BLACK HAIR AND AFRICAN AMERICAN BEAUTY

By the time I was five I knew that Black hair came in grades. ‘White’, ‘Good’, ‘Kinky’, ‘Nappy’ and ‘Bad’ were the designations I heard bandied around my house. Mama, with her straight-up Cherokee mother and half-Irish father, had White hair. It cascaded straight and glossy down her back. Daddy had some Indian in him, too, but obviously nowhere near his steel-wool hair. Their coming together resulted in our middle-grades of hair. Jimmy got the good stuff. ‘Nappy’ pounced on Queenie’s head. I got the kinks.

Mama gave up on Queenie and sent her to Sisterette House of Beauty or Aunt Nutty swatted at Queenie with a hot comb heated over the gas jets in her kitchen. Me, though, Mama had hope for. Every Saturday night she’d iron brown paper bags, rip them into strips and try to roll my hair with them before the paper cooled. Watching from the doorway, Daddy would always say the same thing: You gonna burn all that gal’s hair out. Leave her alone. Aint nothing wrong with how she looks. But Mama thought so, and so I did, too. When he and Mama separated, we went with him. He absolutely would not let Aunt Nutty touch my head. For a while he combed it, ripping out great puffy gobs of my hair as he tried to style it into two great balls on each side of my head.

Finally the Sisterette lady took pity on me. She propped telephone books under me until my head was high enough for her to work on without having to bend over. She used real shampoo, not Ivory soap, as Mama always did. Then she stuck me under the dryer. I came out looking like a dandelion. Good Lord! was all she said. Grimly she went about the task of rubbing her own mixture of Sulfur 8 and bergamot oil into my scalp and hot combing the matted mass into submission. I wound up with corkscrew curls that bobbled around my shoulders. A black Shirley Temple! Aunt Nutty exclaimed, clapping her hands. Now we look just alike! Aunt Nutty always let on that she had good hair, but there were those of us who knew she sneaked off to Miz Walker’s every Saturday to get hers ‘did’. At bedtime she reminded me to tie my head up, so people at church could see how pretty I looked. They never found out. I couldn’t find a head rag, so I put on a shower cap. The next morning I was a mess. A chortling Queenie taught me a new word: ‘reverted’.

Going anywhere, doing anything special all seemed to require doing something to my hair to suppress its natural inclination. Sometimes Miss Sisterette got too close to an ear or to my scalp. She’d make an Mmph sound and dab the injured part with Vaseline, while I wondered why I hadn’t been born with good hair, like Jimmy, who in those days wore it short anyway. Sometimes I wondered what sin I had committed not to be born White, so I could go swimming or get caught in the rain or hang my head out the car window on a hot day without having to run to some establishment to ‘get fixed up’.

Negritude hit our house hard. Aunt Nutty declared the Supremes would look just too strange with Afros, it was all a fad and we’d come to our senses. Daddy said Blacksthat’s what we were, thenmade too much of our hair and we ought to be glad we didn’t have to conk and fry it anymore to realize how pretty we were. Light-skinned Aunt Nutty didn’t like his using the word ‘Black’. She hated Jimmy’s dashikis and Queenie’s bright colors. Mostly, though, she despised my bigger-than-life Afro, and maybe just a little, how gloriously beautiful I felt with it.