Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul (18 page)

“Welcome to my Happy Nappy Hair Care Affair. Make yourself at home.”

“Find a seat on a chair on the floor. Help yourself to whatever you brought to eat, but don't bother me because I'm getting my hair ‘done.' So you best find someone to do yours.”

The message was clear. This was an unstructured, self-serve hair-care affair. My home is a no-shoe zone, and my guests seemed more than willing to shed their footwear and get on common ground. They deposited their potluck dishes in the kitchen then returned to the backyard where they gravitated toward my deck. They briefly exchanged greetings then moved quickly into conversations about hair.

Every conceivable topic was covered. They swapped hair-care recipes, how witch hazel reduces buildup in locks and how lemon juice keeps them tight. They shared hair taboo and superstitions.

Eventually the women got around to what the gathering was all about. They chose partners and got busy grooming hair. We worked to the sounds of reggae, merengue and jazz.

It was beautiful. Some worked while standing, others sat in stair-step fashion, palm rolling, twisting or otherwise fussing over the head of the person in front of them.

Their arms were extended like branches of a family tree and moving nonstop. Watching them work reminded me of the painting
Links and Lineage
. The painting by Paul Goodnight, a Boston-based artist, depicts a family tree of black women—from the elderly matriarch to the youngest girl—engaged in the ritual of grooming each other's hair.

What was happening on my back deck was like seeing Goodnight's painting come to life.

Denise, one of the “token permies,” was so moved by what she was witnessing that afternoon that she asked for us to take her back to her roots. She asked me for a pair of scissors.

“Does anyone know how to cut hair?” she asked. She insisted that one of us cut away all traces of her relaxed hair.

Annette, a willowy artist, accepted the challenge and took the scissors. Now, the only real experience Annette had cutting hair was when she cut her own locks and used them in her artwork.

Denise wasn't worried. “If there was ever a time to do this, it is today,” she said as she settled into a chair.

Annette handled Denise's head like it was a sculpture in progress. Formost of an hour Annettemeticulously snipped and shaped until all that was left on Denise's head was a short, wooly layer of virgin hair, softly framing her face.

It was a nappy work of art, which drew applause from the sisters who watched fromthe sidelines and a warmhug from Denise, who was ecstatic over her new natural look.

“I feel good,” she squealed as she peered into the mirror. “I feel light. . . . I feel free.”

Watching Denise's transformation after Annette's shearing was a powerful moment. I didn't want the evening to end. Apparently my friends didn't either. The last one left at 1:30 A.M.

As I said, I had no grand intentions when I had my first Hair Day. I didn't even think beyond the first one. Yet it evolved into something more than I ever thought it would be.

Now everyone has gotten into the act. Brothers and children also join us for a little nap nurturing and my Hair Day gatherings have spread to many cities in the United States and abroad. My hair affair has become a real family affair. And that's all good.

Linda Jones

4
MY SISTER,
MY FRIEND

T
hese women heal us by telling us their
stories, by embodying emotion that our
everydays can't hold.

Elisabeth Alexander

A Cup of Tenderness

B
eloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter,
you are my face; you are me.

Toni Morrison

I could feel my cheeks burning a fiery pink in the January wind as I scraped the glacier of ice from my windshield. What was left of the warmth in my hands slowly turned to tingle as the crusty ice chips melted on my gloves. Once I had scraped a few basketball-sized holes to peer out of, I scooted into the driver's seat, grateful to grab my steaming mug of coffee from the roof of the car. I cupped it between my frozen fingers and breathed in slowly. This was the daily moment of truth.

“Come on, gal,” I said, touching my hand to the dash and adding a silent prayer for good measure.

Her protests were louder than usual; the Oldsmobile engine sounded more like a horse neighing than any modern mode of transportation. She sounded like I felt. It was clear she needed a cup of tender loving care.
I wish I could
afford to give it to you, gal,
I thought. I pumped a little gas and turned the key once again. Again she faltered. Third time's a charm I allowed myself to hope and once again turned the key. The engine growled to life, and I pumped the gas quickly—just enough to keep her hungry engine-belly full, but not enough to kill her.

It was getting harder and harder to hope that she would last.

Hardship, however unwelcome, was not new to me. I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains, a culture of hard knocks, hard work and hard winters. When I was seven my father orphaned the children in our family by killing my mother in an alcoholic rage and then turning the gun on himself. I grew up in my native Appalachia with first one relative and then another, but I learned how to cope. It was a rough place, at times devoid of tenderness, but I had survived it. This year, however, made those times feel like pleasant memories.

My dear husband of twenty-five years, Roger, was fighting for his life in a cold city hospital bed. I wanted more than anything to be able to stay in the hospital with him, to encourage him and to soothe the pain he was enduring daily from his treatments for leukemia. But the illness did not make the pressures of the world disappear. My son was still at home, a senior in high school, and he needed to be fed. The electricity bill had to be paid, the house payment had to be made, and gas had to be put in the tank for my nearly one-hundred mile daily round trip from home to work to hospital. I was beginning to feel the way I had when I was a child. It was all up to me, and I was alone. And so I went to work every day, rolling out of the chair at the hospital where I had spent the night with Roger, or rolling out of bed at 4:00 A.M. at home where I had done some laundry and tried to make time for my son over a dinner of sandwiches. By lunchtime each day I could drop wherever I stood. My body and soul longed for relief, for someone to offer a cup of tenderness to help refresh me.

I splashed water over my pale white face in the restroom to revive me when I arrived at work; I didn't have to worry about smearing my makeup, no time for such luxuries in my life.

“Brenda.”

I looked up to see my co-worker Darlene. Her chestnut-brown skin was furrowed with concern, and there was tenderness in her soft brown eyes. She cast one furtive glance over her shoulder and then she took my hand and pressed some tightly folded money into it. I looked at it in astonishment. I opened my mouth to say something, but she wouldn't let me. “Do not tell anyone I gave you this money,” she said. “Just go and get your car fixed, and let me know if you need any more.” And then she turned and left.

My astonishment was soon replaced by wonder. I knew very little about Darlene. As so often happens with people from my generation, the few friends I had were white.

Darlene and I were from different worlds. I had grown up in the Appalachians where African Americans did not live, and where prejudice and hatred thrived. The high school I had graduated from still carried the mascot name “Rebels” and marched onto the field under a Confederate flag. And although I did not consider myself racist or prejudiced, I became aware of how isolated I was from people who were not like me. Darlene had looked beyond my white skin, beyond my Southern accent and seen the need not just for financial support but the true need I had that lay beneath the surface—she had stepped over the invisible boundary, and she became my friend.

As the months passed our friendship thrived; although I must admit she was the strong one. Her support was unwavering when my beloved Roger died. She offered a cup of tenderness each time I was down, and when the dating scene started calling my name again we shared hours of laughter and a few tears over dates turned sour. Darlene never mentioned the money again and never asked me to repay it. I began to feel like I had known Darlene my whole life. Like an early morning mist, our cultural differences evaporated.

Darlene was my teacher; she educated me about love. Darlene stepped across the chasm of racial prejudice and the unknown that so often divides us to teach me that we have a responsibility to the human race to provide a cup of tenderness when and where it is needed most. And because of Darlene, my cup runneth over.

Brenda Caperton

Sistahood

F
amily faces are mirrors. Looking at people who
belong to us, we see the past, present and future.

Gail Lurnet Buckley

When I was a child, I hung onto my big sister's every word. To me, she was Nefertiti, ebony and regal, and I tried to be her kindred spirit at any cost. Recently, I was reminded of that when I saw a copy of the print
Sistahood
by the African American artist Charles Bibbs. It was as if that painting triggered long ago memories, a family wish list that had to do more with emotions than things of materialistic values. It whispered to me thoughts about my own sistahood with my sister, whose love had been signed, sealed and delivered from the time her four-year-old fingers touched the ballooning expanse of our mother's belly to feel me.

When my sister became as “grown as she wanted to be,” the term the elder women in the family used to christen teenage girls, words began to latch on to me about our comparison. “She's got some beautiful black skin,” or “Those big eyes of hers are gonna make some man walk into a brick wall,” or “She's got that fine hair that makes pressin' it a breeze.” We were a study in contrasts, but I didn't mind. I was proud that she was my big sister, enjoying running home to our mother to brag about how many fellows whistled, winked, and nearly ran into that brick wall because of their flirting with her.

We lived in a Brooklyn housing project on the fifth floor. We shared a back bedroom with two twin French provincial beds filling up the expanse of the room. As the introverted one, it was more my haven than my sister's. While she seemed to want to escape the confines of our bedroom and our apartment, I longed to be in it with my books and my imagination. When she was not there, I would try on her clothes, her new shades of dime store nail polish and eye shadow, and most of all sneak and read the latest entry in her diary. Her life was more interesting than mine, and I assumed it would always be that way. She was the one who took modeling classes and drama classes and joined all of those black awareness clubs in the community. She was the one who wrote about Afro-wearing boys walking her home from school and giving her a tender kiss. It didn't matter, though, because I knew that even if my sister's life dared her to journey in a different direction, she'd never abandon me. Our sistahood was nonnegotiable, or so I thought.

When I finally caught up with my sister and became the woman that I now am, I realized that we had done nothing to safeguard our sistahood. Somewhere between our marriages, our children, our careers and even our painful storms, we lost track of each other. We came together for family functions or other social occasions, but we seemed to do a dance of pretense. “She's the writer in the family,” my sister would often brag to one of our long-time-no-see relatives or a sister-friend she happened to bring with her. But she often only heard about what I had published through the grapevine, through our mother who made a point of calling each of us each day. We sidestepped the fact that sometimes we didn't speak to each other for six months at a time. We shrugged it off to being busy that neither of us knew the color schemes of each other's living room, what photos were in each other's family albums, or what home-cooked aromas filled each other's kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.

Other women had become our sisters throughout the years. Other women had begun to fill up those sisterly spaces once reserved for each other.We shared our tumultuous storms with those sisters we had adopted along the way instead of letting each other's arms be the familial balm that they were intended to be. It was my sister's adopted sisters who were there to help her heal after years of domestic abuse at the hands of her ex-husband. It was my adopted sisters who helped me heal from the pain and the shame after my two sons, her nephews, were incarcerated. Wasn't it our mother who instilled in us that blood was thicker than water? Didn't movies like
Soul Food
inspire us to renew and rekindle what we once shared because we were all we had?