Dead Leaf Hair

Through all my high school years I wrote fanatically in journals. I wrote in tiny writing on both sides of loose notebook paper, often six pages a night. I bound all the pages between covers that clipped together with metal fasteners. When I got about 100 pages, or when I thought a new chapter in my life was starting, I'd begin another notebook. By the time high school, and then my brief year of college (the first time I went) was over, I had thousands upon thousands of angst-filled pages written.

When I visited my mom in Kentucky last July, I grabbed as many of my old journals as I could fit in my carry-on bag to bring back with me to Seattle. When I got back, I was thumbing through the journal I wrote right after high school, during the summer before college. In it was a chunk of the hair I dissolved with a relaxer. You can even see the words "dead leaf" right above the hair clump, which describes exactly how the hair that didn't totally dissolve or fall out of my head felt when it dried. It was so crunchy that I had to cut the rest of my hair off, and was basically left with a narrow fringe of hair at the back of my neck that the relaxer hadn't touched.

How did I manage to dissolve my hair with a relaxer, you ask? Well, it takes a special person to do something like that, I tell you. I had worn locs during 12th grade, but had put them in wrong, so they were little more than pieces of a large mat that I'd cut into strips to make my locs. So I cut those off at the end of 12th grade, and was left with my curly, and still damaged hair (because I'd been bleaching it auburn). Not knowing what to do with it, I fell back into old habits, and decided to relax it.

However, it had been well over a year since I'd relaxed my hair, and I forgot how to do it. This would have been okay, except I didn't realize I'd forgotten how to do it. I thought I knew exactly how to do it. But I was wrong.

I bought my first box (yes, that's right, my first box) of relaxer, opened up the big jar, and put it on my hair. I waited about 20 minutes, rinsed it out, and saw it didn't work. It wasn't until I looked through the box later that I saw the activator bottle I'd neglected to mix in with it. So I bought another box. My reasoning being that the first time didn't do anything at all to my hair, so I could do it all again with no problem.

I was wrong. When I went to rinse out the second relaxer, it gummed up in my hair and wouldn't rinse out. I went through all my bottle of neutralizer shampoo, and had to use some of the half-used bottles my mom had saved through the years as well. And as I finally rinsed away the relaxer, my hair came out too. When I was done, the sink was filled with hair, and the hair left on my head wasn't really even hair anymore.

And being the dutiful journaler I was, when I cut away this hair, I saved some in my journal, to properly record the day. And then I went out and bought myself my first weave.

The story behind the wavy orange hair

As I've been finding old photos, all the stories behind each style come back to me. Every style I tried was an attempt to find the style: A 'do I could maintain, that would make my hair grow, and that I could feel good about wearing. This hair style was one of those stories:

It started out during 10th grade. I had recently gone after my hair with kitchen scissors and cut it short except for five braids I liked to put beads in. I loved the clink of the beads, but if I turned my head too fast, they'd swing around and hit me in the teeth.

I decided that in order to grow my hair, I needed to choose between either coloring it, or relaxing it (not realizing that because my hair is so fragile, neither is an option). Since I'd been relaxing it and that didn't seem to work to get it to grow, I thought maybe coloring it without relaxing might be the key. At the time, I didn't realize that lightening hair was nearly as damaging as relaxing. Looking back on it, I see how unhappy I was with just about everything my hair was. I wanted honey-brown hair, and I wanted it straight. I couldn't imagine wearing my own dark and curly hair (funny how things have changed, because I now can't imagine wearing my hair any other way).

So I lightened my hair with store bought color until it was a honey brown color, and wore it curly that school year (photo on the left). I actually began to enjoy those little curls, and I even started to think that maybe having curly hair wasn't so bad.

That summer I visited my mom in Kentucky. I spent a lot of time hanging out with my grandmother, who lived two houses down from us. I didn't know this at the time, but my African-American grandmother did not like curly hair. She tried to talk me out of the curls. I told her I actually liked them, and my hair was easier to take care of this way. For weeks she tried to talk me out of the curls, but I held firm. I wanted to keep them. They were my curls, and I saw nothing wrong with wearing the hair I was born with (I still wasn't quite there with wearing the hair color I was born with, but this was a big step in the right direction).

Then one day she tried a new approach. She asked me if there was anything about my hair I'd like to change. I said I did wish it was easier to comb. And then she had me. She said she knew how I could keep my curls, but would make it possible for a comb to just glide through them. That sounded heavenly, but I was worried it would take away the curls. And she said to me "You see, hair like yours can never have all the curls taken away no matter what. The only thing that will happen is that they will just get softer and easier to comb." Those were the magic words. I believed her, and I agreed.

My grandmother got a family friend to put the chemicals on my hair. Throughout the process I asked several times if I'd still have my curls, and she said yes. It wasn't until the process was over, and I was standing in the shower running water over my hair that it began to dawn on me what had happened. My hair hung down like a defeated cloth. I tried scrunching in curls as it dried. Nothing. My hair just fell back down. It lay there. The joyful curls were gone, and in their place hung crinkly orange straw.

Soon after, 11th grade started. The stringy hair hung in my face, so I cut the front down to about an inch with kitchen scissors (photo on the right after lots of scrunching. My hair was much lighter than it looks in the photo). Damaged beyond hope, the ends got lighter and lighter. When they approached a platinum color I'd cut them off.

I have since learned many things about my hair. One of them is that our hair is not lay down hair. Combs do not pass easily through spirited coils. That's just a fact. But the rewards for spending the time it takes to gently comb through wet and well conditioned hair is enormous. It is worth every minute of time I spend with the Denman to have the hair I have now. Hair with spirit means that it is happy and healthy. It sure beats limp and broken every time.

How I Escaped the Relaxer

Up until I grew out the chemicals, my only run-in with my natural hair was what I considered my troublesome new growth's waterwaves peering out from my crunchy straight hair, signaling it was time again for a touchup.

At twenty-six, I didn't know what my real hair looked like. My tightly curly hair had been permed since childhood. And the only time I thought I'd experienced it was as a Frankenhair mixture of a Jheri curl over a straightener over my natural curls, giving me the fabled Mushroom Head that grew larger and larger like a swollen sponge over the summer I had it.

After this experience with my hair, and the sinking feeling I got as a young, easily mortified teen when looking at the photos of my giant balloon head, I wasn't too eager to go through that again. I really hated the relaxers and how they made my hair break apart, but I felt that my own hair would erupt as it grew out, exploding open in slow motion frizz until I couldn't get through doorways anymore. Basically, I felt I had no choice. So I spent most of my life looking for wonder products to undo the damage the chemicals did. But the reality is there is nothing but scissors that can take away the fatally damaged hair once the chemicals have been used.

My mom, who is African-American, could grow her permed hair down her back when she was younger. So I thought I just had to find what she had done, and I, too, could have long, straight hair. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember how her mom (who took care of my mom's hair because it was such a procedure to wash and care for it) got it to grow so long. What I didn't realize is that my mom has individually thicker strands of hair that can better withstand the brutal chemicals than mine. I, on the other hand, have spiderweb thin individual strands of hair. So they literally partially dissolved when I put on the chemicals.

The thing that changed it for me was finding the book Good Hair: For Colored Girls Who've Considered Weaves When the Chemicals Became too Ruff by Lonnice Brittenum Bonner. Here was a woman with hair curlier than mine, and she grew out her chemicals (luckily, I didn't notice at the time her mentioning she still used a texturizer in her hair). I figured if she could do it, so could I.

In Good Hair, Bonner cut off all her permed hair and started fresh. Definitely the recommended way to go. But I didn't want to have such short hair. Hair was (is) a big part of my identity, and I didn't want almost no hair. So I chose to grow it out. How hard could it be? I thought cavalierly to myself. I'd been dealing with the chemical hair all along. That was a known quantity. This process would just introduce a new kind of hair in addition to the familiar hair. That didn't seem so bad.

I washed, combed, and set my hair every week in about twenty or so two-strand twists. I'd let them dry, sleep in them overnight, and untwist them in the morning for a headful of spirals the rest of the week. At night I'd pull my hair back in a bun—not too tight—for fear of smashing the spirals.

And this was fine for the first few months.

Then The Mat arrived.

When I combed my hair, the comb halted at my scalp and wouldn't budge. Every week it got thicker and stronger, as if it were calling in reinforcements. It grew ferocious and puffy at the back of my head. When I prodded it back there, it seemed like something had decided to build an insulated nest, especially packed at the top, back of my head. Now it took me three hours to get through my barely shoulder-length hair, and put it in twists. Every week was a painful session to work my way through the mat, slowly, toes clenched from the pain of having to comb out something so tightly tangled, so close to my scalp. What if this was my natural hair? If it was this bad at two inches of new growth, what would six inches bring?

I'd heard that there can be severe breakage where the two textures meet when growing out a relaxer. Maybe this was another consequence of having two extremely different hair types joined? I tried to pull the hair in the back more firmly down into my bun at night to prevent it getting so riled up, and determinedly hoped for the best.

The mat was tenacious, but so was I. And a few months later I noticed a change. My Denman would glide for a brief moment through the hair closest to my scalp, and then halt abruptly as it landed into the mat. That meant the mat was slowly inching it's way down my hair. The new hair coming in above the mat was slippery and glossy. Now I was interested. I began touching it all the time to feel it. I had no idea something so soft and smooth could grow out of my head.

At about nine months, I pulled open my hair, and looked at the hair growing behind my ear. And there I saw it. A curl pattern instead of chaos. An S shape instead of fuzz. I saw my real hair, strong and sure, coming in over the confused noise of the chemical hair.

From that moment on I was hooked. I took a pair of scissors, and cut off the chemical junk hair (saving two pieces to tape into the Good Hair book—see Curlocide for a photo of them).

I loved my new hair. I still had a way to go towards figuring out how to keep if from growing horizontally rather than vertically, but this was my hair, and we were finally a team.

Curlocide

Yes. I know I can be paranoid. Especially when it comes to tightly curly hair. That being said, I was looking at a magazine for African-American hair last night. It had been a while since I looked at one (since I'm happy with my hair and don't want to change it). And I saw something I remembered I kept seeing over and over again when I used to read them for real (and in the adds supporting them): Our curls are treated as if they must be "cured" rather than embraced.

Actually, there was almost no African-American hair in there. These magazines would be more appropriately called "Hair of Any Other Race (Provided It Is Not As Curly), Yak Hair, Nylon Hair, and Lots of Chemicals—Anything Other than the Curls You Are Born With".

I understand not all magazines are this way. Maybe I have a knack for picking up the ones that are. And I understand dissatisfaction is big business...you don't make any money if we are happy with what we are born with. I guess it's a huge issue with me because I used to feel exactly that way about my hair. I spent my teenage and early adult years ashamed to have the hair I did. I was blind to the beauty and joy in each of my curls. I couldn't appreciate how our hair is unique, fierce, proud and stubborn.

Why did I want to break my curls' spirit? Why did I settle for broken strands of hair that were a chemically induced imitation of someone else's hair, rather than wear the glossy spirals I was born with? Feeling shame for my natural curls was what I was taught in childhood, since my hair had been straightened ever since I remember. My African-American grandmother hated curls, so she painstakingly straightened my hair and set my straight hair every night. I guess there seemed to be something shameful in them to her, like a dirty secret growing from our scalps.

So I guess I felt afraid of the hair that might erupt from my head without chemicals. The message I got was that it must be some terrible stuff I grew naturally, otherwise, why would we use lye-like chemicals to "treat" it? Almost as if we were using the most powerful disinfectant possible to kill them. Like a virus. And all the magazines I read seemed to nod their heads in agreement, and sidle up to me to tell me my curls were unacceptable.

The photo above is the hair I saved when I cut off all my chemicals, after finally catching a glimpse of what my real hair looked like for the first time in my life. I saved the two last pieces I chopped off, and taped them into a book. A dozen years later, even protected within the pages, that processed hair still breaks apart. I used to think this was the only way I could wear my hair.

The photo to the left is of my hair now. It's the same hair, but after I learned to love it, to celebrate it, and above all , let it be what it needed to be. I feel like I cut off a stranger, and grew back a friend.

Our curls are perfect just as they are. I believe that if there were more images out there of how beautiful our natural curls are, the more we will see them as a wonderful, affirming option for us. And less little girls like me will think destroying their curls are the only option for them.

Every year that I used chemicals, my hair continued to grow back in good faith, giving me yet another chance to do right by it. It took decades, but I finally stopped hurting it and began to take care of it. I came to treasure my curls for the curls they are. I know my hair has forgiven me for what I did to it. It will take me a while longer to forgive myself.