This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  I maybe believe in psychics. I admit that. I believe some people have the ability to sense things in a clearer way than most. I believe that we all have a sense of intuition but some of us have an innate capacity to see something that has yet to happen. If that ability is so strong that you can actually charge people for it, I’m cool. Mom says that her mother was psychic. That if MaDear (that’s what my family calls my grandmother, ya know, like those Tyler Perry movies) said something would happen, it always did. Mom also says that when she was a little girl she found herself to be psychic as well. She said she would dream about a family in Africa that was just like hers in Georgia and that the dream felt like a memory, not a dream. But this scared her, so she prayed for God to take the power away from her and, according to Mom, He did. I just called Mom a few minutes ago to confirm all of this, and she says she doesn’t remember asking for God to take the power away. And that she would never say that she or her mother was psychic for sure. I still believe we are an intuitive family but that this intuition is just part of being a woman. Women get to give birth, and they get to know you’re going to screw up your life if you get a neck tattoo. Maybe being psychic runs in my family. More likely, thinking that you’re much more special and talented than anyone else runs in my family.

  Along the same suspicious lines, Tola very well could’ve told me what she thought I wanted to hear. I was a kid, after all. If she could really read those shells, why didn’t they tell her how much I hated her and Dad? Where were those shells when I had to share my room and bed with Dad’s mistress who was pretending to be just his cousin? Was it the shells that told Tola I was unhappy and suffering in that apartment with them? She more likely had some compassion for me and decided to tell me that I’d be rich and famous so that I’d feel better. (I am not saying this was a terrible thing, but it doesn’t make Tola psychic.) If she was really psychic, she should’ve told me to wear underwear on the day in seventh grade when I broke my ankle and had to get a cast put on my foot while trying to cover my vag with a notebook. Thanks a lot, Tola! The fact that she eventually was proven right about my being famous means nothing. It could just be a coincidence.

  5

  #BlackGirlMagic

  Gabby SidiBae

  @GabbySidibe

  I need to make friends with a cool girl in my building who wouldn’t mind coming over to help me take my weave out. #goals

  6:44 PM—Mar 21 2015

  I THINK I LIKE THE IDEA of psychics because I’m often bored with day-to-day things. It’s more fun to fantasize about what will or should happen. My life is way better in my head. I can do anything up there. For instance, I have a recurring and very real fantasy about shaving my head. In my fantasy, I’m standing in a beautifully lit bedroom with French windows. I’m wearing pink silk pajamas, like what TLC wore in the “Creep” video. I’m staring into the distance. Flower petals are floating onto my face, and a soft wind is caressing my pj’s. An electric razor floats through the room into my hands. I slowly buzz away my hair, line by line, until it’s all gone. Then I smile. I’m finally happy.

  I’m always working on a movie or TV show, which means that most of the year what I look like is in the hands of more people than I can count. If I want to cut my hair, I can’t do it without discussing it first with four producers, a show runner, and the head of the hair department. I have to ask permission, and then there has to be a meeting. I spend seven months of every year wearing a blonde wig while filming each season of the show Empire. It’s exactly like when I was fourteen and Mom said I couldn’t get a nose ring. Except Empire pays me more than Mom, so I’m more inclined to do what they say. (I still slam my bedroom door and silently mutter, “I hate it here!” under my breath.)

  But I’m on vacation now, so my hair is my own again! Right now it’s in long extensions that are twisted into braids. It’s called a Senegalese twist. The twists are a medium brown with supposedly honey brown highlights. Ya know what? The highlights are actually just straight-up blonde, and I need to admit that to myself. This is not the color I wanted. I wanted black hair to match my own natural color. I wanted something subtle, because I’m not the kind of person who takes risks with my appearance. My whole life has been a struggle to blend in, and colored hair feels like drawing a target around my face. So how did I end up blonde?

  When I went down to Thirty-fourth Street to the weave store to buy my hair (Yes! I go to the store to buy hair. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen Good Hair), the fast-talking saleswoman suggested I go with lighter colors. She seemed much more confident than I felt, and I was feeling less confident and increasingly uncomfortable by the minute because people were starting to notice me. This wasn’t a great hair day for me. The night before I’d cut out my weave, so I was in the hair shop wearing a wig, a black Yankees cap, and sunglasses. I’d meant to be sort of incognito, but one of the salesclerks had already asked if I’d take a picture with the employees, and a customer had asked if I was “the famous Gabrielle Swordbee.” I wanted to get the hell out of there. I was too uncomfortable to think clearly about highlights, so I just said yes to the saleswoman’s confident assertion that my braids should be brown and blonde. Damn you, Confident Saleswoman!

  Now I’m back in my apartment. It’s 1:30 a.m. on Friday night (or Saturday morning?), and I’ve been online all day scrambling to order hair in hopes that I can get my twist restyled in black instead of brown/blonde because fifteen people have already made fun of my hair on Instagram. I got the blonde hair braids installed because I was trying to convince myself to try something new. Be fun! Live a little! That blonde hair I have to wear seven months of the year could be me for real! (?) I thought I’d stop worrying about it once it was done. I should’ve known better than to venture out of my black-to-dark-brown comfort zone. So very disappointing.

  I’m not sure why I care so much about those fifteen (and climbing) people and what they have to say about my hair. To be fair, they also hate my dress, but that doesn’t make me feel as bad. I’m used to them hating my clothes. But my hair? NO! Why has God forsaken me this way? The thing is, I’ve conditioned myself to carry a lot of my confidence in my hair. My self-confidence is part hair flips and part tress twirls around my finger. That’s how I flirt. It’s how Momma makes her money. Clothes I haven’t figured out. I’m never sure what I should wear to a fancy event. But hair? I always know exactly what I want my hair to look like: down and flowing with bangs to frame my face. I never wear my hair up. Never! There have been a few attempts. I’ve had stylists comb my hair into high ponytails, but as soon as I walk out the door, I pull out the ponytails and apologize to the stylists, saying, “I’m sorry! I just can’t. Executive decision.” I want to wear a high bun one day, but what I want has nothing to do with what I’m comfortable with. A lot of thought has gone into this, which is why I like to think I’ve figured out my hair. So when someone attacks it, I’m hurt.

  When I was a child, hair was my mom’s deal. I had no control over it. On weekends she’d make me put two cushions from the couch on the floor in front of her as she sat on the couch on the remaining cushion. She’d have me sit on those cushions on the floor in between her legs, and she’d braid my hair while she watched all the soap operas she’d recorded during the week.

  Getting my hair braided was torture. Sitting Indian-style for hours made my fat little legs fall asleep. I’d twist and turn and fall off the cushions just so my mom would be forced to stop combing, pulling, and braiding long enough to let me stand up and sit down again in a different position. In my impatience, I’d reach my little hand up to feel how much hair was left to be braided, which would knock my hair out of place, which would encourage my mom to smack my hand with the comb and tell me to stop it and accept my fate.

  There were reprieves. My mom would pause for ten minutes every hour to smoke a cigarette, and I’d get to hop up and down to wake up my legs. When she’d finish her smoke break, we’d both go to pee, and then she’d tell me to stop crying and get back down
on the cushions so she could finish.

  “How many more,” I’d scream through tears and puffy eyes.

  “A hundred! Sit down!” my mom would say.

  I’d sit back down and make sour faces and wish I’d been born a boy. Sometimes it would take my mom two days to braid my hair, which proves she was taking it easy on me. These days it takes a professional hairstylist about five hours to do the job, and I have a grown-up-size head. I bet if I hadn’t complained as much as I did and hadn’t driven my mom to need a smoke every hour, she could’ve finished my kid-size head in about four hours. Maybe even three!

  Daycare Gabby Yes, there are colored palm trees all over my outfit! You don’t know anything about fashion! Though you can’t see them in this photo, my socks also have palm trees on them. I’d like credit for that, please and thank you. Also, check out that nose again! I STILL can’t even! So cute!

  Courtesy of Gabourey Sidibe

  I have to admit something: I was definitely overreacting back then. Did it hurt? Totally. It sucked. (It doesn’t hurt anymore because my scalp is now dead with no more life or feeling.) I was a dramatic child, and I was mostly pissed that my brother got to do whatever he wanted while I had to sit with my mom for hours. Just the two of us. I didn’t use that time to ask her for advice about crushes or how to make friends, and she didn’t teach me anything. I complained, and she watched her soap operas.

  I secretly liked watching my mom watch her shows. When I was quiet, it felt like she would forget I was in the room, and braiding became just something she was doing with her hands. It could’ve been knitting or playing with a yo-yo. She was alone, and she was watching her shows after a long week of work and raising two kids. I was watching her be an adult. A person. Not just a mommy. I’d listen to her talk to the TV screen when Erica Kane’s long-lost daughter Kendall showed up on All My Children. Or when Viki Lord split from Clint Buchanan and then remarried a year later on One Life to Live. I felt like I was getting to spy on who my mom was when her children weren’t around. Maybe I was getting to spy into my own future. Maybe I was seeing the woman I’d become . . . a woman with long and silky hair . . .

  My mom and I have very different hair. My mom’s hair is black, shiny, and easily maintained. Although it’s been said a million times by every black person ever, this is supposedly due to some Native American ancestry. Whatever the reason, my mom hit a hereditary hair jackpot. When I was in the first grade, she dyed her hair a dark purplish red, and she wore red clothes to match. This was one of the most exciting times of my life. I thought she was so cool, and she really was. I remember one near-summer day she wore a red trench dress with a matching red-brimmed hat with her perfect purple-red hair curled softly into a bob. With red lipstick. She was so fucking fierce! (She was way too good for my dad!) I couldn’t wait to grow up and be her. I wanted purple-red hair, and I wanted all of my clothes to be purple-red, too. And I wanted to live in a purple-red house and drive a purple-red car and live a big purple-red life. That was the dream. I know it sounds childish. But don’t you judge me; that’s still the dream.

  My hair, on the other hand, has been rough from birth. I was born with a head full of curly hair: curly, black, and gray. Yes. I was born with gray hair. Tough, wiry, gray hair that couldn’t be tamed. My parents figured the gray strands would go away after a while, but no. The older I got, the more gray hair I got. Strangers would stop my mother on the train, and say, “Oh! Ya baby’s hair is gray! She must be lucky! That’s a blessing.” But in school the other kids would say, “Why is ya hair gray? You old! Maybe you cursed!” I hated it—the teasing, not my hair. My hair I loved. When my mom told me that I’d have salt and pepper all over my head by the time I was in my twenties, I couldn’t wait. I wanted to look like Lena Horne in her older, graceful stage. Or like Alexandra from Josie and the Pussycats. I thought my gray hair made me look distinguished, like a gentlemanly sea captain. Or the wise grandmother tree in Pocahontas. I kept hoping that my gray hair would eventually take the form of a lightning bolt in the middle of my head. I felt special—as long as I wasn’t in school. In school the feeling of being “special” became the feeling of being “different.” Children are assholes and they ruin everything.

  In junior high, I compiled a list of all the things people made fun of me for. The point of the list was to see what I could change in order to stop being made fun of. Gray hair seemed like the easiest thing to deal with, so I asked my mom if I could dye my hair. I was sure she’d say no. The year before, when I asked if I could start perming my hair instead of getting it braided, we fought for months before she finally gave in. She’d been wearing her own hair permed in tight Shirley Temple curls with way too much mousse (for staying power). When she relented, she styled my hair in exactly the same way so we looked like twins. Where was the Bureau of Child Welfare then?

  My mom seemed to like my gray hair as much as I did, but eventually I convinced her to let me dye it jet-black. The morning after my dye job, I was so excited to go to school. My mom was excited, too! I’d decided that I wouldn’t mention what I was planning to my friends and classmates; I’d let them be shocked and amazed by my new hair all on their own. This didn’t happen. They didn’t notice. I started to drop hints, but still no one noticed. After lunch, I finally blurted out: “Hello! My hair is all black now! No more gray! I dyed it!”

  “Oh,” my friends responded. “Oh, yeah. It looks nice.”

  I was pissed.

  When I got home, my mom was waiting to hear how my grand hair reveal had gone.

  “Did ya friends notice your hair?” she asked, smiling.

  “Mom! It’s just hair. It doesn’t even matter.”

  “Oh. Okay,” she said.

  There! Now she was just as disappointed as I was. Children are assholes and they ruin everything.

  By the time I was in high school, my mom had stopped caring about my hair altogether. She was fed up with dealing with me and my brother all the time, so she basically threw up the peace sign and yelled, “I’m OUT!” This applied to hair and pretty much everything else. She’d still pay for whatever Ahmed or I needed, but we were allowed to make most of our own decisions and mistakes. We could stay out as late as we wanted, ditch class, and change our hair! My brother dropped out of high school. I made an equally bad decision: I bleached my hair blonde. A bad perm had made my hair short and even more unmanageable than before, so when a friend suggested I bleach it, I was just young and dumb enough to say, “Why not?” My friend, a guy named Calrisian, decided to bleach his hair as well. He was having problems with his parents so he’d left home to live with his older brother. Like me, he had barely any rules to abide by, and it was only a few weeks to summer vacation. Our lives had become a Mad Max movie. We thought, Fuck it! Let’s be blonde!

  He went first. I think we bought (stole) some sort of bleaching paste from the beauty-supply store and put it in his hair. Then Calrisian put it in my hair and combed it down around my face, smoothing it in around my ears. About twenty minutes later, we both held our heads under the showerhead in the bathroom and washed out the bleach. His hair was now bimbo blonde, exactly what he wanted. My hair was now . . . orange, like the fruit. My gray hair had turned a sickly yellow orange and had become even more wiry and untamable. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Did you know that there’s hair on your face so short and thin that you can’t normally see it? I didn’t—until that hair turned bright orange because the bleach my friend combed around my ears had dripped down my face. When it was all rinsed out and blow-dried, my entire head looked like I’d dipped it into a bag of Cheetos. I don’t remember how my friends at school reacted to my new hairstyle. It’s possible that I blocked it out, in which case, thank you, brain!

  I eventually had to shave my face because the orange glow kept attracting moths. As for the orange hair on my head . . . did you know that bleach and chlorine don’t mix well? I didn’t. I went swimming with my cousins in a pool, and good-bye orange hair,
hello green hair! Yes, I now had green hair. I don’t remember what I did to get rid of the green hair. (Thank you again, brain!) I assume I just burned it down, collected the insurance money, and then moved to Canada.

  Apart from the short-orange-hair episode, I generally wore my hair in braids in high school, but I waited so long in between hairstyles that my real hair would grow under the braid and start to dread up. I started wrapping a bandanna around my head to hide it. The problem: I went to a New York City high school. We had to walk through metal detectors in the lobby, and there were a few gangs so we weren’t allowed to wear bandannas. They were called “colors,” and there was a “no colors or gang paraphernalia allowed” policy. Do I look like a fucking gang member? It didn’t matter. Rules were rules. So every day I’d wear the bandanna in the halls until I got to class. Then I’d wait until my teacher told me to take it off. When the bell rang, I’d tie it back around my head. Some of my teachers would let me keep the bandanna on because they realized I wasn’t a gang member—just a sad girl who had yet to figure out her hair. Bless those teachers.

  There were girls in my high school who already had weaves. Twenty-five inches of hair flowing down to their asses. These girls didn’t wear backpacks to hold their schoolbooks; they used shopping bags from department stores like Macy’s. They had Gucci and Louis Vuitton purses filled with rolled-up spiral notebooks and makeup. They swung their beautiful long hair and expensive but probably fake purses down the hall. I struggled behind with my tough short hair hidden under a scarf, toting a misshapen backpack filled with all my textbooks and at least three notebooks, looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame on his way to ring that bell. We walked the same halls and were probably the same age, but we were light-years apart.