On Hair Care

Every day, I have engaged in the sacred ritual that is my hair care. I gently mist my coily strands with water, apply a cream filled with the building blocks of life, and seal with an oil scented by the gods in heaven itself. This daily tradition has become a point of pride, a coat of arms tying me to the ancestral roots of struggle and resilience. It was not always this way.

My hair could have been held in court as evidence of child neglect. My birth was preceded by an endless list of questions concerning paternity, but the dark, coarse corkscrews that sprang from my crown only served to lengthen the list. My mother's loose auburn curls explained half my head, but the other half remained unaccounted for. My family would later joke, “We didn't know whose you were, but we knew you weren't white.”

As I grew older, my mother would experience significant difficulty managing my hair without the help of the internet to direct her. She would succumb to four-hundred-degree flat irons in between long treks from our rural home to the Black hair salons in the city. I could imagine the pride she must have swallowed as she, a white woman from the country, toted a brown baby with a lion's mane to a space where she was met only with judgmental eyes. She would drop me off at the front and explain to the stylists that I needed a chemical relaxer and press. A “relaxer” was a cream that could be applied to textured hair, effectively breaking its structure and allowing the hair to hang straight until the new, curly growth came in months later.

I remember their scoffs at the white woman who demanded her Black child be rid of something so inherent to her culture. My mother would insist that she had errands to run and would leave for three or four hours at a time. We did not have family or friends on that side of the river; nor did I ever see the groceries and envelopes that came from our other errand runs. Looking back, my heart aches to think that she may not have had erran