children

On the second day before Christmas

I grew up in Detroit and I know a lot about cars, but there is something that as a woman, I know more about than I would ever care to know, and that is I know hair. Yeah, hair. Hair doesn’t just grow out of your head, you know. Hair can be mainpulated to look like jungle gyms, colored to look like a rainbow and textured to look like as straight as thread. Yeah, I got a real understanding of hair from the time I got my first relexer at 8 years old. Because you can find a hair stylist on every corner, we shopped around for one we liked. Once you found your girl (I had very few guys when I was little, but I have had a few really good ones since then), you followed her whereever she went. LaShawn was at 5 different shops over a 2 year time frame and once she opened her own shop, the quality of her service decreased, so we went to Sheila. Sheila was cool until she got into that abusive relationship and had to suddenly take her son out of town to get away from the dude. Ms…what was her name…oh, Sunshine (they used nicknames at this salon to protect their stylists, I guess) was one of my mom’s favorites because she didn’t have our hair looking like we were older than we were. See it’s hard to find a stylist who is successful, but hasn’t fallen victim to the celebrity/hair show/high fashion form of style which is signature for Detroit. Because every salon was crowded, I used to carry a few books to the salon on Saturday and between hearing about somebody’s club experience the night before or about Diana Ross dissing Detroit when she moved to New York (yeah, she’s born and raised in Detroit, but don’t tell her.), I got a certificate in Black Female Drama that I have used for fiction, screenwriting and poetry all of my life. I figure that my mother had no choice since she had three daughters and didn’t have time to do all of our hair plus her own. Every two weeks, I saddled up my library books and went to some colorful establishments like Accent in the mall where they promise you know more than a 30 minute wait or your hair would be discounted. What they forgot to tell you is that you would sit at the shampoo bowl or under the dryer for 2 or 3 hours, so you never got your discount, but you always waited. Or Vantinus, which was owned by this FINE (superFINE is what I thought when I was growing up) brother Van and he would drive up to his shop in this bright red BMW, dressed from his short wavy processed head to his alligator (or crocodile…this is Detroit now) skinned shoes of any and every color and the sistahs would fall out. He would greet you, give you hug or a kiss on the cheek and then glide his tall, slender tail to the backroom. Not the backroom where the supplies were, but the back, BACK room where he handled his illegal transactions or at least that’s what the police said when they shut down his booming 24-hour hair salon chain. No, not a typo. The real deal. 24-hours. No matter what shift you worked, no matter what time the club opened or closed, you could get your hair fried, dyed and laid to the side compliments of not just Vantinus, but Charlene’s may still be open 24 hours at the downtown location.

So, what does this mean to a young woman growing up in the hair capital of USA? (Atlanta/L.A./D.C…they are the juniors/the grandchildren of the Detroit legacy) It means that you had no excuse for not having your hair done up all of the time and you definitely were a weirdo if you wore your hair in any style that was not relaxed. Yeah, natural hair was not the rave, so when I went natural over 10 years ago and cut all of my hair off, my family didn’t speak to me for almost 2 weeks. My father even asked me if I was trying too hard to fit into my male-dominated career by trying to be more masculine. Yeah, I’ve heard it all, but I stayed true to what I believed was more me. I’m pretty low maintenance at my core and I was disappointed in the racket that we call hair care. At least I felt that way until I was faced with a 12 year old daughter who has a ton of thick, beautiful hair and who has to face the family for the holidays. Find out what I went through in the after Christmas aftermath.

© 2006 DahGurl.