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November 10, 2003

The Root of the Matter

The white girls always seemed to be the lucky ones, even though they didn’t know it. Every morning, they’d show up for class with the straight ends of their hair smelling of Herbal Essences or Pantene Pro-V, never a strand out of place or out of sight. They shared round hair ties, barrettes, and thin purple combs, pulling each out from their purses as they passed in and out of the restroom. They brought wide plastic brushes and stood in front of the mirrors, running the thin bristles through the crowns of their heads, adding volume and thickness to their styles. From my square desk, I sat and stared at the back of their heads, sizing up their prim ponytails, soft brown curls, and light blonde bangs—getting lost in just the shape in simplicity of it all.

I never thought it was fair.

And I couldn’t keep up with them. There really wasn’t any way to try, but I did it anyway. While the curls on the nape of my neck got tighter, I would sit at home and pull greedily at the mess of loops with my wide toothed comb. Back then, pulling harder seemed to make things straighter. And if having it straighter was anything like what the white girls seemed to enjoy in school everyday, it was definitely easier, a thousand times easier. I couldn’t help but think that maybe if I pulled hard enough, all the curls would just disappear, and I’d be left with the same bone straight hair as everyone else. But it didn’t change much. After six weeks, I would still end up walking in Monday morning with my split ends trimmed and my usually thick head of hair smoothed. And then I’d walk to class, sit at my desk, and clasp my hands together, hoping no one would notice my “subtle” change in appearance.

But they always did.

“Nice haircut,” they’d smile wanly at me through the hallways. A haircut. That’s all it was to them. I guess they didn’t have a real word for it. My friends meant well, but I couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed that they’d happened to notice. I didn’t like the feeling of being singled out, for being noticed every other month because my hair had finally caught up to the standards over everyone else’s.

I used to be afraid to tell the white girls the truth about my hair, that I’d spend two hours sitting in a plastic salon char, having the fringes of my scalp burnt by the heavy, white relaxer cream. I didn’t tell them how long I spent underneath the hair dryers, waiting for my thick, untamed hair to come out crisp and straight. None of them would understand that the heat I felt at the base of my neck and around the folds of my ears came from a smoking-hot pressing comb. They never thought about the crusty scabs I would scratch away from my temples—they were the price of turning ugly curls into bone straight strands.

The word “haircut” doesn’t even do it justice.

Being of only three black girls in a class of almost three hundred high school seniors, I had to suck all of that down silently. Nobody back there knew a thing about having tight bunches of nappy hair, or the smell of grease cooking fat bangs along a one-inch barrel curling iron. The white girls were familiar with names like Paul Mitchell and Vidal Sassoon, but my bathroom shelf was filled with bottles and concoctions from brands like Dudley’s, Mizani, or Fabulaxer. My white friends didn’t know the stories of Madame CJ Walker, and how she’d become of one the first black millionaires with her invention of relaxer cream in the 1900s. None of those things had any meaning for them.

Sometimes I wonder if Madame Walker ever found any irony in naming her liberating creation a “relaxer,” as if there were anything remotely calming or serene about the entire process. I can just see the turn of the century advertisements now: “Relaxer cream: the thick smelly, paste that sits on the thin edge of your scalp and burns you until you feel as though you’ve stuck your head in an oven. And have no doubt, ladies! This is the same relaxer cream that makes a girl want to scratch as though she’d been doused in fleas.” Yes, what a miraculous invention! A revolutionary cream that had the power to turn wild and untamable kinky curls into the flat, wasted strands of hair that flourished in daytime Pantene commercials. It seems as though there is no limit to the price paid for beauty… or acceptance.

Of course, the white girls didn’t know any of this. A haircut was a haircut—nothing else. There was nothing sacrificed, nothing lost, and nothing changed. My relaxer was a totally foreign idea to them, and you couldn’t tell them any differently. I couldn’t be a black girl in an all white school and think that everybody was going to be automatically programmed to understand and accept me. It was too much work for them, I guess. And in some ways, I don’t blame them. Why would anyone want to go out of his way to accommodate for just one person? It just didn’t make sense. Instead, I was left to assimilate into their world, conform to their standards. Being black was only acceptable when it didn’t raise the fine hairs on someone else’s back. Sharing differences was tolerated until someone got bored, or too overwhelmed. Once you reached that limit, things would go back to the way they always were.

When you’ve got to learn to go along to get along, there are a lot of things you just don’t do. You stop saying words that might have made a person uncomfortable before. You stop thinking of yourself in the way you used to—the only thing that matters is keeping up a face to survive. Eventually, all that adapting meant trading in my curls for my first relaxer in the eighth grade. I got compliments all around on that first day back in class. Girls ran up to me to comment on how much nicer my hair looked, all flat and sheer, slightly curled under with the help of a steaming hot curling iron. Teachers nodded in approval as I took my seat in their class. People I knew only by name would lift their heads to acknowledge the change as they passed me by in the hallways or the lunchroom. They all seemed to endorse my sudden change, none of them giving a second thought as to what I’d had to sacrifice.

As much as I tried to emulate the white girls and their glamorized sense of style, I could never keep up. After two weeks, the high gloss and shine of my bangs would wither away, and by the end of week five, I was back to my nappy roots all over again. My hair looked like a strung-out weed, all bent out of shape from the fierce straightening action that the relaxer cream had produced. While the ends of each strand were cracked and split from the heat and the activity, I could still feel the thick cluster of curls growing in at the edge of my scalp—the new growth of activity that hadn’t been relaxed at all. I loved the way they felt when I ran my fingers over them, like a crazy maze of noodles compacted on my head. They were new, refreshing, natural and real. They were a remembrance of the other me, the part of me that didn’t want to conform for the sake of conforming. I loved them because they were uncontrollable, unexplainable, and undeniably my own.

But by the end of week six, these too were sacrificed. I’d go back to sitting in the same plastic chair, grinding my teeth at the warm tingling sensation that danced above my ears. The maze of noodles would melt beneath the heavy halo of cream, and be forced to detangle themselves into prim and proper strands of hair. The tips of my ears would burn under the suffocating dryers as I sat and waited for the process to be over. I’d be blow dried, hot curled, and flat ironed before getting another chance to run my fingers over the funny bumps along my head. And by Monday morning, I’d be left with nothing more than a haircut.

posted at 3:44 p.m.

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