Read Me, My Hair, and I for Free Online Page A

get their hair to dread. All right, not many of them, but two of them, two straight white normal-looking middle-aged people. Mostly, people see someone with dreadlocks, especially a white person with dreadlocks, and assume that the person’s hair carries with it a position or a message—the message being, Maybe you don’t have as many prejudices against me as you do against black people, but you should. Most people, if asked, might wonder if perhaps dreadlocks are somewhat unpatriotic—isn’t it unpatriotic not to comb your hair? The tangles are so funky, and who knows, they may harbor bugs and disease. Perhaps to some people dreadlocks indicate confusion of thought and character: good children have shiny combed hair, while bad children, poor children, loser kids, have bushy hair.
    But two people in St. Louis stopped me on the street and asked for instructions on how to get their hair to look like mine.
    Eight years after I joined St. Andrew, I moved to a new neighborhood north of where we’d been living. The bad news was that there was more weather there. Hotter weather, more humid weather, fern-frond bangs weather. The good news was that a large, beautiful radical African American Buddhist professor named Marlene Jones Schoonover lived there too, and she had the most beautiful dreadlocks—lovely playful dreadlocks, carefully groomed, like wild plants in well-tended rows.
    Soon after moving there, I became the Democratic precinct leader for our neighborhood, and I used to pass her house as I made my rounds. She not only had hair I loved but a glorious bright overgrown garden like one you’d find on the grounds of Clown College. One time I stopped to talk to her when she was out in her yard picking flowers, and I admired her dreads out loud. “You ought to do it,” she said. “My daughter and I did it as an act of civil rights. And we could help you do it too.”
    I said that sounded just great—but I knew I wasn’t going to follow up. First of all, I felt it was presumptuous to appropriate a black style for my own liberation. But mostly when I thought about having dreadlocks, I felt afraid and disloyal. Dreadlocks would be a way of saying I was no longer going to play with the rules of mainstream white beauty. It meant that I was no longer going to even try and blend. It was a way of saying that I know what kind of hair I have, I know what it looks like, and I am going to stop trying to pretend it’s different than that. That I was going to celebrate instead.
    But I was not ready; I continued to moussify.
    No one knew the effort it took to make my hair look like it hadn’t taken any effort at all.
    I’d pass Marlene in her garden, and she’d look up from her work and say, “You have such beautiful hair.”
    â€œOh, thank you,” I’d say, and paw the ground.
    One day she said, “I
love
your hair.” And then she went on, “Picture Jesus with hair just like yours.” But I couldn’t, any more than I could imagine him with braces on his teeth or short hairy legs. That’s how deeply I had come to believe that my hair was ugly.
    On the other hand, I
could
immediately see Jesus with dreadlocks flowing down his back. And I saw that it would be an act of both triumph and surrender to give up trying to have straighter hair. And that surrender means you get to come on over to the winning side.
    But I
still
wasn’t ready to do it.
    Then two things happened. One was that all of a sudden I couldn’t stop thinking of something Pammy said right before she died, when she was in a wheelchair, wearing a wig to cover her baldness. We were at Macy’s. I was modeling a short dress for her that I thought my boyfriend would like. But then I asked whether it made me look big in the hips, and Pammy said, as clear and kind as a woman can be, “Annie? You really don’t have that kind of time.” And—slide trombone,