“We’re not going to be living here long,” my mother said as she unpacked our few things. Our new home was her old bedroom, a small museum of 1960s artifacts. I found a space in between her Afro-pick sculpture and STUDENTS FOR JFK button to lay my book bag down.
Five minutes into unpacking, Nana called up through the vent.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “Come down here and watch television with me!”
All that worrying about oven-dried hair. I forgot to think about how much boring television I’d be forced to watch at Nana’s. Well, not really watching television, more like talking to television. Whenever one of Nana’s favorite shows was on, she’d yell at the screen, her commentary drowning out the program.
If the news was on and there was a report of a mugging but no police sketch of the robber, she’d yell, “You know he’s white, because if he was black they’d have showed it! That’s just how white people do black people.” She’d sigh, waves of bitterness and anger filling the small living room. I hated watching the news with her. I was certain she believed that, being part white, I was also a bad person.
Game shows were a bit more fun. If Nana was watching a game show, her rules dictated that we drop everything to cheer for brown contestants. One night, I got out of cleaning dinner plates because an Indian man was on Jeopardy!
“Go on, brother, phrase it like a question!” my grandmother yelled.
“Nana, he’s Indian, not black,” I whispered to her.
“He’s not what?” she replied, angry that I had taken her attention away from the Jeopardy! board. “He is a black man. See, they always put black people in the last space.” She pointed to the third Jeopardy! podium.
I conceded and cheered Mr. Bhatia, hoping he would go on a winning streak so I’d never have to clear dishes again.
The only programs that required absolute silence were her “stories,” the soap operas. From the time on the clock, I knew that was what my grandmother was watching when she called up through the vent. I would have chewed off my right foot not to have to go down to the living room. Watching soap operas was torture: The people talked too slowly, no one laughed, and none of the Young and the Restless characters had their own cereal.
As my mother started down the stairs, I told her I had to go to the bathroom but promised I’d be right down. I sat on the toilet trying to figure out how long I could stretch out my freedom before I got in trouble. Nana answered me by calling up through the vent again. “What are you getting into up there?”
I pulled up my pants and headed downstairs.
At the top of the stairs, I looked down at the living room. Nana was humming “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” while trying to push herself up from the sofa. With one forceful shove, she finally rose and stumbled to the china cabinet that housed her army of orange medicine bottles. She stood in front of her cabinet reading the pill names and adding commentary. “No, that one is for my arthureye-tis; I don’t take that one until dinnertime.”
She was blocking my path to the sofa. I knew I would be stuck on the steps until she moved, so I offered up my assistance.
“Do you need me to get something for you, Grandmom?”
Her eyes locked on mine. “Vertigo!” she screeched back at me. She rocked slightly before throwing her upper body into the banister pole. “Vertigo!” she screamed again, and gripped the pole like it was the only stable tree in a hurricane.
My mother jumped up to help her. That wasn’t enough.
“Vertigo, John!” Nana screamed in her Talking to Pop-Pop Voice. My grandfather slowly rose from his seat, and the three of us gently guided her back to her permanently indented cushion on the sofa.
Until I was eleven, because of my grandmother, I thought Vertigo! was what you shouted whenever you were struck with sudden pain. When I experienced my first menstrual cramps, my mother yelled to me to hurry up and get ready for school. I called back, “Vertigo!” and got in trouble because she thought I was mocking her mother.
After my grandmother’s vertigo subsided, she picked up her “lottery book,” a small reporter’s notepad in which she had recorded every Pennsylvania daily lottery number since 1949. She was certain there was a pattern to the lottery numbers, and if she could just crack the code she’d be a millionaire. While she was flipping through her pages, a preview for the news came on. I got nervous—I wasn’t ready to be hated. I asked my mother if I could go outside.
“Yes.”
Yes? That’s when I knew things had changed and Nana’s house was truly our new home. Usually, the farthest outside I was allowed to go was sitting on the enclosed front porch with Nana as she surveyed the block, talking about how downhill it had all gone.
Before my mother could change her mind, I bolted toward the door like I was making a prison break. I ran down the street toward three girls jumping rope, only with two ropes instead of one.
Two ropes should be just as easy, I tried to convince myself, watching the ropes swing like manic egg beaters.
“Big Mac, Filet of Fish,” the girls chanted in unison. They all had braids like mine, except theirs lay flat on their scalps, as if they were glued down. Each tiny braid ended with beads and aluminum foil. When a girl jumped into the ropes, the sun danced off the aluminum and made her head seem to be surrounded by a universe of tiny stars.
I immediately wanted to be a Star Girl, to look like a planetarium when I jumped. I got up the nerve to ask if I could play.
“You got ends,” one girl said, handing me the ends of the wiry clothesline. I would have preferred to start off jumping, bobbing my head as I bounced, practicing for my day as a Star Girl, but since I was the new arrival, I had to start at the bottom. I started spinning my end of the ropes like I’d observed them doing. The girl who had handed them off to me finessed her way into the rope and started jumping. The fast-food chant began—“Big Mac, Filet”—and stopped abruptly when she missed her footing.
“Dag, Kim, you only got to Filet!” my co-turner called out.
Kim stomped out of the rope. “That’s ’cause she’s double-handed!” Kim replied. I knew the she was me. Everyone looked at me. Confused, I looked at my hands.
Double-handed? Did they mean double-jointed? I knew all about that; my next-door neighbor could bend her pinky back until it touched her thumb. If they didn’t mean double-jointed, what did they mean? Should I show them that I wasn’t double-jointed? Should I tell them they were making the game more confusing than it needs to be by using two ropes and a McDonald’s commercial as a counting system?
From the looks on their faces, I was the oddball, so I refrained from offering my jump-rope suggestions. I’d wait until they accepted me to try to change them.
“Here, try again,” Kim said. I started turning the ropes. Keisha, a tall bronze girl shaped like a pogo stick with tiny breasts, entered. She held one arm protectively over her breast buds as she jumped. I studied her feet as I turned. She made it all the way to “Apple Pie.”
“Have you ever jumped double Dutch before?” Keisha asked, snatching the ends from my hands.
Everyone was annoyed with me, but it was finally my chance to jump. This is my chance to prove myself. God, please let me make it past Filet.
The ropes slapped the ground, awaiting my entrance. I held my breath and leapt in with all the grace of a drunk jumping off a cliff. My arms flailed at my sides. My legs landed heavy on the rope as if I had cement in my shoes.
“Big,” all three girls called out unenthusiastically.
I didn’t even make it to “Mac.” I couldn’t even get a whole burger.
“Let her get a freebie,” Kim said, enlightening me on two double-Dutch rules. One: She was in charge because it was her rope. Two: If a jumper can’t get past the first word of the McDonald’s jingle, it must be everyone involved’s fault (no one is that un-talented); thus the jumper gets a second try.
The ropes spun again. This time I tried to imitate how the other girls looked when they jumped in. I scow
led at the ropes like they had killed my firstborn. I put my arm protectively across breasts I didn’t have yet. I swayed my body back and forth to the timing of the rope turns, timing out my entrance in my head. Jump now! No, wait. Jump now! No, wait! Just do it!
I jumped in, and a sharp pain flew across my forehead. I fell backward to the cement, heard a popping sound, and saw a barrette launch into the street and hit the tire of the G bus, which had stopped to discharge passengers.
I tried to get up, but when I moved it felt like someone was pulling a zipper through my hair. When I could think past the pain, I deduced that one of the ropes had smacked me in the forehead, traveled along my head, and got tangled in my braid. My curly hair tends to spiral around anything close to it, and with the barrette no longer holding the ends of the braid together, the individual strands were coiling around the rope.
Butt cheeks still on the cement, I tried to yank my head out of the rope. The girls, stunned stiff with looks of pity until this point, dropped the ends and rushed to unravel me from the clothesline.
“No, Kim, you untwist and I’ll hold her head straight!” Nikki yelled, cradling my head in her hands. “Twist the rope to the left, then to the right! Go with the braid!” she yelled.
I looked up at her helplessly as she commandeered the double-Dutch surgery. I was one notch above a shivering dog floating down an icy stream yelping at the amateur rescue squad. Perhaps I could have been the feel-good story on the evening news: Oreo kid moves to hood, gets curly Oreo hair caught in rope, and is freed by local girls. They’d interview Kim.
“No, I don’t consider myself a hero,” she’d say, explaining that anyone in her situation would have done the same thing.
While looking up at them unraveling me, I wondered how the Star-haired girls hadn’t met this same fate. It must be the flat braids, I reasoned. If your braids fling around loose, you were bound to get ensnared by clothesline.
“You got it!” Nikki yelled. “She’s free!”
“Ick, there’s a bunch of hair on my rope!” Kim said.
Nikki released my head. “Where are you from?” she asked, her tone indicating that she was asking a grander question, like “Where is your type of person manufactured?” as opposed to which house I lived in. Even though I knew this, I turned my sore head slightly and pointed to my grandmother’s house, where I saw my mother coming onto the porch. I used her as an excuse to bow out gracefully.
“Well, it was nice meeting you-all. I’m going to go home now,” I said, then remembered my manners, “And thank you all for untangling me.”
They said nothing.
I walked toward my mother and left the Star Girls confused, holding a very hairy jump rope.
“You made some new friends?” my mother asked as I approached, taking my Walkman headphones off her ears.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“What happened to your hair?” my mother asked suspiciously. She turned my head to the side and fingered my fresh forehead welt. “What happened to your face? Where’s your barrette? Which one stole it? Oh, God, I have to get you out of this neighbor—”
“Nobody hit me,” I said, trying to calm her down. “My hair got caught in the rope. I need tinfoil-star hair like those girls to jump double Dutch.”
My mother wrinkled her brow and asked me to repeat myself. I pointed to the girls I’d just been playing with. She cocked her head, trying to analyze if I was lying. She accepted my answer, then looked over at the girls.
My mother exploded into laughter. “Those are called cornrows, darling,” she explained.
“Can you do my hair like that tomorrow?”
“I don’t know how.”
“But didn’t you grow up on this block?”
“No one in our family knows how to cornrow, honey,” my mother said, and this time, I wrinkled my brow at her. How could she have grown up on this block and not know how to cornrow? Shouldn’t everyone on this block know how to do that? Did she not know how to jump double Dutch either? Is that why she had to marry a white man?
My mother handed me the Walkman. I came up with a new strategy: If I couldn’t get cornrows, I would use my radio technology to gain access to friends. The Walkman had just hit the marketplace, and no one else I knew had one. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with a girl with a Walkman?
I excused myself from the steps and ran back over to the three girls, Walkman on, bobbing my head slowly to “Up Where We Belong.”
My plan started working. “Can I listen?” Kim asked, dropping her spinning clothesline, more interested in what was on my head. I put the headphones over her ears.
Kim listened for a few seconds and then snatched the headphones off and held them away from her body like they were transmitting a satanic broadcast. “Who is this?” she asked, my earphones dangling from her fingertips.
“Joe Cocker,” I replied. I remembered the singer’s name because the boys in my class would always say his last name, point to their crotches, and break out into laughter.
“Keisha, listen to this,” she said, putting my headphones on Keisha’s ears. Keisha recoiled as Kim did. She howled, clutched her stomach, and gasped for air. Kim then repeated the scene with Nikki, who topped Keisha’s laugh by jolting her body like thousands of tiny invisible hands were tickling her.
“Why are you listening to this white station? You should be listening to Power Ninety-nine,” Kim said, putting the headphones back on and adjusting the radio dial a few notches. She listened to some music for a few seconds and then handed the Walkman back to me.
“This music is better,” she said, putting the headphones back on my ears.
All three girls looked at me to see if I approved. I did.
“I like this,” I said, not really having enough time to decide if that was true. As the Star Girls looked on, I smiled and tapped my foot, hoping I could catch the beat.
Doo-Doo Head
African-American women each spend two to three times more on hair care and beauty than women of other races, totaling $1.16 billion annually.
—Data from the Hunter-Miller Group, a market research firm
Living in an all-black neighborhood, I soon learned the importance of hair and found that most black people categorized mine as good. My mother had many descriptive names for my hair, but good was not even close to being one of them.
From the time my hair started sprouting, my mother would style my hair the same way every day. She’d sit me between her legs, part my hair down the middle (which took about half an hour in itself), and put each half of my hair into a ponytail holder. She’d then braid both ponytails and hold the end of the finished braid with her thumb and forefinger while opening a plastic barrette with her teeth. Finally, she’d snap the barrette on the end and flatten any flyaway strands with Luster’s Pink Lotion.
Those braids would last from two to three hours. On other kids, braids were the cactus version of hairstyles: very little maintenance and they still looked good. My hair expands like a balloon if there is any humidity. If the kid sitting next to me spills his juice box—poof—the liquid on the floor causes my hair to enlarge. Every single day I’d leave the house with two braids and two barrettes and sometime between the Pledge of Allegiance and the first bathroom break one of my barrettes would pop off, unable to sustain my swelling, expanding hair.
The first time my barrette flew off, Sister Mary let me look for it. The second time, she tolerated the boys’ laughter as they ducked to avoid my airborne barrette. The third time—when my plastic barrette flipped behind the radiator and melted, making the room smell so bad we had to evacuate and have class in the church—she sent a letter home with me, suggesting a safer hairstyle.
After the note, my frugal mother tried to cut my hair according to a do-it-yourself book she borrowed from the library. Pink faces, not much lighter than mine, stared up from the pages. She sectioned off and started chopping into my hair with craft scissors, brushing back beads of sweat and taking deep
breaths.
“We have to find a Russian Jew!” she’d scream in frustration, throwing the scissors down. Apparently, one of her coworkers told her that Jewish people, especially ones from Russia, have a grade of hair like mine.
Finally, after hours of parting and cutting, being unable to find a salon in the yellow pages with a “We specialize in Russian-Jewish hair!” ad, she surveyed my head and sighed. “I guess this is all right.”
It was not all right. I looked as if she’d bent me over the sink, thrown my hair into the garbage disposal, and powered it on. Without my Catholic school uniform, I looked homeless. I had an AfroCurlMushroom; it was shaped like a chef ’s hat, with random pieces very blunt cut and some long pieces in the back.
After sleeping on it, my mother decided to keep me home from school the next day and call in some hair troops. “They’ll arrest me if I send you out looking like that,” she said. She wasn’t far off. (Many years later my brother’s wife told me that her white mother would try to style her hair using a thin-tooth comb made for fine hair. Desiree would squeal like a pig as the comb snagged its way down her tight curls. The neighbors, hearing Desiree’s screams, assumed that her white mother was abusing her and called the authorities. Several combs later, Social Services showed up on the doorstep. They wrote it up as just another case of white mother, black child, and let Desiree remain in her custody.)
Luckily, no one called the cops when my mother Grace Jones’d my hair, but no one, even salons in the best part of the city, could offer a solution to fix it either. Even after it grew back in, when she took me around from hairdresser to hairdresser, no one wanted to touch my hair. Instead, they offered suggestions.
“Take her to the Puerto Rican neighborhood, they have crazy hair like hers,” the local hairdresser said.
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