Quite a number of years ago I turned to my friend and said something to the effect of “I didn’t get the good hair.” She stopped, tipped her head and said, “Did you just hear what you said?” As an African-American woman, she just had no words. She certainly understands that the struggle with hair is real. So real. We all got somethin’ after all.
I have crazy hair, all the gel and hairspray in the world won’t make it behave. At best those products just drag down the curls and twists due to the fine texture of the strands. My older daughter has beautiful, fine, light blond hair with body. She came home one day from school and cried to me that her “friends” were teasing her because “her mother doesn’t do her hair. My answer was that she should be thrilled that I didn’t do her hair because I suck at it and that she’d really get teased if I was to try to style it. She learned to do her own hair by fourth grade.
This is the long way around to sharing a story about an experience I had and a decision I made based entirely on hair issues.
In my past life, I coordinated a small annual festival in our academic area that was meant to help expand interest in studying foreign language. Each department that offered courses in the 30+ languages that were taught at the University were invited to put together a table of information, which usually included food and giveaways, and gave the staff and faculty a chance to talk to students for several hours about their particular area. It was a good event and fairly popular. We ran it at the beginning of the autumn semester so we might be able to catch students who hadn’t signed up for a language course so at first the festival was in early September until the University calendar changed.
Early September is a crap-shoot weather-wise in the Midwest. We preferred to hold the festival in front of our building or in the open-air courtyard located just inside the front doors of the building.
The plot thickens…
One year the weather was inclement. It was just not clear if it was going to rain or the weather front was going to move off. We had decided to use the courtyard and the staff was busily setting up the tables and preparing the venue.
A couple of rain drops splattered down. There happened to be four Black women doing set up and all of them, as if driven by some unseen force, turned their heads up toward the heavens at the same time and gave the great above the same look my Hungarian grandmother used to stop us dead in our tracks. There was no mistaking the thought process…Lord above, if you let the rain ruin my hair, there will be repercussions…. They all had chemically straighten hair and if you have ever seen “Legally Blonde” you know very well that hair chemicals and water have major repercussions.
Really, all of them at the same moment. I stopped dead in my tracks, looked around and called everyone in the courtyard to bring their tables inside. No way, no day was I going to chance a down pour on women who so carefully cared for their hair in a way I could not relate to but to which I knew took the time and money I’d never spent on my locks.
There was a palpable sigh of relief. It turned out it wasn’t much of a weather front and it only lightly rained for a few minutes but I was not going to die on that hill that day.
My hair still looks a mess most of the time, side note, my hair curls better in the rain but as someone who maybe gets my hair cut twice a year, my respect for carefully quaffed hair is total.
There are other hills…and other days…
Khatzkel Did It 