"Why don't he like my hair?": constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon' and Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.'

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by Bertram D. Ashe

This last declaration, uttered by a feverish, distraught, dangerously mentally ill Hagar Dead to her mother Reba and her grandmother Pilate comes midway through one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. In the passage, grandmother, mother, and daughter discuss whether Milkman, the novel's central character, "likes" Hagar's hair. By the time the scene has ended, it doesn't matter that Pilate has offered credible reasons why Milkman couldn't not love Hagar's hair - "'How can he love himself and hate your hair?'" Pilate asks - Hagar is certain that Milkman is only attracted to women with distinctly European features and insists, with deadly finality, "'He's never going to like my hair.'" Ultimately, all Pilate can say in reply is, "'Hush. Hush. Hush, girl, hush'" (315-16).

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, braid extensions, Jheri curls, etc.) remains the most popular way to approximate a white female standard of beauty. Neal and Wilson contend that much of the black female's "obsession about skin color and features" has to do with the black woman's attempting to attain a "high desirability stem[ming] from her physical similarity to the white standard of beauty" (328).

But just whom do African-American women hope to attract by attaining this "high desirability"? While there is some debate as to whether the choice of one's hair style automatically signifies one's alliance with, or opposition to, white supremacy, anecdotal evidence clearly points to the straightening of black hair as a way to fit, however unconsciously, into an overall white standard of beauty.(1) What is often overlooked, however, are specific black-male expectations where black-female hairstyles are concerned.

In much the same way that men gravitate toward certain styles, behaviors, and attitudes that are more likely to attract attention from women, male "likes" must rate, on some level, as at least a consideration when a female hair style is chosen. Of course, the reasoning a woman employs while choosing a hair style ranges much further than simply trying to attract some man. Above all, no doubt, women wear their hair in a style that pleases them. However, as Erica Hector Vital put it in a recent article about cutting off her dreads and retaining a short, natural style, certain

Toni Morrison characters, such as Hannah in Morrison's Song of Solomon, Sula in a novella of the same name, and the girl-child Pecola of The Bluest Eye, all fall prey to dishonor and grief without the presence of the mothering voices to grant the essential reminders: Don't let your slip show, don't sneak off with the neighborhood boys, don't forget to do your lesson, don't be a fool with your hair . . . . no man likes a bald-headed woman.(11)

While Vital did go on to cut her dreads - as she certainly should have, since that was her preference - one of the questions she asked herself in those final moments in the barber's chair was, ". . . what will the brothers think?" (12). This consideration of the black male's "likes" is not always on the surface, but, like the black male's regard for the black female's "likes," it is there, subterranean.

Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, in their works, engage the black female's struggle between her own hairstyle preferences and the female hairstyle preferences of the black male. These two authors offer dissimilar but compatible discussions of not only the black female's encounters with the white-female standard of beauty, but also the black female's difficulties negotiating her black-male partner's conception of that standard. Morrison, in Song of Solomon, critiques the ideal by creating two characters who fall on opposing sides of the white-beauty construct. Pilate Dead, who wears her hair closely cropped, represents "Nature . . . [as she] energetically work[s] against the allure of outward appearances" (Guerrero 769). Pilate's granddaughter Hagar, on the other hand, "fantasizes a persona that she imagines will make her more desirable to her projected lover, Milkman" (769). Hagar's imagined "persona" is one that will include "silky copper-colored hair" (Solomon 127), because Morrison primarily uses hair in Song of Solomon to draw Pilate and Hagar as opposites where the white standard of beauty is concerned. Eventually, by revolving these opposites around Milkman, the novel's central character, Morrison devises her own African-American standard of beauty, an alternative to the white-beauty ideal.