The History of Hair: On Whiteness and Blackness and Being in the Betweens

The story of me always starts with hair. I had bushels of it, the kind you could get lost in, wiry, coarse, yet yielding — I had the kind of hair that gave passersby a double-take. As a child growing up in Brooklyn my hair stood in stark contrast to my skin, which was pale, practically translucent. I remember standing in the bathroom as my mother took a tub of Vaseline and a brush to my hair, yanking and pulling, all in an effort to get the mess of weeds under control. Come nightfall I’d watch her take a comb to her hair, which grew straight and shiny from the root, and the only thing we shared was thickness. Fact: I knew I belonged to her because we had the same parchment skin, the wide-set eyes. I was my mother in miniature, except for my hair. Except for the one thing that made the girls around the way pause and suck their teeth. Everyone hissed: Girl, you ain’t white, but you ain’t black, either.

What do I say to that? Fact: my last name is Irish (Sullivan) and my mother tells me that this hair, the wreck of it, is pure Italian. But none of the Italians in the neighborhood had hair like mine. They were Sicilian and reluctant to claim me as their own. It made no difference that I grew up in Borough Park, steps away from the elevated train on New Utrecht. It didn’t matter that I purchased the same chicken legs wrapped in brown paper from the bodega or swam in the same pool in Sunset Park or pinched loosies (single cigarettes) when we could–what mattered was my hair. Because where I came from being white was a liability. Being white got you jumped. Being white made you an outsider. You were lesser than because if you had the privilege of that skin, and you lived where you lived, you were considered a joke. It was as if you had a lottery ticket you were too dumb to cash in. But my mother wore Pumas, was ferocious, waitressed at a diner, played her soul records and knew all the right people. So mostly, they left us alone.

But I had that skin. All corpse-white and blinding. I had the kind of complexion that burned under the sun. I was the white girl who could pass if my hair was pulled back real tight. Don’t wear that red lipstick, my girl Judy once said. Everyone will think you’re Puerto Rican. Judy was Puerto Rican, but when we grabbed Dipsy Doodles and quarter grape juices at the bodega on Fourth Avenue, everyone spoke Spanish to me. None of it mattered really until I moved to Long Island — home of shiny fine hair, Debbie Gibson LPs, and Benneton. Months after we settled into a basement apartment in Valley Stream, I called Judy from a payphone, confused. Everyone’s white, I whispered into the receiver. You’re white, she laughed. How could I make her understand that the girls in my class were nothing like me?

White people didn’t have this hair. White people didn’t speak with a Spanish lilt to their voice. White people didn’t grow up listening to soul when rock and roll existed (which, by the way, my mother listened to, too). And I remember a group of Spanish girls in my junior high school who took me in, asked where I was from, and the next day no one made comments about my hair. The cheerleaders in their green pleated skirts, the girls named Lea, Ryan, and Michelle, didn’t say anything at all. They were frightened and in that fear came the silences. I shook my head, and wanted to say that my last name was Sullivan! That I was Italian and Irish! But while I thought all of these things as truths, I knew they were also somehow untrue. I didn’t see anything wrong with being black or Spanish, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I didn’t feel white but I didn’t feel black, either. How do you explain to thirteen-year-olds who live on binary terms that you are possibly gray? When you’re small you don’t understand the gradations of color, the in-betweens. When you are that young, you still believe you have to color in the lines. To the Leas and Ryans of my small world, black men were ball players, rappers, men who robbed your house. Wait, what? I couldn’t see any of that. Sure, men in my old neighborhood tossed rhymes on stoops, drank 40s out of brown paper bags, but they were also kind, always had your back, and worked from dark to dark. Rhyming, drinking, and dreaming were some of the things they did to pass the time, to make their lives easier to bear.

Now I lived in a place where people kept blacks at a remove — relegated to television shows and radio stations, and possibly I posed a threat to that fragile world. That girl with the pale skin, the “right” last name, but that hair. That hair was dangerous, foreign, something that deserved to be denied trespass to skate dates at Grant Park and hang-outs in Green Acres Mall.

Back in the day (we’re talking late 80s, early 90s), I used Queen Helene because while everyone raved about Aussie and Pantene, I crept toward the small shelf in the drugstore that catered to African-American hair. That tough hair, my mother used to call it. The kind of hair that society would tell me I should be ashamed of. When I was sixteen, I seriously contemplated shaving my head and buying a wig. One summer I slathered an entire tub of Revlon hair straightening cream in my hair to then witness my locks fall out in clumps in the shower, lightened two shades from the chemicals. I tried wearing baseball caps to class but teachers viewed caps as subversive, and no self-respecting lady in her right mind would dare bring attitude through the doors of Valley Stream South H.S. I purchased blow-dryers and flat irons and cried when my scalp burned. Why couldn’t I have the kind of hair you could flip, the kind you could easily run your hands through? Why was I, by definition, unruly and impenetrable?

The white girl who used to pass ate lunch alone. I buried myself in my books, and after school, I rode the train into the city and Queens to be with my friends who didn’t care if I was white, black or whatever. I was just Felicia—the girl who made everyone laugh. In my desperate desire to further lighten my shade, I’d forgotten about my friends who accepted me for who I was even if they initially gave me a double-take. It would take me years to realize that I chased after white acceptance so fervently, sometimes tossing aside my Spanish and black friends who just shrugged me off as mixed. It would take me years to see the beauty in color, even if I knew in my heart it was there all along. Buried. Innocuous. Denied White Trespass.

I have a memory, but it comes and goes in fragments, like swallows, and I remember the glare of a television in a dark bedroom and I’m lying on the floor watching it. I am small and my mother is in bed with a man named Keith. He is black, striking in his beauty, his man-ness, and they are talking in the way that couples do after they’ve just been intimate. They exist in the space of the after, when conversations are easy, slow, and you talk about the things you wouldn’t normally discuss in the morning. That’s all I’m able to remember, and now I think: was that him? Was that man my biological father? Who’s to say?

Another memory: Another man, another state. We are in Pennsylvania and my mother (a mistress now) travels with her abusive boyfriend to visit his ex-wife and children. I never understood why we traveled to a place where we were not welcome, but we made the trip and the children, sisters, made snide comments about from where we’d come, about how I wasn’t one of them, white. The mother’s name was Virginia and I never saw my mother so afraid when she was in that house.

I think back to those girls in junior high school, and my nearly all-white high school, and how everyone believed that black men were to be feared. But no. I shook my head, no, because in my experience white men weren’t to be trusted. They hid behind the privilege of their skin. And then I got all confused because had I become one of those people coloring in the lines? Not understanding that the content of one’s character isn’t married to the pigment of their skin?

The summer before college, I worked at Pizza Hut and I started dating one of my coworkers who drove a nice car and lived in Queens. We bonded over our affection for A Tribe Called Quest, and I remember over the course of our date how he kept playing “The Low End Theory” in this car. He came to my door and met my family, and I remember how my father, Gus, shook his hand and smiled because Gus is the kind of man who will shake your hand and mean it, but my mother, my mother, cowered in the background and scowled. She took me aside and told me she hadn’t known that my date was black, and didn’t I know that his color would cause trouble? Because we were no longer in Brooklyn. And I shook away from her because I knew that I was going to college and college meant freedom, and who was she to talk to me about blackness when there was Keith and all the men who had come before? I didn’t choose my date because he was black, I chose to go out with him because he was cool. I said as much and walked out of the house. In the car my date made a comment about my mother being something and I said, she sure is. Something.

That was our only date. While we spent the rest of the summer making personal pan pizzas, something was off, wasn’t the same. We were still friends. We still joked but we were changed, and I can’t help but think it had to do with the fact that I was white (but not really) and he wasn’t, and I was angry because it didn’t matter when someone loves “The Low End Theory” just as much as you do. When someone can turn the task of dumping frozen pepperoni on a pizza into a game, into something fun.

I went to Fordham, a college in the Bronx, and on the weekends, I spent two hours in a Dominican salon in rollers under a hot dryer. Women tugged and yanked at my hair and I spent $15 to have my hair partially resemble those of my friends, who were white and affluent, hailing from genteel towns in Long Island and Connecticut. It wasn’t until my early 20s when flat iron technology would transform my hair.

In 1999, I stood in a salon on the Upper East Side and cried. My hair was straight and fine, with only roots serving as a betrayal. For most of my life, this was how I viewed my hair — as a betrayal. A decade later I would visit a salon that would style my hair curly and I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. I left the salon and pulled my hair back into a bun, even as friends told me they envied my curls. People pay good money for the hair you have.

If only you knew.

When I turned 39, I took a DNA test. I remember the morning when I received the email and I expected that the results would reveal that I was Puerto Rican. While I can’t explain it, I’ve always felt Puerto Rican. I spoke Spanish as a child and felt connected to the community. I was shocked to learn that I was African. In the year and a half since I’ve been quietly trying to figure out how I can own blackness in a way that feels honest and respectful. My black girlfriends laughed when they heard the results. Oh, we always thought you were black. Maybe you had a black grandmother? Why didn’t you tell me? We thought you knew. I mean, your hair.

How do you own blackness after a lifetime living uncomfortably comfortable in white privilege? I’m still trying to sort this out. I’m an ally; I’m able to go in the places where some can’t, but is that enough? I still wonder: what does my blackness mean to me?

This morning I read a beautiful post about Beyonce’s “Formation”. Kate Forristall writes:

How many centuries were our black brothers and sisters relegated to the position of audience — the thrills of competitive sports, television and movie screens, even the petty dramas of middle class servitude demanding their attention. We gave them the role of witness to our stories without so much as a thought that they might have their own. Today those stories are rising to be told and though we may be the villain or not so much as a paragraph,if we listen, it will be our great joy to learn all that we have missed.

I read this post from my white perspective because while I’m part black I don’t yet feel I have the right to claim it. I love how Beyonce made such a powerful political and socioeconomic statement of black pride and struggle by juxtaposing image and type. Yet I felt like a bystander because I’ve never had to live a life as a black woman, and while I can empathize I’ll never truly know what it means to inhabit black skin, and all the sickening hate spewed so freely, without apology, by people who inhabit the color of my skin. Over the past few years, I’ve become hyper-aware of the casual everyday racism and appropriation. How black culture creates something uniquely and beautifully of their own to have it be stolen and reduced to a point where it’s less black. Where black voices are thinned out. I think about the near child-like emphatic desire that white people exhibit by placing their sticky fingers on everything, claiming ownership, and how they quiver, shake and rage when the world doesn’t fall so neatly into their white dominion. That white will no longer be the default setting. I’ve observed people who share my privilege who will do anything not to lose it.

But all of this is my education and my work (I consider myself well-educated, but I still have so much to learn considering most of my education didn’t emphasize black history, which is an utter disgrace, but that’s a whole other post). Because being mixed means more than checking off the “Two or More Races” on job applications. For me, right now, it means more color in my news consumption. It means speaking out when people make flippant racist remarks (that’s so ghetto!) instead of listening uncomfortably.

A few weeks ago a receptionist from the salon I patron left me a message about moving my hair appointment. She repeated that my “difficult” hair would require more time. And I wondered if she said as much to white women. Did she refer to their hair in the pejorative? Why is it that people still ask if I’d ever consider straightening my hair? Do they ask white women if they considered perming their hair? These comments are casual, but they’re caustic. They implicitly tell you that one kind of hair is better, easier, viewed as coveted over another. When I arrived for my appointment, I made a point tell my stylist and the salon manager that I don’t have “difficult” hair — I have mixed hair, which is just as beautiful as any other kind of hair.