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

African American Review, Spring, 1993 by Pearl Cleage

Three of my first cousins on my mother's side had "good" hair. FIVE, they got it from their father, my uncle Buddy, a large, Italian-looking black man with a bushy mustache and an abundance of thick, wavy black hair the likes of which show up rarely enough in black America for it to be the cause of rejoicing on both sides of the family if it makes it through that crucial first year without turning to fuzz.

Uncle Buddy parted his hair on the side and brushed it to the left in a symphony of confident curls and greasily voluptuous waves that drove his wife crazy and earned him a well-deserved reputation as a ladies man. His three daughters, my cousins, inherited his hair. It made them instant stars in our neighborhood and was a sore point between us throughout our childhood and adolescent years.

Okay. Now our raft is steaming along toward that place on the river where people dive off every summer and get killed because of hidden rocks or stumps or something that doesn't move but they seem to believe will, or has, as they step off into space, laughing drunkenly the moment before they hit the water with a final splash and go down, down, down for the third time.

SIX, I decided to stop straightening my hair when I was eighteen. It was 1968 and black was arguably more beautiful than it had been at any other time since I had been alive. I delivered the news to my smooth-faced young boyfriend, who, looked at me in horror and withdrew his premedical school arm from its customary place on my shoulder and said, a bit self-righteously, I thought, even then.

"Well, you do what you want, but I'll never touch your hair again." Now that was quite a blow to me since he was the first lover I had ever had, and the only reason we had reached such status was my absolute conviction that we would marry upon graduation and remain together to the grave and beyond throughout all eternity. I was not, after all, a fast girl.

I tried to picture making love throughout eternity with him being careful to avoid any contact with my afroed head. It was not a pretty picture.

SEVEN, but he wasn't the first to let me know that my hair left a little something to be desired. There was the evening when my mother fluffed my four-year-old natural around my head like a golden crown and led me innocently in to bask in the anticipated delight and affection of my father. When my father looked up from his desk to find me grinning in the doorway, he masked his irritation with a quick smile.

Look at your beautiful daughter," said my mother, pushing me into the room. My father patted my shoulder gently, his eyes flickering over my hair, a longer, lighter replica of his own in an un-Murrayed state. He said, "It's not quite long enough for her to wear it down yet, is it?"

Now I was only four, but I was old enough to know that "not quite long enough" was a polite way of saying "not quite good enough," as in the phrase she got that good stuff, when applied to hair. Good in this context needed no qualifiers. Good could stand alone. We all knew what it meant and we were humble, especially since "good hair" often occurred along with other oppressed-community-defined qualities of beauty, such as lighter-toned skin, sharper features, and, every now and then, the wonder of light eyes.