How Much Longer? An Experience at a Black Barbershop

Photo: http://captainandclark.com/

Every black man in Britain has experienced an African and Caribbean barber. Most of us have waited for 45 minutes in the leather chair waiting for the skin fade. Anthony Lorenzo asks how much longer we have to experience the ‘Black Barber’.

The media periodically prints lists of the amount of time people spend doing various activities. It’s been calculated we spend twenty-five years of our lives sleeping and forty-eight days having sex (is that all?) Women apparently spend seventeen years of their lives trying to lose weight and we spend two years watching adverts, which isn’t hard to believe if you regularly watch X Factor.

These time periods seem lengthy unless you are a black man. It has been calculated that a black man spends an average of seventy-five years in a barbershop waiting to get his hair cut. Even if he only lives to be forty.

We black men all know the drill. You get up early on Saturday morning, needing your hair cut before whatever highly important engagement has to be attended to later that day. The edges have grown back, the hairline has decided to abandon its carefully contoured sharpness; the curls have regained their Samson-like powers and are determined to fight against gravity in their quest upwards and outwards. You set your alarm for an ungodly hour, wash your hair one more time, make sure behind your ears won’t betray your general unkemptness, and leave the house.

You get there at 9, because this time will be different. It isn’t different; Flex/Don/Vice isn’t there. The shutters are down, and in their gleam you see mocking. If shutters could talk, the barber shutters would say: “Fool. You really expected this place to be open at 9? Do we look white to you?’

You go home knowing the shutters had a point, and return three hours later. In that three hours, 50% of the black male population has decided they too need haircuts, and so begins a jostling for supremacy to ensure you get yours done before the sun goes down.

Black barbers often have the accusation thrown at them (by fellow black people) that they are ‘unprofessional’ because there tends not to be an appointments system. Of course, this is not about professionalism, but about logistics, and culture. An unprofessional barber would leave your hair looking like your Granny who has Parkinson’s tried to cut your hair with a lawnmower; the reality is when we finally leave the barbers, we’re happy with our cuts.

Complaints about time fall on deaf ears for many Caribbean-run establishments because Caribbeans have a different sense of the passage of time to Western people.

A white man who needs to run an errand will tell you he’ll be back in a couple of hours, and when he turns up four hours later will have a list of reasons the world conspired to make him late.

A black man who needs to run an errand will say ‘soon come’, and when he turns up four hours later he has no need to provide such explanations; he knows he cannot control the world around him.

He’ll be back when he’s back. This is an honest, albeit frustrating, relationship with time.

Black barbers do not really know how long one haircut will take, which goes some way to explaining why even when appointments systems are vaguely put in place, they soon fall apart. An appointment can only lead to disappointment, as you believe your hair will be cut at 2pm, and you leave at 7pm wondering why your people are so lax. Things that get in the way of allotted times for cuts include:

1. A guy who complains his hairline has been taken too far back, requiring the rest of his hair to be shorn.
2. A Chinese man with all the latest films out on DVD in his giant bag comes in periodically to sell his wares. Squabbles over the terrible quality of the last DVDs the barber bought never seeming to result in a parting of ways. This is because Caribbeans know about poorly-dubbed films as much as they know about anything.
3. A Yardie who has been a customer for centuries comes in with his crocodile shoes and blond step hairstyle, and he takes precedence over everyone in there because he is part of the fabric of the Caribbean community you know and love and what can you say? You also agree that he REALLY needs his hair doing, and can completely understand his wish to change his barnet in a hasty manner.
4. The barber gets hungry and has to dash off next-door (there is always a Jamaican takeaway on the same road. This is logistics, duh) to get a patty or some curry goat. He does this mid-cut. You could complain, but given half your head looks like you’re about to shoot for a modeling contract, and the other half looks like you’ve been shot and spent the last six months in hospital, you stay quiet. Even when he’s slurping soup while you sit in the chair.
5. Never-ending phone conversations, because your barber is also a pillar of the community and is in demand- black barbers fulfil the role of sympathetic counsellor as much as any other salon owner, and are often called upon to give sound advice.

A panoply of other factors leads to appointments becoming irrelevant. You accept you will have to give up your whole day to get a haircut that takes half an hour when actually being executed, partly because you know in your soul that the Caribbean way of doing things is better for your soul, and partly because what choice do you have?

You could always just rub in some coconut oil, put on a cap and take to the streets, but you don’t want to. You want to look sharp. And truth be told, your barber always makes sure you do, and for that, you’d happily give up two days.