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Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2001. vii + 198 pp. (Cloth US$23.95)
Some of my most poignant childhood memories from the 1950s and 1960s revolve around family events in my grandmother's tiny, tidy kitchen. Among these events were regular hair care rituals. Washing, drying, straightening, and braiding the hair of four restless girls involved hours of work for my grandmother, and more than a little discomfort for my sister, two cousins, and me. We would sit at the kitchen table playing little girls' games while our grandmother laid out the supplies for hair grooming time. I can still remember the smell of hair grease-sweet but serious-and the sizzling sound it made as the hot straightening comb melted "Dixie Peach" or "Royal Crown" pomade into our thick hair. As each girl took her turn sitting in a hard, upright chair by the stove, the other three would marvel at the miracle of heat and grease in my grandmother's skillful hands. Although we each had different "grades" of hair, as our grandmother would remind us regularly, she seemed to know how to negotiate all types of nappiness.
In the 1950s, these laborious hair care rituals were not only essential to a sense of well-being among little Black girls, they were also a part of the many complex survival strategies that African Americans had developed since slavery. For generations, as Byrd and Tharps argue in Hair Story, "visual conformity" was critical for Blacks when presenting themselves to the White world. It would take the radicalism of the Black Power movement to bring about a massive shift in our collective conscience, challenging our deeply embedded cultural notions about who we African Americans were as a people-politically and socially, as well as physically and stylistically.
What role does hair-its texture, length, color, and/ or style-play in Black people's cultural and political...