A curly girl’s homecoming
Hair is nothing, but hair is everything. As a brown girl who is naturally curly, I’ve grown up obsessing with my hair, and the adult women in my family did the same. Hair is a highly sensitive topic for many people of color. All my life, I’ve seen black people deride others for the “quality” of their hair. They speak of “good hair” and “bad hair,” nappy hair, rough hair. There’s no choice in the matter if you have such hair– most often, during childhood the hair gets straightened by harsh burning chemicals. And once it’s done, it’s never undone. I felt like I was walking the plank the very first time I got my hair chemically relaxed. Puberty kinked my curls too much for my mother’s liking, so out came the tub of Creme of Nature No-Lye. My oldest sister Farah, the hair expert who still to this day regularly devotes entire 24-hour periods to haircare, explained to me several times in an ominous tone: “Once you relax your hair, you have to relax it for the rest of your life. There’s no going back. Ever.” Well, Jesus. What the hell’s a 10-year-old supposed to say to that? And those of you who have met Farah know how staunch and unbending her pronouncements can be, so I took it as Gospel.
My mother applied my first relaxer. When I rinsed it, I was left with super straight silky long hair, which then had to be put in rollers, followed by an hour and a half under a hairdryer. I loved the results. Of course there was no way I had the patience to do that regularly. I know women who roll their hair every week, or blow-dry their hair every week, or do the salon thing every week. More power to ’em; their hair looks great. For me, when I’m sitting under a hair dryer, I start thinking of all the other things I could be doing. I’ve always refused to put that kind of time and effort into my hair. A multi-hour ordeal every week to straighten hair that wants to do nothing more than curl up? Please.
What no one tells you, of course, is that once hair is chemically relaxed, you become a slave to it. They also don’t tell you that chemical relaxers don’t actually make your straight; they weaken the curl pattern and leave your hair more dead than it already is so that the hair can easily submit to other straightening methods such as blow-drying, using rollers, hot combing, etc. If your hair is relaxed, you end up doing a lot of planning around it. If you’re invited to a pool party, your first thought goes to your hair (because all black women with relaxed hair know how complicated life gets once the hair gets wet). If you hear the word “rain,” your first thought goes to your hair. Before going on extended multi-day canoeing trips through the Everglades, I had to lay out plans for what to do with my hair during that time (usually by the first or second night, I threw any planning out the window because I just didn’t care how I looked). And if you’ve lived this way, you know your friends and relatives will actually tell you to your face that you look bad if your hair’s not looking good. They’ll ask you outright, “Hmm, when was the last time you relaxed your hair?” while they frown and squint at your head and run their hands through your tresses. Or you’ll be conversing with a girlfriend and she’ll be staring at the top of your head, and she’ll tell you “I think it’s time for a relaxer.” Because I was never one for time-consuming hair maintenance or daily/weekly hair straightening, I almost always wore my hair loose and wavy/curly, much to the chagrin of my mother. She would ask me point blank on certain days “Did you do your hair today?” Or her younger sister, my aunt, would smile at me and run her hands through my hair asking, “Hmm, what are you trying to do with your hair these days?”
Aside from being annoying and a waste of time, my biggest problem with this whole hair drama is that it brings highly charged emotions to the surface for all people involved, and that’s way more input than hair ought to have in one’s life. I remember one time I came home from a three-month trip to West Africa. Just before coming back, I had gotten my hair braided there. Back in Miami, I worked at my father’s clinic on the weekends and one of his longtime elderly female patients came up to me and chided me harshly for having my hair in braids, asking me over and over “why someone with such ‘good’ hair would do that,” telling me that “it’s not nice at all that [I] did that, it doesn’t suit someone of [my] background and upbringing.”
I can’t count how many arguments my mother and I have had about my hair. To this day, if she and I are both attending a social event, she will phone me beforehand to ask me what I’m wearing and how I plan on styling my hair. I tell her, “Don’t worry about me, I know how to be appropriate.” She’ll usually respond with a heated “Don’t come with your hair undone!” Of course, what she means is ‘don’t come with your hair unstraightened.’ At that point in the conversation, I usually change the subject. Other times I’ll ask her, “You do realize that I have curly hair, right?” I sometimes feel I have to remind her–she is, after all, much lighter-skinned than I am, has straighter hair than mine, and never experienced life with relaxers. She hems and haws and ignores my question, replying “Your hair looks so nice when it’s smoothed out (translation : straight).” Why the sense of shame over curly hair, or hair in its natural state? Or in the case of my father’s elderly patient, why the sense of shame over a hairstyle that–gasp–makes me look black. That was the bottom line of course, in that unpleasant little situation at the office. She was appalled that someone with lighter skin would style her hair in a way that was distinctly African. Being only 16 years old at the time and rendered speechless by her rudeness, I didn’t gather up enough voice to inform her that straightening my hair didn’t fool anyone–unless legally blind, even with my hair straight, people could still see the brown skin on my limbs and face.
Yawn. Eff that. I have better things to do with my time anyway and have no silly self-limiting beliefs about skin color or hair texture having anything to do with sense of self, personal identity, or character. Last year, I made the conscious decision to stop swimming upstream : I was going to embrace my curls in their natural state. After nearly two decades of relaxers, I was going to let my hair transition slowly and awkwardly to what it was meant to be. This can be tricky. New hair comes out of the root curly, but thanks to years of relaxers, the rest of your old hair is in a weird semi-straight brittle condition. This is the reason that people end up having to relax their hair every few weeks or months–once the roots of new curly hair begin to show, you’re roped into that cycle of having to relax your hair all the time so that all the strands look uniform.
Having a hairstylist who’s confident about your transition makes a world of difference. The stylist whom I currently see is Israeli and is used to dealing with super curly hair. Michael was also the very first hair professional to tell me to stop relaxing my hair. The very first time I sat in his chair, he began studying my hair for a haircut and working his hands through it. After a couple of minutes, he paused and looked at me in his mirror and said, “Promise me that you will stop relaxing your hair.” He said this to me completely unbidden, and I was secretly pleased since I had already been contemplating stopping the relaxers. I was also surprised–the first thing old stylists wanted to do whenever I walked through their doors was relax my hair. Now here was a stylist telling me to stop doing all that, telling me that curly hair is wonderful and versatile, that I don’t need to abuse my hair with such harsh chemicals, that I should let the hair grow in naturally and wear it curly. Quite a breath of fresh air. Lots of women who decide to stop relaxers do a “big chop.” This is the term for cutting off all the relaxed hair and growing the hair from scratch, so to speak. I’ve never had super short hair, so that would have been a touch too traumatic and dramatic for this sunny diva, so I opted for cutting off several inches of old relaxed hair so that I could transition slowly. Michael just keeps cutting my hair to just around the shoulder, getting rid of the relaxed bits little by little. They’re almost gone now, and soon enough I’ll have a full head of completely natural unrelaxed hair.
I’ve been relaxer-free for over a year and a half. Rather than a difficult marriage, I’m now engaged in a happy love affair with my hair. I love touching my curls and feeling how soft they are. I love not using toxic hair product. I love being able to jump into water wherever I am without any worries that I’m going to mess up my hair. My haircare routine is easy–it’s pretty much wash and go, which is all I have patience for when it comes to hair. When I feel like wearing it straight, I go to the salon since Michael’s better and faster at blow-drying than I am. These days, when I see young black girls with beautiful wild curls, I find myself wondering if their mothers, grandmothers and aunts will let them keep their hair this way, or whether they’ll relax it. If you chemically alter your hair and you’ve been thinking about going natural, I would tell you that for me, it’s been a wonderful, liberating and fun trip; you should try it. Besides, you may think hair is everything, but hair’s actually nothing.
Nana
September 13, 2010OH, OH, OH, Marilise…my Marilise. Your best article to date. As you may (or may not) be able to tell from my profile picture, I have been in the process of transitioning to my natural hair….and let me tell you one thing: it has been the most liberating thing I have done for myself. Your article struck me in so many profound ways as I also have gone through this crazy drama with my hair. But with only two inches or so of relaxed ends left, I am in LOVE with my natural hair!! I love the waves and the versatility. I love that it treats me nicely when I treat it nicely. I love the natural products I have found. I love that my hair actually loves…..water! (Gasp!) I am not dissing relaxers; I’m just happy that so many women such as you are embracing the alternative.
Good for you, cuz. Keep me posted.
sunnyglobaldiva
September 13, 2010Nana, I clicked “like” on your most recent facebook profile pic because I thought you looked gorgeous with your hair the way you’re growing/wearing it now! Like you, definitely not dissing people who choose to relax their hair, but am so glad that more people are exploring the alternative.
Jessica Fernandez
September 13, 2010Lise…. The entire time I read this blog I kept saying “Yes! So true! I completely agree!!” I decided several years ago that I was done with the relaxers. I couldn’t take the maintenance, not to mention that living in Miami makes it nearly impossible to maintain. It is way too humid and I refuse to dedicate hours and hours on my hair only to have it ruined by a rain storm. It took me a very long time (years) to “grow out” the relaxed sections and my hair looked very weird for a long time too. But now, I’m all natural…. no relaxers, no hair dye, just long, black, natural curls. And for the record, I get compliments on a DAILY basis about how beautiful it is. I can’t imagine girls with straight hair get that many, lol. Embrace the curls. And yes, curly hair is versatile. No matter which way you wear it you look “dressed up”. And when the mood strikes (or when the weather is nice and chilly out with little humidity) you can go get it blown out and have the “straight” look. The nice thing about that is just adding water makes those natural curls come right back. I didn’t see you mention how much pain women with curls, (and not all of us are brown by the way, hee hee), go through to make our hair straight. It is awful!!! Screw it. Curly hair is quite a bit of maintenance too. I can’t just wash and go… but spending 60 minutes once or twice a week to add enough product to last for days is fine with me. Welcome to the club!!
sunnyglobaldiva
September 13, 2010Jess, you are are absolutely right–not all the major curls are found on brown and black girls; I thought of you several times when I was writing this post! Your curls are magazine-worthy 😀 I mentioned the skin color aspect simply because growing up, I didn’t know a single black woman who didn’t relax her hair.
And in regards to the pain you mention for straightening hair….Ugh, there aren’t words enough for that, LOL.
Molena Mompoint
September 13, 2010Great entry Marilise! I’m still relaxing away, but I have looked into growing my hair out natural MANY MANY times. I too just can’t imagine myself doing a big chop, and while transitioning, I always give in and just end up getting relaxed. It would take soooo long to grow my hair out to its current length… but I guess you just take it a step at a time!
Congrats!
sunnyglobaldiva
September 13, 2010Molena, I feel your pain…I won’t lie, it takes a lot of patience, and your hair is LONG, so it would take extra patience and then some, lol 😉
Kristina
September 13, 2010Good for you Lise! I love the curly you! I’ve been contemplating a major chop to get back to natural colour and healthy hair too! Not sure if I am as brave as you! Blonde with dark roots is even harder to hide than half straight/half curly!! I’d have to go REALLY short!
sunnyglobaldiva
September 13, 2010Thanks Kristina! I know what you mean about the big chops being scary. I think super close-cropped hair looks great on Halle berry, but I totally couldn’t have pictured it on myself, lol. I don’t know, you may have to go bold and short for a while!
Elena
September 13, 2010Love you hair Lise! You know I love the curls, and like you, I cannot stand spending all day in a salon. Now if only I could convince myself that I don’t need to be a blonde anymore… Not likely 😉
sunnyglobaldiva
September 13, 2010Elena, no more blonde? Let’s take it one step at a time… :-p
Patricia R.Lamothe
September 14, 2010Wow, You are more beautiful inside and out that you were ( and believe me you have always been) I love you and well said…
sunnyglobaldiva
September 14, 2010Thanks Patcy 🙂 xoxo
Monica
September 15, 2010It’s so funny that I fell on this link on this day because I was actually deciding today whether or not to relax my hair. I haven’t relax my hair in about six months but I haven’t worn it out either (braid extensions have been my best friend. I would be classified as someone who has kinky or nappy hair and I’ve always been led to believe that if my hair isn’t straight it isn’t pretty. So growing up I would see pretty mixed girls with their long curly hair (think tracee ellis ross) and wondered why my hair never looked that. As I move into knew wonderous adventures I always go back to my hair what should I do natural or chemical and I have this draw that natural is the right thing for me so I hope I get the strength to committ! wish me luck.
sunnyglobaldiva
September 15, 2010Monica, I wish you luck! If you end up relaxing it, that’s fine too, but I can honestly tell you that if you decide to go natural, you won’t be disappointed. It’s funny how we’re scared to go natural because we think about how much time it takes to transition, but really the time passes before you even realize. As you’ve mentioned, half a year has passed already and you’ve held out this long!
Audrey
November 9, 2010Just clicked on the article because I was looking up hair tips for my 2 yr old bi-racial daughter. She looks just like you in that first picture…..so I clicked it and I read the article. Nice information, thanks for the advice. I’ve been trying to convince my mother that there is nothing “wrong” with my daughter’s very very very curly hair. : )
sunnyglobaldiva
November 9, 2010Audrey, keep on fighting the good fight! Definitely nothing wrong with very very very curly hair 😉 I’m sure you’ve come across many tips through your online searches, but in case you want more, I’d say definitely stay away from products with tons of chemicals–the curls need conditioning more than anything. I know the brand “Carol’s Daughter” makes a lot of good hair products, particularly for curly-haired children; you might want to check out their hair products line for your little one if you haven’t already.