My Hairs

God bless my poor, white, flat haired mother. It probably never occurred to her that marrying a black man would result in children with piles of curly hair. Her first child, my brother, came out with some soft, bouncy curls. Plus, he’s a boy, so it’s never been anything but short. Then came the girl children, with rolling hills of curly, kinky, often dry, growing all over the place hair.


My hair has been through many phases. Most hair has one, two maybe three phases. Mine has had at least 6.

The Original Hair Given to Me By Jesus

I imagine my hair grew in as all baby’s hair does: weird. Patchy and weird. But eventually, according to my Mother, it was glorious mounds of curls, which she promptly pulled back into ponytails or braids. Weekly, my mother would make me sit on the floor between her feet and she’d comb my hair. And I would scream. Scream. She didn’t understand that it was inappropriate to try and rip the comb through my hair as she did on her own head. Yes, I can totally blame her for this because I have proof that it was her inability to understand my hair: there are pictures of me sleeping peacefully while my black aunt gently and lovingly combs my hair. So there.

When I was 5, my mother decided she’d had enough and took me to the hairdresser. All of my original Jesus hair was chopped away, leaving a short little afro. Like Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes.

Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes

Suddenly, I was a boy. Despite my rapidly growing breasts and angelic feminine face, my short hair made me male. Other kids made fun of me, which was nothing new but shit—give a girl a break, white people. Also, my mother had two serious rules about my and my sister’s hair:

1. No playing in sand. Sand got trapped in our hair and honest to baby Jesus, my mother took a vacuum cleaner to my sister’s head more than once upon us returning from the park.

2. Don’t get your hair wet. Chlorine, specifically, is black hair kryptonite. Dries it right up. For days afterwards you have straw head.

The Arnold years were actually good because it allowed me to craft a very professional business plan at 8 years old about why I should be allowed to get my ears pierced.

Let Your Soul Glow

Ahhh the Jheri Curl. Laugh all you want, my white friends, but the Jheri Curl gave black folks that wet, loose look we all desperately wanted. To obtain this look, you must go to the hair salon where they put a softener on your hair to loosen the curls. Then they roll your hair with tiny little rods and put a solution on it to hold the loose curl in place. Yep—dumb.

I had a Jheri Curl in junior high and I thought it was fantastic. I mean, you had to spray about 10 ounces of Curl Activator on your head every morning. You also had to keep a bottle in your locker at school. A dry Jheri Curl isn’t loose and doesn’t move, which is what you want. Curl Activator smells like oil and bad, cheap perfume. It also ruins every shirt you own. Remember the scene in Coming to America when all the black folks get up from the couch and leave big oily stains where their heads were? I left big, wet, greasy marks on the school bus windows.

Ain’t Nothin’ Relaxing About a Relaxer

Eventually, we tired of having to keep our hair saturated with Activator. So we decided to get relaxers. A relaxer is a chemical process which literally damages your hair in order to eliminate as much of the curl as possible. These days, there are many types of relaxers. Back then, the most common type was a relaxer that contained lye, which is what they use to make lutefisk. It’s a very harsh chemical that can do a lot of damage. Thus, relaxers need to be “controlled.”

It starts with your hairdresser rooting through your hair to see how much growth you’ve had since your last relaxer. Then, she puts on gloves, gets a tongue depressor and starts smearing something that smells like swimming pool cleaner on your hair. It begins to tingle immediately but you ignore it: the goal is straight hair, goddammit.

Then you are left to sit while the relaxer literally cooks your hair—and your scalp. There are degrees of discomfort:

• Tingling: No problem. A decent article in People Magazine will distract you.
• Burning, Stage I: Tingling turns painful. But not so painful that you’re going to tell anyone about it.
• Burning, Stage II: Ok, it’s starting to hurt. It’s a weird kind of sensation, like peppermint fire.
• Burning, Stage III: You’re squirming now and also sweating. Your hairdresser comes over to rinse you out and you say, “It’s ok, I can wait few more minutes.
• You’re Head is on Fire: You really shouldn’t ever let it come to this. This happened to me once when an idiot who had just learned to do relaxers put the maximum strength one on my hair and took so long to put it on that I was at Burning Stage III in about 5 minutes.

Your hair is then rinsed out and it honestly feels like someone rinsed the fire out. Then a neutralizer is applied. More sitting and waiting.

Then the neutralizer is rinsed out and your hair is painstakingly set in curlers. I have 7800 pounds of hair. This took forever. Then you are placed under a dryer. By this time, your butt is asleep, you’re starving and all you want to do is shave your head.

The end result is bouncy and curly. It swings and hangs like white girl hair and you leave feeling like a hair model. But Jesus Christ, do not go near water. If your hair gets wet, you are totally and completely fucked. Get caught in a rainstorm? Screwed. Someone throws you in the pool? Kill them. Have you ever seen a black woman whose hair gets wet? You’ve never heard so much shrieking and cursing, and for good reason.

A relaxer may also leave you with some chemical burns. No need to panic; your Mom will apply ointment to them and they’ll heal, dry up and flake off.

The Braid Parade

In high school, I decided that the white devil had conned me into thinking my hair was unruly, so I wasn’t going to get relaxers anymore. Fight the Power. With braids.

I got my first set of braids done by two morons at The Hair Police, Minneapolis’s only place for the best white people dreads, Manic Panic application and (allegedly) braids. The two white girls who braided my hair spent most of the 8 hours I was there discussing how hung over they were. In the end, one side of my head was braided in a completely different manner than the other side. I borrowed $200 from my father to look like a fucking idiot.

After that, I sought out the Africans. Braid Parade (not its real name but let’s protect the shady) offered quality braids done by real African women for a lot of money. Braid Parade was run by a man we’ll call Ray-Ray. Ray-Ray was smooth and charming and was always wearing a white Hanes undershirt, long baggy shorts, white athletic socks and Adidas shower shoes. There was no fanfare at Braid Parade; it was honestly a front room with nothing in it and a back room full of African women who didn’t speak any English and chairs. These ladies were very fast and very nice, even though they could have been telling me to go to hell for all I knew. But I paid Ray-Ray and Ray-Ray only took cash. I started to wonder if the women doing the actual work saw any of that money.

I never made any friends at Braid Parade. The other clients would come in with dry, extremely damaged over-processed hair that was all different lengths and on the edge of falling out. These women brought hair with them to be braided into what little hair they had. They would eye me, suspicious. And they would ask, “Is that all your hair?” I would say yes and they would instantly hate me.

I rocked the hell out of some braids for years. But when it came time to undo my braids and go back to Braid Parade, it took days and days for me to unbraid. I’d sit in front of the TV with a comb and painstakingly unbraid my mountain of hair. I hated it.

Oh, I Rode The Pony

After deciding I was exceedingly lazy, I went natural. But only via ponytail. I never wore my hair out. I slapped some Aveda Brilliant on my head and pulled that shit back. If I had a boyfriend, I even slept in a ponytail—God forbid he should find out that my hair is crazy. People were always asking me why I didn’t wear my hair down. I would occasionally and this is what would happen:

“OMG, I loooooooooooove your hair! Can I touch it?”

“How the hell do you get your hair so curly?! That’s amazing!”

“I would kill someone for hair like that. I hate my hair. I want your hair.”

“Did you get a perm?”

I went through a weird phase where I got my hair blow-dried straight every single week. But that got expensive and tedious. So I reverted to the ponytail. But this time I added a headband. Hot.

Now, I just don’t give a damn. I’m old and I pay taxes and my hair is my hair and I’m done trying to make it someone else’s hair. It’s big, it’s curly, it’s soft and it looks INSANE when I wake up in the morning. It clogs drains, it gets stuck everywhere. Old roommates have told me that my hair lived in the apartment long after I’d moved out. If you’ve ever hung out with me, you’ve probably taken some of my hair home with you. And isn’t a pile of dead, curly cells the greatest gift of all?