A Band-Aid For My Wounds
And a flesh-coloured one at that
Band-aids caused more pain than they tried to heal
When I was a kid, I used to hate getting scraped and cut. Of course, the obvious reasons for this were the pain and discomfort of being wounded. But there was another reason that I so despised becoming injured: the Band-Aids.
Yes — something as seemingly mundane as a simple aid to stopping infection and helping to protect a cut was ironically the basis of much angst and pain.
You see, being a Black child in an era when the beauty of the range of skin colours in the world was ignored, was interesting to say the least. Upon falling and receiving scrapes and cuts, the inevitable washing of the wound by a loving parent or teacher was inevitably followed by the salve — yes, the antibiotic, but the physical salve — the Band-Aid — that would apparently make things better. Yet it didn’t.
The stark and very ugly “flesh-coloured” bandage that was put on my wounds ironically added to the emotional pain of realizing that “flesh” only meant a certain range of hues
