The Politics of Hair
“…the racial conflicts of the sixties and the solitary apostolic histrionics of Wallace left Alabama with a single provincial vision of itself in the nation and the world, and a single ruthless expectation for unanimity — not only in ideas but also in habits, in morality, even in dress: most youngsters in Alabama classrooms regarded any deviation from short hair and neatly pressed clothes as a sign of perversion. The archaic specter of the unkempt beatnik still hovered over the state and conglomerately connoted everything sinister of the Alabama mind: communism, miscegenation, dope, illicit sex. It was a mentality cultivated not only in the pulpits of Alabama but also in the schools: it pervaded everything” (Marshall Frady, Wallace, 214).
It’s a funny thing about hair, and about history. I hope I’m always humble enough in writing and in life to understand that I don’t always get the way history and society conjoin.
For instance, I know that George Wallace captured the votes, the imagination, and the reverence of so many Alabamians in the 1960’s and 70’s that they might have elected him Governor-For-Life had they the chance. And truly, given the span of his political career as governor, what else was he?
I also knew that people within my neighborhood and family didn’t approve of long hair on men. But I thought that disapproval arose mainly from the GI haircut of the World War II generation of men, and then the fear of the British Invasion of my rock and roll heroes.
I didn’t quite get, until I read the above passage in Marshall Frady’s Wallace, that what I experienced as a grade school kid — I started first grade in 1962, the year Wallace was first elected Governor of Alabama — that the conventional expectation, if not dictate, that we boys wear our hair short and neatly parted — that is, if we weren’t wearing butch or flat-top cuts — emanated from the image and whim of our new governor, who looked like this in ‘62:
I didn’t know that I was supposed to grow up to look like that, or worse, to look like that at ages six, seven, and eight.
And I’m sure the thought has occurred to some of you that we’re talking only of white boys here. I don’t want to speak to what white girls or black kids were expected to look like. Or rather, I don’t want to assume or appropriate anyone else’s pain or experience. I want to write about what I saw, felt, and lived with, though I do remember when “Peyton Place’s” teenaged star, Mia Farrow, cut her long blond hair into a Twiggy style. Oh, the pain and consternation from sources within my world.
I’ve written before about how my family didn’t support Wallace, about how my brother and I were taught not to hate people because of skin color, or any other reason. Yet, in this regard, the politics of hair, my parents were definitely Wallace supporters. Or at least I assumed so.
Once, when I was in fourth grade, my hair not even as long as Wallace’s, my dad convinced my mom — our barber — to shear my half-inch long strawberry locks into skinhead territory. She pretended to make a mistake with the new electric razor she had bought with Green Stamps, explaining that now, she’d have to shave everything off.
Back then, I wanted to look like a Beatle, and it didn’t matter which one, so I had bangs that skimmed the edge of my forehead. As they fell by my side on the day of my mother’s “mistake,” they were accompanied by my tears of rage. I don’t know how my mother managed to finish with my howls, but she did, forcing me to “hold still.”
Fortunately, that was the last “crewcut” I ever got.
For the next few years, I was allowed to grow my bangs long, though I had to get the back of my head buzzed-cut. I refuse to find a photo to display my look here. Trust me that I was stupidly happy and fancied myself as an heir to everything cool and hip in Bessemer, Alabama.
Until I hit adolescence, no one seemed concerned about my hair except my grandmother, who thought my Beatle bangs were ugly. She didn’t use the word “ugly,” but she kept wanting to hold a mirror up to me so that I could see for myself how bad I looked with that hair. I looked, too, and liked what I saw.
Poor thing, I have no memory now of what my Nanny considered handsome, but it hurts to know that not only wasn’t I it, but that I also so stubbornly refused to listen to her, that I too laughed at her for what I considered her foolishness. I use that word intentionally because it was Nanny who once chided me for calling my brother a fool: “He who calls his brother a fool shall not abide in the Lord.” I probably don’t have that verse right, but I did call my brother a fool, and I have lamented doing so ever since. I ask his and Nanny’s forgiveness now.
I don’t, however, ask forgiveness about my hair.
Once, our next-door neighbor asked my dad why he didn’t force me to cut my hair. I was fourteen and now modeled myself after my favorite rocker, Neil Young.
“It’s his hair,” my dad said. “He can wear it any way he wants to, and besides, it’s none of your business.”
I’m not sure that our neighbor was a Wallace supporter, or that she was chastened, as even afterward, she’d accost me about my hair, telling me that it wasn’t “manly.” She really didn’t like it when I suggested that her Lord had long hair, too.
I had never heard my dad support me in such a manner, though I was not fooled for a minute about whether or not he liked my hair, which covered my ears and hit my shirt collar in back. My flannel shirt collar.
He also supported me when I got sent home from school in ninth grade for having hair that covered my ears and collar. He wanted to fight it, but my mother decided that we shouldn’t, that I should get my hair trimmed. I sort of did, pushing most of it behind my ears, as other white kids did. It worked for a while, until it didn’t, until I had to get a more “manly” cut.
By tenth grade, though, our school had too much to battle: racial animus, overcrowding. White guys were allowed to wear their hair any length they wanted; black kids could have Afros. Any girl could wear jeans and their tops didn’t have to cover their rear ends. Cool.
Life didn’t end here, even though Wallace was still governor.
What also didn’t end were the people who thought they needed to mind my business, the ones, like our football coaches, who took it upon themselves to ask regularly why I didn’t “cut that hair and look like a man?” And maybe it was just me, but the way they said it, the way they looked at me, the grin on their faces. What else would they say or do, if they only could?
No one ever hurt me, though I remember being called those quaint, gender-disparaging names. “Sissy.” “Pussy.” “Girl.” What kind of world do we live in when “girl” is a disparaging word? I got whistled at, too, when I was a high-schooler. I suppose the guy who did that hadn’t looked at photos of Duane or Gregg recently. Or Charlie Daniels.
I suppose I was too sensitive, and maybe I still am. When I see or hear the word “snowflake,” what I feel is that someone wants to take me by what hair I have left and shave it and then do something else with the rest of me.
And I have it pretty good, compared to others who are ridiculed, humiliated, and threatened for what they look like, who they are.
Is it Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling, or his Afro, that enrages his critics more?
Be honest now.
And speaking of honesty, here’s Frady again, showing us the inside of Wallace’s hair.
Wallace was campaigning for president at Syracuse University. He entered a frat house for supper:
“But once inside the fraternity house — old and dim and sparsely furnished with genteel but slightly sleazy Victorian furniture — Wallace seemed a bit uncomfortable among the clean-faced, dapper students with their Kennedy coiffures. (He asked a reporter once, in a low, earnest voice, ‘How come you reckon Bobby Kennedy wants to wear all that hair? I mean, I been wondering about it. You reckon that’s why he’s so big with all these college kids?’ And unconsciously, he touched his own limp, oil-combed streaks with the heel of his hand, as if he were fleetingly considering whether he himself could muster a mane.)” (248).
Yep, maybe so. Because, I’d say to Wallace now if he were still with us, we are free in America to emulate whomever we want, which is not always a comforting thought when I consider those Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and whose hairstyle they’re emulating.
Today, my daughters would like me to wear my hair shorter, to look stylish, though what style they mean escapes me. What I want, and have decided to try, is wearing my hair longer again. I know I have thin hair. I know I have a large bald spot in back that I can see only when standing between two mirrors. But I don’t do that often. Nor do I plan a comb over.
I am not innocent. I am not immune to criticizing or even poking fun at other men’s hair. Do what you want and let others alone. But please, understand why you, they, are doing it, wearing it. I’ll end here, though, before I take a cheap shot. For I want to learn from history, at my ripe age. Not repeat it.
