I was a new teenager in the late eighties (age thirteen through fourteen), with pimples sprouting all over my face and gangling arms and legs flailing everywhere. I was a human grasshopper who was popping pimples in front of the bathroom mirror while in the midst of forming my identity.
Momma kept her hair braided for most of that time period. She would spend an entire day at a makeshift hair salon — usually the living room of a woman’s house — getting her hair plaited. Dad, a fierce proponent of “natural hair” (basically an Afro), was not shy about voicing his disapproval at the time and money that my mom spent on her hair.
“This is nonsense,” my dad would say. “Why do you spend so much time doing this? This is a useless exercise in vanity.”
Momma would often defer to my father in most matters, but not when it came to the upkeep of her hair. So she was willing to risk the ire of my father in this regard, for it was only a temporary — usually a couple of days — expression of anger. Getting her hair done by a professional hairdresser was an essential component to momma’s happiness at the time. And despite his considerable upset, I think that my dad understood this motivation.
The braids were intricate and fine, perhaps an eighth of an inch in width, and cascaded across the length of her shoulders. Most of the hair didn’t belong to mother though. Camilla — the name of the hairdresser was the same as my baby sister — would intermingle smooth synthetic hair with my momma’s natural hair until a weave was created between the two.
When momma stepped into the house with a fresh new hairstyle on a Saturday evening , a winning smile lighting up her face, my sisters and I couldn’t help but to smile at her. Momma had always been a beautiful woman for as long as I’d known known her, an object of desire for many men no matter the hairstyle. But momma’s plaited hair created an aura about her which stole the breath from my lungs. She looked like a queen, albeit the somewhat demure kind. And I was ecstatic for her.
Yes, I really loved momma’s hair until it was time for her braids to be undone.
Every few months or so, we’d have the move the coffee table from its usual spot on the carpet, and replace it with newspapers and a kitchen chair. Momma, wearing a pair of black sweat pants and a wrapped towel, took her place in the chair. There was a plastic bag positioned next to my mother’s feet and a comb nestled on her lap.
My sisters, ages seven and eleven, and I would form a semicircle around our mother, select a braid, and start the process of untwisting the plait. It was delicate work that we performed. Momma’s real hair would have grown some in the previous months, creating new knots with the synthetic hair that we had to disentangle. If one of us happened to yank on the knot by accident as we removed the synthetic hair, momma would let us know about it.
Momma would end up chiding us more than a couple of times for irritating her scalp with inadvertent pulling of her hair, which would lead to a change in my mood. All of us were devoting hours of our Saturday or Sunday to completing this task. It could be a painful — physical and psychological — process for everyone who was involved.
Once after accidentally pulling on a knot and getting chastised for it, I slammed my hands against my sides and said, “Why can’t you have the lady who fixes your hair undo your braids momma?”
My two sisters stopped untwisting, and then looked at me. Their eyes told me that I’d done wrong.
“Are you angry at me my dear?” momma replied.
“No.” I said. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “You’re doing a good job. Just slow down a little. We’ve got the entire day to do this.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
The truth was that I would rush sometimes because I hated having to do it. I am a boy, I thought. I shouldn’t have to do my mother’s hair. I was so relieved when we’d finally finished the job. And then momma would arrive at the house with new hair the next weekend, and I would love her hair again.
*****
I shaved my head bald in the early nineties for two reasons: I wanted to be like Michael Jordan, a tall, powerful, and muscular black man who dominated the basketball court; and because I was fed up with getting haircuts from my mother and father, who would often cut bald spots in my hair, opening me up for ridicule and derision from my fellow students. My father eyes opened wide when he saw his son sporting a bald head for the first time. “You look like a middle aged man,” he said. “Why can’t you cut your hair like the other boys?”
“I like keeping my hair this way Daddy,” I said. “I like not having to worry about it.”
I like not having to worry about how my hair looks after you and mom butcher it, I thought.
Dad and I would go back and forth about my hair until it was time for me to leave for college in September, 1995. He sat me down in the living room to admonish me for insisting on keeping my head clean shaven.
He raised his chin in the air and said, “I want you to let your hair grow and then get a real haircut. You’re going to be going to college very soon. He pointed his finger at me. “You have to look like you belong at that place.”
I groaned. “It’s my hair though. Why can’t I cut it the way I want to cut?”
Dad, offended by my insolent retort, opened his eyes wider than before. “I won’t have you going to college looking like that.”
I’d been able to secure scholarships, loans, and grants for college. It was too bad that they were only sufficient enough to cover a significant fraction of my expenses at Boston University. Mom and dad were going to have to cover the remaining two-thousand dollars, money that I didn’t have.
“Fine,” I said. “But I want to go to a professional barber next time.”
“I agree to that,” dad said.
Again, fine. I was going to be like my mother. If I was going to have hair on my head, then I was going to insist on exerting control over how it looked.
After graduating college in May, 1999, I returned to my childhood home. When I secured a job two months thereafter, and was earning my own salary, my father became resigned to the fact that I was going to remain bald until I decided to grow my hair again, which was never.
*****
Sections of my momma’s hair would turn gray soon after I entered my third decade of living. She’d also stopped going to the hairdresser because she was no longer amendable to getting her hair braided — she got tired of sitting in chairs having her hair pulled for hours. So she would spend hours washing, blow-drying, and coloring her hair on certain weekends. After momma was finished with this business, she would walk out of the bathroom looking ten years younger than before.
Beauty supply stores were popping up all around the Denver area in the previous decade. Momma frequented quite a few of these stores, the majority of which were located in strip malls. She liked “to shop around” as my dad liked to say, because caring for hair can be very expensive, and she wanted to be as economical as she could. I would sometimes accompany my momma on trips to these beauty supply stores, those that were built to cater to the needs of black women but were owned by Koreans. She bought hair lotions, hair caps, pins, and other ancillary products.
After we bought the new house, mom and dad were given the master bedroom. They were afforded two closets, one just beyond the bedroom entrance and one in the rear of the bathroom. One area of the bathroom closet was sectioned off to accommodate all of my momma’s hair paraphernalia.
*******
My father was diagnosed with multiply myeloma, a lymphoma which feeds on blood in the bone marrow, on November 12, 2012. He fought the cancer for a year before succumbing to both cancer and kidney failure on November 8, 2013. Shortly thereafter, my momma was told that she would not be allowed to have her hair.
Momma went to Nigeria to see that my dad was buried in his ancestral homeland, and to undergo a compulsory ritual, at age sixty. The ritual is called Isiku, and it requires that the new widow subject herself to hardships. While reading a journal article about the practice I gasped, and exclaimed, “Oh my god!” A woman who’d just lost her husband is expected to drink the water that was used to wash the husband’s corpse, sleep on the ground without a blanket, sit motionless for a specified period of time, eat only with the unwashed left hand, fast, and shave her hair. With the shaving of the head, the widow was committing to eschewing vanity and the attention of other men. Momma spent six days in Nigeria before coming back home with her head clean shaven. It would take my mother and me a while to get used to the new reality.
Before my mother was bald, I’d always associated a bald woman with a cancer diagnosis. And here was my still healthy mother, not quite looking like herself. She looked like she’d aged ten years.
We were eating dinner at the table one evening when I said, “I don’t like what happened to you momma. Did they really have to chop off of all of your hair?”
She sighed. “I know, but it had to be done.”
My blood began to boil. “I mean, God! It’s 2014. Why do these people insist on still holding onto strict interpretations of ancient cultural traditions?”
“It’s part of the culture, my dear.”
I shook my head at that. “Are you going to be all right?” I said.
“I think so. How about you?”
“Yeah. I’ll just wait for the time to go by. They say it gets better with time…”
Then there was silence, and eating. The house was too quiet.
“You want me to turn on the news?” I asked.
“Yes, it is quiet in here,” she said.
I walked to the living room, grabbed the remote control, and brought it back to the kitchen table. I pushed the power button and switched the channel to dad’s favorite cable news station.
“I’m glad that you were returned to me as whole as you could possibly be,” I said.
She smiled. “I am glad that I am back.”
Moving forward from my father’s death meant that my mom would have to resume her work schedule at the nursing home. On her first evening preparing for her first trip to work in months, she would have to figure out how to integrate her observance of the grieving requirement into her nightly routine. Nevertheless, momma was still a woman and she cared about presenting her best self to the outside world.
So before heading to Boulder to work the night shift at the nursing home, we would step in front of the vanity mirror in her bathroom. I watched her as she applied her make-up, lotions, and other accessories. After she fastened her obsidian black earrings onto her earlobes, she dropped her hands to the side. She stared at herself in the mirror, turned her head from left to right and sighed.
“It just doesn’t look like you,” I said.
“I look sick,” momma replied.
I smiled. “Nope.” “You look me like me since we’re both bald eagles now. Can I rub your head? ” I reached my right hand in the direction of her head.
Momma laughed and then waved my hand away. “Stop it.”
“Okay. What are you going to do momma?”
Momma turned in the direction of the closet and walked there. She reached up and grabbed two separate wigs from on top of the white foam heads upon which they’d been placed. She walked back while carrying the brown curly wig with the golden highlights in the right hand and the jet black wig in the left. “Which one do you think is better for me?”
“I don’t know momma,” I said. “Try them on to see which is better.”
She modeled both wigs. I liked the black one because it was simpler, less ornate. But momma chose the curly wig over my objections.
“It does accentuate your skin color,” I said.
Momma broke into a smile. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
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