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

bells, rim shot—I
got
it, deep in my being. While walking by Marlene’s garden, Pammy’s words suddenly rang through the chambers of my mind.
    So I kept thinking, How much longer am I going to think about my hair more often than about things in the world that matter? I kept passing Marlene’s house. She’d be out watering her crazy clown garden. We’d talk about politics, our children, and God. Then we’d talk about hair. “Call me,” she’d say, “when you’re ready.” She knew how scared I was.
    One day I said, “I think I’m getting there.”
    â€œPrincess be about to
arrive
,” she said.
    The second thing was that right around that time, I saw
Th
e Shawshank Redemption
, where at the end, the character played by Tim Robbins escapes from prison via the sewers after serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. He emerges from the pipes of the prison into a rushing rain-swollen river and he staggers through the current with his face turned toward the sky, his arms held up to heaven as the rains pour down.
    I sat in the movie theater and cried for a while. Then I started to smile, because it occurred to me that if I were the prisoner being baptized by the torrential rain, half my mind would be on how much my bangs were going to shrink up after they dried.
    I went home that night and I called Marlene. “OK, baby,” I said. “I’m ready.”
    The next day she and her dreadlocked teenage daughter came over to my house with a little jar of beeswax, which would hold the baby dreads in place until they could start tangling themselves together into strands. Marlene sat me down in the kitchen. She and her daughter sectioned off my hair, twisted it into long strands that almost looked braided, and glued it in place with the wax. It took a couple of hours, and I was scared almost the whole time. We listened to gospel and reggae for inspiration. I cried a little—I had never let people enter into my hair weirdness with me, had never let anyone help me before, had never believed I could get free. I let them work on me, and after a while I thought of the sacredness of animals grooming each other. I felt the connection and the tenderness, the reciprocal healing offered by the laying on of hands. The two women twisted, daubed, smoothed my hair, practical and gentle at the same time; there aren’t many opportunities for this left, away from the sickbed. Marlene worked with the grave sense that we were doing something meaningful—politically, spiritually, aesthetically. And her quiet daughter worked with bouncy joyful efficiency, bopping along to the reggae beat. When they were done, I looked beautiful—royal, shy, groomed. Beautiful. Strange. Mulatto.
    Who will love me now? I wondered. Will anyone want to stroke my hair again? I didn’t know the answer, so this act was like taking a vow of chastity. And I didn’t care. I just wanted to stroke my hair myself.
    The dreads are so cool; no wonder two people in St. Louis wanted my secret. Like snowflakes, each dreadlock is different, has its own configuration, its own breadth and feel. It’s like having very safe multiple personalities. It’s been twenty years since that day Marlene and her daughter first twisted them into vines, and they have grown way past my shoulders down my back. Sometimes I wear them up, sometimes down. I used to look at people with normal white people’s hair, and their bangs always stayed long and they got to hide behind that satin curtain, and I was jealous. But now my bangs are always long too. I peered out at St. Louis from behind my dreadlocks, as through a beautiful handmade fence, in the drizzle, in the wind, in the rain.

Frizzball
    PATRICIA VOLK
    I have thousands of enemies. That’s not in my head. It’s
on
my head. I’m talking follicles. The average person has 130,000. Follicles can be friendly or you can spend your entire