Editor's Note: I wrote this piece in the 1990's for the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a piece near and dear to my heart as it looks at the intersections between mine and my grandmother's lives with black hair. Enjoy!
"WHAT WOULD YOU like done today?" the receptionist asks me as I stand in a daze before her counter.
It's been 10 years since I've set foot in a beauty college, and the question of what style to choose means more than the receptionist could know.
I can't even contemplate the question without thinking of my grandmother. Before I was born, Louise Russell, a graduate of The Madame CJ Walker School of Beauty Culrure in Chicago, was famous for the hairstyles she'd fabricate in the back of her home in San Bernardino. I heard stories of women traveling the 60 miles from L.A. to have my grandmother make them glamorous. I'd sit in her back room and imagine the scene: The pressing comb in its tiny stove, Grandma swinging her Marcels (metal curling utensils) around like Bill Pickett while managing to maintain a slippery patch of pink pressing wax on the back of her hand. These women of the '40s and '50s would ride back toward Hollywood like poised divas - hair silked, curled or waved.
By the time my baby-soft hair had grown into a thick, bushy mane, my grandmother was too old and tired to mess with so much hair. She preferred to take me downtown to the beauty college and let the "girls" deal with me. I'd sit while Grandma made arrangements with the receptionist for two
"colored girls" - a sophomore for her and a senior for me.
Heads would turn as my stylist and I crossed the room, and I'd grin back, not caring whether the women were marveling at my cuteness or at the discombobulated state of my woolly ponytails.
"Are you tender-headed?" my stylist would ask, fingering through my hair, and I'd stoically contend that I wasn't. I'd suffer through minor tugging and pulling and leave the school with bright colored bands around my neatly twisted hair and the scent of cherry shampoo and coconut hair grease in my nose.
One student with nearly 1,600 hours under her belt - almost enough to graduate - is calling out her sister-in-law for phoning in and asking if "someone at the college" could do her hair.
"I was like, "I can do your hair,"" recounts the irate stylist. She's proud of her skills, as she should be: She's hooked herself up with the same wispy golden curls that hip-hop balladeer Mary J. Blige probably pays big money for.
My student dresser, Yvette, is round and beautiful with long Gucci braids (thick twisted plaits), and reminds me of the young women dressers who used to look so old to me.
"I always did my friends' hair," she tells me as she wraps a shiny metallic smock around me. "When I started this I just fell in love with it and started dreaming about having my own shop."
Yvette takes my hair down from the loose bun I wrapped it up in this morning and fingers through it. "My hair is the same length as yours under my braids," she tells me.
"Maybe a little shorter." I confess that I've been using Mane 'n Tail, a lengthening conditioner which is all the rage. The product was originally marketed for horses and I used to have to get it in pet stores until it caught on. Now I buy it at Walgreen's. Yvette tells me she uses it, too.
We move over to the sink and Yvette opens the five-gallon bottle of cherry shampoo. She works up a cool lather with her massage and that ambrosial scent emanates from it. I scan the room, watching young women indulging other women, and listening to the harmonic chatter that could easily be confused with gossip. Sometimes the students misinterpret the talk, Yvette tells me, and feuds begin. But for the most part they get along.
Yvette tells me something else that makes me think about how much has changed since the days when Grandma did hair. Just two weeks ago, a student who was about to graduate was shot at a party. "Candy had 1,600 hours and was really good," Yvette tells me as she delicately towel blots my hair. Classes were suspended for two days. A couple of the students did her hair and make-up for the burial.
Back at her station, Yvette gives me a generous dose of brown gel to cast the wet set of my choosing. I decide on fat Shirley curls all overflowing from my crown and into my face. But just as Yvette is emptying out the bag of plastic rollers, I spot a young hairdresser with large sculpted fingerwaves and become inspired. Yvette adds enough gel to hook up some fingerwaves in the front, leaving enough hair free at the crown to make my fat curls successful.
I look in the mirror and my own face takes me back a generation or two. Back in the day, young black women's creativity might have been restricted on the job or in daily life, but they let loose with their hair, their one pliable appendage. Fingerwaves added to pincurls added to a slick roll at the back with fat curls falling from it.
But the young women of Grandma's generation didn't face the conflicts today's young women do every time we straighten our hair. Rebelling against Eurocentric beauty standards, our mothers fought for and won the right to 'fro, braid and dread their daughters' hair to reassert our African heritage and beauty. The result for a lot of us daughters is that we question our consciousness every six weeks: Am I perming for my man, my boss or me? Can I love myself with my natural hair texture?
Hair for Grandma had an entirely different meaning. She spent her childhood during the Depression caring for her six younger brothers and sisters, and her teens fighting courts and social workers to keep them. She kept them exceptionally groomed to avoid any false charges of neglect, and discovered her love for self-expression through hair in the process. By the time I came around she'd gotten quite modest about her own appearance, and went to the school not to get her hair whipped up but to be pampered. She went to be rubbed, massaged and cared for at her crown - to receive a little service for all she'd put in over the years.
By the time I get out from under the beehive drier I'm one of the last clients in the shop. Yvette removes the last moldings of a 1930s hairstyle, one Grandma might have worn in her youth. I'd gone back to the beauty college out of nostalgia for my girlhood, but when I look in the mirror I'm surprised to see a grown woman - one who makes her own choices and manages her complicated freedom. I think Grandma might have recognized her.
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