I say “yet” because most black babies are born with soft, silken hair. Then, sooner or later, it begins to “turn,” as inevitably as do the seasons or the leaves on a tree. And if it’s meant to turn, it turns, no matter how hard you try to stop it. People once thought baby oil would stop it. They were wrong.
Everybody I knew as a child wanted to have good hair. You could be as ugly as homemade sin dipped in misery and still be thought attractive if you had good hair. Jesus Moss was what the girls at Camp Lee, Virginia, had called Daddy’s hair during World War II. I know he played that thick head of hair for all it was worth, too. Still would, if he could.
My own hair was “not a bad grade,” as barbers would tell me when they cut my head for the first time. It’s like a doctor reporting the overall results of the first full physical that he has given you. “You’re in good shape” or “Blood pressure’s kind of high; better cut down on salt.”
I spent much of my childhood and adolescence messing with my hair. I definitely wanted straight hair. Like Pop’s.
When I was about three, I tried to stick a wad of Bazooka bubble gum to that straight hair of his. I suppose what fixed that memory for me is the spanking I got for doing so: he turned me upside down, holding me by my feet, the better to paddle my behind. Little nigger, he shouted, walloping away. I started to laugh about it two days later, when my behind stopped hurting.
When black people say “straight,” of course, they don’t usually mean “straight” literally, like, say, the hair of Peggy Lipton (the white girl on The Mod Squad) or Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary fame; black people call that “stringy” hair. No, “straight” just means not kinky, no matter what contours the curl might take. Because Daddy had straight hair, I would have done anything to have straight hair—and I used to try everything to make it straight, short of getting a process, which only riffraff were dumb enough to do.
Of the wide variety of techniques and methods I came to master in the great and challenging follicle prestidigitation, almost all had two things in common: a heavy, oil-based grease and evenly applied pressure. It’s no accident that many of the biggest black companies in the fifties and sixties made hair products. Indeed, we do have a vast array of hair grease. And I have tried it all, in search of that certain silky touch, one that leaves neither the hand nor the pillow sullied by grease.
I always wondered what Frederick Douglass put on his hair, or Phillis Wheatley. Or why Wheatley has that rag on her head in the little engraving in the frontispiece of her book. One thing is for sure: you can bet that when Wheatley went to England to see the Countess of Huntington, she did not stop by the Queen’s Coiffeur on the way. So many black people still get their hair straightened that it’s a wonder we don’t have a national holiday for Madame C.J. Walker, who invented the process for straightening kinky hair, rather than for Dr. King. Jheri-curled or “relaxed”—it’s still fried hair.
I used all the greases, from sea-blue Bergamot, to creamy vanilla Duke (in its orange-and-white jar), to the godfather of grease, the formidable Murray’s. Now, Murray’s was some serious grease. Whereas Bergamot was like oily Jell-O and Duke was viscous and sickly sweet, Murray’s was light brown and hard. Hard as lard and twice as greasy, Daddy used to say whenever the subject of Murray’s came up. Murray’s came in an orange can with a screw-on top. It was so hard that some people would put a match to the can, just to soften it and make it more manageable. In the late sixties, when Afros came into style, I’d use Afro-Sheen. From Murray’s to Duke to Afro-Sheen: that was my progression in black consciousness.
We started putting hot towels or washrags over our greased-down Murray’s-coated heads, in order to melt the wax into the scalp and follicles. Unfortunately, the wax had a curious habit of running down your neck, ears, and forehead. Not to mention your pillowcase.
Another problem was that if you put two palmfuls of Murray’s on your head, your hair turned white. Duke did the same thing. It was a challenge: if you got rid of the white stuff, you had a magnificent head of wavy hair. Murray’s turned kink into waves. Lots of waves. Frozen waves. A hurricane couldn’t have blown those waves around.
That was the beauty of it. Murray’s was so hard that it froze your hair into the wavy style you brushed it into. It looked really good if you wore a part. A lot of guys had parts cut into their hair by a barber, with clippers or a straight-edge razor. Especially if you had kinky hair—in which case you’d generally wear a short razor cut, or what we called a Quo Vadis.
Being obsessed with our hair, we tried to be as innovative as possible. Everyone knew about using a stocking cap, because your father or your uncle or the older guys wore them whenever something really big was about to happen, secular or sacred, a funeral or a dance, a wedding or a trip in which you confronted official white people, or when you were trying to look really sharp. When it was time to be clean, you wore a stocking cap. If the event was really a big one, you made a new cap for the occasion.
A stocking cap was made by asking your mother for one of her hose, and cutting it with a pair of scissors about six inches or so from the open end, where the elastic goes up to the top of the thigh. Then you’d knot the cut end, and behold—a conical-shaped hat or cap, with an elastic band that you pulled down low on your forehead and down around your neck in the back. A good stocking cap, to work well, had to fit tight and snug, like a press. And it had to fit that tightly because it was a press: it pressed your hair with the force of the hose’s elastic. If you greased your hair down real good and left the stocking cap on long enough—voilà: you got a head of pressed-against-the-scalp waves. If you used Murray’s, and if you wore a stocking cap to sleep, you got a whole lot of waves. (You also got a ring around your forehead when you woke up, but eventually that disappeared.)
And then you could enjoy your concrete ’do. Swore we were bad, too, with all that grease and those flat heads. My brother and I would brush it out a bit in the morning, so it would look—ahem—“natural.”
Grown men still wear stocking caps, especially older men, who generally keep their caps in their top drawer, along with their cufflinks and their see-through silk socks, their Maverick tie, their silk handkerchief, and whatever else they prize most.
A Murrayed-down stocking cap was the respectable version of the process, which, by contrast, was most definitely not a cool thing to have, at least if you weren’t an entertainer by trade.
Zeke and Keith and Poochie and a few other stars of the basketball team all used to get a process once or twice a year. It was expensive, and to get one you had to go to Pittsburgh or D.C. or Uniontown, someplace where there were enough colored people to support a business. They’d disappear, then reappear a day or two later, strutting like peacocks, their hair burned slightly red from the chemical lye base. They’d also wear “rags” or cloths or handkerchiefs around it when they slept or played basketball. Do-rags, they were called. But the result was straight hair, with a hint of wave. No curl. Do-it-yourselfers took their chances at home with a concoction of mashed potatoes and lye.
The most famous process, outside of what Malcolm X describes in his Autobiography and maybe that of Sammy Davis, Jr., was Nat King Cole’s. Nat King Cole had patent-leather hair.
“That man’s got the finest process money can buy.” That’s what Daddy said the night Cole’s TV show aired on NBC, November 5, 1956. I remember the date because everyone came to our house to watch it and to celebrate one of Daddy’s buddies’ birthdays. Yeah, Uncle Joe chimed in, they can do shit to his hair that the average Negro can’t even think about—secret shit.
Nat King Cole was clean. I’ve had an ongoing argument with a Nigerian friend about Nat King Cole for twenty years now. Not whether or not he could sing; any fool knows that he could sing. But whether or not he was a handkerchief-head for wearing that patent-leather process.
Sammy Davis’s process I detested. It didn’t look good on him. Worse still, he liked to have a fried strand dangling down the middle of his forehead,
shaking it out from the crown when he sang. But Nat King Cole’s hair was a thing unto itself, a beautifully sculpted work of art that he and he alone should have had the right to wear.
The only difference between a process and a stocking cap, really, was taste; yet Nat King Cole—unlike, say, Michael Jackson—looked good in his process. His head looked like Rudolph Valentino’s in the twenties, and some say it was Valentino that the process imitated. But Nat King Cole wore a process because it suited his face, his demeanor, his name, his style. He was as clean as he wanted to be.
I had forgotten all about Nat King Cole and that patent-leather look until the day in 1971 when I was sitting in an Arab restaurant on the island of Zanzibar, surrounded by men in fezzes and white caftans, trying to learn how to eat curried goat and rice with the fingers of my right hand, feeling two million miles from home, when all of a sudden the old transistor radio sitting on top of a china cupboard stopped blaring out its Swahili music to play “Fly Me to the Moon” by Nat King Cole. The restaurant’s din was not affected at all, not even by half a decibel. But in my mind’s eye, I saw it: the King’s sleek black magnificent tiara. I managed, barely, to blink back the tears.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
WALK THE LAST MILE
MAMA CAME TO believe early on that the key to wealth and comfort in America was owning property. She wanted a nice house for the same reason she liked nice things. But she wanted to own a piece of earth too. Because colored people were hindered from owning property in Piedmont throughout the years of my childhood, our houses were always rented.
So Mama always wanted to buy a house. She was possessed by the subject. The funny thing, though, is that up to the very end, she would say that her first home with Daddy was her favorite. And now that I have been married for two decades, I understand how a house for four people that was as big as a postage stamp could be re-created by imagination and memory as a château. She loved it because she was happy, and in love, and in love with her life there. This would not always be so. But none of that stopped her from moving.
Unfortunately for Mama, the only person in the Gates family I ever heard of who didn’t care for owning property was Daddy. Just Mama’s luck, and ours. Daddy was terrified of debt. So even in the late sixties, when her brother Earkie established a precedent by purchasing the Coleman family house, he still wasn’t interested. And the inability to own became one of Mama’s great frustrations.
Where Daddy shied from debt, Mama was intrepid, at least until the change. She could leverage Daddy’s two salaries like a Wall Street financier. But Miss Pauline wanted a house, and that was tantalizingly out of reach.
She started buying house books and magazines. Dozens, for research. She and I would look at them, just as I would study the pages of the three or four mail order catalogues we’d regularly receive: Ward’s, Sears, Roebuck, General Merchandise, Mayer’s. (Almost all of our Christmas gifts came from General Merchandise.)
At one point, Mama’s plan was to build a house, on land near her mother or brothers on Erin Street. The first time I ever saw Mama really angry at my father—much angrier than when she’d accuse him of flirting with Miss Noll or Miss Mary—was on the day when he killed the deal that would have let us build a sort of family complex with two or three of Mama’s brothers. We had the plans, the land was picked out (just below Big Mom’s, near where Miss Lizzy’s dogs barked at night when the Sneakin’ Deacon made his rounds visiting his parishioners), and Mama was all excited. Radiant, in fact. She loved to dream, like all the Colemans, and she loved to make things happen, which was more Gates than Coleman. (When it came to finance and risk, Daddy was more Coleman than Gates.)
“We’re not going to do it,” Daddy said.
“Why not?” Mama demanded.
“Because I’m not going to sign the papers.”
That was it. The whole thing. I don’t think Mama ever got over it. Not until they bought the old Thomas house on East Hampshire Street, if then.
Mrs. Thomas was an old white lady for whom Mama had worked when she was a little girl. I never met Mrs. Thomas, but I knew the name because Mama would mention her to Daddy once in a while. She and her husband had a son, Paul, who went off to college and became some sort of executive. He lived Elsewhere. “I used to call all colored women Dorothy,” Paul told me later, “because Dorothy Coleman [Nemo’s wife] was our maid, and I loved her so much.” (Nemo was Mama’s brother, James Coleman, Sr., the oldest of the nine Coleman siblings.)
I thought that was sweet. Racist cracker, Daddy would later say. Then he’d laugh: All niggers do kinda look alike.
Cut to 1960. I was all of ten years old and was sitting in the living room of Mrs. Thomas’s house. She had just been buried, and her son was selling off their antiques. Mama knew the furniture, because she had cleaned it. She was very comfortable with Paul too. He treated her with a great deal of respect, even deference.
Mama had something on her mind, some goal in sight, and she was determined to achieve it. So we had bathed and put on our good clothes. She was dressed to kill.
I want those two bookcases, Paul, she said straightforwardly. And the desk in your room.
Paul hadn’t wanted to sell that desk, I suspect. He looked sort of blankly at Mama.
They are a set, she said.
They stared at each other for a little bit, like two animals dancing for dominance.
Is twenty dollars too much? Paul finally asked. When Paul went to get the receipt book, Mama whispered that maybe we’d live in a nice house like this someday.
One case went for our reference books, the other went down to Aunt Marguerite’s, and the desk went to me. Elmer Shaver—Daddy’s boss at the telephone company—bought the house.
Owning furniture wasn’t the same as owning a house, and as I grew up, I resolved to do something about it.
Our rented house had been plenty big enough, until Mama started collecting obsessively, canned food and bolts of cloth for a rainy day, as she’d said at first. You never know when you’ll need these things, she’d said. One day next Tuesday, Daddy would mumble under his breath, by which he meant the twelfth of never. All of us, even Daddy, used to spend long hours praying that one day next Tuesday would come soon. She hoarded items like someone who was afraid of being poor again, and she was immune to reassurance. She had even taken to hiding her money in the drawer of her bureau.
I came home from college one summer and walked up the pavement. When Mama opened the door, I saw her as if for the first time: so old and tired and despondent. The years of having her hair done had damaged her hair so much that she was going bald. She’d taken to wearing a wig. I know I look bad, she said, wiping her forehead, where the sweat ran down from under her wig. I am just so tired.
Opportunely, Elmer Shaver had decided to retire and sell the Thomas house he’d bought when I was ten. My brother Rocky, Daddy and I pooled all our resources, including a few scholarship checks, and the deal was done.
The purchase of the Thomas house wasn’t all I arranged at that time. I also prepared to go to court and change my name from Louis Smith Gates, as my birth certificate reads, to that of my father. Mama had promised her best friend, unmarried Miss Smith, that she’d pass her name on to the second-born, since the first-born was named for his grandfathers, Paul Coleman and Edward Gates. I had hated that name, Smith, felt deprived of my birthright. Finally, I got around to telling my parents. Then, oddly, I found myself climbing Up the Hill to tell my grandmother. “Thank the Lord,” Big Mom said. “That name never made sense to me anyhow.” A few days later, I was on the witness stand, responding to Judge Cuppett’s questions about why I sought to do this thing after all this time. Because I love my father and because it is my true name, I said, in the presence of Mama and Daddy and my soon-to-be wife, Sharon, and a bailiff. We all cried and cried together at that courthouse in Keyser.
Completing the purchase of the Thomas house from the Shavers prove
d a more delicate affair. A year later, just after the closing, Mama decided she didn’t want to move in. She preferred this house or that house. Even the Campbell house next door, which needed a complete renovation. She wasn’t going to leave Erin Street. She didn’t have enough furniture. The house was too big. It was too dark. Who’d cut the grass? The neighbors were racists.
Mama, what’s wrong with you? I pleaded. We’ll lose all our money.
It was a pitched battle, but Mama finally moved. Sharon and I bought a dining room set at Macy’s—on a charge account that was soon canceled for nonpayment—rented a U-Haul, and drove it from New York City to the Valley. Mama’s brothers unpacked it and carried it in. Rocky and his wife, Paula, and their two girls drove down from New Jersey. And we had one hell of a feast. Roast beef and brown potatoes; “baked baked beans”; baked corn; kale, well-seasoned, cooked for hours with a big piece of fatback. Then I asked Mama, in the quiet of the celebration’s aftermath, just what all the rigmarole about not moving was all about.
“Skippy, you’ll never know,” she said.
Then, haltingly, she began to talk.
“Mrs. Thomas used to make me sit out in the kitchen, at a little wooden table, and eat the scraps. She was a mean woman. She used to leave money around, to see if I would steal it. She made me work on Thanksgiving and Christmas. She treated me bad. . . . The thought of moving into this house . . . I wanted to burn this house down.”
Her eyes were glassy; she lowered her head, placing two fingers on the bridge of her nose. It was a gesture of resignation; she was angry that the memories still had that power.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 4