Rachel writes…
My best friend Joanna has long, red hair with perfectly, spiraled, cascading, blonde, highlights that glow like gold coins in the sun. People are often commenting on how beautiful her hair is. In fact, her mom loves to tell people about when Jo was four years old and she was once approached by a woman in the grocery store who ooh-ed and awed, “Where did you get such beautiful hair!”
Jo rolled her eyes and smugly replied, “Macy’s.”
If I could’ve bought hair like that at Macy’s, I would have been first in line. Instead, I spent at least two hours at my aunt’s beauty salon every weekend trying to “fix” my hair. It’s funny because I always loved curly hair and yet I had been straightening my hair every month since my first communion.
Hair has always been a stressful thing for me. At an early age, I knew I didn’t have “good” hair. My cousins would always show off how long their braids drooped down their back, tied up with red barrettes and pink bobos that would swing to and fro when they ran.
I was so jealous that I once tried to get my braids to swing while I ran like those other girls; I was playing hide-and-go-seek and running towards a tree I was going to hide behind. My barrettes were snapping against my temples and I envisioned myself in slow motion like a Baywatch bodyguard with hair crashing and rising like waves. I must have been swinging my head too hard because my cousin, Gino, didn’t hesitate to ask if I was retarded. “What’s wrong with your head?” he said giving me that sidelong, scrunched-up face that can only be translated as “eww”. On that embarrassing afternoon, I never imagined that it could get worse, but like they say, one should never say never.
For Catholic families, your confirmation is a right of passage, and for Jewish children it’s their Bar/t Mitzvah, however for many black girls, it’s the day you move from hot combs to chemical relaxers.
And let me just say, there is nothing relaxing about a relaxer. Now that I think of it, it’s so misleading to call a chemical hair straightener a relaxer, when the entire process is just plain painful. Perhaps, this is why black women almost always refer to it as a perm rather than a relaxer, and only remember the difference when some white person asks why your hair is straight if have a perm.
For ten years, I went to my aunt’s salon, which was in her house and used the Revlon Professional Conditioning Relaxer in super strength. My aunt has four daughters and her house always felt like a middle school playground. There was music blaring from the den, a loud TV on upstairs, a few Haitian women shouting and laughing in the kitchen and hair dryers humming in front. The smell of burnt hair and food mixed throughout the house. The kitchen was always busy with various aunts in rollers eating, while their children sat pouting around a two part sink, one side for washing hair, the other filled to the brim with dirty dishes.
Most days, I would arrive at my aunt’s house and wait at least an hour to get my hair done and then I would sit in the sticky, plastic chair and get pumped up into her eyesight. My cousins, her two eldest daughters, would stare and smirk as I sat perfectly still for an hour while their mother slapped the smelly, white, perm goo onto my hair; no matter how careful she tried to be, somehow it always dripped on my ears and shoulders and her daughters would wipe it off with a towel before it burned my skin. After ten minutes, my scalp would start to itch; another five minutes and my head would get warm while my cousins watched, each with a glint of excitement in their wide eyes. That’s when I would start getting squirmish and impatient, my back would start sweating and making squeaky noises as I rubbed against the plastic seat, anticipating the worse because I knew that soon my scalp would be fully on fire and burning.
I learned tricks to delay these affects such as, having my cousins spray hair spray on the areas that had started to itch, but regardless, it always ended up burning. And the worst part about sitting there, with my hair burning off, is the guilt I felt to wait it out a little longer so that the perm could “take” because if I didn’t wait, my hair wouldn’t be as straight and to have kind of straight hair is the ultimate failure.
I began to consider how, to many people, the words “black women” are synonymous with “strength” and I saw this severe vulnerability that contradicted that stereotype; one that runs so deep, I wondered if anyone outside of us can see it.
For months these thoughts plagued me. I couldn’t sleep. I’d sit in bed all night thinking of how I had gone to friend’s apartment a week earlier with a freshly permed, bouncy, straight hairdo and how my hair had become the object of sincere admiration for a young Brazilian girl named Maya. She looked just like me, with thick short box braids patterned across her head and big dark eyes marveling over my silky strands. She ran her fingers through my smooth hair and smiled, no doubt recognizing the texture of it from her dolls. I looked at her, beautiful and wide-eyed, and I saw myself.
And so on a cold, winter, day last February, I buzzed 20 years of smooth, smelly, flowing, fragile, chemically straightened hair clear off my scalp. I walked into a New York City barbershop filled with men and their sons, watching me awkwardly. I sat in another sticky, plastic seat, this time overwhelmed with testosterone, and was surprised by how painlessly the razor ran over my scalp; breathing a sigh of release with piles of hair growing on the floor around my seat, I thought, here’s to Madame CJ Walker.
