As I was trekking solo from Paris to Amsterdam I met a woman named Denise on the flight. While she was only 5’8″ she appeared relatively tall. She was lithe, sinewy, dark, and carried herself with the Queen’s grace … a queen who ran track … thus the appearance of height. She was beautiful, gorgeous really, except for her hair. It was very short and plastered to her head. It had the sheen of a brand-new black Cadillac with gold interior.
Each time I looked at her during the flight I thought “Why is this style so popular, and, for goodness sake, how do you make love?” Every combination of positions I could conjure placed her hairstyle at great peril. I surmised that she would only maintain her queenly status while making love vertically, with her head touching nothing, and God forbid, anything touching her hair. I also determined that this style would not “work” if she had made love with any of my past lovers; upon rising she would look as if lightning had struck, and did not leave a good impression.
As I disembarked the plane, and we said our goodbyes, I was flooded with my own memories of hair. While locating my luggage in the foreign airport, images of my mother, and hours spent holding my ears as she “straightened” my hair, came crashing down. I laughed as I pulled my luggage from the circling carrier thinking, “I should be careful lifting this bag since I probably have permanent neck damage from jerking my head away from the hot comb.” I am not sure which was worse, a chance encounter with the hot comb straight off the stove, rendering my ears and my psychology burned for life, or my mother’s yelled insistence that it was my moving that would cause the burn.
Before my mother died she sent me a greeting card with a Jacob Lawrence image of black folks pressing hair at the kitchen stove. I remember opening the card and stopping dead in my multi-tasking tracks. I thought of my mother’s smell as she pressed herself against my body to steady both the hot comb and me. I remembered sitting between her legs when I was younger and then on a kitchen chair next to the white enameled stove as my frame became large enough. I must admit the smell of heated hair-oil and the sound of a sizzling curly mane makes me smile and also pains.
I love black hair, but this phenomenon of frying, pressing, curling, and gooing hurts my heart. As black folks we love to adorn ourselves, it is a long-standing tradition thousands of years old; it is a “Blood Memory.” But some of the specifics of adornment are directly related to our reaction of living in a culture of the non-frizzy, the non-curly, the non-nappy, and the non-coiled. Chris Rock’s narration in the movie, Good Hair may carry the complete message: straightening and/or not straightening our hair is a political, social, and personal endeavor. One thing I know for sure, hair always takes me home.
