A Well-Rounded Woman

"All of that," my husband says, grinning.

Then I claim my place in his arms, and we resume kitchen duty all up in each other's way.

It's no surprise that I married a man who loves -- no, adores -- me in all of my glory. That's because, like many African American women, I grew up in a culture where there was no shortage of love and acceptance for the girls with the curves.

Growing up on the West Side of Chicago in my own insular world provided a model for how I saw me. You see, Tina Turner got her legs from my Grandma. And by the time I reached high school, where the demographics were different, it was too late. I was already grounded and stubborn and on the verge of being, as some folk refer to it, "full-figured."

Here, in America, where the standard of beauty is single-digit dress sizes, and grown women are praised for their boyish good looks, my childhood narrative featured the daily declarations of a mother with whom skinny didn't sit well, and the compilation of way too many sidewalk serenades.

My mother also grew up on the West Side, and as a wispy, 98-pound teenager in 1970 surrounded by black women with hourglass figures and generous backsides, she decided she wasn't curvy enough. "Twiggy wasn't in; hips were," she tells me. My Aunt Bonnie was the brick house, Mom says. "She had lots of boyfriends. I wanted to be a brick house, too."

So Mom set out to get herself some hips. A friend introduced her to Wate-On, a drugstore supplement that promised to fill her out. She picked up a bottle and kept her fingers crossed. A Wate-On ad from that time featured a black woman with ample thighs and bust in a black leotard, and boasted that one tablet provided more calories than a broiled steak, a baked potato, wax beans or carrots, a slice of bread, ice cream as dessert, and a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. But it didn't work for Mom.

It wasn't until her early 30s that she managed to get past 120 pounds. As I was growing up, she'd always compliment me on having "big, pretty legs, like your grandmother's," and she was just as vocal about my potential.

"I wanted to make sure you understood that nobody could tell you what you couldn't do," she tells me now. For me, that translated into more than what I could accomplish. It also meant that one's opinion about my looks was just that, an opinion. It was what I thought that mattered, and I was comfortable with the standard set on my side of town, on my block, in my house.

Of course, everybody there was black, and now as an adult I wonder how, exactly, race played into it.

I turn to Kathleen LeBesco, a scholar in the emerging academic field of fat studies, for insight. LeBesco's students are a diverse lot, so she has a front row seat on how people from different racial and ethnic groups view weight.

"White students may say that a person is too fat. Black students will say, no, she's not; she carries it well," says LeBesco, who is white and has struggled with her weight her entire life. LeBesco points out that, even today, many African tribes engage in the process of fattening a woman before she marries. Plumpness, LeBesco says, equals affluence and fertility in African culture, and that equals beauty.