None of the Above

I am in the not-unique position of coming from mixed heritage. Like many of us who hail from the Kentucky and Tennessee Appalachians (we pronounce it apple-ate-cha, not apple-atsha), my family is a mix of African, Native, and Scottish. Except for the white boy who raped my fifteen-year-old Cree/Cherokee grandmother to make my mother. We don't really know what he was, other than the obvious. In old photos of my family, we look like a checkerboard. The young ones are towheaded and fair-skinned, the grandparents wonderfully burnished, the between generation coffee and cream. My father was the oddball, with bright red hair and pale blue eyes, whereas my mother resembled her mother, with black hair, oaky skin, and deep, dark eyes.

This mix played itself out by bestowing on me unmanageable, bushy, strawberry-blond hair. The moment I took my first job at the young age of fourteen, I began going to salons where they regularly put relaxer on kinky hair. The salons that catered to Black women, in other words. I loved those places and those women. They looked at me knowingly and smiled. Not one other person looked at me in such a way—judgingly, yes; knowingly, no. Mostly people at school made fun of me. Not because of my hair but because of my plumpness. Lard ass and sweat hog are two names I remember most.

I wonder where those boys are now.

My locks do not look like that today. “The bush,” as boyfriends and husbands called it, mostly fell out during my second divorce and grew back quite differently. Wavy, smooth enough that a little gel takes care of the kink. My last relaxer was in 1992. Bittersweet, you could say: a sad gift to my more aware adult self, a relief to my teenage self who was schooled by catalogs and magazines to think that a smooth coif was essential to a happy life. All those years of Dippity-do gel and sleeping on orange juice cans and ironing my hair on the ironing board every morning—you people who grew up with flattening i