Some people have said they liked my introduction yesterday. Good! Stay with me now. You love me when I’m angry.
Or anyway, you should. Especially if you’re white, because the fact that I let you know I am angry, well, that’s me being nice to you. It’s a sign of trust on my part, a measure of the strength of our relationship. If I didn’t like you, if I didn’t feel comfortable letting you know I was angry, I would treat you the way I did the woman on the bus this morning.
The white woman on the bus this morning.
She liked my hair. I wore my hair down this morning, so I looked much like I do in my avatar on this site, minus the doll, the scarf, and the waterfall. The white woman on the bus said, “I like your hair,” and I was prepared to leave it at that. I told her thanks and went back to the book I had to turn in a review on.
That wasn’t enough for her. After a minute she continued on. “I wish my hair was curly like yours. It’s curly, but not that curly. When I was younger,” she gave an embarrassed giggle, “I tried to have an Afro.”
“You’d have to be born black for that to work,” I told her, becoming engrossed in my book again. I didn’t look back up until she got off. Then I rolled my eyes at the black man who had been sitting across the aisle from us. I couldn’t see his whole expression because he had dark glasses covering up his eyes, but I saw his smile.
See, this woman had curly hair. Her hair was curly. It was short, brown, and curling all over her head.
My hair isn’t curly. And don’t you be calling it curly. It was kinky when I had to straighten it to make it look like a white woman’s, and it’s kinky now.
Okay, maybe “kinky” is no longer le mot juste. I talked about this some with Nalo Hopkinson a couple of years ago. Since kinky has come to belong in a brand new bag, maybe it’s time to create a new word to describe the kind of hair I and my two sisters have, and my Daddy, cousins, uncles, aunts, et al. “Crinky” was the neologism Nalo and I settled on. Sort of a combination of kinky and crinkly. Or maybe we could call our hair “nhappy.” Nappy and happy.
In order to get into the collaborative, playful space where such terms arise, though, I would have had to expose this woman to my anger. Expose my anger to her. I just wasn’t up for that.
I have read a bit of pornography. (No, that’s not a non sequitur. Come on, stay with me. Still.) I saypornography rather than erotica because it often includes words made entirely of vowels.
The most unforgettable pornographic text I’ve ever read is appended to the end of a novel called Whirlpool. Whirlpool is an anonymously written novel, and the fragment following it is without either title or author. At one point in the fragment’s episodic paragraphs the heroine’s fifteen-year-old sidekick is asked by a debauched older man in a silken kimono if she’s a virgin: “‘If you like,’ she replied coldly. ‘I’ve been cornholed.’”
That statement is the essence of smile and nod.
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Effing awesome. I hope we hear from you often.
I like the point about the Afro. Some white people may indeed be able to have hair in a formation similar to an Afro, but as they’re white, it’s not an Afro. Rock on.
It’s a testament towards who gets to define context and meaning “for the record” that directed, incident-focused anger from people who belong to less privileged groups is described by the privileged as (A) out of proportion and unjustified (B) overly aggressive and threatening. Even when the person getting upset is simply asking for courtesy.
It is impossible to be truly close with someone who has privilege and refuses to be aware of it. Because facts won’t be accepted and true feelings will be rebuffed instead of engaged with caring and respect. The nod and smile is social survival in the face of another moment of unasked-for ignorance and pain, not friendship at all.
Wow. My first thought when reading this was that I don’t think I’ve ever heard a white woman say she wanted an Afro before. I come from a very curly-haired family, with several family members in Jewfro territory (using the naturallycurly.com definitions, members of my immediate family range from 3A to 4A, and there are a few Type 2 outliers in my extended family), and I constantly remember people coming home from the beauty parlor and asking, worriedly, “Does it look too much like black hair?” Whether it was a natural curly style that seemed too much like a black woman’s natural hair, or a straightened style that seemed too much like the relaxed/straightened style that a black woman might have, looking “like black hair” was definitely something to be avoided. (I also remember one very pale family member once trying on a bathing suit and deciding she didn’t like the way that the bra part of it was constructed, because it made her breasts look black. I never did figure out what that actually meant.)
I remember once, when I was about 3 or 4, we were living in the Bronx, so a lot of the other kids I saw at the playground or around the neighborhood were black. I once told my mother that I wanted her to style my hair the way I’d seen some of those black girls wearing their hair — a bunch of braids, like five or six of them, all over the head, with plastic animal barrettes at the end of each braid. My mother said no, because that was a hairstyle for black girls. She was fine with me having black friends, and she thought it was fabulous when I asked for a black doll at about that age, and books or TV shows with black characters were great, but a black hair style was simply Not OK.
(I also remember one very pale family member once trying on a bathing suit and deciding she didn’t like the way that the bra part of it was constructed, because it made her breasts look black. I never did figure out what that actually meant.)
????????????????
I really appreciated this post, btw. I haven’t had much to say, but I’m reading and enjoying.
I understood what she didn’t like about that swimsuit — it had a high neck and tight shelf bra, which meant that it pretty much squished her E cups into one enormous spandex-covered monoboob — but I’m not quite sure why that translated into “black.”
Sadly, after my initial WTF resided, I realized that if you said she thought a piece of clothing made her ass look black, I would have understood immediately what she meant by that. I just kind of tricked myself into thinking that was an unusual thing to say because I’d never heard it with breasts before. So, yeah …
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I once told my mother that I wanted her to style my hair the way I’d seen some of those black girls wearing their hair — a bunch of braids, like five or six of them, all over the head, with plastic animal barrettes at the end of each braid.
I went to nursery school and kindergarden in the early 1970s in downtown Detroit, and I remember that hairstyle, too – except that instead of barrettes, big glass beads were woven in. It was so cute, and I was envious as well. Never asked my mom to style my hair that way, though. Mine’s very obviously a different texture, and it wouldn’t have worked.