(Black) Hair

1.

Samson’s hair gave him power—made him king of a mighty land, but only until the crown began to thin, only until the barber’s gyrating clippers misunderstood a little off the top, bruh to mean relieve me of this crown. One buzz too many on Saturday morning at the shop, Samson cackling too deeply at the same old joke about Moses’ old lady. Then, the glance in the mirror. The tuft of black coils like tumbleweed, hurtling to the white tile floor. An inch balder, and already Samson felt powerless, felt the seismic quake of Delilah blowing up his phone, buzz buzz buzz the sound of a kingdom falling, the strobe of text messages illuminating the phone he kept, like a sword, in his front jean pocket.

2.

He would always struggle to pull them out of his front jean pocket—a green container of breath mints meant to break the ice. Sometimes, he’d shove them in two at a time, smiling with a mouth full of menthol and big, bright teeth. He, the first boy I did not love, was precise in many things—mints at the ready, a film of chapstick always neatly applied, a film of chapstick neatly re-applied when our lips were chapped from kissing, and the tiny black waves in his thin film of hair. He wore a du rag every night—I never saw it because we were good, Christian teenagers who only went as far as our clothes and curfews would allow. But, sometimes, when he’d wake up late and rush to meet me, I saw the little crease on his flat forehead where he’d tied the cap the night before, a greenhouse for waves—just add a little Murrays and a few strokes with the wood brush, and even the most stubborn afro would remember the moon and shimmy down flat and wavy with the tide.

3.

Flat and wavy, a tide of curls dripped down my back as I left the hair salon. Seventeen years old and too blind to realize I’d just gotten a jherri curl, or Wave Nouveau as they were calling it then. I’d read it would give me “manageability,” which really meant a chemical de-kinking, an ooh, it’s cold followed by a wait, it’s burning and a it needs to set a little while, you’ll be okay. The women on the internet looked biracial with their Wave Nouveaus—curls popping and body rolling all down their backs. I wanted the ease of a curl in the wind. I wanted my soul to glow, oh so silky smooth. Look, they would say, how her hair obeys gravity. Look how she slips a hat on with ease. Even the flat iron would open its mouth and sigh at the sight of all that obedience—one pass with its hot mouth and I’d be hair flipping my way through high school, just like a girl in a movie.

4.

When a girl in a movie is in love, her special boy always runs a hand through her hair. Through her hair. Through it. Even Teddy Pendergrass wants something silky and flowing—let your pretty sexy hair down, baby, he moans. When you take your hair down, it remains suspended in midair, reaching out to grab itself.

5.

When did Al Sharpton first reach out for the box of permanent relaxer? No Lye, no doubt. Was he guided by the sweat-gleaming hand of James Brown, his lifelong mentor? Did he think the revolution would only be televised if its leader had hair you could comb with ease? The road to freedom won’t be easy, but Lord, I will have manageable hair. Did he bless the gods of Black hair care each night while he wrapped a satin scarf around his crown of glory, bejeweled with pink foam rollers?

6.

For a year, I snapped a handful of pink foam rollers to the ends of my silky ponytail to make it bounce the next morning, so I could swing it around and feel it land on my back. I even bought a pair of fake pearl earrings to make me look more Southern, more like the pale sorority girls I knew and envied. I was a junior in college, giving campus tours to prospective students, and all I wanted was to smile with that same effervescence. A campus full of bouncy ponytails. A campus where you can shine. I wanted to idly play with a lock of hair during meetings, pull the ponytail out of the way as I threw on my backpack. One sign of reversion and I was back in the bathroom, flat iron at the ready. It wasn’t until my hair began to jump, kamikaze style, from my head to the bathroom floor, that I realized it might be time to cut it off.

7.

Before he cut it off in favor of professionalism, or maybe in favor of the receding his hairline had taken to, or maybe just so his fire helmet would fit, my dad had a high top fade. All that hair balanced on his head reminded us that he was more than Dad—he was a fashionable man, he was a powerful, hair-full man. He was a man who was a man outside of his dad-stained clothes. This Dad only exists in our memories—there are barely any pictures of him outfitted in his black, number-two-pencil-eraser-hair.

8.

Erase her hair, scrub it with shampoo and blow it dry, drag the brush through it to remove the kink, smear it with Blue Magic and heat the hot comb on the stove, if the eye is red hot and smoking, you’re doing it right. Hold your ear, baby girl, I got to get them naps.

9.

We never measured them in naps and grunts—to us, the Williams sisters were goddesses. The beads lined up at the ends of their braids were magical—each plastic crash reminded us of ourselves, beaded and clacking down hallways, waking up with the little round toothmarks the beads made on our cheeks while we slept. When they marched out in all that blackness with hair stitched frontways and backways and sideways and down, we thought, familiar, power, maybe I should ask Mom to buy a pack of all white beads next time. Each grunt an anthem, each swing our own arms swinging. We wondered, were they real, were they princesses from some place where tennis balls grew whole and hollow, fluorescent apples from rubber trees? We watched them serve and volley, marveling at how much like our faces theirs were. And their hair, their hair…

10.

Their hair just doesn’t grow. That’s why they always wear weaves.

11.

As you weave your hair into ropelike twists before bed, you try to remember the time before the fro. You should say, the time before this fro, because you had one in high school. Remember? Remember how the boy who dipped tobacco used to see how many pencils he could fit in your puffs during Algebra I? Remember them calling you Minnie Mouse—her ears, your hair? Remember your best friend’s warning to cut it after the full moon, or else it wouldn’t grow? Was the full moon out when you cut your hair three months ago? Does even the moon have a stake in which way your hair goes?

12.

My mother was young when she learned that hair comes just as it goes. She used to have the longest hair—full and fluffy, perfect match for her light brown skin. Then, the chop and the jheri curl, her mother, her aunt, everyone at church asking why did you cut off aaaaaaaaall your pretty hair? This was before I was born. But maybe the strength to let go of hair is a recessive trait. Maybe, in her ovaries all those years ago, my egg perked up at the sound of scissors, the soft schinck schinck of their blades.

13.

can scissor blades hear

the kinks crying out, spare me!

I wanted to grow!

14.

I wanted it to grow—hair so long I could be like Samson. I could be powerful. But it turns out it was not the having of the hair, exactly. Cut after cut, I realized, it was the ownership, the this is mine and it’s all natural. No need for a bottle of activator in my front jean pocket, no pomade to keep it all flat and wavy. Like a girl in a movie, I could walk down a street, only an inch of hair to my name and hear some theme music pushing me on. My hair, a little black crown, a circle, one curly arm reaching out to grab itself, unbent by the wind or the tourniquet of a pink foam roller or the hungry teeth of the hot, hot comb. When I finally cut it off, I saw how hair could be an eraser, you weren’t anything but your silky weave or a bowl of naps. When I finally cut it off, I was bigger than my hair, bigger than the curls weaving into themselves atop my head. When hair goes, the spirit doesn’t go with it. The blades separate shaft from shaft but even Shaft (2000) was powerful with his big bald shine. Even he, hairless and black, could run his hands over his head and feel something in his scalp, something brilliant and big, growing, a halo, an afro made of sun.