8
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
On Beauty;
ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE
2ND PLACE
or,
A Reluctant Beauty Queen
by Glenis Redmond
U-G-L-Y. You ain’t got no alibi. You ugly. You ugly. Absolutely ugly. As a cheerleader on the Woodmont High School cheering squad in the late ’70s, early ’80s, this was one of my favorite cheers to tease our opponents with. It was not aimed at anyone in particular. It was a full-throttle cheer to rouse the audience and the team for a win, and we chanted it all in good sport. While yelling that cheer, I never thought about its relation to me, but deep down, the cheer resonated. I began by saying it to myself, and soon I took it on as my own personal mantra. On the outside, no one would ever know that I felt this way about myself, because I was well coiffed, well dressed, and well shod. When I went to school, I was always well turned out because my mama was a seamstress. She made my dresses and skirt suits
for homecoming court, talent shows, and musicals. I designed. She sewed. No matter how good I looked on the outside, on the inside I felt like a shabby street cat. No matter how wonderfully Mama braided or straightened my hair, when I looked in the mirror, I saw ugly, and I felt absolutely ugly deep within.
ABOVE LEFT Glenis Redmond, a cheerleader at Woodmont
Photographs courtesy of Glenis Redmond
High School, Piedmont, SC, circa late 1970s
How I Learned to Dance and Read the Weather On eggshells I danced. Grooves to fit my father’s moods: Tap dance. Bebop. Dirge.
My father had much to do with my self-image. From him I got negativity on top of negativity. It wasn’t always that way. When I was between five and eight years old, I absolutely adored and idolized him. I thought he was the handsomest, most talented, smartest man on earth. When I turned nine, my view of him changed. I saw him with keener eyes – the eyes of a daughter who had been treated poorly.
RIGHT The author as a child
GLENIS REDMOND, a South Carolina native, travels nationally and internationally reading and teaching poetry so much that she has earned the title “Road Warrior Poet.” She is Poetin-Residence at the Peace Center for the Performing Arts in Greenville, SC, and at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ. In 2014-16, she served as the Mentor Poet for the National Student Poet’s Program to prepare students to read at the
Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House. The poet is a Cave Canem Fellow, a North Carolina Literary Fellowship Recipient, and a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist. She also helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC. Read her poems in NCLR Online 2019 and NCLR 2012, 2014, and 2019.