Read Me, My Hair, and I for Free Online

It’s not as garbling and stapled as a tongue stud, say, or as snaky as tattoos. But dreadlocks make you look a little like Medusa, because they writhe and appear to have a life of their own, and that’s scary. These women at my church love me more than life itself, and they want me to move safely through the world. They want me to pass. So they worried, and slipped the name of black beauty salons into our conversations.
    When I first started coming to this church, I wore my hair like I’d worn it for years, shoulder length and ringletty—or at any rate, ringletty if there was an absence of wind, rain, or humidity. In the absence of weather, with a lot of mousse on hand, I could get it to fall just right so that it would not be too frizzy and upsetting—although “fall” is perhaps not the right word. “Appear to fall” is close. “Shellacked into the illusion of ‘falling’ ” is even closer. Weather is the enemy. I could leave the house with bangs down to my eyebrows, moussed and frozen into place like the plastic sushi in the windows of Japanese restaurants, and after five minutes in rain or humidity, I’d look like Ronald McDonald.
    Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain? Can you imagine how discouraging it was for me to live in fear of weather, of drizzle or downpour? Because Christianity is
about
water: “Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” It’s about baptism, for God’s sake. It’s about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and
wet.
Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that’s a little sloppy because at the same time it’s also holy, and absurd. It’s about surrender, giving in to all those things we can’t control; it’s a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get
drenched.
    There’s something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. It’s tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots of water, tending to you, making you clean all over again. And in the Christian experience of baptism, the hope is that when you go under and you come out, maybe a little disoriented, you haven’t dragged the old day along behind you. The hope, the belief, is that a new day is upon you now. A day when you are emboldened to take God at God’s word about cleanness and protection: “When thou passeth through the water, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.”
    Obviously, when you really want this companionship and confidence but you’re worried about your bangs shrinking up like fern fronds, you’ve got a problem on your hands.
    Furthermore, I don’t think you’re supposed to devote so much of your prayer life to the desperate hope that there not be any weather. Also, to the hope that no one trick you into getting into a convertible and then suddenly insist on putting the top down. Because I tell you, you take a person with fluffy wiry hair like mine and you put her in a convertible with the top down, the person gets out of the car looking like Buckwheat. Or Don King. It helps in one way to wear a hat, but when you take it off you have terrible hat hair—it looks like a cartoon mouse has been driving a little steamroller around your head. And you can’t wear a scarf or you end up looking like your Aunt Bev. So you have to pick—Don King, or Bev.
    So that’s the background. Now I have dreadlocks, long blondish dreadlocks, and some of the people of St. Louis were asking me how they could