Hairpeace - requirement for Afro-American women writers to discuss hair - Section 1: Black South Culture

African American Review, Spring, 1993 by Pearl Cleage

One day a famous white guy photographer came over to take Greta Garbo's picture, but when he got there and turned the lens in her direction, Garbo said, "O-o-o-o-o-o", this terrible hair!"

I know the feeling. Sometimes it seems like all we ever talk about is hair. But it's not our fault. It's a rule. You can't be a black woman writer in America and not talk about hair. They won't renew your license and, well, a black woman writing without a license in America? I guess you know the penalty for that.

So we talk about hair. Jerri curls and cold waves. Pomades and permanent press and whatever that stuff is that Patti LaBelle uses to make hers stick up and out and over like the demonic diva that she is. The thing is, I don't think it's fair. I don't think we should have to tell ten hair stories a year as part of our qualification process. I think publishing and performing and having plays produced is proof enough of being a writer.

But the licensing board doesn't see it that way. Their position is that hair was, is, and ever shall be so central to the lives of black women that anybody who really is one - a black woman, that is - would, in her very genes (and I don't mean Calvins!), be thinking and feeling and writing a lot of stuff about hair.

So far, they have turned a deaf ear to my protests, and the deadline for filing is coming up on January first, so now I find myself in the awkward position of not having told my quota of hair stories for the year. The rest of my application is complete, but this hair thing is really a problem, and when I cared the Licensing Board's office I was told "no extensions for troublemakers." So, as the Emperor said to Mozart, there it is.

But it isn't going to do me any good to get mad. It's too late now to file a formal protest and I can't make a living for a whole year without writing, so I have decided to comply with the requirements of the Board. But I'm going to do it in my own way ...all at the same time, in front of the same people, with no frills to make it cute, and no knowing wink to suggest that, since we are all cooler than that now, we can afford to laugh at this hair thing. Right? Right...

ONE: The first time I got my hair straightened I was eight years old. I didn't stop straightening it until I was eighteen. Ten years. During that time, I spent approximately two hours a day worrying about my hair. Two hours a day, times 365 days, times ten years. A total of seven thousand, three hundred hours!

I could have been doing cancer research.

I could have been sleeping.

I could have been making love...

See, the thing is, I know it's a rule, but I don't understand why. I can't figure out what it is we,re supposed to be getting at with all us talk about hair. I mean, how many gently amusing stories do we need to take us back to the golden years of those Saturday afternoon visits to the beauty shop surrounded by the hot combs and the hair straighteners and the lady taking numbers over the telephone while she clacked those curlers around my head in a rhythm as familiar to me as the movement of my own hips.

A brief digression: Do you remember, during one phase or another of The Cultural Revolution, groups of Chinese young people going around reciting loudly from Chairman Mao's little red took and interpreting the dictates of the revolution for the people who had to go to work (like people always do) and so didn't have time to study and shout the teacher's words of wisdom from the deck of a raft floating lazily down the Yangtze River and probably listing to the left as was befitting a craft of such revolutionary intent and intellectual craftsmanship?

They were committed to making sure that the ideas that had fueled their hard-fought revolution would be translated continuously to those who needed to hear them the most, so they shouted the contradictions out loud as part of the healing; process. (That's also why China has all those murals of heroic men and women striding toward the future, shoulder to shoulder, noble brow to noble brow, racism and sexism merely memories from another more decade time ... )

I wonder what they would have said about hair. I wonder what we would say if we set out on a woman-made raft to correct the misinformation, and reclaim the beauty, and right the wrong and sing the song of our own black loveliness?

There is clearly something to be said that hasn't been said. I'm not sure what or how, but I know that the way we're doing it now is just going for the cheap laugh. The slave's advantage, as if there could be a slave's advantage. It excuses us from communicating the intricate, infinite complexities of our lives in the sloppy shorthand that leads down the road to Murray's and Dixie Peach and Johnson's pressing oil and worrying about, TWO, whether or not you should slow dance with a boy who sets your soul on fire because it's July in Detroit and it might mess up your hair on the cheek-to-cheek side so badly that you would be self-conscious and unable to relax for the rest of the night.