“Your hair has a lot of tiny curls,” the reporter said to me. Her name was Rosemary and she was a white colleague at the paper where I worked in Tampa, Fla., some years ago. I was sitting at my desk, Rosemary was standing over me and she could see the top of my head.
I was wearing my hair in a short afro at the time, a symbol of my blackness. I had never thought of my hair as curly, but once she said that, I realized she was right. When I ran a pick through my ‘fro at home, little curls – not kinks – dropped into the sink. What we for years had called nappy was actually millions of tiny curls that Rosemary could see and I couldn’t.
Black hair has become news because of Chris Rock’s movie “Good Hair,” which I saw last weekend. Today, the four of us bloggers at weareblackwomen.com are writing about our own hair and its history. I’ve never been one to spend a lot of time on my hair. I never went to the hairdresser every two weeks for a perm. Too much trouble. It’s hair, for goodness sake, something to keep your head covered.
As an auction-goer, I occasionally come across early photos of black women and black magazines with black models. In one magazine I picked up at auction, a March 1946 edition of “Headlines and Pictures, A Monthly Negro News Magazine,” every woman – from actresses to plain folks – had silky straightened hair. One photo showed a young college co-ed admiring her hair in the mirror. The back inside cover advertised “human hair” wigs for sale: a page boy ($2.98), a coronet braid ($4.50), a chignon ($3.50). You could even send in a sample of your own hair to match up with the right wig.
I also have what looks an old church fan with three black women on the beach, smartly dressed in bathing suits, a nice car behind them and a lighthouse in the distance. Their heads are fashionably covered. I have a 1969 Life Magazine with Coretta Scott King on the cover, her hair straightened. And a lobby card for the 1950 movie “The Jackie Robinson Story” with Ruby Dee, her hair flying in the wind, straightened.
I grew up getting my hair straightened, too, with Royal Crown Hair Dressing and a hot comb. Many a time, my cousins and I would sit in a chair, waiting for the straightening comb to get hot on the gas stove, then folding an ear away from the comb to keep our mothers from accidentally burning our ear. We hated the process but we loved the result.
I don’t recall saying out loud that I wanted “good hair,” but it was an unspoken fact that our hair wasn’t fixed (that’s what we called it in my South) until the kinks had been flattened. Straightening our hair was right up there with forsaking the color red (I refused to wear red for years until I bought this beautiful red silk blouse that made my dark skin sing).
What Rosemary saw as curls, society had told us was nappy or kinky. Years later, I recall someone describing black hair as strong hair that fought back. Maybe that person was right. Ours certainly did. You came at it with a comb, and it tussled with you. Royal Crown and heat was the only way to tame it. But even that was temporary, because the first sign of water and our hair happily reverted back to its natural state.
It didn’t matter, though. We endured the hot comb to get the hair we saw on the white women’s heads on TV. Madame C.J. Walker recognized the yearning, building an empire on products to grow wonderful hair, to keep it manageable, and with a steel comb, to keep it straight.
She wasn’t’ the only one selling products. Once at the Atlantique collectibles show in Atlantic City, I came across some unused product labels for black hair and skin. The graphics were in very good condition, and I couldn’t tell if the labels were originals or reproductions. I bought six of them and had them framed.
These products were before my time, but I understood the allure. I straightened my hair right through college, mini-skirts and bid whist in the lobby of the boys’ dorm. When I was voted Miss Paine College in 1973, I went to a beauty shop in downtown Augusta, Ga., to get my hair done. Along with straightening my hair, the beautician pinned a wig piece to the back of my head. I don’t remember why a hairpiece was necessary, maybe to give me enough hair to sit the crown on.
At the time, I was a budding militant. I was black and I was proud, but not brave enough to go natural.
I started wearing an afro – cut very short – in grad school at Ohio State. I’ll never forget being in a department store with my friend Daisey in Columbus when a white saleswoman said, “Thank you, sir” after I made a purchase. I was about to walk away, but spun around and stared her in the face. She apologized. In my mind it was a conspiracy to force me to go back to the hot comb. I didn’t.
Since then, my hair has gone from afro to curl to locs. My first experience with someone wearing locs was 20 years ago when I moved to Philadelphia. The locs I saw were always tangled, matted and looked like they were never washed. That was not endearing at all.
I decided to try something easy: a curl, not the grease-dripping jheri curl that Keenan Ivory Wayans and Robert Townsend made fun of in “Hollywood Shuffle.” My curl was a perm that lasted six months rather than two weeks. For me, that was forever. So what if I had to spend five hours to get it done; it was five hours every six months. And I could wash it myself.
I had to keep it oiled regularly, and my hair – which had always been short and hard to grow – grew quickly and it grew long. Every time I went to the beauty shop, I had an inch of new growth that my stylist would un-kink. This curl was amazing.
A couple years ago, I was ready to go natural again. My stylist cut the curl down to my inch of natural hair, and I sadly said goodbye to her (we all have affection for our stylist, no matter our hairstyle). It started as a short afro, but I knew that I wanted to try locs.
Today, I have locs. Hallelujah. When it rains faintly, my perm-ed friends reach for umbrellas. I don’t. If it’s sweaty hot, so what. Those tiny curls Rosemary saw in my afro now drop from my locs and I love it. Locs have set me free. There’s no going back.
