Growing Black Hair
By: W. Island
Tags: Hair, Beauty, Black Women, Culture

Eight hours. Eight hours and over two hundred dollars to have two women braid someone else’s hair with mine. That’s how much I hate my hair.

Most of the women in my family are fair complexion with what Chris Rock would call “good hair” but somehow that gene skipped over me. I instead got the kinkiest, most course and unmanageable grade of hair possible. And now that I am older, it’s filled with the unruly gray strands. This gray hair taunts me whenever I look in the mirror, daring me to pluck it. And I do. I pluck, I yank, and I pull only to find two more strands growing in its place the next day. It’s like a twisted game of Hercules, where the gray hair is the multi-headed Hydra, and he’s cutting and cutting while more heads keep popping up until Hercules gets smothered in a giant gray Brillo pad.

With hair like mine, it takes real ingenuity to find the right places to get it done. It takes patience and the research skills of the top legal minds. If you don’t find the right person, you end up with a stylist who you pay to insult you about your hair. I have sat quietly why a stylist talked with other stylists and even some other customers about how knotty my hair was. Even had one laugh right in my face while she said I should cut it off and start from scratch. The black hair salon is not a place for the thin skinned.

It’s also not a place for the tender headed. Perming hair like mine hurts. The stylist has to pull and tug then smooth it down, then pull some more and tug some more and the chemicals start to burn. When you finally can’t stand it anymore, you get some relief at the shampoo bowl but that’s followed by the scrubbing of your hair to make sure all the chemicals are out. All those commercials you see where woman are almost orgasmic from having their hair washed were not filmed in a black salon.

And while I might be afraid to go to certain parts of town for anything else, I will hop in my car and drive anywhere if it means I can get my hair done. No part of town is off limits. No ridiculous salon concept is too stupid for me to go through either. One salon I frequented didn’t take appointments, just walk-ins on a first come first serve basis. So me and at least 20 other women with similar hair issues, stood outside in the freezing cold waiting for the door to open. I laugh at the Black Friday shoppers freezing their butts off camping outside for a deal on a TV when I did the exact same thing for a weave. What’s even worst is once you get inside; the chairs are lined up so you move up a chair whenever some goes to get their hair done. I guess it never occurred to the owners to just give people numbers, or call their names, anything but have grown women playing some weird version of musical chairs. It was also right next to a church, so on Sundays you got the conflicting sounds of Kirk Franklin from the church and Two Chains from the hair salon. Sadly, that’s one of the better places.

Even with all of this, all the time and the money, it was worth it. I just don’t buy into the natural hair craze. I don’t care how many young people tell me how bad the chemicals are for my hair. I don’t care if stylists laugh at me, or someone broke in my car and stole my car charger in the salon parking lot, you will have to pry my Dark and Lovely from my cold dead heads.