. I just blinked blankly and gave him a ride as images of me spilling off a speeding tricycle and scraping off the left side of my face rose up from my memory. He asked me to wait. I did. I had nothing else to do, sadly. He took a long time, and when he got back in the car, he wanted me to chill while he rolled a blunt. “You don’t mind do you?” he asked, already dumping the innards of a cigar out the window. I guess not. While keeping one eye out for the po-pos, I managed to look interested while he dumped a pitiful sack into the cigar husk and gave me an impromptu rap performance. Turns out he was somebody on the hip hop scene. He wasn’t bad, his lyrics weren’t terribly original but he had style. Still, his next comments obliterated any joy in his talent. He wanted to know why I talked like white folks.

It wasn’t a new question. It was quite boring in fact. I’m not always clever enough to retaliate to the ridiculous on the spot, but this pissed me off, as I’d given his punk ass a ride and sat like a duck while he hooked up with the dope man. I deliberately kept a blank face. I took a few mental breaths to soothe the loud, angry Black woman episode I could feel welling and asked him, when did white folks get the monopoly on grammatically correct English? As a rapper, I told him in a reasonable voice, I’d think the dictionary, a tool of language, would be one of your best friends, since there are no stipulations by Webster that people of color have been banned from its usage. Now, it was his turn to look blank.

My speech became even more crisp. The trouble with someone like you, I said softly, getting a perverse thrill at using the words ‘someone like you,’ is that you’re so hung up on this little lifestyle you’ve decided is cool, you never take the time to look around. There’s a mess of different speech out there! Accents, dialects, all kinds of shit! You’re so distracted by all this bling-bling bullcrap that it never occurs to you to venture beyond the six-block radius outside your home, open your ears to listen, or stick your nose up against the glass windows of whatever. Leave a stain if you have to, I said, better a little honest snot than a pristine, untouched image that gives no hint of history or color or lessons learned.

I could see that he’d lost interest. He’d forgotten his question as interest in my skin returned. There was a considerable amount exposed. It was summer. Winter is so long in Chicago that by the time warm weather arrives, most folk are starved for it, and fat and thin alike bare all in daily homage to the elements. He tried to get fresh and I put my ride in gear so I could put his ass out. He gave me his rap name and number. I looked at it, a mess of Z’s and S’s on a scrap of paper and asked what his government name was. “Sean,” he said, or something like that. “Goodbye, Sean,” I said and watched him walk down a dark road towards his recording studio. The scent of pot drifted back to me and I realized he hadn’t offered me a hit. Must be something about this white voice of mine that made him think I wasn’t interested. tee-hee-hee.

Echoing bore of skin colors and stereotypes aside, I will continue regular usage of my cocoa butter sticks. If I must curtail my love of clichés and endure random judgments by strangers on dark streets, I might as well have smooth skin!

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Kellye Whitney is a Chicago-based writer and editor. Her work has appeared at web sites like urbanfilmpremiere.com, ediets.com and in newspapers
and magazines. She is currently working on her first
© 2004 Me Three