Black fuzzy thing: the truth about our love-hate relationship with our hair by Asali Solomon
Tell yourself what you will. Everyone knows that the most valuable capital a woman can possess is a beauty other people can readily perceive. But many women have to decide they're beautiful in spite of what they've been told by high-school boys, employers and music videos. I did. I'm medium-height, dark-skinned, thick around the middle, with flat size 9, corn-flecked feet. I know I'm beautiful because I decided this is the case. But sometimes I can't shake the sinking feeling that no one besides my parents and sister know it. I can see myself through the eyes of the brother in the shiny black Escalade who stares right through me, the White woman smiling at me curiously in the supermarket, and the Mexican construction worker who leers at me with erotic hostility. Despite how I try to see myself, it sometimes catches me and takes my breath away that for most people I'm homely because I'm brown and nappy.
There is, however, one remarkable physical thing about me, and that is my hair. It is the thing that people most want to touch and talk about. I have indisputably beautiful dreadlocks--thin, defined, falling to the middle of my back. I decided to grow them when I was 21 and newly out in the real world. I wanted good-looking, hassle-free hair but didn't want a chemical straightener that wouldn't agree with me. So Roberta, my loctician back in Brooklyn who started me seven years ago, taught me to take care of my hair so well that people on the street think I should be doing their hair too.
People love my locks so much that I don't feel as if they're my hair. Because my hair was an ill-fated high-school perm that I could never get to hold a recognizable style or grow into a respectable ponytail. My hair was a gangly natural that chunked up into a kinky misery when I sweated at middle-school dances. It was the superclose-cut natural that I loved but suspect kept me from having a date all through college. And it was the thin, shoulder-length, shakable extension braids that I liked wearing but were literally not my hair.
Yet this remarkable hair of mine, it plagues me. It asks me questions. Like: What do you love about me now? Do you like the geometry of my lines? Do you love the different reds and blacks that mingle at surprising intervals? Do you love the nappy edges that you beat back with your endless twisting? Or do you like that I hang down like a White girl's?
Uh-oh.
See, I know how I should feel about Black hair, Black people and Black me, I am the firstborn Swahili-named daughter of two righteous Black folks from West Philly who got married in dashikis and Afros and taught me that a Black man invented the traffic light and possibly electricity itself. I'm the daughter of Brother Sol and Sister who told me early on (maybe too early, my therapist says) about slavery and the assassination of Malcolm X, about the once and future glory of The Continent and the mess that Europe has made of the world. The politics of beauty were symbolized in my home by pictures of tall, smooth-headed Masai women cut from UNICEF calendars, and by the short natural my mother has worn my entire life. I remember being not quite 10 and precocious at the supermarket. Inexplicably, I had just learned the phrase "beauty standards." While we rolled down the hair-products aisle, I said to my mother, "So you don't follow White beauty standards, huh?" As if it were the least complicated thing in the world, the most natural position in this majority racist country, she said, "No."
But we did have television. We saw Disney movies: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella--a brunette, a blonde, a blonde. Is it any wonder I remember kindergarten the way I do? I recall being surrounded by White girls on the nubby rug where we read stories and sang songs. Looking back, I cannot see myself. I see a ring of blond and brunette girls with high-pitched voices--and an awful blur, a black fuzzy thing on the rug.
Though I went to school with Black kids from first through fourth grades, I took the black fuzzy feeling with me. Then, during some poignant middle-school years, I went to school with rich White girls in the suburbs. There I willfully changed my mind and, stopping short of full resolution, began feeling definitely unpretty instead of merely invisible. The solution to this new discomfort came in fantasies in which I led a fawning group of followers down the stately hallway from the dining room to the classroom. I couldn't have articulated why at the time, but in the fantasy I had mixed-girl hair. I loved it! My dream hair floated and billowed and could be tied up in a spirited ponytail. It framed my face in a sympathetic way. It was yielding and giving--the hair that would finally get me asked to dance. With mixed-girl hair in kindergarten, I could have been a black flowing thing instead of a blur on the rug. And I could have floated out of range of so much pain.
Recently I was loving myself in the mirror, and my hair suddenly asked me this: Would you like me better if I were not neat dreadlocks that any kinky girl can get, but a soft, blurry swish of obscenely shiny black? I still find that a long, full head of relaxed hair gives me aches. The beauty of that hair still makes me hurt with admiration. I often wish my mother had thought longer about my question that day in the supermarket, maybe told me more of what she went through in the pre-Afro sixties when she had a thin perm, split ends and a goofy smile. I often wish I'd told her more of how I felt about my self, and not only about the day when I was 12 and the Black boys in McDonald's hooted approvingly at my friend with the perm and barked at me. I wish she had told me that the only thing as torturous as holding a standard of beauty you can never fully achieve is holding a standard of consciousness that is sometimes impossible to maintain.
There is, however, one remarkable physical thing about me, and that is my hair. It is the thing that people most want to touch and talk about. I have indisputably beautiful dreadlocks--thin, defined, falling to the middle of my back. I decided to grow them when I was 21 and newly out in the real world. I wanted good-looking, hassle-free hair but didn't want a chemical straightener that wouldn't agree with me. So Roberta, my loctician back in Brooklyn who started me seven years ago, taught me to take care of my hair so well that people on the street think I should be doing their hair too.
People love my locks so much that I don't feel as if they're my hair. Because my hair was an ill-fated high-school perm that I could never get to hold a recognizable style or grow into a respectable ponytail. My hair was a gangly natural that chunked up into a kinky misery when I sweated at middle-school dances. It was the superclose-cut natural that I loved but suspect kept me from having a date all through college. And it was the thin, shoulder-length, shakable extension braids that I liked wearing but were literally not my hair.
Yet this remarkable hair of mine, it plagues me. It asks me questions. Like: What do you love about me now? Do you like the geometry of my lines? Do you love the different reds and blacks that mingle at surprising intervals? Do you love the nappy edges that you beat back with your endless twisting? Or do you like that I hang down like a White girl's?
Uh-oh.
See, I know how I should feel about Black hair, Black people and Black me, I am the firstborn Swahili-named daughter of two righteous Black folks from West Philly who got married in dashikis and Afros and taught me that a Black man invented the traffic light and possibly electricity itself. I'm the daughter of Brother Sol and Sister who told me early on (maybe too early, my therapist says) about slavery and the assassination of Malcolm X, about the once and future glory of The Continent and the mess that Europe has made of the world. The politics of beauty were symbolized in my home by pictures of tall, smooth-headed Masai women cut from UNICEF calendars, and by the short natural my mother has worn my entire life. I remember being not quite 10 and precocious at the supermarket. Inexplicably, I had just learned the phrase "beauty standards." While we rolled down the hair-products aisle, I said to my mother, "So you don't follow White beauty standards, huh?" As if it were the least complicated thing in the world, the most natural position in this majority racist country, she said, "No."
But we did have television. We saw Disney movies: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella--a brunette, a blonde, a blonde. Is it any wonder I remember kindergarten the way I do? I recall being surrounded by White girls on the nubby rug where we read stories and sang songs. Looking back, I cannot see myself. I see a ring of blond and brunette girls with high-pitched voices--and an awful blur, a black fuzzy thing on the rug.
Though I went to school with Black kids from first through fourth grades, I took the black fuzzy feeling with me. Then, during some poignant middle-school years, I went to school with rich White girls in the suburbs. There I willfully changed my mind and, stopping short of full resolution, began feeling definitely unpretty instead of merely invisible. The solution to this new discomfort came in fantasies in which I led a fawning group of followers down the stately hallway from the dining room to the classroom. I couldn't have articulated why at the time, but in the fantasy I had mixed-girl hair. I loved it! My dream hair floated and billowed and could be tied up in a spirited ponytail. It framed my face in a sympathetic way. It was yielding and giving--the hair that would finally get me asked to dance. With mixed-girl hair in kindergarten, I could have been a black flowing thing instead of a blur on the rug. And I could have floated out of range of so much pain.
Recently I was loving myself in the mirror, and my hair suddenly asked me this: Would you like me better if I were not neat dreadlocks that any kinky girl can get, but a soft, blurry swish of obscenely shiny black? I still find that a long, full head of relaxed hair gives me aches. The beauty of that hair still makes me hurt with admiration. I often wish my mother had thought longer about my question that day in the supermarket, maybe told me more of what she went through in the pre-Afro sixties when she had a thin perm, split ends and a goofy smile. I often wish I'd told her more of how I felt about my self, and not only about the day when I was 12 and the Black boys in McDonald's hooted approvingly at my friend with the perm and barked at me. I wish she had told me that the only thing as torturous as holding a standard of beauty you can never fully achieve is holding a standard of consciousness that is sometimes impossible to maintain.