![\"smile-and-nod\"](\"http:\/\/theangryblackwoman.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/icons\/nisishawl.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Some people have said they liked my introduction yesterday.\u00a0 Good!\u00a0 Stay with me now.\u00a0 You love me when I’m angry.<\/p>\n
Or anyway, you should.\u00a0 Especially if you’re white, because the fact that I let you know I am angry, well, that’s me being nice to you.\u00a0 It’s a sign of trust on my part, a measure of the strength of our relationship.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The white woman on the bus this morning.<\/p>\n
She liked my hair.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The white woman on the bus said, “I like your hair,” and I was prepared to leave it at that.\u00a0 I told her thanks and went back to the book I had to turn in a review on.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t enough for her.\u00a0 After a minute she continued on.\u00a0 “I wish my hair was curly like yours.\u00a0 It’s curly, but not that <\/strong>curly.\u00a0 When I was younger,” she gave an embarrassed giggle, “I tried to have an Afro.”<\/p>\n “You’d have to be born black for that to work,” I told her, becoming engrossed in my book again.\u00a0 I didn’t look back up until she got off.\u00a0 Then I rolled my eyes at the black man who had been sitting across the aisle from us.\u00a0 I couldn’t see his whole expression because he had dark glasses covering up his eyes, but I saw his smile.<\/p>\n See, this woman had<\/strong> curly hair.\u00a0 Her<\/strong> hair was curly<\/strong>.\u00a0 It was short, brown, and curling all over her head.<\/p>\n My hair isn’t curly.\u00a0 And don’t you be calling it curly.\u00a0 It was kinky when I had to straighten it to make it look like a white woman’s, and it’s kinky now.<\/p>\n Okay, maybe “kinky” is no longer le mot juste<\/em>.\u00a0 I talked about this some with Nalo Hopkinson a couple of years ago.\u00a0\u00a0Since\u00a0 kinky has come to\u00a0belong 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<\/em>.\u00a0 “Crinky”<\/strong> was the neologism Nalo and I settled on.\u00a0 Sort of a combination of kinky and crinkly.\u00a0 Or maybe we could call our hair “nhappy.”\u00a0 Nappy and happy.<\/p>\n In order to get into the collaborative, playful space where such terms\u00a0arise, though, I would have had to expose this woman to my anger.\u00a0 Expose my anger to her.\u00a0 I just wasn’t up for that.<\/p>\n I\u00a0have read a bit of\u00a0pornography.\u00a0 (No, that’s not a non sequitur<\/em>.\u00a0 Come on, stay with me.\u00a0 Still.)\u00a0 I saypornography rather than erotica because it often includes words made entirely of vowels.<\/p>\n The most unforgettable pornographic text I’ve ever read\u00a0is appended to the end of a novel called Whirlpool<\/em>. \u00a0Whirlpool<\/em> is an anonymously written novel, and the\u00a0fragment following it is without either title\u00a0or author.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 ‘I’ve been cornholed.’”<\/p>\n That statement is the\u00a0essence of smile and nod.<\/p>\nAnd now a word from our sponsor…<\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n