HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
When I was a kid, my gender and race lived together, tightly tied in a braid on top of my head. My brothers and I share a skin tone that is pale in the winter, and cinnamon in the summer. Our father was the only black person in our rural town, and as far as we knew, we were the only mixed-race kids on Earth.
Read MoreWe were all dressed in the checked, green gingham, but it was their bodies that moved expertly to the rhythm. They swayed their hips and shook their behinds, to Tony Matterhorn’s “Dutty Wine.” I watched from the sidelines, with a book in hand. All I could do was tap my feet. It was not in my muscle memory to jive to the steelpan beat. Our outer coating was the same—melanin rich, yet like mismatched puzzle pieces, I did not seem to fit.
Read MoreYou see, I was born into a system, a family, whose very history is fraught with the most insidious abuses; kept in the secret and in the dark. When you come into a world like that, you lose your power and your voice before you can even walk. Even as I took my first steps and learned my first words, how was I to know that a monster would step out of a closet and snuff out my life before it began?
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