A Hairy Situation

By Keisha D. Rucker

(from http://www.africana.com/Utilities/Content.html?&../Utilities/Lifestyle.htm&../Column/bl_voices_52.htm)

It wasn't easy, being the Benetton poster child for suburban whites who recruited me into their utopia state and being the Arrested Development wannabe to my brothers and sisters who still believed in such a thing as "good hair."

Bald headed bitch. Cockle beads. Nappy head. Itchin' kitchen. Dark-N-Ugly. Need a retouch. New growth too much. If you wanna "keep it real," straighten it so your man can feel ... it.

Fakin'. Frontin'. Mind must be missing somethin'. Wearin' the lye. Relaxing to fry the mess out yo' head. Self-hater. Non-contemplater. Eurocentric. Your mentality needs a Gentle Treatment.

Hair.

For women, it's synonymous with style, choice, change and femininity. But for black women, hair is as complex as the turn of each coil of our naturally nappy hair or the splitting of each fried, dyed and laid to the side strand. For us, it's a source of contention, contemplation and, for a minority of us, contentment. And as more black women are turning away from relaxers and embracing that which springs from their scalps, I am noticing more allegiance to their respective sororities.

I'm not talking about the AKAs, the Deltas or the Zetas. I'm talking about the natural vs. processed camps.

First came the stars. Toni Morrison. Alice Walker. T'Keyah Crystal Keymah. Lauryn Hill. Erykah Badu.

And then the books. Tulani Kinard's No Lye. Noliwe Rooks' Hair Raising. Diane Bailey's Natural Haircare and Braiding. Pamela Ferrell's Where Beauty Touches Me and Let's Talk Hair. And most recently, Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories, edited by Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson, and Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, edited by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps.

And then the web sites. Dreadlocks.com. Nappyhair.com. Yourhaircareplus.com. Naturallycurly.com. The befallen Blackhaircare.com, which vanished without warning to the chagrin of its members and whose owner had the audacity to request a membership fee way after that act of unprofessionalism. And the most recent demise of Black Hair Super Grow Out, a Yahoo! club where nap-tural and processed heads gathered to share secrets and give support as they took the 365-day challenge to grow longer hair.

But apparently going natural wasn't enough. Now black women are creating cyber cliques and less than sisterly circles as they debate just what constitutes "natural." Sure, it might sound silly, especially to those who think, "It's just hair." But is it really?

I remember the weekly hair ritual I engaged in growing up. Unbraid those reverted kinks. Shampoo. Condition with mayonnaise and eggs with a heating cap. Rinse. Slap on a few palm-fulls of Blue Magic bergamont and get to pressin'.

Sizzle!

I remember the liquefied grease dripping behind my ears like drizzle. I cringed and shrugged and looked with terrified eyes as the foreboding comb moved toward me, leaving silhouettes of funky smoke in its wake. As a child, I hated getting my hair pressed and preferred the crinkly texture of it when I just removed my week-plus old plaits. I recall loving the times I spent hours sitting between my mother's thighs, as she parted my coils with ancestral maternal dexterity and crafted cornrowed art atop my scalp, as beads secured with aluminum foil hung from them and click-clacked to their own rhythm.

I got my first relaxer at age 12, just before I entered the seventh grade. I remember going to the salon that day, where the beautician "oohed" and "ahhed" over the natural "henna" tint of my hair, but frowned at the natural "resistant" naps of it, too. I remember bidding farewell to my naps and looking ambivalently at the new relaxed me.

My new hair hung like wet string and shook when I moved my head. I flipped it like a white girl in the mirror when no one was looking. But my permed mane was only relaxed when it was sopping wet. Come dry time, and one could easily tell that my kinks weren't going down without a fight. Beauticians tried to get it right, blow-drying it at high-temperatures or even pressing it after a retouch. And we know that's a no-no.

I daringly cut off my relaxer in the ninth grade. If you flip through my high school yearbooks from 1992-1996, I'm the "revolutionary black chick" - the only natural one in a sea of perms. It wasn't easy, being the Benetton poster child for suburban whites who recruited me into their utopia state and being the Arrested Development wannabe to my brothers and sisters who still believed in such a thing as "good hair."

I became an exotic challenge for white men who wanted to fulfill their "wild" interracial fantasies. I became a bastion of blackness for "conscious" brothers. I became a source of contention for baller-type brothers who thought I'd be "fine if got a perm."

But I haven't returned to the perm or hot comb ever since. I have been Afroed, twisted, locked, closely-cropped, braided, cornrowed and practically every natural incarnation in between. I now look at relaxed sisters as allies in a battle with constantly shifting enemy lines.

And that's why a recent observation bothers me.

Now black women are creating a hierarchy of naturalness, based on a non-specific set of standards. But let me try to break it down for you. On the whole, it goes something like this (in descending order): Dreadlocks, a TWA (teeny weeny afro), an amalgam of other natural styles (twists, cornrows), transition hair (those growing out the perm) and, finally, extension braids and nappy-textured weaves (which some argue is as unnatural as a relaxer even if the hair underneath is happily nappy).

So why does any of this matter? It's just hair, right? But this stuff atop our heads is also what keeps many of us from exercising, going out in the rain, being hygienic (don't wash it regularly at the risk of it "going back") and making love to our men. It's the stuff that defines our political allegiance, our level of cultural enlightenment, even our spirituality.

And it's also what's dividing us, even if it's all nappy. 'Cause now we even build alliances with those who have the same degree of nappiness. If you believe the classifications on haircare websites, 4As and 4Bs have classically nappy hair and 3As and 3Bs have multiracial-looking hair (think Scary Spice or Cree Summer). And now some 4As and 4Bs are being attacked by their sistren for using products like Naturalaxer (www.naturalaxer.com) and Bodiphier (www.freshlookhair.com) to try to get those ethnically indistinguishable curls.

Yes, there is a duel going on. And we are armed with facts, figures, testimonials and lab reports.

And I'm more than a little concerned.

I admit it. Sometimes I feel inexplicably drawn to sisters who don't fight their naps with sodium hydroxide and alkaline-based formulas. Those who don't break out the curling iron, blow dryer or flat iron every morning. 'Cause I know we've got similar stories to tell. Tales full of laughs, tears, lots of money down the drain, unsolicited comments from family members and strangers on the street, relapse and revelation.

But having been natural for almost ten years, I have evolved. No longer is every sister with a perm a sell-out, culturally obsolete or a blight to our unadulterated beauty.

Now I see every sister as just that: a sister, be she weighted with weave, pressed or permed, bedecked in braids, fashionably 'froed, luminously locked, terrifically twisted or anything else under our boundless hair rainbow.

I see a potential war going on, an inferno festering, and I don't like it.

Natural sisters, try equipping yourself with a grin, not proselytizing, the next time you pass a "permie" on the street.

Relaxed sisters, holler at us. We don't bite.



First published: May 31, 2001

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"the real pyramids were built with such precision that you can't slide a piece of paper between two 4,000 lb stones, and have shafts perfectly aligned so that you can see a tiny aperture through dozens of these mammoth blocks