As a black child born in 1960, I was only a curious spectator during the black consciousness movement. In addition to the dashikis and the upraised fists, what impressed me the most were the prodigious, kinky halos of black hair. I was agog by the be-Afroed activists like Angela Davis and blaxploitation screen queens like Pam Grier.
My mother, on the other hand, was horrified. She wore her thick hair straightened and flowing down her back or finger curled into a prodigious beehive. For her, Afros were a personal offense, and she regularly berated the black entertainers on television for glamorizing what was later commercially called “natural hair.” Braids, kinks, and puffs were for poor people or little girls too young to endure the straightening process. Decent Negro women did not leave the house with their nappiness showing.
Despite my admiration for Afro “bushes,” there was never a question that I would wear my hair straightened, and that process became a ritual that bound Mom and me to generations of black mothers and daughters. She’d shampoo my hair at the kitchen sink, then wend it into ropy plaits as I sat flinching between her knees. That’s where I learned the meaning of a term that every black woman knows: tenderheaded.
My hair took all night to dry. The next morning, we’d get up early and she’d straighten it with a hot comb heated on the kitchen stove. I trusted her completely as she brought the comb, smoking like a branding iron, close to my scalp. Only rarely did she singe the rim of my ear, or the rise of my forehead. The result would be a colored approximation of white beauty. The process was so laborious, that I learned early to shrink in terror from summer splash parties, humidity, exercise, mist, and, God forbid, rain.
To be fair, my mother didn’t invent the insidious colorism that put a premium on “light skin and long hair.” It has been thousands of years in the making as European culture divided women of color based upon how closely they approached whiteness. But having landed on the “lighter” end of the color spectrum, my mother never questioned her genetic stroke of luck. Beauty may be only skin deep, but her embrace of the white beauty aesthetic went down to the bone.
My maternal grandmother, Bettie Goode, claimed to be black, but there was little in her appearance to suggest it. I’ve done some genealogical research and she appears in 1910 census records as a mulatto living in the railroad junction town of Waverly in rural Virginia. Her mother, a midwife named Mary Parker, was listed as a mulatto as well. Bettie’s father was, by all accounts, a white landowner named Logan Birdsong, a scion of an influential family in Sussex County, Virginia. Mary and Logan never married—miscegenation was illegal in Virginia until 1967. Still, it was commonly known throughout town that the white bachelor, Logan, had taken up with Mary, the colored midwife, and fathered seven of her eight children, including Bettie.
Bettie and her siblings continued to enjoy the Birdsong privilege as they thrived in the rural black community. Some of the children eventually moved north, passing for white by day at work, then going home to their black families at night. Others became landowners themselves and relatively wealthy in the town of black sharecroppers and millworkers. Bettie was well loved for her gentle ways and white skin. In fact, she was called “Miss Dolly” most of her life because as a child she’d looked like a porcelain baby doll.
When Bettie married Junius Goode, it was not to pass on her white privilege. His complexion was as rich as a cup of chicory, and all of their five children were praline brown. For my mother, the baby of the family born during the Depression, the only remaining connection to the Birdsong pedigree was her telltale mane of long hair, a racial inheritance that earned her unique status in the black community. Despite her lack of focus on her studies, she was always teacher’s pet. Without any special athletic ability, she got to be a cheerleader. All of the girls wanted to be her friend, and the boys stood in line for a date. In everything, all my mother had to do was to pull forward her waist-long braid to prove that she was just a hair better than everyone else.
By the 1990s, the Second Great Natural Hair Movement had begun to take hold in the United States. This time, “natural hair” meant letting black hair do what it wanted, and forcing this new measure of beauty upon mainstream America. Cornrows (a system of plaiting close to the scalp that resembled furrows ready for planting) were so popular that even whites couldn’t wait for their Mexican vacations to try them. Black models walked down runways nearly bald. African braids sprouted in corporate settings. (And just to demonstrate the cancer of internalized oppression, black women often interwove straight, Asian hair into their African braids to create a Rapunzel effect.) Some black women were getting an intricate system of thin, uniform, dreadlocks. Instead of letting the hair lock in thick, natural clumps made famous by Bob Marley, the hair was crocheted into a grove of thin locs that could be styled like loose hair.
I watched this revolution as I approached my midthirties. I had long traded the hot comb for a chemical relaxer, but I desperately craved the freedom exuded by women wearing natural hair. They exercised! They walked in the rain! They took extended vacations without a hotplate! I admired the adamant beauty of their ostentatious puffs, braids, and locs. They seem so evolved.
By then, I was raising a daughter, and spending hours with her between my knees, twisting her ample, wavy hair into long braids, each tipped with a bead. I’d come to love the way her hair curled so fiercely and frizzed into a magnificent mane. I questioned my decision to continue straightening my own hair. What kind of example was I setting for her?
I found out when she was only four, and neighborhood kids had gathered at our backyard pool for a cookout. While her brother and their friends were having a ball, I noticed her sitting on the edge, watching.
“Why don’t you get in?” I asked.
“I don’t want to get my hair wet,” she said.
Where had she gotten the notion that she shouldn’t get her hair wet? I went from shocked to furious. I lifted her gently into my arms and threw her into the pool.
As my mother reached her sixties, the demands of detangling, straightening, rolling, and dyeing her hair became too much. Along with her signature gold loop earrings, ruby lipstick, and cross necklace, she added a straight-haired wig to her morning toilette.
At first, she only wore it on special occasions, or when the Virginia humidity kept her from being presentable. But when her own bountiful hair began to thin dramatically, she was never without her wig, even to run to the grocery store or to line dance with the “Jammin’ Seniors” at the YWCA. A sienna hairpiece with shoulder-length loose curls and feathery bangs, became her trademark look.
Eventually, Alzheimer’s stole many aspects of my mother’s personality, but never her vanity. There were many days when we would be late for an appointment because I couldn’t stop her from primping. She’d lavish attention on her wig, traumatizing it with damaging oils and brutal brushings until it looked just right. She’d search in vain for the strappy sandals I’d trashed for her safety. She’d try to smear solid deodorant on her cheeks for rouge, take a black Sharpie to her graying eyebrows, or strip off the clothes she’d just put on in order to start all over again.
But as she neared her eighties, she started neglecting her appearance. There were days when she would take off her wig and toss it under the bed, beneath her chair, in the dirty clothes. Some days, she refused to put it on at all. I panicked the way a mother might panic if her teenager tried to go to school in a bikini. Her baby-thin hair still grew down to the middle of her back, but I couldn’t bear people staring at the wisps that barely covered her balding crown. I felt the need to protect her from her own humiliation, to preserve her dignity. Who was she without her hair?
The situation was even more complicated because there were days when she would be in a tizzy, doubling back inside to look for her wig, patting the top of her head to explain to me what she wanted. And there were other days when she’d whip the wig off before I could get her into the car. I could never guess when she really didn’t want it, when she had simply forgotten it, or when, like an empress without her clothes, she would suddenly realize with horror that I had let her wander out in public, wigless.
Dreadlocks have had global spiritual meaning for many cultures, including ancient Egyptians, Hindus, the Maasai warriors of Kenya, and Jamaican Rastafarians. For me, the hairstyle feels like a reclamation of my soul. I am now in my late fiftiess, having been locked for more than a decade. Finally, I belong in the sorority I’ve so desperately wanted to join for much of my adult life.
Unlike so many fashion trends that are ignited by the young, black women who lock their hair are often older and, as a dear friend of mine explained, “Done with the dumb shit.” We no longer care about the needs and wants and opinions of others. We are confident enough to challenge people to love us the way we are. We realize that going along to get along will eventually kill us. We greet each other as sisters as we pass on the streets, and often compliment each other. Like sharing our stories of overcoming addiction, we ask, “How long have you been locking?” When we see women with straightened hair looking at us curiously, we are tempted to say, “If you had started locking when you first wanted to, you’d be free by now.”
But as wonderful as the journey has been, I had to be jarred from my mental colonization in order to embrace it. Right out of law school, I’d married into a well-to-do Detroit family of doctors. My husband was also a lawyer with political ambitions. All the women in our social circle straightened their hair; the only exceptions were artists or oddballs.
As if the constraints of my social life weren’t enough, there was my professional life to consider. At work, black hair telegraphed as much about me as would a skull and crossbones tattoo, a diamond watch, or a missing front tooth. If I wore my hair straight, it meant that I was promotable, nonthreatening, and acceptable. Conversely, natural hair would signal that I was combative, angry, anti-white, and radical. Was wearing natural hair worth locking myself out of economic opportunity?
None of these considerations was as stultifying as the thought of breaking my mother’s heart. Even as I’d grown older, she’d held fast to her image of me as a straight-haired version of herself. Whenever I had changed my hairstyle, she would mope, personally offended that I had chopped it off, or gotten rid of bangs, or plaited it into braids (which was like a knife in her heart).
I had the courage to stand up to my social circle, to my colleagues, even my husband and children. But did I have the guts to denounce the privilege of “good hair” that my mother so deeply cherished?
But when, at forty-five, my marriage fell apart, all pretentions crumbled. Suddenly, my life was my own. I immediately began the process of locking. About three years later, I found a photo of me on a family vacation, my locs still new and curving around the contours of my face. We were standing on the Maid of the Mist cruising the white waters of Niagara Falls. Despite the turmoil in my life at the time, I radiated joy. My hair was stunning. I had finally become who I was.
The day came when my mother’s wig disappeared completely. I turned the house upside down looking for it. I prayed that I hadn’t inadvertently thrown it out with the trash, not realizing that Mom might have stuffed it in a grocery bag or rolled it in tissue paper.
When my search proved fruitless, Mom and I embarked upon a search for a new wig. At the wig shop, a white woman with Kool-Aid-colored hair greeted us warmly.
“Have a seat right here, Miz Cooper, and we’ll take care of you,” she said, gesturing to a a plush chair in a mirrored cubby. Mom took her throne, allowing us to go through the store to bring her samples.
Daring to test my mother’s resolve, I selected a bobbed black wig full of frizzy ringlets—something more race-appropriate. She frowned immediately, but not wanting to appear impolite in public, bowed her head to try it on.
“Oh, how pretty!” the saleswoman cooed.
But my mother wasn’t having it. “No,” she said, suddenly able to find her words. “Too thick.” By which she meant nappy.
We left the shop with something akin to the wig she’d worn for years—shoulder-length, loose, auburn curls (with bangs, of course). I actually broke the bank and bought two. This time, I would keep one in my room in case she managed to lose the new one.
A week later, I found the first wig. She had put it in the plastic sleeve that protected the morning newspaper and hidden it in her nightstand drawer. That was the same day that the new wig disappeared.
We went months like that, losing and finding wigs, wearing and not wearing them, refusing to leave the house without them, but then tossing them in the backseat of the car on our way out to dinner. Each time, I frantically conducted search and rescue missions, dreading the moment I’d have her all dressed for an appointment only to find that she wouldn’t leave the house without her hair.
I never discussed my decision to lock my hair with my mother. I knew that she hated it; for years, she’d suggest that the only way I’d catch a boyfriend was to get a makeover. Once, I found her staring at me. Finally, she asked, “Why did you do that to your hair?” It was as if she believed that I had imported the coarseness, or teased up the kinkiness as an intentional act of violence against my light-skinned heritage. Had she repressed, or merely forgotten, all of those years she’d spent in the kitchen, hot-combing my natural hair straight?
One day, long after she had fallen into the abyss of lost memory, I noticed her scowling at my hair. I lost my patience. “This is my natural hair—get used to it!” I shouted. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying to make it look like I’m white.”
Insulted, she shot back, “You are white.”
Nowadays, strangers come and go—nurses, social workers, respite caregivers, physical therapists. Many are white, which is an awkward boundary for my mother, who remains a child of the Jim Crow South. She is wary of the intimate touch of the chipper, white nursing assistants, and the personal questions from the blonde social workers with their judgey notebooks. She cannot make cogent sentences, but she becomes agitated and nervous, her eyes pleading for me to help her give all the right answers. She is hyperaware of the probable assessments that whites must be making about her, her home and her family.
Inevitably, she finds her way back to that familiar crutch. She is, after all, beautiful, popular, and a Birdsong. As the workers pack up their things to leave, she grabs them by the arm to insist upon a tour of the house. She points and smiles at her framed needlepoint on the wall. She gestures like a game show hostess at the expensive furnishings now cluttered with tchotchkes and vases of artificial flowers. She points out the enormous, framed graduation pictures of my brother and me. My mother especially cherishes that picture of me, where I am posed with my wavy hair laying softly on my breast, a black Mona Lisa.
With each room, she seems to be saying, “We are not ordinary blacks. We are acceptable, cultured. We are as good as you are.”
To put a fine point on it, she turns her head to the side, pulls out her long, thin braid, and says, “See?”
Desiree Cooper is a former attorney and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, 2016), is a 2017 Michigan Notable Book that has won numerous awards for short story and cover design, including a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper is a contributor to the seminal essay collection, Detroit 1967, reflecting upon the 50th anniversary of the rebellion in Detroit. Detroit 1967 is a winner of the Historical Society of Michigan’s 2017 State History Award. Cooper’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010 and This is the Place, among other online and print publications. A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio Fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers.
