Me, My Hair, and I (4 page)

The cultural skirmishes over the significance of Michelle Obama's hair and her look signifies just how important these questions still are. Just as in the minds of many Whites, there is the image of the “angry” Black man and “angry” Black woman (usually brown to black in skin tone, hands on hips, often but not always full figured), there is also “angry” Black hair. During the 2008 presidential election campaign, when the
New Yorker
magazine wanted to capture the paranoia that some Whites felt about a possible Obama presidency, the magazine ran a cover that featured Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim cleric and Michelle Obama sporting an Afro, an AK-47 strapped over her shoulders, and a “shut your mouth” glare. While clearly the cover was meant to parody mindless racism, many across the political spectrum took offense.

As First Lady, Michelle Obama has been crowned, quite justly, an American queen of style and glamour. She is considered by many ordinary folk, as well as those who are the arbiters of fashion and style, to be beautiful and elegant and a premier symbol of American female beauty, as influential as Jacqueline Kennedy. And her hair, whether it's bone straight that day, straight but curly, or straight and shiny, has been an endorsement of conventional, acceptable styles. Just as Barack Obama declared that he was president of “all America,” Michelle Obama's hair has been accepted from sea to shining sea. All but the most hardcore Black cultural nationalists, who long to see a Black woman with an Afro in the White House, or White racists who have in Internet chat rooms called the First Lady and her daughters “gorillas,” agree that the First Lady is the one Black woman in America who has won the hair wars. And beyond the question of hair, who would have imagined a beautiful brown-skinned, identifiably Black woman as the nation's First Lady? OK, the revolution just got televised.

Yet the controversy continues generation after generation. The cultural tumult is inspired, I feel, by the questions that continually haunt Black people. Questions that years of activism, protest, and progress have failed to answer in ways we can uniformly accept: Who are we? What makes us “authentic” Black people? What is
our
standard of beauty, and where are the roots of that beauty to be found? We can't agree on the answers, and we both accept and reject the conclusions forced on us by the larger White society. These questions spring from our position as both central to American culture and perennially marginalized by it.

And there are the other questions that hair leads to as well, about femininity, questions that haunt women of all shades, hues, and races. Why do we have to live under the tyranny of a global doctrine that posits femininity in the length and straightness of a woman's hair? Especially when real beauty, the kind that can light up a room literally and figuratively, radiates from within? Black women, like women all over the world, live imprisoned by a cultural belief system about beauty and hair whose time should have passed.

Today my natural is full of gray hairs, and I love it and my face more than ever, as the battle about Black hair rages on. I often wonder if, with my college degree, my status as a published author and educator who has worn natural hair for over forty years, I am too dismissive and critical of the reasons why so many Black women care so deeply about the state of their hair. I care about my hair too and have frankly chosen the natural as a form of adornment and statement.

But as I said, if you are a Black woman, hair is serious business. My hairphobic sisters have gotten the same message that I received relentlessly as a young girl: my natural hair is bad and it could exact a potentially high price if I choose to expose it and exult in it. I have just always been willing to pay the price. But my sisters know that with straight hair they are acceptable in the corporate world. They see high-profile celebrities like Beyoncé disguise her natural hair with a head full of synthetic hair and rule the world. They have lost jobs because they chose to wear braids. They know that many Black men prefer long, straight hair, and they don't care what Black women do to get it.

Yet I am deeply conflicted as I assess the young Black girl making minimum wage at McDonald's, sporting a weave that could easily cost thousands of dollars a year to maintain, money that, yes, I dare to say, she could use to go to college. Certainly a college degree would have a more positive long-term impact on her career goals than a weave. I am conflicted as well by the sight of a Black female professional wearing a wig whose locks reach the middle of her back. All of this is squishy, squirmy, and very difficult to write and speak out loud, for I am violating the racial rules about not airing dirty linen in public and the rule that says sisterhood trumps truths that may be hard to handle. I feel narrow minded and judgmental, when all I really want is a world where Black women are healthy and have healthy hair that does not put them in the poorhouse, cause health problems, or reinforce the idea that they have to look White to be valued. And this does not mean that I want a world of Black women who have hair that only looks like mine.

Yet who I am to judge? Who am I to assume that women who invest hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in synthetic hair don't or can't have as much racial pride as I do? Maybe they know something I don't, that what's on your head is not necessarily a barometer of what is in your mind. I know that Black women make these hair choices for reasons beyond reflexive conformity to White beauty standards, reasons such as convenience and the practical need to “fit in” to a prevailing White standard of beauty for the sake of their careers. I know that Black women are damned no matter what we do to our hair. And we are damned, ironically and most cruelly, by our own people, who are not often the ones who hire and fire, but are the ones who accept us into or push us out of the tribe. But I know too how deeply the wounds of racism and self-hatred have burrowed into the souls of Black men and women. I still hear too many Black women, and Black girls of all ages, talk obsessively among themselves, on the Internet, in social media, and face-to-face, about their desire for “good hair” and how much they fear having “bad hair.” I am still waiting for that conversation to cease. I have been waiting all my life.

Sister

ANNE LAMOTT

O
n a trip to St. Louis a number of years ago, something for which I'd waited a lifetime happened: people asked me how they could get their hair to look like mine. I have dreadlocks now. I finally have fabulous hair. Now, you may need a little background on this to help you see why this means such a great deal to me: you've got to realize I grew up with men and boys asking me if I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. Of course, it's one thing when you're a twelve-year-old girl with nappy hair and the older boys ask if you've stuck your finger in the light socket; this is certainly exhilarating enough and could give a girl enough confidence literally to
soar
through puberty. But it's another when you have to keep fending off the question well into your twenties and thirties. Once at a funeral, an old friend of the woman who'd died actually asked me if I'd stuck my finger in a socket. At a funeral! And his wife had to stand beside him trying to look as if this were the most amusing thing you could possibly say at a funeral. I looked at her with compassion, and then at him rather blankly, and said as gently as I could, “What a rude, rude thing to say.”

I was a towheaded child with bushy urchin hair. My father and some of my chosen mothers thought my hair was beautiful, but they were about the only ones who did. I got teased a lot. My mother took me to get it straightened for a while; I slept on rollers for years, brushed it into pigtails that I tied with pretty ribbons, set the bangs with enough gel to caulk a bathtub, and finally got it cut into an Afro in the late sixties. It looked better, but I loved having bangs, and they seemed to be forever a pipe dream.

Industrial-strength mousse came along in my twenties and I could moussify my hair and bangs into submission with this space-age antifrizz shit that may turn out someday to have been carcinogenic. I used to worry about this, but then I'd think, I don't really care as long as they don't take it off the market.

When I first started going to St. Andrew, most of the thirty or so women at my church who are African American processed their hair, and still do. A few wear short Afros, a few wear braided extensions; but mostly they get it straightened or flattened against their heads into marcel waves. When I got dreadlocks a few years ago, the other women were ambivalent at first. I think it made them a little afraid for me.

Dreadlocks make people wonder if you're trying to be rebellious. It's not as garbling and stapled as a tongue stud, say, or as snaky as tattoos. But dreadlocks make you look a little like Medusa, because they writhe and appear to have a life of their own, and that's scary. These women at my church love me more than life itself, and they want me to move safely through the world. They want me to pass. So they worried, and slipped the name of black beauty salons into our conversations.

When I first started coming to this church, I wore my hair like I'd worn it for years, shoulder length and ringletty—or at any rate, ringletty if there was an absence of wind, rain, or humidity. In the absence of weather, with a lot of mousse on hand, I could get it to fall just right so that it would not be too frizzy and upsetting—although “fall” is perhaps not the right word. “Appear to fall” is close. “Shellacked into the illusion of ‘falling' ” is even closer. Weather is the enemy. I could leave the house with bangs down to my eyebrows, moussed and frozen into place like the plastic sushi in the windows of Japanese restaurants, and after five minutes in rain or humidity, I'd look like Ronald McDonald.

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain? Can you imagine how discouraging it was for me to live in fear of weather, of drizzle or downpour? Because Christianity is
about
water: “Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” It's about baptism, for God's sake. It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and
wet.
Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving in to all those things we can't control; it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get
drenched.

There's something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. It's tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots of water, tending to you, making you clean all over again. And in the Christian experience of baptism, the hope is that when you go under and you come out, maybe a little disoriented, you haven't dragged the old day along behind you. The hope, the belief, is that a new day is upon you now. A day when you are emboldened to take God at God's word about cleanness and protection: “When thou passeth through the water, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.”

Obviously, when you really want this companionship and confidence but you're worried about your bangs shrinking up like fern fronds, you've got a problem on your hands.

Furthermore, I don't think you're supposed to devote so much of your prayer life to the desperate hope that there not be any weather. Also, to the hope that no one trick you into getting into a convertible and then suddenly insist on putting the top down. Because I tell you, you take a person with fluffy wiry hair like mine and you put her in a convertible with the top down, the person gets out of the car looking like Buckwheat. Or Don King. It helps in one way to wear a hat, but when you take it off you have terrible hat hair—it looks like a cartoon mouse has been driving a little steamroller around your head. And you can't wear a scarf or you end up looking like your Aunt Bev. So you have to pick—Don King, or Bev.

So that's the background. Now I have dreadlocks, long blondish dreadlocks, and some of the people of St. Louis were asking me how they could get their hair to dread. All right, not many of them, but two of them, two straight white normal-looking middle-aged people. Mostly, people see someone with dreadlocks, especially a white person with dreadlocks, and assume that the person's hair carries with it a position or a message—the message being, Maybe you don't have as many prejudices against me as you do against black people, but you should. Most people, if asked, might wonder if perhaps dreadlocks are somewhat unpatriotic—isn't it unpatriotic not to comb your hair? The tangles are so funky, and who knows, they may harbor bugs and disease. Perhaps to some people dreadlocks indicate confusion of thought and character: good children have shiny combed hair, while bad children, poor children, loser kids, have bushy hair.

But two people in St. Louis stopped me on the street and asked for instructions on how to get their hair to look like mine.

Eight years after I joined St. Andrew, I moved to a new neighborhood north of where we'd been living. The bad news was that there was more weather there. Hotter weather, more humid weather, fern-frond bangs weather. The good news was that a large, beautiful radical African American Buddhist professor named Marlene Jones Schoonover lived there too, and she had the most beautiful dreadlocks—lovely playful dreadlocks, carefully groomed, like wild plants in well-tended rows.

Soon after moving there, I became the Democratic precinct leader for our neighborhood, and I used to pass her house as I made my rounds. She not only had hair I loved but a glorious bright overgrown garden like one you'd find on the grounds of Clown College. One time I stopped to talk to her when she was out in her yard picking flowers, and I admired her dreads out loud. “You ought to do it,” she said. “My daughter and I did it as an act of civil rights. And we could help you do it too.”

I said that sounded just great—but I knew I wasn't going to follow up. First of all, I felt it was presumptuous to appropriate a black style for my own liberation. But mostly when I thought about having dreadlocks, I felt afraid and disloyal. Dreadlocks would be a way of saying I was no longer going to play with the rules of mainstream white beauty. It meant that I was no longer going to even try and blend. It was a way of saying that I know what kind of hair I have, I know what it looks like, and I am going to stop trying to pretend it's different than that. That I was going to celebrate instead.

But I was not ready; I continued to moussify.

No one knew the effort it took to make my hair look like it hadn't taken any effort at all.

I'd pass Marlene in her garden, and she'd look up from her work and say, “You have such beautiful hair.”

“Oh, thank you,” I'd say, and paw the ground.

One day she said, “I
love
your hair.” And then she went on, “Picture Jesus with hair just like yours.” But I couldn't, any more than I could imagine him with braces on his teeth or short hairy legs. That's how deeply I had come to believe that my hair was ugly.

On the other hand, I
could
immediately see Jesus with dreadlocks flowing down his back. And I saw that it would be an act of both triumph and surrender to give up trying to have straighter hair. And that surrender means you get to come on over to the winning side.

But I
still
wasn't ready to do it.

Then two things happened. One was that all of a sudden I couldn't stop thinking of something Pammy said right before she died, when she was in a wheelchair, wearing a wig to cover her baldness. We were at Macy's. I was modeling a short dress for her that I thought my boyfriend would like. But then I asked whether it made me look big in the hips, and Pammy said, as clear and kind as a woman can be, “Annie? You really don't have that kind of time.” And—slide trombone, bells, rim shot—I
got
it, deep in my being. While walking by Marlene's garden, Pammy's words suddenly rang through the chambers of my mind.

So I kept thinking, How much longer am I going to think about my hair more often than about things in the world that matter? I kept passing Marlene's house. She'd be out watering her crazy clown garden. We'd talk about politics, our children, and God. Then we'd talk about hair. “Call me,” she'd say, “when you're ready.” She knew how scared I was.

One day I said, “I think I'm getting there.”

“Princess be about to
arrive
,” she said.

The second thing was that right around that time, I saw
Th
e Shawshank Redemption
, where at the end, the character played by Tim Robbins escapes from prison via the sewers after serving time for a crime he didn't commit. He emerges from the pipes of the prison into a rushing rain-swollen river and he staggers through the current with his face turned toward the sky, his arms held up to heaven as the rains pour down.

I sat in the movie theater and cried for a while. Then I started to smile, because it occurred to me that if I were the prisoner being baptized by the torrential rain, half my mind would be on how much my bangs were going to shrink up after they dried.

I went home that night and I called Marlene. “OK, baby,” I said. “I'm ready.”

The next day she and her dreadlocked teenage daughter came over to my house with a little jar of beeswax, which would hold the baby dreads in place until they could start tangling themselves together into strands. Marlene sat me down in the kitchen. She and her daughter sectioned off my hair, twisted it into long strands that almost looked braided, and glued it in place with the wax. It took a couple of hours, and I was scared almost the whole time. We listened to gospel and reggae for inspiration. I cried a little—I had never let people enter into my hair weirdness with me, had never let anyone help me before, had never believed I could get free. I let them work on me, and after a while I thought of the sacredness of animals grooming each other. I felt the connection and the tenderness, the reciprocal healing offered by the laying on of hands. The two women twisted, daubed, smoothed my hair, practical and gentle at the same time; there aren't many opportunities for this left, away from the sickbed. Marlene worked with the grave sense that we were doing something meaningful—politically, spiritually, aesthetically. And her quiet daughter worked with bouncy joyful efficiency, bopping along to the reggae beat. When they were done, I looked beautiful—royal, shy, groomed. Beautiful. Strange. Mulatto.

Who will love me now? I wondered. Will anyone want to stroke my hair again? I didn't know the answer, so this act was like taking a vow of chastity. And I didn't care. I just wanted to stroke my hair myself.

The dreads are so cool; no wonder two people in St. Louis wanted my secret. Like snowflakes, each dreadlock is different, has its own configuration, its own breadth and feel. It's like having very safe multiple personalities. It's been twenty years since that day Marlene and her daughter first twisted them into vines, and they have grown way past my shoulders down my back. Sometimes I wear them up, sometimes down. I used to look at people with normal white people's hair, and their bangs always stayed long and they got to hide behind that satin curtain, and I was jealous. But now my bangs are always long too. I peered out at St. Louis from behind my dreadlocks, as through a beautiful handmade fence, in the drizzle, in the wind, in the rain.