Your Eyes, My Nudity(Completed)

Chapter 1

There were all types of jitters and uncertainties surrounding the day I left home and got away from the people that make up my world. Butterflies and questions. So many of them flying in the pit of my stomach.

Will these new people like me? Will I miss my old world? Will I flop around and die like a fish out of water? Or a whale stuck on the beach?

Or will I thrive and adapt like a Chameleon?

I couldn't help but wonder if adapting meant blending in like the Chameleon or standing out. I didn't want to move all the way from Houston to Florida just to become another Floridian. I wanted to become someone that would be unique; someone that would be remembered.

I chose Florida A&M primarily because it was such a large historically black school with lots of history. Aside from them offering a great teaching program for education majors, they offered me the chance to mingle with 11,000 black men and women across a 400+ acre campus. I was so ready to step out of my sheltered home life into the opening credits of the Cosby spinoff show A Different World.

Almost too ready.

My church going parents had snatched me and my sister out of public school while we were still learning our times tables. It wasn't the math, or the English, or the PE they had a problem with, but the health curriculum that included Sex Ed. And after that, the science curriculum that included that blasphemous bunk known as evolution.

When my Sunday school teacher couldn't answer my relentless questions about Adam, Eve, and how-in-the-world-did-the-earth-multiply-without-incest, I brought my insecurities to my science teacher. She explained in so many words that man had evolved on earth, which totally blew my sheltered mind. The next Sunday at church, I was telling my elderly Sunday School about evolution, in front of dozens of other 8 and 9-year-olds just as indoctrinated as me.

When my parents found out, my days in public school were numbered.

"They took prayer outta schools. And now dey teachin' my kids dat we came from munkeys. I ain't havin it," my mother said to the board of trustees at that next church business meeting. "My daughter Beyonce came home talkin' all kinda nonsense that dem schoolz is teachin."

The next fundraising opportunity came and it involved creating scholarships for kids at our church to attend Christian private schools. My parents went a step beyond that and pulled us out of school altogether. They instead got me and my younger sister a tutor to home-school us.

I initially was devastated to be taken away from my friends; well what little friends I had. I learned a lot more about the world at school than I learned at home. Where was I suppose to learn new curse words from? Where else would I be able to flirt with boys?

In only 4th grade, I felt like my life was over.

My first tutor gave me hope for the life after. Not life after death, but what lied beyond the strict home I was living in. Her name was Ms. Kizzy. She was a Haitian lady with tons of life experience (which means she was old as shit) and many funny stories she would tell me after her lessons.

She talked a good game to my parents, but little did they know that she was an atheist, and had no problems polluting my head with secular seeds in our downtime. She received her degree in education from a Historically Black College, although it wasn't by choice. In her time, college was a rarity for black folk, especially immigrants. But she worked her ass off and eventually was accepted into FAMU.

She told me incredibly vivid tales of southern racism, but also mused just as expressive stories about the kind of music, fashion, food, and overall fun that was taking place on campus. She lit a spark in me about life that would only grow in intensity as I got older.