There's some miracle, and folklore in the history of Sarah Breedlove’s rise to wealth and fame. A daughter of a former slave, she moved to St. Louis to become a washerwoman in the late 1880s and, to her distress, began to lose her hair from a scalp condition called alopecia. One night she dreamed a “big African man” spoke to her of a secret remedy, a scalp conditioner that would make her hair grow again. Or so the story goes. There are competing versions, including one in which a pharmacist came to her aid and another in which she stole the formula from a competitor. Whatever happened, Breedlove became America’s first black millionaire, an entrepreneur who created a new persona, Madam C.J. Walker, and a hair product called Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower that changed the lives of American black women forever.
The Walker Company, run by the Madam’s daughter A’Lelia Walker and a series of descendants, sold a line of hair and cosmetic products through an army of beauty agents, black women who opened and ran Walker Company hair salons. They used the Walker products to heal scalp ailments, promote healthy hair and, famously, to straighten kinked hair. (Cruder, less successful methods had been used for years.) The results were a sensation. During the Depression, Walker put women to work—as many as 1,300, according to her contemporary W.E.B. Du Bois—making their customers feel beautiful.
In post-emancipation America, black women found in the Walker Company an opportunity for reinvention. Reinvention, of course, prompted attacks from writers and thinkers who saw, and who continue to see, hair straightening as a slow, often painful rejection of an African heritage. Natural black hair is usually “nappy,” coarse and tightly coiled. Straightened through chemicals, lengthened through weaves, colored or even left natural, black hair has moved from a statement of fashion to one of politics, economics or history. In its changeable, adaptable state, hair becomes a reflection of identity and a site of debate.
Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories (Pocket Books, 2001) is like a microphone trained to all sides of the argument. Edited by art historian Juliette Harris and former Essence senior editor Pamela Johnson, ’82, the anthology (of reprinted and original material) gives us a cacophony, heated and comic, irreverent and solemn. It is history and theory and memoir; poem, joke book, pictorial. As varied as America’s black hairscape, Tenderheaded won’t lie flat, is unruly, kinked up, knotted, coiled, fascinating.
Harvard African-American studies chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. sounds a lyrical note recalling intimate moments in his family’s kitchen: “Slowly, steadily, with deftness and grace, Mama’s hands would transform a round mound of Odetta kink into a darkened swamp of everglades.” Meg Hanson Scales, a New York City-based writer, delivers a knockout essay on the notion of a tenderhead, one who cries during the pulling, tugging, hot-comb cauterization of the straightening process. “It can go dominatrix in a heartbeat—you in a kitchen chair, and she standing, imperious, brandishing a plastic comb in striking zone from you, freshly washed and trapped.”
Scales makes the point that black women have trained themselves away from the role of tenderhead to an unnatural standard of toughness. It’s a cautionary message, one reinforced by cultural critic bell hooks, ’73: “Individual preferences (whether rooted in self-hate or not) cannot negate the reality that our collective obsession with hair straightening reflects the psychology of oppression and the impact of racist colonization.” That’s a common sentiment in the collection, a hair-politics of emancipation in which going natural constitutes a kind of deliverance. We hear from Alice Walker that “Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain,” from physician Denise L. Davis on “Post-Traumatic Tress Syndrome” and from many others. The messages are largely the same: as women listen to the demands of fashion, of men who insist on wavy, blow-in-the-wind locks, of employers who dangle promotion in front of those who fulfill their notion of respectability, women’s hair and their inner lives lie dormant, unable to grow.
At times, the insistence on linking hair to liberation feels pious and inflexible. It echoes a message delivered by the black consciousness movement of the ’60s, embodied by Angela Davis (who contributes an excellent essay on “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia”) and her planet-sized ’fro. Except now the object seems spiritual as much as political: straight hair is an image of conformity in a racist society; going natural connects you to a more fundamental, spiritually sound community.
The editors of Tenderheaded, however, remind us that 70 percent of American black women straighten their hair and that there are as many ideological communities and points of view as there are hairstyles. The most irreverent moments in the collection provide a contrast to the political message of hooks and others.
For instance, former Essence beauty editor Jenyne Raines writes, “Relaxed hair has evolved past the imitation of the white girl. It represents a lifelong bond and ritual. . . . Mom puts the comb on the stove, breaks out the Sulfur 8, and pulls out the high chair; it becomes mother-daughter time.” She celebrates “All-Time Top Hair Divas” from Josephine Baker to Lil’ Kim, who “rocks a wig with sassy aplomb, be it brassy Mae West blond or a lavender china chop.” Dekar Lawson, a Harlem hairdresser, tells journalist Pamela Johnson that “Black women have got it all over [white women]. There’s nothing they can’t do: wear it straight like them, wear it nappy, pin it up, roller set it, achieve all these different textures.”
Then there is the reportage from more intimate cultural corners. Cherilyn Wright trolls through the sex lives of her friends with expensive, elaborate perms and weaves, finding out that “Black men do not expect to have their hands in our hair when we make love.” Her friend Arlene relates her sex strategies: “I always keep my eyes open to make sure that my partner isn’t coming for my head. I never let my head get in the way of the action.” The essay is a voyeuristic thrill, told in a roiling vernacular, not the PhD-speak of some other contributors.
The success of Tenderheaded lies in such juxtapositions. From the history of Madam Walker to anecdotes about slavery-era hair care (conditioner made from wild apple leaves and chicken fat) to an examination of hip-hop’s hair message, Tenderheaded cobbles together a wealth of information and anecdote, creative and wild, contentious and funny. The book is a heterogeneous mix, sensitive to political and apolitical points of view, strengthened by its variety.
Taylor Antrim, ’96, is a writer based in San Francisco.
