Calamity Jane #4 - Fourth Circle of Hell (Greed)

As an African, my fancy dress attempts at school (a fetish we blacks neither dare nor care to understand) were never up to par and the concept of it still leaves me mystified. As my friends exerted energy (their mothers up, all night sewing and stitching and sweating until the dawn) creating a teenage mutant ninja turtle outfit from scratch; my mother would simply blot some black powder on my face, draw dots with her eye liner, and with the rest of my body adorned in my usual get up, send me off to school as Anansi, the folk character (spider) only blacks had heard of. And there were to total of four of us in my school. Two of whom were related to me.

Non school uniform day, by comparison, was the social event of my year. Weeks were spent planning meticulously, discounting every outfit in my wardrobe and justifying to my mother the benefit of a trip to view the latest collection at Tammy Girl.  The hair, (remembering it is pre relaxer as I wasn’t old enough for the chemicals), raw and rock hard. Being surrounded by little girls with spindly legs (even as a child I had strong thighs, or athletic as my sports coach would refer to my physique) and long flowing blond locks that whispered menacingly in the wind, I knew I had to impress….

The braids were removed, washed, blow dried (breaking the forks of more than one comb as it fought its way through my wild roots to freedom) and combed ‘down’ to my delight. Move over Shingai (Noisettes), I was rocking my hard core fro, loud and proud, way back in the day! There was the obvious ‘can I touch it?’, but I was impervious to any mocking about the height as opposed to length of my hair. My greed for the bigness outweighed my childish desire to blend in with my (melanin deprived) peers.

  

My big hair wasn’t limited to my childish fro of yesteryear, but spawned a desire (even if it meant a return to the ‘can I touch it’?) for the big, the bad and the most brazen hair I could muster. The bigger the better, except of course when referring to the size of my thighs, arms or butt…

The only problem with my desire for big hair is that my head is relatively small by most standards. Imagine the wig Erykah Badu is rocking on her new album and you have some concept of the scale of my hair.

I was greedy for more, and what started off as a modest afro, spawned into a manifestation of my rejection of the straight, glossy, relaxed, homogenous hair of the masses. Keesha happily slapped on the hair (she’s like that with weave – there’s no holding back), using pack after pack, weaving and gluing to produce the lolly pop effect.  Like all things taken to excess at some point you can’t take anymore. I bored of the look (having revolutionised hair care, black women are in the enviable position of being able to radically change their hair from one look to another) and constructed a new image, premised on natural and boyishly short hair, to which Keesha simply said...NO!

It was then that the natural hair prejudice was revealed. You see it was acceptable for me to sew a mass of hair on to my head, but to cut it off to its natural state and this woman who once veered away from enforcing her opinion about my hair choices, was quick to speak with authority and certainty. She felt it necessary to save me from myself and after so bullishly endeavouring on this plight, like a child in a corner (in God Bless of all places) I backed down, afraid of the result that would ensue (Keesha had the scissors and I was scared of what she’d do) and haplessly resigned myself to a fate of wigs and weaves.

CJ.