It has been over ten years since I last combed my hair. When I mention this, friends and family are sometimes scandalized. I am amused by their reaction. During the same ten years they’ve poured gallons of possibly carcinogenic “relaxer” chemicals on themselves, and their once proud, interestingly crinkled or kinky hair has been forced to lie flat as the slab over a grave. But I understand this, having for many years done the same thing myself.
Bob Marley is the person who taught me to trust the Universe enough to respect my hair; I don’t even have to close my eyes to see him dancing his shamanic dance onstage, as he sang his “redemption songs” and consistently poured out his heart to us. If ever anyone truly loved us, it was Bob Marley, and much of that affirmation came out of the way he felt about himself. I remember the first time I saw pictures of Marley, and of that other amazing rebel, Peter Tosh. I couldn’t imagine that those black ropes on their heads were hair. And then, because the songs they were singing meant the ropes had to be hair, natural hair to which nothing was added, not even a brushing, I realized they had managed to bring, or to reintroduce, a healthful new look, and way, to the world. I wondered what such hair felt like, smelled like. What a person dreamed about at night, with hair like that spread across the pillow. And even more intriguing, what would it be like to make love to someone with hair on your head like that, and to be made love to by someone with hair on his or her head like that? It must be like the mating of lions, I thought. Aroused.
It wasn’t until the filming of The Color Purple in 1985 that I got to explore someone’s dreads. By then I had started “baby dreads” of my own, from tiny plaits, and had only blind faith that they’d grow eventually into proper locks. In the film there is a scene in which Sofia’s sisters are packing up her things as she prepares to leave her trying-to-be-abusive husband, Harpo. All Sofia’s “sisters” were large, good-looking local women (“location” was Monroe, North Carolina), and one of them was explaining why she had to wear a cap in the scene instead of the more acceptable-to-the-period head rag or straw hat. “I have too much hair,” she said. “Besides, back then [the 1920s] nobody would have been wearing dreads.” Saying this, she swept off her roomy cap, and a cascade of vigorous locks fell way down her back. From a downtrodden, hardworking Southern black woman she was transformed into a free Amazonian Goddess. I laughed in wonder at the transformation, my fingers instantly seeking her hair.
I then asked the question I would find so exasperating myself in years to come. How do you wash it?
She became very serious, as if about to divulge a major secret. “Well,” she said, “I use something called shampoo, that you can buy at places like supermarkets and health food stores. I get into something called a shower, wet my hair, and rub this stuff all over it. I stand under the water and I scrub and scrub, working up a mighty lather. Then I rinse.” She smiled, suddenly, and I realized how ridiculous my question was. Through the years I would find myself responding to people exactly as she had, delighting in their belated recognition that I am joking with them.
The texture of her hair was somehow both firm and soft, springy, with the clean, fresh scent of almonds. It was a warm black, and sunlight was caught in each kink and crinkle, so that up close there was a lot of purple and blue. I could feel how, miraculously, each lock wove itself into a flat or rounded pattern shortly after it left her scalp — a machine could not have done it with more precision — so that the “matting” I had assumed was characteristic of dreadlocks could more accurately be described as “knitting.” How many black people had any idea that, left pretty much to itself, our hair would do this, I wondered. Not very many, I was sure. I had certainly been among the uninformed. It was a moment so satisfying, when I felt my faith in my desire to be natural was so well deserved, that it is not an exaggeration to say I was, in a way, made happy forever. After all, if this major mystery could be discovered right on top of one’s head, I thought, what other wonders might not be experienced in the Universe’s exuberant, inexhaustible store?
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