For me, writing about myself is hard. Writing about my hair is even harder. It seriously might feel less revealing to publish my bank balance.
So when my editor suggested that my coverage of the
Atlanta Natural Hair Health and Beauty Show include a personal blog, naturally I cringed.
I'm a black woman. My hair has been the source of both joy and pain, frustration and fascination, for much of my life. It has preoccupied my thoughts, eaten away at my time and that aforementioned bank balance in ways that I am ashamed to admit.
How did I get here?
Let's see, I've had long, pin-straight, blow-in-the-wind, no-it's-not-a-weave hair. And I've had huge, afro-black, I'm-trying-to-embrace-the-African-in-me hair.
I've had boyfriends who made it quite clear that they were dating me
and my hair. And, I have a father who read Kenneth and Mamie Clark's famous black doll study and understood the depths of black self-loathing it revealed. He decreed that my sisters and I should only own and play with black dolls.
I had a grandmother who sat with her sisters and mixed up hair tonics made from lard and lavender around the time that Madam C.J. Walker and Madam Poro started mass marketing black hair products. And, I had a mother who rocked a shoulder-grazing Afro though the 70s and early 80s. She forbade the use of terms like "good" and "bad" hair in our home.
I've listened to a dear friend's struggles with alopecia. And I've sat with my best friend during a 14-hour sew-in weave appointment. In the end, it cost somewhere between the per capita GDP of Niger and Sierra Leone. But, she seemed happy. Even with that knowledge, I've reached judgmental conclusions about the self-esteem and finances of women who live every moment of their lives shrouded in weaves.
I've read 'The Autobiography of Malcom X,' and knew all about the poetry and pain of colored girls long before anyone heard the names Tyler Perry or Talib Kweli. I also have a personal collection of hair products that would make both Sally and Ricky jealous. And, I know that just two weeks ago a haircut brought me to tears.
I know where I am supposed to be when it comes to my feelings about my hair and where I really am.
But as I walked around the hair and beauty show at the Georgia International Convention Center about a week or so back, I was struck by the fact that there were women like me everywhere.
The place was, quite literally, packed to capacity with women who might secretly hate or love their hair, and those who likely vacillate between the two. And there were women seeking congress around their struggles. There was even as one women told me, a "money changer in the temple" trying to sell something her company calls an "organic weave."
I couldn't help but wonder how many women were there to, as one woman said, "finally put hair in its proper and somewhat unimportant place."
There's really no way to know. But there was one moment that gave me a little hope that it might be possible.
I met a 5-year-old girl named Tylar Nunally Williams in a kids play area. Tylar's mother brought her to the show to check out products and see the growing world of black women who have opted to embrace and wear their natural hair.
Tylar and I have something in common. Like me when I was Tylar's age, she is one of very few black kids at her school. She gets lots of uncomfortable questions about her hair. And, last year, when Tylar started asking her mother when she was going to get hair that hangs (instead of puffing up), Tylar's mother and grandmother decided to stop relaxing their hair.
Back at the show, a young black woman had been stationed near the kids play area. To capture attention, she was wearing a big, sparkly white dress, a tiara and a collection of short dreads in an updo. Her employer, she told me, really wanted her to wear what they considered a more princess-like wig, but Tylar and the other kids who stood in line for a photo with her didn't seem to have any problem determining who and what this woman was about.
There, in the middle of a two-day event devoted to hair, hair products and black women's obsession with both, Tylar got her turn. And it turned out her personal preoccupation wasn't about hair at all.
"Since you are a princess, did you ever have to kiss a frog?" Tylar asked.
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