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| FORMULA FOR FORTUNE: Walker's products made her
America's first black millionaire. |
| Walker Family Collection, Courtesy Pamela Johnson |
THERE'S SOME MIRACLE, and folklore in the
history of Sarah Breedlove’s rise to wealth and fame. A daughter
of a former slave, she moved to St. Louis to become a washerwoman in the
late 1880s and, to her distress, began to lose her hair from a scalp condition
called alopecia. One night she dreamed a “big African man” spoke
to her of a secret remedy, a scalp conditioner that would make her hair
grow again. Or so the story goes. There are competing versions, including
one in which a pharmacist came to her aid and another in which she stole
the formula from a competitor. Whatever happened, Breedlove became America’s
first black millionaire, an entrepreneur who created a new persona, Madam
C.J. Walker, and a hair product called Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower
that changed the lives of American black women forever.
The Walker Company, run by the Madam’s daughter A’Lelia Walker
and a series of descendants, sold a line of hair and cosmetic products
through an army of beauty agents, black women who opened and ran Walker
Company hair salons. They used the Walker products to heal scalp ailments,
promote healthy hair and, famously, to straighten kinked hair. (Cruder,
less successful methods had been used for years.) The results were a sensation.
During the Depression, Walker put women to work—as many as 1,300,
according to her contemporary W.E.B. Du Bois—making their customers
feel beautiful.
In post-emancipation America, black women found in the Walker Company
an opportunity for reinvention. Reinvention, of course, prompted attacks
from writers and thinkers who saw, and who continue to see, hair straightening
as a slow, often painful rejection of an African heritage. Natural black
hair is usually “nappy,” coarse and tightly coiled. Straightened
through chemicals, lengthened through weaves, colored or even left natural,
black hair has moved from a statement of fashion to one of politics, economics
or history. In its changeable, adaptable state, hair becomes a reflection
of identity and a site of debate.
 Tenderheaded:
A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories (Pocket Books, 2001) is
like a microphone trained to all sides of the argument. Edited by art
historian Juliette Harris and former Essence senior editor Pamela Johnson,
’82, the anthology (of reprinted and original material) gives us
a cacophony, heated and comic, irreverent and solemn. It is history and
theory and memoir; poem, joke book, pictorial. As varied as America’s
black hairscape, Tenderheaded won’t lie flat, is unruly, kinked
up, knotted, coiled, fascinating.
Harvard African-American studies chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. sounds a
lyrical note recalling intimate moments in his family’s kitchen:
“Slowly, steadily, with deftness and grace, Mama’s hands would
transform a round mound of Odetta kink into a darkened swamp of everglades.”
Meg Hanson Scales, a New York City-based writer, delivers a knockout essay
on the notion of a tenderhead, one who cries during the pulling, tugging,
hot-comb cauterization of the straightening process. “It can go dominatrix
in a heartbeat—you in a kitchen chair, and she standing, imperious,
brandishing a plastic comb in striking zone from you, freshly washed and
trapped.”
Scales makes the point that black women have trained themselves away from
the role of tenderhead to an unnatural standard of toughness. It’s
a cautionary message, one reinforced by cultural critic bell hooks, ’73:
“Individual preferences (whether rooted in self-hate or not) cannot
negate the reality that our collective obsession with hair straightening
reflects the psychology of oppression and the impact of racist colonization.”
That’s a common sentiment in the collection, a hair-politics of emancipation
in which going natural constitutes a kind of deliverance. We hear from
Alice Walker that “Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain,”
from physician Denise L. Davis on “Post-Traumatic Tress Syndrome”
and from many others. The messages are largely the same: as women listen
to the demands of fashion, of men who insist on wavy, blow-in-the-wind
locks, of employers who dangle promotion in front of those who fulfill
their notion of respectability, women’s hair and their inner lives
lie dormant, unable to grow.
At times, the insistence on linking hair to liberation feels pious and
inflexible. It echoes a message delivered by the black consciousness movement
of the ’60s, embodied by Angela Davis (who contributes an excellent
essay on “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia”) and
her planet-sized ’fro. Except now the object seems spiritual as much
as political: straight hair is an image of conformity in a racist society;
going natural connects you to a more fundamental, spiritually sound community.
The editors of Tenderheaded, however, remind us that 70 percent
of American black women straighten their hair and that there are as many
ideological communities and points of view as there are hairstyles. The
most irreverent moments in the collection provide a contrast to the political
message of hooks and others.
For instance, former Essence beauty editor Jenyne Raines writes, “Relaxed
hair has evolved past the imitation of the white girl. It represents a
lifelong bond and ritual. . . . Mom puts the comb on the stove, breaks
out the Sulfur 8, and pulls out the high chair; it becomes mother-daughter
time.” She celebrates “All-Time Top Hair Divas” from Josephine
Baker to Lil’ Kim, who “rocks a wig with sassy aplomb, be it
brassy Mae West blond or a lavender china chop.” Dekar Lawson, a
Harlem hairdresser, tells journalist Pamela Johnson that “Black women
have got it all over [white women]. There’s nothing they can’t
do: wear it straight like them, wear it nappy, pin it up, roller set it,
achieve all these different textures.”
Then there is the reportage from more intimate cultural corners. Cherilyn
Wright trolls through the sex lives of her friends with expensive, elaborate
perms and weaves, finding out that “Black men do not expect to have
their hands in our hair when we make love.” Her friend Arlene relates
her sex strategies: “I always keep my eyes open to make sure that
my partner isn’t coming for my head. I never let my head get in the
way of the action.” The essay is a voyeuristic thrill, told in a
roiling vernacular, not the PhD-speak of some other contributors.
The success of Tenderheaded lies in such juxtapositions. From the
history of Madam Walker to anecdotes about slavery-era hair care (conditioner
made from wild apple leaves and chicken fat) to an examination of hip-hop’s
hair message, Tenderheaded cobbles together a wealth of information
and anecdote, creative and wild, contentious and funny. The book is a
heterogeneous mix, sensitive to political and apolitical points of view,
strengthened by its variety.
Taylor Antrim, ’96, is a writer based in San Francisco. |
