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Judge Me Not By the Texture of My Hair But By the Content of My Character
Growing up in the projects off of 8-Mile Road in Detroit, my mother prayed for one thing — not for an end to poverty, not for the safety of her siblings, not even for racial equality being a part of the first integrated class in her high school. The one thing she prayed for was “long hair like Betty.” Mom’s friend Betty was a light-skinned girl with soft locks that cascaded past her shoulders like a chocolate waterfall. My mother would pull at her own nappy roots with the hope that they would one day grow out and make her pretty and “passable” like her friend.
Years later she met my father. He was smart and successful, a doctor from Chicago who also happened to be white. So when I was born with a caramel hue and a head full of dark, wavy hair, my mother proclaimed, “My prayers were answered. You got the long hair like Betty.”
Mom would rake through my hair each morning and pull it into poofy pigtails tied off with plastic barrettes. My friends at my 98 percent white elementary school thought they were fun to play with and so did I until the day my barrette burst open and my uncontrollable afro escaped. The teachers began to panic. They had no idea how to tame my explosive mane so they let me run free like Buckwheat for the rest of the day. You can imagine my mother’s horror when she came to pick up her perfect little doll and found a wild child instead.
Eventually I began to embrace that my hair and roots were neither white nor black. Combing my curls into uncontrollable frizz no longer appealed to me and I began to style my hair with gel, which allowed them to shine. Yet I still felt burdened by the promise I’d made to my mother to protect her greatest asset, my hair. I could not cut it, relax it, or otherwise damage it in any way. This hair was on loan to me from God.
I began to embrace my curls and see them as beautiful even though I had developed the idea that men preferred hair they could run their fingers through I ended up meeting and marrying a guy who loved me exactly the way I was.
