Though it was the coldest night I had ever experienced in Dallas, I was having a lot of fun. My divorce had just become final, and I had been in this new city for a year, forming meaningful friendships and engaging productively through paid work and volunteerism. I felt good about my life and thought it was time to celebrate. My Girl flew in from Louisiana, and I invited some of the new friends I had made in Texas and a handful of coworkers. It was a vibrant, upbeat affair, primarily centered in the living room due to the bitter February weather, with ample entertainment and drinks flowing in the neighboring kitchen. The party was a success, but this story isn’t about the party; this is a tale about my face.
I had been seeing Kitt (a white woman my age) around the halls at my workplace and learned that she was also recently out of a marriage and trying to form a community, which earned her an invitation to the Divorce Club. Kitt came bearing a lovely bottle of wine and gelled well with my friends, so well that Kitt was collecting numbers left and right. The party wound down, but as Kitt headed out the door, I noticed she didn’t look well enough to drive. My Girl and I intercepted and had Kitt sit with us. The three of us drank water with added electrolytes and chatted well into the wee hours. Kitt’s filter had been washed away by whatever signature cocktail I served that night, and mine barely existed in the first place. We ventured into deeply hidden aspects of ourselves and laughed, cried, chortled, cackled, and saw each other anew.
I was mid-sip when Kitt said, “Shellie, I didn’t know you would be such a nice person. I rarely talk to you because your face is really scary, but I appreciate you inviting me and taking care of me tonight. I needed this.”
This is my face. I have heard a lot about it over the years, but never that it is scary. Now, I don’t doubt that it is, but the people who have learned to fear faces like mine usually know better than to say so out loud. I didn’t immediately consider what it means to have a scary face, whether it exists to my detriment or advantage, and what I might have gained or lost. At the moment, I was disconcerted but not too curious. I was on a mission to ensure Kitt could drive home safely and that I could get some sleep before sunrise.
I have not yet brought this up in therapy. Why? Because I have survived domestic violence, I am seeing footage of starving children being blown to bits daily, Jamaica’s poor people are still being gifted basic needs as PR stunts for Andrew Holness and, Donald Trump is president again. The discovery that my face is scary ranked very low on the list of things to pay someone to talk to me about. In the months since this took place, it entered my mind a few times:- once when I was meeting my sister’s new child (who, it turns out, isn’t scared of my face); another time when I chose to ride the train from the airport instead of getting an Uber, and wondered why a tired-looking commuter chose to flail about in the aisle instead of taking the last seat beside me, and most recently when I returned home to Jamaica for the Calabash International Literary Festival.
Although primarily utilized by the upper echelons of Jamaican society and social climbers as a place to see and be seen, Calabash has been one of my creative fortresses since I first attended in 2006. Poetry, prose, and honest conversation flow with the tides and travel on the ocean breeze. Under the tent, it gets hot, but I can always retreat to a seaside bench or a shady tree between readings. Retreating to the sea is precisely what I was doing when a man (Chinese-Jamaican, perhaps in his sixties) tapped my arm and implored me to fix my face. Mary-Alice Daniel had just read from a collection of her poems that seemed to be psychedelic-fueled; I was still high on the alliteration and in deep recollection of my ex who would use accusations of ill mental health as a weapon, just like the boyfri4end in Mary-Alice’s poetry. I imagine this was his first time seeing me because he did not indicate that we had ever met before he chose to interrupt my reverie, but he assured me it was okay to smile sometimes because “nobody nuh trouble you.” I kept walking. This man was not scared of me, but he was displeased with my non-smiling face, or perhaps my non-smiling face scared him, so he took a chance and confronted his fear.
As I write this, I remember watching Dirty God at Sundance in 2019. The film is about a once-pretty white woman(Jade) who survived an acid attack by a (black) domestic partner and is now so ugly that even her toddler daughter is afraid of her. I didn’t think the face was scary. Sure, it had been injured, but I didn’t perceive anything other than a human attached to that face. Now I wonder if I were to present my un-deformed, natural, black face to Kitt alongside the actual injury of Jade’s acid-attacked mug, which would she find more horrifying?
I have buried other specific memories of fellow humans’ disapproving interpretations of my face, though I am sure some have imprinted on my subconscious self-image. These interactions now cause me to wonder what barriers my natural expression has created for me, to hope strangers will privately manage their reactions to whatever they see when they look at me, and to desire friends who, in their reading of the text that is my face, acknowledge it as canon.
