hairstory: pitstops on the road to the glorious coil

Even though it’s completely opposite to my natural texture, straight hair is where my story begins. In childhood memories around hair, first came the hot comb, and then later, the no-lye relaxer. There were times when I wore my hair in African braids, beautiful intricate styles that lasted for months at a time. Even so, soon after the braids would come out, in would go the relaxer. The idea that hair needed to be straightened was such a given, it was like a fundamental part of the way I was wired. I was born into that world, knew nothing else, and didn’t find my way to questioning any of it until decades later.

When I first started experimenting with changing my hairstyle, my ideas were variations on it in its relaxed state. Like the period in high school when I decided I didn’t want my hair tightly curled with a hot iron and stacked into an impossible looking asymmetrical sculpture (It was the eighties). I stopped curling my hair. I would part it on the side, and let it fall, which I will admit, in retrospect, left it looking more like an interruption on the way to a hairstyle than an actual hairstyle.

Another phase in my hairstory was the summer of the weave, in the middle of college. The only evidence I have of that now is a set of photo negatives, and the vague memory of how quickly the excitement of having that new hairstyle faded. Once I got the weave, and lived with it for a bit, I didn’t get it anymore. The maintenance was too involved for my taste and I had answered my wonder about what it would feel like. It felt exactly like what it was: someone else’s hair sewn in strips to mine. Not for me. Now when I see those negatives, I can’t help but laugh and think, Damn it looks like I was trying to give Chaka Khan a run for her money on the hair tip.

In my 20s I got curious and courageous enough to cut all my hair off. By that point I had done all I was going to with a relaxer, and I started to notice Black girls with amazing natural hairstyles. I wanted to experience the ease of a wash and go style. At the same time, I was becoming more aware of societal beauty norms, how little they coincided with how I felt and thought, and how automatically, often frantically, people subscribed to them. It all seemed a tad on the bizarre side to me because my hair changes felt in a sense like I was trying on selves for fit. And when the fit wasn’t right, I didn’t linger.

Nowadays, I wear my hair in long dreadlocks and I absolutely love it. I love my hair in its natural, coarse, texture. I love the myriad styling options available to me. I love the strength of it, the coil of it, and yes, the feel of it. I know I’m not supposed to, if I want to fit in with my land-of-the-free society. Every day, several times a day, I encounter billboards and all kinds of ads that basically say, as if it’s a given fact, that what my hair does naturally is not what hair is supposed to do, not what I should want it to do. I get the message. I just disagree. Highly.

It wasn’t some mystical, magical, beyond-us force that came down and decided that a European beauty ideal would be the law. Those kinds of ideas came out of human minds, like mine. Like yours. Like the ones it will take to eventually get mainstream media to reflect our society’s beauty in its gloriously diverse actuality. Once I got conscious of this, it became impossible for me to blindly ingest beauty ideals served up by mainstream media, or anyone else.