Hello world!
This morning I spent some time surfing various and sundry sites as I am wont to do and I came across a new blog on AOL Black Voices called “I Am My Hair“. Today’s topic dealt with the issues born of the term “good hair” and exhorting us to bury this term and all it implies. I suppose that I am one of those individuals who possesses a head of “good hair”. What this means in the black community is that you have hair that is neither nappy nor coarse, does not want for a pressing comb or relaxer and is usually luxuriant and long because it has a lot of elasticity and does not break easily. It is trumpeted as something to be desired.
I don’t remember the first time I heard the term used, but it was most likely as soon as my family touched down in South Carolina after my father retired from the military when I was six or seven. The women in my family (mother, grandmother, aunts) had various grades of “good hair” and my father’s hair was also thick and soft, so that was all I knew and did not recognize a difference, really. Until I showed up at school. I was amazed by what I saw, the depth of difference and the array of variety astounded me. Afros on the fifth grade boys! What seemed like hundreds of tiny braids both short and long ending in brightly colored beads, plastic barrettes and even foil on the little girls! The smell of dressing oil, afro-sheen and tcb hair grease. I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at, but look and look some more I did. I was fascinated…and instantly shunned by the black kids because of a) the way I spoke and b) my hair.
I didn’t learn to speak in the South. I learned on military bases in a time where it was very, very, very important for a little black girl to speak Proper English. My parents’ first station was in Anniston, AL in the late 1950’s, and then Texas. I can only imagine what that was like and what it instilled in my parents as far as survival skills. I imagine that these skills were passed down to me in my style of speech, which is, for the most part, unaccented textbook American. And my hair. When I was first turned loose on the unsuspecting civilian public, I was two soft pig tails with plastic barrettes out of necessity instead of decoration because my hair was so thick that it would come undone on its own and bangs that stood straight up in the air in a riot of tangled curls until I discovered the magic of training them into a single smooth roll by wearing a single pink roller all night.
So not only did I “talk like a white girl” I had white girl hair/good hair as well, instantly dooming me to the realm of the wanna-be, the weird, the goofy, the freaks, the Uncle Toms, etc.
I love my hair now. I consider it to be one of my best features even if I am ignorant in the ways of hair care. Average black hair care products do me little to no good and in the past have actually done me great harm. I have zero creativity when it comes to styling, I am sad to say, but put me in a stylist’s chair and they can work immediate wonders, sucking their teeth and clucking their tongues at me all the while for not doing more with it myself. I didn’t love my hair then. To me, having “good hair” only meant that I was different, and different at age six was not what I wanted to be.
But there I was, for better or for worse. And so, I made a career of it. Which will be plainly painted as we progress. Hang on to your garters, Myrtle.
Hey, you!