Born Too Early For Today's Fashionable Full Lips

I was born in 1935.

Had I been born sixty years later I could have avoided one of the marking hurtful events in my young life.  I was born with full lips – not grossly full, but fuller than  the lips of my mother, sister, aunts or cousins. Today I would have been so in fashion.  But not then and there.  When hurt, angry or just obstinate I stuck out my bottom lip.  Daddy was wont to say, “Better pull in that lip or you might step on it.”

On one Sunday visit to Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Mirtie, Ivy and I, Shirley (the same Shirley who did not cut the clothesline) and Betty Jo went with Bobby Jean (Aunt Mirtie’s girl) to Sunday School. Our Sunday School class had several boys who did not bend to discipline. The girls fed off the boys misbehavior.  They did not listen to the teacher; they chatted; they giggled; they made paper airplanes from their Sunday School pamphlets .

My disapproval was obvious from my stuck out bottom lip. Then it began—what today would be labeled as bullying.

"What fat lips you have.”

”Somebody smack you in the lip?”

“I ain’t never lips that big ‘cept on niggers.”

“I’d be  ashamed of  them lips?”

I rolled my lips together, lowered my head. I did not look at or talk to anyone.

Uncle Lawrence picked us up in his truck. “You youngens have a good time?”

“Yeah”

“Yeah- real good.”

“Yeah from everybody.  Including me who still held my lower lip as tightly confined as I could.