Chocolate Chip: Free Your Hair and Your Scalp Will Follow

by Charlie

“I don’t want no baldheaded woman, it’ll make me mean, yeah Lord, it would make me mean.” The great American songwriter Shel Talmy penned these words, among many others, for the Who and the Kinks, and I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently. Well, what if she should looked like this? Then would you validate her existence by banging her?

Hair. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere and sometimes in the most inconspicuous of places. It makes people very uncomfortable if you don’t have it or have too much of it and, for real pricks, it’s great fodder for racist jokes about spooks and/or cancer survivors. It is perennially on our minds because it is, although somewhat superficially, part of what defines us, like a Nantucket fleece or fresh sneakers. The way we choose to wear it, shear it, buzz it, dye it, comb it and curl it is under constant scrutiny, but for good reason?

I’ve been wearing my hair straight for as long as I can remember. So long, in fact, that I hardly recognize myself in the mirror when my hair is in its natural, nappy state. Is nappy all that bad? Not really. Not unless you’re completely unfamiliar with the texture of naps, which according to my best friend from high school, the beaner I love dearly, resembles pubic hair. This does not mean giving yourself a good hand job is tantamount to touching your token black colleague’s hair. Even if you’ve given yourself a good hand job recently, reading this will probably make you more frightened by the foreign, eroticized texture of a black bush. God did not create all hair equally. There are many different textures, colors and lengths of hair — and that goes for everyone, and their pubes to boot.

During those nascent years when I too believed I’d have a chance to pole dance on the Teen Choice Awards, I longed for my hair to grow like Rapunzel’s. I even prayed to Jesus of Nazareth asking Him for long hair and promising to shave it off once it reached the small of my back. The holy tonsure as it were. Of course, I would never shave it off, but I lie to Jesus all of the time because I know I’m going to hell once this topsy-turvy thing we call life is over anyway. The whole praying thing is just a formality, you know, to see if old Jesu will give me what I want even though I’m batting for Satan. Besides, what does Jesus Christ know about being a nappy headed ho? His hair was long and silky smooth. It wasn’t even curly! Christ had good hair. (And a swimmer’s body.)

So as a little black girl in America I spent a good deal of time lamenting my nappy headedness. I would curse my mother and the florescent plastic beads she would put in my hair after a torturous braiding session during which I felt as though a Comanche were scalping me. Chris Rock’s daughter also begrudges her naps; she is the inspiration behind her father’s documentary Good Hair. This film will not teach a black person anything they don’t already know: black women are crazy, lots of black women wear weaves, if you put a gay white man in a room full of shiny black women, hilarity will ensue. On the other hand, a white audience may consider Good Hair a groundbreaking authority in the field. Who knew black women had the money to buy thousand-dollar weaves and that the “creamy crack” (equally addicting and potentially as deadly as the real thing) is the sodium hydroxide blacks put in their hair to make it look straight?

Black people take the hair debate (natural and nappy vs. straight and/or fake) very seriously. The subject recently inspired a brouhaha on NPR when guest-host Allison Keyes went ape shit after some unassuming white person touched the fro without asking. The irate “oh no she didn’ts” from angry black listeners everywhere quickly followed. Interestingly, the comments echoed those that surfaced after a black woman criticized Michelle Obama for not wearing her hair au naturel. In the latter case it was the whites up in arms, decrying all angry, bitter, likely single and/or unmarried black women for attempting to appropriate the first lady’s hair.

Black hair has often had a place in politics, the most obvious example being the Afro. In the 1960s, the Afro was transformed into an iconic symbol of power and authority, a visible embrace of negritude. Somehow, the fro evolved into the hi-top fade and black hair once again lost all of its credibility and political cachet.

Has Chris Rock done his fellow colored friends a good service by reintroducing the subject of black hair to the general public? Is it true that if black hair is relaxed white people are relaxed and if it’s nappy they’re unhappy? I think the documentary’s emphasis on nappy and/or baldheaded black women was a mistake. It could have been that much more interesting had it also discussed Hasidic women and their fancy wigs, all the very unfortunately looking white women of the world who could benefit from a good weave, the fetching charm of the powdered wig and how women like Amber Rose, Grace Jones and others are both bald and sexy.

The subject of hair rests somewhere uncomfortably between identity politics and the Jheri curl-constantly on our minds, and yet, we should desperately try to forget about it and move on. Hair may seem trivial, but the topic keeps popping out like Elizabeth Berkley in what could have been a perfectly decent Paul Verhoeven film. I’m sure card-carrying members of the angry black woman brigade will have me drawn and quartered for saying this but, please, don’t we have enough to bitch about without rehashing the nappy-headed hoes epithet or trying to explain-away our addiction to weaves, the creamy crack or simply how we want to wear our hair? Wendy Williams’ hair is as real as Michael Jackson’s complexion. Do you care? Me neither. More to the point, black women are not the only women with “bad hair.”

I’m not mad at the Jesus for my unanswered prayers. I’d still be going to hell even if my hair weren’t so goddamn nappy. I still do a double-take when I see my hair naturally nappy, but I also do that when I see my face without makeup. We all create an image that we think others will want to see, only a few of us are immune to this desire. I say, wear your hair and everything else the way you want to, and may the Lord bless Richard Simmons, Rob Tyner and Phil Spector for being white dudes and unafraid to rock the Afro.

“Charlie” is the pen name of a seriously profesh young lady in the City of New York.