In third grade, I sat at a blue metal table outside on the blacktop. An older boy at the next table over said to me, \u201cYour hair looks greasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t even remember his name, but I remember he was a white kid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it because your name is Mercedes?\u201d he asked me, \u201cDo you have to grease up the way you grease up a car?\u201d<\/p>\n
He said nothing else, simply stood up and walked away. I sat there, a third grade girl, staring at my unpeeled orange, feeling, for the first time, aware of my own hair. Feeling, for the first time, defined by my hair, noticing how it did not make me unique, but somehow different. A bulge of hot tears formed.<\/p>\n
This was the beginning of my awareness of all the things my hair was: kinky, stiff, coily, frizzy, nappy, oily. This was the beginning of my awareness of all the things my hair wasn\u2019t: straight, long, flowy, the kind of hair that moved when the wind blew, the kind of hair you see in the movies.<\/p>\n
I am bi-racial and my Spanish mother has thick flowing hair. When I was younger, I always wondered why mine never looked like hers. Even black celebrities had hair that looked \u201cwhite.\u201d All I wanted was for my hair to look like theirs.<\/p>\n
Then, as if by a miracle, as if the universe heard me, I came upon relaxer, the magic formula, the \u201ccreamy crack,\u201d the stuff that made my hair luscious and flowing, that removed every unwanted kink and curl. I was eight years old.<\/p>\n
I remember sitting in my Spanish class with my newly straightened hair, feeling \u201cpretty.\u201d It was a small private Catholic school and I was among three black students who attended there. The girl behind me asked if she could touch my hair. I let her. Then, three other girls came over, because they wanted to touch my hair too. I sat there, surrounded by these white girls touching my hair, feeling noticed, relishing the attention until my Spanish teacher walked in. She saw us, and screamed for the girls to stop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a petting zoo,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fine with me,\u201d I told her, upset she scattered the girls around me.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
It would take me years to understand what she meant by this.<\/p>\n
Later, that summer, my mother took me to a salon to put my hair in braids. When I came home, my neighbor, who was my age, said to me, \u201cNow, you look black.\u201d A thirteen year old me stood there realizing that the way I wore my hair could define my race.<\/p>\n
Growing into adulthood, the way I wore my hair determined whether I looked \u201cprofessional\u201d or not, whether I was \u201cpretty\u201d or not, whether I was wealthy or not. For every job interview and first date, I made sure to straighten my hair, to brush it back, to flatten every curl.<\/p>\n
In the news that year, I watched as critics claimed that Viola Davis\u2019 natural hair at the premiere of the movie, The Help, was \u201cinappropriate\u201d for the red carpet. It made me angry, but not angry enough to do anything about it.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s friend called me one day. I had stayed with her for a couple of months when I was three while my mom traveled overseas for work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am so sorry,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor what,\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you were little,\u201d she told me, \u201cI shaved all your hair off.\u201d<\/p>\n
She told me on the phone that she could not handle my hair, could not handle the amount of it, the curliness, the way it knotted up if it didn\u2019t get tied back. So, she shaved it off. She told me this years later as if she had been keeping this secret from me. She didn\u2019t know that when I got ready in the mornings, sometimes I felt like shaving it off, too. She didn\u2019t know that every morning I set out tubes and tubs of leave-in conditioner, olive oil, hair polish, shea butter, hair detangler, and other mixed concoctions out on the bathroom counter each morning. She didn\u2019t know that when I went to the shampoo aisle, I was led to a separate section near the back labeled, \u201cethnic hair care.\u201d She didn\u2019t know that this had always instilled a sense of shame in me.<\/p>\n
About a year ago, I learned about the \u201cBig Chop,\u201d which is exactly what it sounds like. A hairdresser \u201cchops\u201d all of the relaxed, chemically treated hair, leaving nothing but the natural. My first time witnessing this was when one of my coworkers came to work with a puffed out mini afro on her head. She was a girl who wore weaves and wigs and seeing her natural, I remember the rest of us saying things like, \u201cGood for you\u201d and \u201cI could never pull that off.\u201d I knew, secretly, I wasn\u2019t brave enough to do what she had done, to shave her hair down to its root in an effort to get back to the natural curls.<\/p>\n
About a year after dating my current boyfriend, I curl my relaxed hair, which comes out, not curly, but wavy. It\u2019s the first time he\u2019s seen my hair when it isn\u2019t straight. I\u2019ve kept it straightened for no other reason than that I simply feelmore attractive when it\u2019s straight. My boyfriend is Caucasian, an Irish and Scottish blend with a head full of bright red hair.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love your hair curly,\u201d he says to me and I think, you haven\u2019t even seen curly since this isn\u2019t even my natural curl. No, my natural curl has the kind of kink you can\u2019t stick your fingers through.<\/p>\n
\u201cBetter than when it\u2019s straight?\u201d I ask him.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d he tells me and even goes on to say that he prefers my hair when it\u2019s curly.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019m just upset with myself. How can this guy, who knows nothing of black hair, nothing of the pressures put on little black girls, love my hair more than I do?<\/p>\n
When I go to see my therapist, I ask her, \u201cWhat should I do?\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a real dilemma for me and I\u2019m the kind who needs to be told.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo the kind of thing that would make your children proud.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have any children,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, imagine them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Imagine my children? It\u2019s absurd, really, but I start thinking about it. About how I would want them to see me. Imagine your children, she tells me. So I do.<\/p>\n
On a Friday evening on the west side of Chicago, I imagined them as I walk into an all black hair salon, the first one I\u2019d been to since I was seven. I imagined them as I waited in the black leather seats, flipping through Traditional Homeand as the hairdresser called my name. I imagined them when she asked me if I was sure and when I told her that yes, I was sure. I imagined them as she wrapped a purple cape around my neck, as she grabbed her shears and lifted up a strand of my long shoulder-length hair. I imagined them when she cut it, all of it, down to only about an inch from my head, when she styled it and turned me around in front of the mirror. Little strands of curls, thick shining curls in tightly wound spirals, stuck up from my head. Beauty was not something I had ever associated with my own natural hair, but sitting there, I felt beautiful and I imagined what that would mean to my children. I smiled, a big goofy smile I couldn’t seem to get rid of, even as I rode the train home. I caught glimpses of my new hair in storefront windows and car door reflections and I smiled.<\/p>\n
A few months ago, something really amazing happened to me. As I was walking around downtown Chicago, a homeless black man sat on the corner, shaking a cup in front of the passing people. As I became closer, he did not ask me for change like he had the others. Instead, he simply said, “Thank you.”<\/p>\n
I was confused. I stopped. That day I wore my hair behind a headband, in a bunch of curls going this way and that.<\/p>\n
“Your hair,” he said.<\/p>\n
“My hair?”<\/p>\n
“It’s natural.”<\/p>\n
He knew. Of course, he knew and I smiled, slipping some money into his cup, telling him eagerly that I had finally decided to chop it off. He listened, nodded his head and just before I left, he said, “It’s so nice to see women with their real hair.”<\/p>\n
That’s what he called it, real. My hair. My black hair.<\/p>\n
I walked on, through the crowded city streets, knowing what it meant.<\/p>\n
In third grade, I sat at a blue metal table outside on the blacktop. An older boy at the next table over said to me, \u201cYour hair looks greasy.\u201d I don\u2019t even remember his name, but I remember he was a white kid. \u201cIs it because your name is Mercedes?\u201d he asked me, \u201cDo you [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[51,126,125],"class_list":["post-2806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfictionmemoir","tag-photo","tag-the-coiffure-project","tag-vanessa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2806"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2814,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions\/2814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nMercedes Lucero is a second year MFA student at Northwestern University and has been published in the Chicago Tribune\u2019s Printers Row Journal, Burner Magazine, Whitefish Review,<\/em> and Canvas<\/em> among many others. Her short story “Memories I Cannot Recall” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"