Nonfiction
"Grandma's Kitchen"
By Rasheena Fountain
By Rasheena Fountain
Tick, Tick, Tick. Swoosh. The flame on Grandma’s stove ignited. As a child, I’d brace myself for the impending heat to my hair. Clink. The straightening comb would collide with the stove as she rested it directly in the flame on the stove burner.
“Hold your head down.”
“Hold your ears.”
“Grandma, sorry.”
Iron collided with my dark brown skin, and I let out a soft “ouch.” The burn was painful, but Grandma loved me. She would straighten my hair for special occasions. I admired her art and experience. Grandma kept me from having burnt ears, a burnt neck, and singed hair. Living with Grandma and Grandad with Mama on the West side in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood after the divorce felt like a privilege—to have those times with Grandma combing through my hair. Grandma’s touch was gentle, even with her time-worn hands. Her dark brown hands had known manual labor—sharecropping labor in the Mississippi Delta where elementary school lessons were for the privileged. Free Black girl’s lessons in Merigold, Mississippi were in the fields instead of going to elementary school. I could tell that Grandma had been through shit. She was calm and reassuring. Mama and Aunt Diane burnt me more often when they straightened my hair. But Grandma had control—the ability to keep calm under pressure. I knew Grandma as a Baptist church “Ursher” on Sundays and blues woman every other day. And my brother John-John told me that when that man in the neighborhood tried to threaten Aunt Shirley, she ain’t call the police. Grandma chased that man with a pistol. I witnessed her stand between a gunman and Michael in the kitchen. Grandma handled things. The straightening comb was a step up from a generation who had once used clothing irons to straighten hair back in Mississippi.
I thought the straightening comb looked archaic: a black iron handle with tiny metal teeth set closely together. The comb turned orange like a cattle brander when hot. I’d seen cattle branded in those Western movies with A-list stars like Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando that I watched with Granddad. In those movies, white men dressed up in cowboy costumes and fought against other white folks masquerading as Indigenous people for our colonizing, Hollywood pleasure. They conquered and explored and assumed ownership of everything around them in those films; mutilation by iron was just the prequel to the cattle’s eventual chopping into tiny bits of capitalism between greedy teeth. I don’t know why Granddad liked those movies, considering our family oral history says that we have some Indigenous roots. He proudly told me stories of Indigenous heritage, naming specific nations and stories, but I have forgotten the specifics. Many Black people have claimed to have Native blood, and I have yet to find out if Grandad’s stories were true. I do know that his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi has a rich history of Black and Indigenous relationships. I don’t think he understood the years it would take to undo this harmful indoctrination from those films. I watched the mutilation—the mockery of culture and Indigenous people slaughtered. The films showed that colonized land was like a fiery furnace. Grandma’s stove during straightening sessions was like the fiery furnace, heating assimilation through my tiny curls. That fiery furnace heated iron to brand my ancestors. They were stolen from their land and used as agricultural power. Grandma was a sharecropper. And her freedom would depend on living in and beyond that mutilation.
But the straightening comb was no match for my natural hair. It rebelled—in the humid Chicago summers, when heavy rains fell in spring, and as minutes passed in any day. My hair kinks always crept their way back in. By the next day, my hair would revolt to an in-between stage like voice cracks in puberty. And I could’ve just let nature take its course and allow my hair to run wild and radical like Angela Davis’s afro. I could’ve let my hair lock up like Bob Marley’s Rastafarian thick strands that swung free with him as he danced to revolution songs. I could’ve chosen to join my hair kinks in their resistance and free them to stretch in all their intended capacities. But as a child I didn’t know the power of the rebel. Resistance was outside of what I knew. I knew not what it meant to be unapologetically Black and beautiful.
Parents in my family and neighborhood knew to tame rebellion. I felt as if someone was always watching, ready to jump in and punish my parents for unkempt children and for the look of anything other than the proper well-polished child. Appropriate hair was just as important as not making any sudden moves during a police officer encounter. It was as important as a firm handshake. Hair was the difference in receiving welcome versus suspicion, acquittal versus conviction, or life versus death. Compliance with society was somehow tied up in the taming of my tight and wild, dry, youthful curls. I would often see my parents and others react with a force that I couldn’t clearly see as a child. I now know that my familial oral history passed down through generations was versed in how we survive in a society as unwanted visitors on colonized land; look the part, dress the part, talk the part, be politely Black or else.
Clever, sharp neighborhood kids’ roastings kept me ajar of the ramifications and pain of natural hair. And I had the kind of natural hair that made good material for hair jokes, because the world taught us that Black self-hatred was funny as hell.
“Yo’ hair is so nappy I took a nap in it.”
“You got a kitchen in yo’ hair.”
“You baldheaded!”
And at age nine, I had arrived at what seemed to be a rite of passage, but I was indifferent. Straight, long hair was supposed to be my aspiration. Mama’s hair was naturally manageable, wavy, and people would say that she had “good hair.” Her father, Granddad, came from a mother of mixed race; his side of the family was light-skinned. Mama says that she was part Irish. So, Mama’s inheritance was not my great great grandmother’s big white plantation house in the South she visited as a child and not the checks that Grandad got from the oil found on the land where my ancestor’s big white house once stood. She inherited hair that white folks and some Black folks deemed closer to the standard of beauty. I inherited Dad’s more African, spongy hair: hair that dried quickly, broke the teeth on combs, and made me look unkempt, if not “tamed.”
Before my first hair relaxer, I had mostly worn pigtails. Mama would part my hair symmetrically: pigtails on all sides of my head. After the divorce, Dad tried to do the same when I stayed at his house. I had collections of colorful barrettes and ponytail holders to accentuate my do. My hair was to always be drenched in hair grease to put the comb at ease and to give my hair that fresh, shiny kempt Black girl’s look. That was the look of youth, however. I was becoming a big girl at age nine. Mama thought I needed more lasting taming.
Dad and Mama agreed that assimilation was best. Yet, they disagreed on mostly everything. And they had their own ideas of what assimilation meant. Mama was okay with my use of “finna” or other Black Chicago lingo. Dad corrected it. “You need to master the King ’s English before you use the other language,” he’d say. Dad knew the power of language—the power in being able to code switch. Mama and Dad would argue about clothes and shoes Mama would buy my brothers John-John and Shad. When she bought them Major Damage brand outfits, all hell broke loose. Everybody wore Major Damage on the Westside: the drug dealers, the blue collar workers, kids, everybody. Yet, Dad wanted us to look different—to stand apart and not give those outside forces any reason to mistake us for a criminal, to kill us, to arrest us. Dad had made it out, mastered code switching and knew the blueprint to be successful. My brothers’ hair was to be nicely faded. No cornrows, even though our family photo album shows young Dad sporting braids.
Mama let us wear Michael Jordan gym shoes and join the latest trends in our neighborhood in the 90s. Jordan shoes could make us targets and people got killed for them, but not having Jordans or off-brand shoes made us targets too. Wearing Pro Wings, knock-off brand shoes, was like having nappy hair. And ain’t nobody wanna deal with the roasts and the violence from not assimilating. My shoes, my clothes, and nicely-done hair, kept the bullies off my back. Mama understood that. Brands and the pursuit of capitalism exploited us and masqueraded as protection. It still does. But big-picture thinking on a micro level can be hard when you just trying to get by and you just want to be a part of your culture. Mama ain’t want us to forget the culture—to forget where we came from. She embraced Grandma and Granddad's language and their sacrifice for family. I saw Mama embrace that, even when her choice to move away from Chicago and get married to Dad put her on the outskirts of the norms in our family. Mama’s assimilation was like Grandma’s—embracing the good, the bad, the ugly because we in this shit together.
Mama and Dad disagreed on whether I was ready for a hair relaxer at age nine. Dad called me his “only little girl” as a child, before my younger sister Imani was born and after Dad remarried. He took joy in putting my hair in pigtails with colorful barrettes on his weekends with me. I don’t remember if he thought I didn’t need a hair relaxer because of my age or what he thought about women with natural hair. I think he believed that I was too young and that hair relaxers came much later. I am not sure what Mama thought, but I knew it was a concoction of “I can do whatever I want with my child.” She wore a hair relaxer, even though her hair was straighter than mine. My parents’ relationship was toxic. Their kinks would never be straightened. Their divorce was the reason Mama and I lived with Grandma. My first hair relaxer was only a little over a year after. I don’t remember if Mama ever asked me if I wanted the hair relaxer. But the relaxer was good pain—necessary pain?
In 1991, on the day of my first hair relaxer, I sat in the chair atop the telephone books so that I could reach the sink in Grandma’s kitchen while Aunt Diane put relaxer in my hair. The intense smell of chemicals in my hair rushed up my nose. My hair began to feel heavy. Each hair follicle became covered and weighed down by thick, white gook. Fingers in my hair pushed against the grain of my natural kinks. Soon tingling. Then, pain—good pain? The temperature around my small head rose.
“It’s beginning to burn,” I told Aunt Diane.
The burning sensation meant that my hair was relaxed, a state where my natural fro of tight, dry, strands had become new. My hair began to feel like red ants biting at my scalp. Aunt Diane told me to sit on my knees so that I could reach the sink to wash out the chemicals. I leaned my head back into it. I could hear water flowing from the sprayer down into the drain as Aunt Diane waited for the water to get hot. As the water hit the surface of my head, I felt the difference. There was no resistance to the flow of the water as it moved through my hair. New dangling, straight hair dangled on my neck, and the water droplets against my burning scalp felt relieving as the chemicals washed away. When my hair was wrapped, blow dried and curled, I knew to smile. And I felt indifferent about the results. Unlike the hair relaxer, the pain and the mutilations could not be washed away in Grandma’s kitchen. As an adult, I have chosen to rebel. But as a child, I did not know that rebellion was good pain—necessary pain.
“Hold your head down.”
“Hold your ears.”
“Grandma, sorry.”
Iron collided with my dark brown skin, and I let out a soft “ouch.” The burn was painful, but Grandma loved me. She would straighten my hair for special occasions. I admired her art and experience. Grandma kept me from having burnt ears, a burnt neck, and singed hair. Living with Grandma and Grandad with Mama on the West side in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood after the divorce felt like a privilege—to have those times with Grandma combing through my hair. Grandma’s touch was gentle, even with her time-worn hands. Her dark brown hands had known manual labor—sharecropping labor in the Mississippi Delta where elementary school lessons were for the privileged. Free Black girl’s lessons in Merigold, Mississippi were in the fields instead of going to elementary school. I could tell that Grandma had been through shit. She was calm and reassuring. Mama and Aunt Diane burnt me more often when they straightened my hair. But Grandma had control—the ability to keep calm under pressure. I knew Grandma as a Baptist church “Ursher” on Sundays and blues woman every other day. And my brother John-John told me that when that man in the neighborhood tried to threaten Aunt Shirley, she ain’t call the police. Grandma chased that man with a pistol. I witnessed her stand between a gunman and Michael in the kitchen. Grandma handled things. The straightening comb was a step up from a generation who had once used clothing irons to straighten hair back in Mississippi.
I thought the straightening comb looked archaic: a black iron handle with tiny metal teeth set closely together. The comb turned orange like a cattle brander when hot. I’d seen cattle branded in those Western movies with A-list stars like Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando that I watched with Granddad. In those movies, white men dressed up in cowboy costumes and fought against other white folks masquerading as Indigenous people for our colonizing, Hollywood pleasure. They conquered and explored and assumed ownership of everything around them in those films; mutilation by iron was just the prequel to the cattle’s eventual chopping into tiny bits of capitalism between greedy teeth. I don’t know why Granddad liked those movies, considering our family oral history says that we have some Indigenous roots. He proudly told me stories of Indigenous heritage, naming specific nations and stories, but I have forgotten the specifics. Many Black people have claimed to have Native blood, and I have yet to find out if Grandad’s stories were true. I do know that his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi has a rich history of Black and Indigenous relationships. I don’t think he understood the years it would take to undo this harmful indoctrination from those films. I watched the mutilation—the mockery of culture and Indigenous people slaughtered. The films showed that colonized land was like a fiery furnace. Grandma’s stove during straightening sessions was like the fiery furnace, heating assimilation through my tiny curls. That fiery furnace heated iron to brand my ancestors. They were stolen from their land and used as agricultural power. Grandma was a sharecropper. And her freedom would depend on living in and beyond that mutilation.
But the straightening comb was no match for my natural hair. It rebelled—in the humid Chicago summers, when heavy rains fell in spring, and as minutes passed in any day. My hair kinks always crept their way back in. By the next day, my hair would revolt to an in-between stage like voice cracks in puberty. And I could’ve just let nature take its course and allow my hair to run wild and radical like Angela Davis’s afro. I could’ve let my hair lock up like Bob Marley’s Rastafarian thick strands that swung free with him as he danced to revolution songs. I could’ve chosen to join my hair kinks in their resistance and free them to stretch in all their intended capacities. But as a child I didn’t know the power of the rebel. Resistance was outside of what I knew. I knew not what it meant to be unapologetically Black and beautiful.
Parents in my family and neighborhood knew to tame rebellion. I felt as if someone was always watching, ready to jump in and punish my parents for unkempt children and for the look of anything other than the proper well-polished child. Appropriate hair was just as important as not making any sudden moves during a police officer encounter. It was as important as a firm handshake. Hair was the difference in receiving welcome versus suspicion, acquittal versus conviction, or life versus death. Compliance with society was somehow tied up in the taming of my tight and wild, dry, youthful curls. I would often see my parents and others react with a force that I couldn’t clearly see as a child. I now know that my familial oral history passed down through generations was versed in how we survive in a society as unwanted visitors on colonized land; look the part, dress the part, talk the part, be politely Black or else.
Clever, sharp neighborhood kids’ roastings kept me ajar of the ramifications and pain of natural hair. And I had the kind of natural hair that made good material for hair jokes, because the world taught us that Black self-hatred was funny as hell.
“Yo’ hair is so nappy I took a nap in it.”
“You got a kitchen in yo’ hair.”
“You baldheaded!”
And at age nine, I had arrived at what seemed to be a rite of passage, but I was indifferent. Straight, long hair was supposed to be my aspiration. Mama’s hair was naturally manageable, wavy, and people would say that she had “good hair.” Her father, Granddad, came from a mother of mixed race; his side of the family was light-skinned. Mama says that she was part Irish. So, Mama’s inheritance was not my great great grandmother’s big white plantation house in the South she visited as a child and not the checks that Grandad got from the oil found on the land where my ancestor’s big white house once stood. She inherited hair that white folks and some Black folks deemed closer to the standard of beauty. I inherited Dad’s more African, spongy hair: hair that dried quickly, broke the teeth on combs, and made me look unkempt, if not “tamed.”
Before my first hair relaxer, I had mostly worn pigtails. Mama would part my hair symmetrically: pigtails on all sides of my head. After the divorce, Dad tried to do the same when I stayed at his house. I had collections of colorful barrettes and ponytail holders to accentuate my do. My hair was to always be drenched in hair grease to put the comb at ease and to give my hair that fresh, shiny kempt Black girl’s look. That was the look of youth, however. I was becoming a big girl at age nine. Mama thought I needed more lasting taming.
Dad and Mama agreed that assimilation was best. Yet, they disagreed on mostly everything. And they had their own ideas of what assimilation meant. Mama was okay with my use of “finna” or other Black Chicago lingo. Dad corrected it. “You need to master the King ’s English before you use the other language,” he’d say. Dad knew the power of language—the power in being able to code switch. Mama and Dad would argue about clothes and shoes Mama would buy my brothers John-John and Shad. When she bought them Major Damage brand outfits, all hell broke loose. Everybody wore Major Damage on the Westside: the drug dealers, the blue collar workers, kids, everybody. Yet, Dad wanted us to look different—to stand apart and not give those outside forces any reason to mistake us for a criminal, to kill us, to arrest us. Dad had made it out, mastered code switching and knew the blueprint to be successful. My brothers’ hair was to be nicely faded. No cornrows, even though our family photo album shows young Dad sporting braids.
Mama let us wear Michael Jordan gym shoes and join the latest trends in our neighborhood in the 90s. Jordan shoes could make us targets and people got killed for them, but not having Jordans or off-brand shoes made us targets too. Wearing Pro Wings, knock-off brand shoes, was like having nappy hair. And ain’t nobody wanna deal with the roasts and the violence from not assimilating. My shoes, my clothes, and nicely-done hair, kept the bullies off my back. Mama understood that. Brands and the pursuit of capitalism exploited us and masqueraded as protection. It still does. But big-picture thinking on a micro level can be hard when you just trying to get by and you just want to be a part of your culture. Mama ain’t want us to forget the culture—to forget where we came from. She embraced Grandma and Granddad's language and their sacrifice for family. I saw Mama embrace that, even when her choice to move away from Chicago and get married to Dad put her on the outskirts of the norms in our family. Mama’s assimilation was like Grandma’s—embracing the good, the bad, the ugly because we in this shit together.
Mama and Dad disagreed on whether I was ready for a hair relaxer at age nine. Dad called me his “only little girl” as a child, before my younger sister Imani was born and after Dad remarried. He took joy in putting my hair in pigtails with colorful barrettes on his weekends with me. I don’t remember if he thought I didn’t need a hair relaxer because of my age or what he thought about women with natural hair. I think he believed that I was too young and that hair relaxers came much later. I am not sure what Mama thought, but I knew it was a concoction of “I can do whatever I want with my child.” She wore a hair relaxer, even though her hair was straighter than mine. My parents’ relationship was toxic. Their kinks would never be straightened. Their divorce was the reason Mama and I lived with Grandma. My first hair relaxer was only a little over a year after. I don’t remember if Mama ever asked me if I wanted the hair relaxer. But the relaxer was good pain—necessary pain?
In 1991, on the day of my first hair relaxer, I sat in the chair atop the telephone books so that I could reach the sink in Grandma’s kitchen while Aunt Diane put relaxer in my hair. The intense smell of chemicals in my hair rushed up my nose. My hair began to feel heavy. Each hair follicle became covered and weighed down by thick, white gook. Fingers in my hair pushed against the grain of my natural kinks. Soon tingling. Then, pain—good pain? The temperature around my small head rose.
“It’s beginning to burn,” I told Aunt Diane.
The burning sensation meant that my hair was relaxed, a state where my natural fro of tight, dry, strands had become new. My hair began to feel like red ants biting at my scalp. Aunt Diane told me to sit on my knees so that I could reach the sink to wash out the chemicals. I leaned my head back into it. I could hear water flowing from the sprayer down into the drain as Aunt Diane waited for the water to get hot. As the water hit the surface of my head, I felt the difference. There was no resistance to the flow of the water as it moved through my hair. New dangling, straight hair dangled on my neck, and the water droplets against my burning scalp felt relieving as the chemicals washed away. When my hair was wrapped, blow dried and curled, I knew to smile. And I felt indifferent about the results. Unlike the hair relaxer, the pain and the mutilations could not be washed away in Grandma’s kitchen. As an adult, I have chosen to rebel. But as a child, I did not know that rebellion was good pain—necessary pain.
"A Black Hair Journey"
By Rasheena Fountain
By Rasheena Fountain
Tugs. Pulls. Yanks. Fingers from multiple Black hands twisted my hair roots, hard. My hair was being weaved like a basket into micro-braids across my head. The comb parted my thick hair, rubbing across my scalp like construction workers making thin street gridlines.
“Hold your head down.”
“Turn your head to the side.”
“You must be tender headed.”
In the summer of 2000, three women worked through my hair inside a Harlem braiding shop. They spoke in an African tongue vibrantly to each other as they tugged at my roots. I was miles away from Grandma and the family banter that often filled Grandma’s kitchen during hair straightening sessions in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. I was living in Midtown Manhattan for the summer before my freshman year of college with Dad and my stepmom, Monica. I had just graduated high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan a couple of months earlier and had only spent my senior year in Michigan. My previous high school years were in Fairfax County, Virginia. Dad had a journalism fellowship with the University of Michigan, but was now stationed in New York for his job at the New York Times. I had rebelled, like Mama did years earlier, choosing to live with Dad and Monica in Virginia four years earlier. Before I moved with Dad, I was flunking out of high school, severely depressed, and dealing with trauma from the violence on the west side of Chicago. An unfortunate event, my brother Shad getting shot at, catalyzed me to make a decision at thirteen to leave my friends, Mama, and my entire life to head east.
Throughout much of my teens, I continued the mutilation—the self-hatred and succumbing to the pressure to straighten my hair and assimilate. Straight hair had become the norm since my first relaxer at age nine. I arrived in Fairfax County Virginia with a heavy west side of Chicago accent and swag. And the chorus of Black friends and family made me want to be silent most of the time.
“You sound ghetto.”
“You sound country.”
"Don’t say finna.”
I understood where Dad was coming from, but I had mastered the Chicago lingo I was speaking. It was a necessary skill when I moved back to Chicago at age seven after living in Urbana, Illinois for years. Yet, that type of Blackness felt unacceptable in Fairfax; it made me stand out and signaled to others that I had once lived beyond suburban landscapes. And my Air Jordan shoes ain’t mean shit out there. If I wore my hair with too much gel or the way I had worn my hair in Chicago, I was treated inferior in the land of white picket fences. I hadn’t hated where I grew up, but I began to internalize self-hatred and began covering up my hair, my Chicago accent, and my upbringing with polished, top-notch assimilation. And Dad’s job afforded me some privilege. When I told teachers that Dad worked for The Washington Post, they would brighten their smile and welcome me in a way that had not been previously shown. I guess then they saw me as a different kind of Black person, and I guess that was supposed to make me feel better. I embraced the growth in my straight hair as progression. I was better off educationally. My grades improved, and I went from an all “F” student to being accepted to my college of choice.
Progression felt like loss. It still does. My relationship with Grandma suffered when I lived in Virginia. The kitchen and the times with Grandma became distant memories. I rarely went to Chicago, we barely spoke on the phone, and I was busy exploring a new identity. When I did visit Grandma, I felt like an outsider. Culture is professed in the ways of being, and I could feel myself losing it. I could feel that she knew I had changed. My hair was straight but professionally straight. I had a certain suburban aura—an aura that could be picked out of the crowd if I walked down Chicago streets. Maybe Grandma thought that I thought I was better than her now—thought that I saw all she had worked for as less than. It pains me to realize, but she was right. I started to see suburban life in Virginia as better than my tight-knit Chicago community, or that somehow choices had caused the trauma that my community and Grandma faced. Grandma’s choice to stay in the hood and embrace it felt opposite to the narrative I was learning. I was learning how to make it out—how to assimilate into larger society. I regret this lost time—the lost times with Grandma when I believed in the façade of the American Dream and the lie of being Black and suburban. I mourn making her feel less than or that her granddaughter had turned on her. I couldn’t see that Grandma was just making do, giving us grandchildren what she could, and that our growth was her living. Straightening my new growth, our hair sessions, was a part of her dream—a dream where families stayed together.
Now over ten years since Grandma’s death, the moment I have never recovered from, I know that the only true acceptance I have ever felt has been in Grandma’s kitchen. And I feel ungrateful. The rituals like hair straightening were acceptance—Grandma passing down what she knew. I didn’t understand the nuances—the intentional mutilation of Black communities that had promised hope during The Great Migration, that Black communities were branded by redlining and predatory lending and disinvestment. I now know that the heat was turned up on Blackness in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood; it was hunted and thrown into the great melting pot full of violence and toxic mixtures much like the hair lye that erased my hair kinks at nine. My progression those four years on the other side of the tracks was progression in self-hatred. By the end of the four years, I was unrecognizable to most, and, most importantly, myself. Uncovering myself fully would take years of rebellion.
But New York began to change me—Harlem changed me. Harlem was still Harlem when I met it—Black and Brown folks from across the diaspora. We’d visit some of Monica’s family in Harlem. On one trip to visit her family, we went to the Magic Johnson Starbucks on 125th. That’s when I saw groups of Black women decked out in rebellion—hair beautifully kinky and free, with dreads and afros. Maybe some had straight hair, but I didn’t notice. I found something I didn’t know I had longed for—a feeling that interrupted my indifference I had taken on as a child. I wanted that beauty. I was becoming a woman, and indifference felt like a coping in need of change.
I couldn’t just wear my hair natural. I first had to convince Dad and Monica to let me make this transition. I remember addressing them like I would have to present an argument. Monica wore a relaxer, although that has since changed. Now, she wears her hair in a natural. “I don’t want to wear a perm anymore,” I told them. They asked why and I told them that I just preferred to wear my hair natural. They did not reply right away, because they usually would talk big decisions over away from us and deliver the results to inquiries as one accord. My hair up until then was always in an in-between stage, always a step away from needing to be straightened again. I no longer wanted to view my hair resistance as a threat. I wanted the feeling of raindrops hitting my hair without worry and to submerge my face in swimming pools without fear of my relaxer being ruined. My feelings were deep—an uncovering of self, but I kept my reasons why more surface-level, because I lacked the language of rebellion. Yet, they welcomed the change and allowed me to make an appointment to get my hair braided in Harlem so that I could let the hair relaxer grow out.
On the day of my rebellion, I took the trip alone—something Monica and my Dad let me do a lot that summer, even though they were strict when I lived in the suburbs. I was leaving for college, and I believe they were preparing me for independence. I took the New York subway I had gotten to know during that summer. A hair appointment might seem mundane for some, but this was my first intentional choice related to my hair. I pictured the women in that Magic Johnson Starbucks. I imagined not having to feel the burn of the hair relaxer any longer or to sit under the miserable hair dryer. I was nervous, but I felt this journey was better than feeling indifferent about my reflection in the mirror or feeling my reflection was less my own. I wanted ownership over my image. Having three women pulling at my hair for hours felt like good pain. And the itch from the braids on my face felt freeing. After hours of pulls and tugs, I stepped out of the African hair braiding shop into the Harlem streets with pride. Blackness was beauty—the kinks, the perseverance, the natural resistance.
I still miss the clinks on Grandma’s stove, and I miss her kitchen. I now fully embrace and see her progression and sacrifice that I benefit from. Grandma wore her hair straight, jet-black, with strands of gray. I’ve worn my hair straight, short, died, shaved, in an afro and more, even after Harlem. And that has been my choice. I don’t believe straight hair is wrong or that those who choose to wear their hair straight to be wrong. When I made the choice to get my hair braided, I was just happy that straight hair was no longer the default for my beauty. I choose to live beyond the mutilation—the white supremacy that stains us and is even etched in hair. I am still uncovering self, still repairing the scars, and am living to remove the toxicity. Maybe that’s what Grandma was doing—living to remove the toxicity.
“Hold your head down.”
“Turn your head to the side.”
“You must be tender headed.”
In the summer of 2000, three women worked through my hair inside a Harlem braiding shop. They spoke in an African tongue vibrantly to each other as they tugged at my roots. I was miles away from Grandma and the family banter that often filled Grandma’s kitchen during hair straightening sessions in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. I was living in Midtown Manhattan for the summer before my freshman year of college with Dad and my stepmom, Monica. I had just graduated high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan a couple of months earlier and had only spent my senior year in Michigan. My previous high school years were in Fairfax County, Virginia. Dad had a journalism fellowship with the University of Michigan, but was now stationed in New York for his job at the New York Times. I had rebelled, like Mama did years earlier, choosing to live with Dad and Monica in Virginia four years earlier. Before I moved with Dad, I was flunking out of high school, severely depressed, and dealing with trauma from the violence on the west side of Chicago. An unfortunate event, my brother Shad getting shot at, catalyzed me to make a decision at thirteen to leave my friends, Mama, and my entire life to head east.
Throughout much of my teens, I continued the mutilation—the self-hatred and succumbing to the pressure to straighten my hair and assimilate. Straight hair had become the norm since my first relaxer at age nine. I arrived in Fairfax County Virginia with a heavy west side of Chicago accent and swag. And the chorus of Black friends and family made me want to be silent most of the time.
“You sound ghetto.”
“You sound country.”
"Don’t say finna.”
I understood where Dad was coming from, but I had mastered the Chicago lingo I was speaking. It was a necessary skill when I moved back to Chicago at age seven after living in Urbana, Illinois for years. Yet, that type of Blackness felt unacceptable in Fairfax; it made me stand out and signaled to others that I had once lived beyond suburban landscapes. And my Air Jordan shoes ain’t mean shit out there. If I wore my hair with too much gel or the way I had worn my hair in Chicago, I was treated inferior in the land of white picket fences. I hadn’t hated where I grew up, but I began to internalize self-hatred and began covering up my hair, my Chicago accent, and my upbringing with polished, top-notch assimilation. And Dad’s job afforded me some privilege. When I told teachers that Dad worked for The Washington Post, they would brighten their smile and welcome me in a way that had not been previously shown. I guess then they saw me as a different kind of Black person, and I guess that was supposed to make me feel better. I embraced the growth in my straight hair as progression. I was better off educationally. My grades improved, and I went from an all “F” student to being accepted to my college of choice.
Progression felt like loss. It still does. My relationship with Grandma suffered when I lived in Virginia. The kitchen and the times with Grandma became distant memories. I rarely went to Chicago, we barely spoke on the phone, and I was busy exploring a new identity. When I did visit Grandma, I felt like an outsider. Culture is professed in the ways of being, and I could feel myself losing it. I could feel that she knew I had changed. My hair was straight but professionally straight. I had a certain suburban aura—an aura that could be picked out of the crowd if I walked down Chicago streets. Maybe Grandma thought that I thought I was better than her now—thought that I saw all she had worked for as less than. It pains me to realize, but she was right. I started to see suburban life in Virginia as better than my tight-knit Chicago community, or that somehow choices had caused the trauma that my community and Grandma faced. Grandma’s choice to stay in the hood and embrace it felt opposite to the narrative I was learning. I was learning how to make it out—how to assimilate into larger society. I regret this lost time—the lost times with Grandma when I believed in the façade of the American Dream and the lie of being Black and suburban. I mourn making her feel less than or that her granddaughter had turned on her. I couldn’t see that Grandma was just making do, giving us grandchildren what she could, and that our growth was her living. Straightening my new growth, our hair sessions, was a part of her dream—a dream where families stayed together.
Now over ten years since Grandma’s death, the moment I have never recovered from, I know that the only true acceptance I have ever felt has been in Grandma’s kitchen. And I feel ungrateful. The rituals like hair straightening were acceptance—Grandma passing down what she knew. I didn’t understand the nuances—the intentional mutilation of Black communities that had promised hope during The Great Migration, that Black communities were branded by redlining and predatory lending and disinvestment. I now know that the heat was turned up on Blackness in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood; it was hunted and thrown into the great melting pot full of violence and toxic mixtures much like the hair lye that erased my hair kinks at nine. My progression those four years on the other side of the tracks was progression in self-hatred. By the end of the four years, I was unrecognizable to most, and, most importantly, myself. Uncovering myself fully would take years of rebellion.
But New York began to change me—Harlem changed me. Harlem was still Harlem when I met it—Black and Brown folks from across the diaspora. We’d visit some of Monica’s family in Harlem. On one trip to visit her family, we went to the Magic Johnson Starbucks on 125th. That’s when I saw groups of Black women decked out in rebellion—hair beautifully kinky and free, with dreads and afros. Maybe some had straight hair, but I didn’t notice. I found something I didn’t know I had longed for—a feeling that interrupted my indifference I had taken on as a child. I wanted that beauty. I was becoming a woman, and indifference felt like a coping in need of change.
I couldn’t just wear my hair natural. I first had to convince Dad and Monica to let me make this transition. I remember addressing them like I would have to present an argument. Monica wore a relaxer, although that has since changed. Now, she wears her hair in a natural. “I don’t want to wear a perm anymore,” I told them. They asked why and I told them that I just preferred to wear my hair natural. They did not reply right away, because they usually would talk big decisions over away from us and deliver the results to inquiries as one accord. My hair up until then was always in an in-between stage, always a step away from needing to be straightened again. I no longer wanted to view my hair resistance as a threat. I wanted the feeling of raindrops hitting my hair without worry and to submerge my face in swimming pools without fear of my relaxer being ruined. My feelings were deep—an uncovering of self, but I kept my reasons why more surface-level, because I lacked the language of rebellion. Yet, they welcomed the change and allowed me to make an appointment to get my hair braided in Harlem so that I could let the hair relaxer grow out.
On the day of my rebellion, I took the trip alone—something Monica and my Dad let me do a lot that summer, even though they were strict when I lived in the suburbs. I was leaving for college, and I believe they were preparing me for independence. I took the New York subway I had gotten to know during that summer. A hair appointment might seem mundane for some, but this was my first intentional choice related to my hair. I pictured the women in that Magic Johnson Starbucks. I imagined not having to feel the burn of the hair relaxer any longer or to sit under the miserable hair dryer. I was nervous, but I felt this journey was better than feeling indifferent about my reflection in the mirror or feeling my reflection was less my own. I wanted ownership over my image. Having three women pulling at my hair for hours felt like good pain. And the itch from the braids on my face felt freeing. After hours of pulls and tugs, I stepped out of the African hair braiding shop into the Harlem streets with pride. Blackness was beauty—the kinks, the perseverance, the natural resistance.
I still miss the clinks on Grandma’s stove, and I miss her kitchen. I now fully embrace and see her progression and sacrifice that I benefit from. Grandma wore her hair straight, jet-black, with strands of gray. I’ve worn my hair straight, short, died, shaved, in an afro and more, even after Harlem. And that has been my choice. I don’t believe straight hair is wrong or that those who choose to wear their hair straight to be wrong. When I made the choice to get my hair braided, I was just happy that straight hair was no longer the default for my beauty. I choose to live beyond the mutilation—the white supremacy that stains us and is even etched in hair. I am still uncovering self, still repairing the scars, and am living to remove the toxicity. Maybe that’s what Grandma was doing—living to remove the toxicity.
