All That Good Hair
As a 15-year-old Afro-Caribbean schoolgirl, I yearned for ‘television hair.’ I coveted the locks of Charlie’s Angels’ Farah Fawcett, platinum blonde pop stars, and my Caucasian friends. I ached for hair that shone, moved, and returned to home base without having to wrestle it into submission when caught in even the puniest of winds.
In the privacy of my bedroom, I would tie towels around my head, twirling and prancing to emulate the look and feel of straight, manageable hair. As much as a bath towel can resemble hair, I clung to the illusion as Blondie belted out ‘Picture This’ on my cassette player.
The bane of my afro hair, as I saw it then, was it didn’t ‘behave.’ A gentle breeze would play havoc with any cultivated ‘do,’ and a whisper of humidity would spring back a head of hair I took pains to brush straight each morning before school.
Ah, school. If dampness and humidity were kryptonite for my textured hair, school swimming lessons were their own special kind of torture. The supplied rubber swimming caps, which smelt oddly like gasoline, did everything except keep out moisture.
Then, the hairdryers at school, with their blush of lukewarm air, suitable only for the fine gossamer hair of fairies, were best avoided for good mental health. The choice was to go back into class with air-dried hair or a tummy ache severe enough to guarantee you a bed in the sick bay until the bell rang for home time.
And it wasn’t that I favoured elaborate hairstyles. I would later come to prefer my hair parted off-centre, brushed, and tied away from a face prone to chronic acne.
This gave me the control I craved without resorting to becoming a different race.
But future preferences and self-awareness were still out of reach to my dissatisfied, teenage self — a dissatisfaction that flirted dangerously with self-loathing. Admittedly, this was not yet language I had access to, but daily condemnation of self can lead nowhere good.
An exception to the Black Hair Equals Difficult Hair rule appeared to be the girls of colour in America. Their hair moved and behaved like the ‘TV hair’ I longed for. Initially, I attributed this aberration to the States having the right kind of weather. My world was opened up when I discovered these girls often ‘relaxed’ their tresses with creams or lotions called ‘Hair Relaxer’ to achieve their shiny, sleek looks.
These chemical hair treatments straightened curly or tightly coiled hair by breaking down the hair’s natural structure. Containing strong alkalis and ingredients like sodium hydroxide and other unpronounceable science, I saw only the words: ‘Up to four weeks of shiny, silky straight hair.’ Hair relaxer and I became fast friends.
The irony of my young hair journey angst is I had what my culture considered to be ‘good hair,’ even though the wider world made little distinction and categorised all black hair as ‘afro hair.’ Good hair was often longer, straighter-looking, and easier to maintain than the pejorative ‘picky’ hair, which was coarser, often short, and prone to matting.
But even with all this good or relaxed hair, it could take an easy two hours for me to wash, dry, and comb my mane into any sort of order. So, when I started working, I switched to straight hair extensions in expensive London salons. Convenient, yes, but these extensions were often applied too tightly at the roots and caused significant damage to my hairline — just as my overuse of relaxers had done. Gentler clipped-in hair pieces wouldn’t become popular until mainstream hairdressing embraced trends from adjacent cultures.
The intermingling and acceptance of different cultures informed my next hair phase — long, skinny braids.
Years before, I would have hesitated, intuiting the subtle message that braids might not be professional enough. Another contemplation for another essay, perhaps. But en masse, my braids were as thin as individual strands of hair and, yet again, took hours to execute — and then some. A weekend passed in a blur as the salon women took shifts to plait in hundreds of braids.
Luckily, black hair salons also doubled as entertainment centres, so you laughed as often as you cried from the pain in your scalp before you were done.
I can’t quite remember when it all became too much of a faff, leading me to cut my hair pixie short. Unlikely, it would have been while I was still living at home; I would have feared an older generation’s collective gasp at my throwing away all that good hair God had given me. I still have a vivid memory of how I felt the next morning after the deed was done. It was unadulterated joy with not a strand of buyer’s remorse. I have loved my short hair from that day to this.
More likely, I may have started to love myself.
Now as a busy middle-aged woman, I spend little time on my hair, although I do occasionally relax it. Typically, though, I wash and condition my hair, then wrap it with a silk headscarf while it’s wet. The result is that it dries straight and flat. This is a preference, not escape.
Maybe if I had seen more of myself on television growing up, among the Charlie’s Angels and Farah Fawcetts, self-acceptance would have come sooner.
But among all the hairstyles—towel-wearing, natural, relaxed, extensions, braided, coloured, and damaged—the style I favour the most today is being kind to myself, on good and bad hair days alike.
