Personal Essay- The BC (Revised)

*This is the revision of my NYTimes Lives piece

According to many of the members of my extended family being bad at taking care of my hair is one of my personality traits, along with being nerdy and a little weird. Since the age of 10, when I was old enough to sit still in a chair in the salon to get my hair relaxed enough to make it straight, my mother would always make it a point to chastise me with the one insult that every girl lived in terror of,

“It will all fall out if you never take good care of it.”

She would always follow that statement with a judgmental look and say,

“I didn’t grow up like you. I took care of my hair.”

The journey from my childhood to adolescence was spent ignoring the ideology engrained in my head by so many women in my family, that my hair was essential and important, and having straight hair is deemed even more essential to my existence as a little black girl. I never felt the same as my mother did as a child by cherishing those precious strands that poured out of my head, if anything I felt the opposite.

Being African-American meant constant comparisons between yourself and other’s skin color, hair, noses, and butts. While I was born in the 90s my mother, who came from a previous generation spurned by the legacy of Madame C. J. Walker, believed that a woman’s hair should be straightened to look acceptable in society.

I learned at a young age that light skin was good, and good hair was good. Nappy, unkempt, tightly coiled locks were bad, like Celie’s hair in The Color Purple. I spent all of my pre-teen years realizing that I was a made of a frustrating genetic combination that I had no control over. My skin was always going to be darker than both my parents, and my hair was never going to grow past my shoulders. While the other female members of my family would coyly smile as others observed new inches of hair growth when we saw each other during holidays and family vacations, I wore ponytails, pretended to care less about being girly, and sat in silence at the hair salon while my scalp burned from the chemicals in the Just For Me hair relaxers.

At this point, I also was beginning to forget what my hair ever looked like before my curls were permanently altered through damaging chemicals and heat. My whole life revolved around appointments at the Dominican salon around the corner from my house, and my hair was suffering for it. Often, the beauticians at the salons would take over my mother’s job of shaming my lack of commitment to maintaining my hair while putting on plastic gloves to protect their hands and applying the white, creamy, chemical relaxer just above my scalp.

            “You scratch you head mami,”
They would say. Tisk tisk. Scratching the tender scalp before a relaxer almost always resulted in the festering of painful sores that are difficult to get rid of. I would sit through the pain because, the longer one waited to rinse out the relaxer, and the straighter one’s hair will be. Routinely every 4-6 weeks I went in to get it relaxed, and then every two weeks I got it washed, roller set, flat ironed and dried. I wrapped my hair at night, stayed the hell away from pools and rain in order to preserve my hairstyle longer. I hid the detrimental effects of hair loss due to constant chemical treatments in tightly wrapped tissues thrown away in the bathroom wastebasket, and rarely wore it down in order to avoid showing my embarrassing bald spots.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to conceive of my hair as something more than just a burden of failed expectations from my family, and that I could take agency over challenging what I originally felt that I was powerless situation with help and advice from other black women. In my sophomore year I met another African-American K student, whose enlightened philosophies on hair maintenance enlightened me when she asked,

            “Have you ever considered going natural?”
Before that moment I had never understood what the concept of going natural really meant until she explained to me that it entailed,

“Freeing yourself from the harmful effects of hair relaxers in order for your hair to become healthy.”

The summer before I was going to spend six months in Europe on study abroad I decided to cut it all off. As I was sitting on a couch in my best middle school friend Kellie’s living room, surrounded by chatter of other people, my brain repeated the same thought process that I had been fighting with since the school year had ended. To big chop or not to big chop? With my thoughts swirling in my brain and adrenaline rushing through my veins, I ask Kellie,

“Do you have a pair of scissors?”

I rushed to the bathroom in a hurry for no reason, itching to get rid of the hair that seemed to metaphorically weigh me down. I stood in front of the mirror, gripping locks and periodically snipping them off with a pair of kitchen shears, and watching as the hair that was once on my head accumulated all over the floor and in the sink, and what was left was less than an inch of new growth that hadn’t yet been tamed by a relaxer. After a few moments, the emotional backlash of having just made a permanent decision about my personal appearance in the span of a few minutes settled over me and filled the room like fog. I kept reaching for hair that didn’t exist, like people with phantom limbs grasping at parts of the body that aren’t there anymore, still feeling the remnants of what once existed as a part of you. I walked downstairs while running hands in my hair, to the shocked and confused glances of my friends. I was critically self aware of the un-professional hack job that I had done, yet felt emancipated from the pressure of having to conform to a standard of beauty that I didn’t subscribe to. Later in the afternoon, when my father came to pick me up to go to brunch, his face dropped when he saw me standing there, wearing Kellie’s big hoop earrings to compensate for my boyish cut.
 “Why did you do that?” He asked me, echoing my friend’s earlier confused stares.
“I don’t know.” I answered back, not really having the right words to explain why I did it, sinking further into a black hole of self-consciousness that I was finding even harder to climb out of.

“I’m not walking outside with you without a hat on,”

He demanded and I complied, fearful of the judgments and staring I could be subjected to from strangers who had zero interest in my self-defiant act of emancipation. However, as my father devoured blueberry pancakes, I stared out the window of our booth at IHOP, wearing a black beanie in the blistering July heat. It finally hit me that I cut off my hair because I was done sitting passively in that salon chair. I told him so, and eventually my mother. And the one word that kept swirling around my brain was liberation. Even almost two years later in the present, as I come across an article asking what it would mean for black women if “Michelle Obama Had Natural Hair” while perusing blogs and youtube videos looking to imitate the right twist out or bantu knot style, I feel liberated.