Celebrate Me Home

Any journey begins with a need to get from here to there. My here began long before I was born on a battlefield littered with the remnants of the conquered. They survived, but cultural pride was replaced with a broken spirit. In their brokenness, the conquered sought to take on the ways and appearance of the conqueror. In doing so, all that was of their former selves was undesired and repugnant. However, the past has a way holding on to us and reminding us of what we really are.

For me my past is the thick, sometimes kinky mass of hair that I demoralized every six to eight weeks with a substance strong enough to dissolve metal. Other than childhood pictures, I have never seen my real hair. What I’ve seen in three decades has the life burned out of it thanks to sodium hydroxide, a substance strong enough to dissolve metal in 4 hours. Of course, you’d never know that my hair was burned because I made it look so good. My burned hair was shiny and bouncy thanks to years of wrapping, conditioning, and religious dedication to a few talented stylists. But often, one bad perm or replacement stylist later, and my hair would look just like what it was, burned. A bad perm meant a three month foray into braids or a wig.

Being beautiful shouldn’t be this hard; I always thought that. But then something kept bothering me, like an itchy scalp when the hair “needs” a perm. Being someone else’s definition of beautiful is hard, especially you try to make what God gave you into what God gave someone else. Yes. It stinks that what is unique to black women has never been synonymous with beautiful, but the burning and bleaching of the black self to be beautiful is just insane. It’s the doll test all over again.

So, with the support of my mother and the ultra talented stylist Chris ( I love you!), I have decided to take my hair from here to there. I put last chemical in my hair on October 23, 2010. (Ominous music here…) On December 28, 2010, I had my stylist cut off everything except an inch of coily-corkscrewed virgin hair. AAAHHHHHHHHH.

The last time my hair was in a natural state was 1978.. I was three years old. Recall that there was an ozone layer then and children did not have car seats. One had to carry change to use a public pay phone. And the president was always going to be a white man.

But things have changed. The president is a black man. I have two beautiful boys that I strap dutifully into car seats, and I am about to reclaim what was scorned.

I have to thank my sorors for this Damascus conversion. I was a woman who made excuse after excuse about why I couldn't got natural. But my sorors, beautiful and defiant women, rocked my world with their natural hair. I found myself asking them things like “You did that with a ceramic flat iron and your hair is not permed? You put what in your hair? That’s just wash and go?” I can’t tell you how amazing their hair looked. This naturally textured hair was my inheritance?

The only natural hair that I’d seen was the “peas in the kitchen”, beaded up, The Gods Must Be Crazy-bushmen style. Of course, that was the image I saw on television, and I couldn’t rock that. And I wasn’t about to rock a Foxy Brown either. I’d be hard pressed to find a judge or jury that would take me seriously with an Afro that blocked out all the light in the room. Don’t get me wrong. That is an empowering look for the right woman. I needed the right look for this empowered woman. All I am certain of as I make this transition is that, this is that I shouldn’t be punishing my hair for the way God made it. There is nothing wrong.

I was divinely designed to live my life in the body God created. Why then, should my hair be any different?

Follow me on this voyage....