Reading · No Trifling Matter

I am taking some much needed respite this month and will be sharing some previous writings. This is an revised excerpt of an article that I wrote in 2010 for Geez magazine (which unfortunately paused publication in 2024). It’s about my hair journey. I was reminded of it this week when a woman asked me if I was a survivor. At first I was confused about how she knew. Then I realized that it was my head, which I had shaved that morning. Next week I might write another post about my hair journey since it has evolved so much since I wrote this piece during the height of the natural hair movement in the early 2000s.

It started in front of the mirror. I was in the bathroom, trying to figure out how to squeeze the next appointment between classes, a dissertation, and a research assistant gig. I’d pulled off some impressive scheduling maneuvers before, but in the final stages of my PhD program, it was increasingly difficult.

My weekly salon visits began in my junior year of college. During a visit, my mother looked at me and asked, “When was the last time you got your hair done?” I’d mostly done it myself since freshman year.

“You need to get it done every week.” Was she kidding? It took a minor miracle to stretch my paycheck for groceries and textbooks.

“I’ll pay for it.” But not tuition, groceries, or books? My hair, it seemed, was a bigger priority.

By the time I stood in front of the bathroom mirror six years later, my weekly appointments had become my financial responsibility. I estimated that I spent at least $1500 annually on my hair on a graduate stipend of $11,000. Thirteen percent of my income went toward my hair: the salon visits and the the cabinet full of products I bought in the never-ending search for the bottled miracle that would keep my always-reverting hair straight.

Suddenly I heard a voice. No, not God’s. It was my hair: “Isn’t it obvious that I don’t want to be straight?”

That was ridiculous. Of course my hair wanted to be straight. Why else would I endure costly and corrosive chemicals every five weeks? Why would I pay to have someone shampoo and style my hair each week between relaxers?

“That’s the point! You have to keep going back because I don’t want to be straight!”

Oh.

Black women are likely the only racial/ethnic group in the world where the majority do not wear their hair in its natural texture. In a society gripped by racism and sexism, we are strongly discouraged from doing so. Some corporations actually have policies forbidding “ethnic” hair, resulting in the passage of the CROWN Act, which prohibits race-based hair discrimination.1

It is no wonder, then, that most African American girls are subjected early to harsh processes designed to break the bonds of naturally kinky hair and to transform it into straight, socially acceptable hair. According to Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, authors of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, 65 percent of African American women use chemical relaxers or hot combs to straighten their hair. In the past decade, these processes have been supplanted by methods of integrating commercial air, including extensions, weaves, and wigs. The popularity of extensions and weaves among Black women and girls has risen so dramatically that one comedian joked that the current generation of Black children will never see their mothers’ real hair.

Actually, many Black girls never even get to see their own hair. I got my first relaxer when I was six years old, kicking off a 20-year odyssey of chemical processing. The results were often disastrous – burns on my scalp, neck, and ears; damaged hair; perhaps even a contributor to the fibroids and breast cancer that I was later diagnosed with.

At 27, I’d had enough. Since high school, I’d dreamed of going natural when I was older. I said I’d do it when I was 60. But standing in the bathroom that morning, something came upon me. I’m not sure if it was courage; it may have been plain old fatigue. The next day, I was sitting in my stylist’s chair undergoing the big chop. She trimmed away the chemically straightened ends, leaving me with just half an inch of new growth. Seeing my hair for the first time in my adult life was daunting. A persistent thorn in my colonized flesh had been my hair’s refusal to show any sign of the racial miscegenation evident in my caramel complexion. The stuff on my head was thick, coarse, wiry, and tightly coiled, all the markers of “bad” hair.

I put on a brave face, smiling in response to the stylist’s pleased expression. I walked to my car, put on the baseball cap that I’d had the forethought to bring, and drove to the nearest beauty supply store where I bought a wig. It was another five weeks before I adjusted to the sight of my own hair and began exposing it to the world.

When I finally did, it was like being emancipated. I was freed from a daily 20-minute hair ritual and a weekly two-hour salon appointment. Freed to exercise whenever I wanted, not just when I could spare an hour afterward to get my tresses back in shape. Freed from fear of rain and the weight of umbrellas and ponchos that I carried constantly in Miami to guard against a relaxer’s kryptonite. Freed from the bondage of constantly striving to make my hair conform to an ideal that I could never attain.

For some Black women, going natural is just a temporary style preference. But for others, especially those of us rooted in the traditionally conservative Black church, letting our hair exist in the way that it grows out of our head is revolutionary. It is a countercultural move, an intentional act of personal liberation from the sociopolitical powers and principalities that tell us that we are “less than.”

Although I had not anticipated it at the time, going natural marked the beginning of a journey of spiritual transformation. A few months later, I had a different experience with a mirror. Arriving at work one morning, I pulled down the visor to give myself one last look before I went into the building. I was stunned to see a pair of beautiful, enormous brown eyes looking back at me.

For most of my life, I had spent so much time obsessing over my hair that I had never noticed my face. That morning, I drank it in. I recognized the reflections of my parents in my face. I realized how much I looked like the aunts whose beauty I admired.

In going natural, I saw myself for the first time. I realized that I was beautifully, wonderfully, and intentionally handknit by God. And I was good.

Did anything in this post resonate with you? Do you want to read more about my hair journey, specifically my post-chemo journey of accepting my baldness? Leave a comment and let me hear from you.

The Spirituality of Going Natural

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