This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(9)

At first, this application of what I later found out was a perm seemed okay.1 The product was cool upon my scalp, but then I began to twist and turn in my seat because that coolness turned into tingling and that tingling became a burn. I started to cry. I was immediately taken to the sink, my head placed underneath the faucet. Once the water hit my head, my afro flattened into loose strands that I could see rotating around one other in the stream. My mother’s friend ran her fingers through my hair and I hissed, noting how sensitive my scalp had become. What happened next is hazy, but it doesn’t really matter because that night began a tradition of more than a decade.

I grew up learning about “good” and “bad” hair. Natural hair was not a style that I saw as a child, unless you count the biracial, light-skinned black girls whose midback-to waist-length curly hair turned bone straight in the pool. I was told that I had “good” hair even though my hair was just as thick, if not thicker, than that of other girls, maybe because I am light-skinned and my complexion somehow mitigated the thickness of my afro.

That white beauty was the ideal was never formally taught to me. I learned it through warnings and observation. I noticed my white female classmates seemed more invested in the latest lip gloss colors than in their hair. Meanwhile, my eyes and those of my black female classmates surveilled whose hair might be fake, whose hair might be real. If a black girl’s hair didn’t touch her shoulders, someone might have easily called her “bald-headed” as an insult. If I impulsively wanted to jump in the pool, my mother would tell me, “You’re not a white girl, Morgan. You can’t just jump in the pool without letting me know.” So I began to pay more attention to the white girls I knew who could just jump into the pool and reemerge looking like bathing suit models or extras on Baywatch. They didn’t have to sleep with bonnets or scarves. They rolled their head around on pillows and allowed anyone to play with their tresses.

In the evenings, during Nick at Nite, I watched Marcia Brady of The Brady Brunch excessively brushing in front of the vanity mirror in the bedroom she shared with Jan and Cindy. Every day, on my TV, Marcia would wake up, but Carol Brady would never yell from downstairs that she was coming up so that she could do Marcia’s hair. That practice was strangely missing, planting one of the first seeds of difference in my head. My hair care regime was much more strenuous, and demanded more of my time, than Marcia’s.

The painstaking effort directed towards one’s hair is taught incredibly early, and it never lets up. Many mothers choose to plait their daughters’ hair to make it grow quicker and then, around grade school age or so, perm it to see its true length. From the age of three to around fifteen, I received a perm every four to six weeks. I started to go to a salon when I was around eight or nine years old. The hairdresser would apply the perm to my head, and within a matter of minutes, I would complain that it was burning.

“That’s okay, it’s working,” she would always say, and leave the room to take a phone call or eat Chinese or soul food in the sitting area of the salon.

I would clench the handles of my seat and tighten my entire body. My eyes would turn bloodshot, and I could think about nothing else but the pain, which was of a degree that I, to this day, have never experienced in any other situation. I silently repeated to myself, It’s working. It’s working. The burning means that it’s working.

That burning didn’t just affect my scalp. My skull could feel it, too. Every time I was sure that I was going to be injured, but I tried to soothe myself by imagining how pretty I would be once my hair swished and swayed whenever I walked. As soon as the hairdresser returned, I dashed to the sink and rolled my butt around on the cushion in order to get comfortable. When the water hit my scalp, it stung. Each time the hairdresser worked her fingertips through the back of my head, a new scab would appear, and she would admonish me not to scratch my scalp so much in between sessions; then, she said, it wouldn’t burn as much, and new scabs wouldn’t appear on my scalp. I took her advice and patted my head whenever I had an itch, but the scabs still appeared. All of the pain disappeared, though, when my hair was finally dried, trimmed, and flat-ironed. I would stand in front of the large mirror wall in the salon sitting area and twirl around and around, beaming at how my strands flew in the current created by my outstretched arms. This, I thought, was how I was supposed to be. Nothing else would do.

I was obsessed not only with my hair’s straightness, but also with its length. I thought that if I had long hair, not only would I fulfill my beauty’s ultimate potential but I would also elude the restraints of my blackness. I was already mistaken for Dominican and Puerto Rican by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Besides the white girls, the Latinas were the most sought after in my school. They were often called sexy or hot, and I began to think that these attributes were inherent to their ethnicity. I watched rap video after rap video of black and Latina women dancing and swimming in pools with their hair flowing past their shoulders (not realizing that many of these styles were lace front wigs and weaves). Long hair would seal the deal for me.

Each time I got my hair permed or braided, I asked the hairdresser to show me the length of my hair before she started. One birthday, my eleventh or twelfth, I wished for hair that stopped underneath my breasts before I blew out the candles on my cake. If straightness would draw me closer to purity, length would draw me closer to sexiness, and stretching between these two poles would make me perfect. At the age of eleven or twelve, I stretched only to undo myself.