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Good Hair. Benilde Little. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 237 pp. (Paper US$11.00)
The idea that hair carries serious weight in relationships with the opposite sex may seem frivolous to some people. While reading Good Hair, however, I was challenged to rethink how great an impact hair texture and length, as well as skin complexion, may still have on relationships among African Americans today. Benilde Little's novel highlights social and economic hierarchies within African American communities that are rooted in one's appearance, especially having "kinky" or "straight" hair, long or short hair, and light or dark skin. More specifically, Little pinpoints how, for members of the black upper class of Manhattan (New York City) and Washington, D.C., these deliberately divisive hierarchies undermine idealized constructions of the family and the community.
Positioning her own life historically, the protagonist, Alice Andrews, informs her readers of a grandmother, Viola, whose life in the 1930s was shaped by her light complexion, "good hair" and her size. The first-person narrator emphasizes, however, that her grandmother's life was one of both good and bad experiences due to her ability to assimilate with confidence into mainstream society, while simultaneously coping with shame stemming from the knowledge that her looks represented a violation of the spirit and body of African American women. Believing that she inherited her grandmother's persona, in part because her own mother forces it upon her, Andrews experiences the conflict of self-confidence and shame even more intensely.
Andrews, a reporter from Newark, New Jersey, chooses to deconstruct her life by revisiting painful...