Me, My Hair, and I (10 page)

Philosophy

She is a filmmaker, younger than I am by about thirty years, African American, a near celebrity, gay, very gifted, up-to-the-minute chic. We are sitting at breakfast at an artists' colony when she suggests I shave away a patch of hair above my right ear. This will render me asymmetrical, she explains, and therefore cool, even as cool, she implies, as she is. This out of nowhere: I'm flummoxed. Why would I make such a change? Even when it's dirty or I've resorted to a bed-head look, hardly a day goes by when I don't receive a compliment on my never-colored, near-black, long, thick hair. But she has rendered me speechless, bereft of my usual certainty. “Why?” “You'll like it. A change. Something new!” As if at my age I'd want something that ilk of new! “I don't want anything new,” I retort, unable to keep myself from sounding defensive. “You can always let it grow back,” she replies. Why does she insist? “I don't think so,” I say. “Go ahead,” she says. “Don't be scared.” Scared? Am I scared? I am never scared! “I'm not
SCARED
,” I reply. “It
will
grow back,” she says, with an even smile, as if I, the queen of hair, of the endlessly growing mop of silken locks, don't understand that hair grows. “It will always grow back,” she repeats.

Shave

On one recent night before sleep, I streamed a video, a movie set in France during the First World War. At the end of the film, a girl of about seven meets her father for the first time. It is 1918, just at the end of the fighting; he is British, a soldier, and he and the girl's French mother had been lovers. He had not known of this child, but now he does know and is coming to meet her. He approaches a small country cottage, a grassy path, everything green. The little girl is coming toward him, the father's point of view. Her hair is light brown, honey-colored in the light, flowing long down her back.

A week later, I had the following dream. A man I know who is not a haircutter is snipping away at the short gray hair of the now dead great poet whose early work inspired me when I began to write poems. She is sitting calmly, which makes me extremely anxious, especially when I see that beneath her hair is a shaved patch, the very shaved patch I visualized when the young woman at the artists' colony made her recommendation. It's clear to me in the dream that the man is attempting to cut away the poet's power and that he doesn't notice the shaved patch. I am aware I have chosen a different path than my great mentor. My power resides in the length and thickness of my hair, and I will never give it up.

Blow Dry

Mayumi still cuts my hair—the daughter she was pregnant with when we met is now out of college—but every week, the day I teach my first class, a man named Mike Riz blow-dries my hair. I like thinking that I am of a matrilineage of women who, at a certain age, turn the care of their hair over to others. My mother died at fifty, so who knows if she would have been one of us, but my father's mother had her hair permed, curled, and rinsed blue, and my maternal grandmother, the one whose hair stayed brown into her sixties, kept it dyed that color until she went into a nursing home at eighty-five. My immediate predecessors are two aunts, my mother's and father's sisters, who lived near each other and shared only a love of gardening, but ran into each other at the hairdresser once a week. Have I turned into an old lady? I choose to think not. I continue to want the compliments I've received all my life, even from young women decades younger than I whose locks flow down their backs, who have not a thread of gray. Last night, when I put on my fur hat, one of my students said I looked “imperial.”

Two years ago, Mike Riz disappeared, and in the spirit of capitalism, no one at his salon would tell me where he went. The eighteen months it took to find him were a trial, but when I found him at his own eponymous salon, our reunion was sweet. “Ah! Honor!” he said, and he gave me a big hug and then his card and cell phone number so we would never again be parted. Like John Sahag, he is Lebanese, and just yesterday, as he worked, hair dryer in one hand, brush in another, he rehearsed the answers to questions for his citizenship exam: What is the separation of powers? Who is the governor of New York? He never knew Congress had two houses! As he blew me dry, he said again how he had missed my hair all those months we were separated, and then he did what he always does at the surprising moment when my hair is all dry: he lifts and pulls it away from my head, twisting the brush this way and that, lifting and brushing so that it falls back in waves, then with his hands massaging my scalp upward, the hair again falling and settling. Every time he blows my hair dry, he does this. And every time he does it, we laugh. “Beautiful,” he says. “Beautiful.”

My Wild Hair

MARIA HINOJOSA

M
y brother and I thought we had made a major hairdressing discovery. He was eight and I was six, and we were trying to find a way to make our somewhat unruly hair look more like our friends Bobby's and Lisa's, nice and flat and straight.

We had discovered that if you cut off the top portion of our mother's stocking, it became a tool to silkiness. We would pull the thigh of the stocking over our heads, down to just above the eyebrows, and tie the top part like the end of a sausage. If we put the stocking on after a bath and slept that way, the next morning we'd have smooth hair, and though it looked a little awkward, we knew early on that with flat hair, all would be good in the world that day.

My new country didn't understand my home country's hair. I was a mixture, a mestiza of Mexican, Caribbean, Spanish, Indigenous, and African (still no DNA proof, but this is my best guess). So my hair was unruly. Curly. Frizzy. Loud.

My birth country was Mexico. My new city was Chicago. In both I had problem hair.

It was all about keeping it down and flat. I was in such deep agony about the perpetual frizz that I begged my mom to take me to get my hair ironed, and I meant with an actual iron. She didn't think much of the idea. She said no and even called me
una loquita—
a little crazy girl.

In junior high school, something called Hair So New changed my life. I sprayed on the conditioner and suddenly the tangles were gone. That meant I didn't have to wear my nylon stocking cap anymore. The next hair development was feminism. At the height of the movement in the 1970s, short hair became hipper. That helped a lot, since my hair never seemed to grown straight down anyway—why not keep it short? In high school, a few years later, curly perms were all the rage, so I cut all my hair off and had a hip little 'fro till my senior year, when I let it and my armpit hair grow out.

At Barnard College, in New York City, I began to accept my “not the norm” looks and my Latina identity. I stopped cutting my hair, and soon after, watching the movie
Eu te amo
, I found my new hair role model. Her name was Sonia Braga. Back then, her long black hair was curly, unruly, and wild. I knew I could never be her, but I could try to make my hair look like hers. And that hair was almost half of the mystique around Dama Braga.

As I came to accept and even love my wild hair, it became a way for me to feel power that I had never experienced. Physically, I am limited. I am only five feet tall. But with my full hair out and a pair of five-inch platform shoes, I had presence and I gave off the air of being tall. I saw that once I accepted my hair, I could accept myself in a deeper way. And soon I really did have the Braga hair—and then the fun started. I remember nights when I danced and swung my head and my long, luscious curls, dancing myself into a delirium. My wild hair was an essential part of feeling free, uncontrolled, and in the moment.

I have happy hair memories of my first foray into television as a journalist on a local New York PBS station, in the early 1990s. It was a group of us talking around a table, and no one paid much attention to my long, curly hair. But soon after, when I was asked to anchor my own show, I was told to tie my hair back and make its distinctiveness disappear. I think they wanted me to be a Latina Talbots model. It was not all that becoming, but it taught me an important lesson: being on TV meant I would have to conform to someone else's idea of how I should look.

When CNN called in 1996, asking me to join them as a correspondent, one of the first items I put in my contract was that they could not dictate my hairstyle. And they agreed. But as I got older and the on-air look became more competitive and conformist, with big, glossy hair the new normal, I learned to blow out my hair, and then it became a habit.

Now that I run my own media company, I decide how I want to look on camera. And I always struggle with my hair and my look. Always. Only on rare occasions does it look just right. I have become accustomed to getting out of bed and praying to the “hair gods” that when I unclip it, the hair will fall perfectly into place. I learned the clipping technique from a Dominican hairdresser, who showed me that it was a way to keep the body and curl. Most every night I roll my hair into two loops on top of my head with special bobby pins.

But nothing anyone could say about my hair affected me as much as what my artist-husband said in the middle of a heated argument over how much time I spend working. Everything about me had changed because of work. “Even your hair is corporate now!” he charged. “It's short and straight, like everyone else's!”

I was horrified and wounded. My husband looked at my hair now and saw corporate, put together, and uptight—the opposite of Sonia Braga!

I made a promise to myself to prove my love to my husband by letting my hair grow out as long as I could. I would become the wild woman again, to honor him and prove my love through my hair. I had the best of intentions, but in truth I also wanted to see if, after fifty, my hair would still cooperate and grow. I took on my hairdresser too, who is a hard-core believer in the school of Over Fifty Women Should Never Have Long Hair. And for three months, I was going to stop coloring it too.

I also checked my calendar for upcoming TV shoots, to make sure that I could get away with not being on camera during that period. But the entire challenge came back to one thing: love and my husband, whose own gorgeous hair made me fall in love with him.

When I first met him in 1988, German had a Dominican 'fro. We connected instantly, but we were both in other relationships. Two years later, I ran into him at the Village Gate, at their weekly Salsa Meets Jazz concert. My hair was in full Sonia Braga mode, and I danced in Braga style. His hair had grown and he was sporting a long, curly ponytail. The sight of this masculine, muscular man with a ponytail made me feel weak at the knees. I knew that night I had found the one. And I knew his new hairstyle had something to do with it.

After hours of dancing, I asked German up to my apartment for tea. Instead of jumping on me like a dog, as we got comfy on the sofa he put his gorgeous head of hair on my chest and just lay there. My first act of loving touch with my future husband was to stroke his hair and run my fingers through his ponytail, while I marveled at the tightness of each curl and the butter softness of each lock. Our hair sealed our relationship, and it is still at the heart of it.

What do I mean? The greatest act of love I can show German is to comb out his hair and braid it. I brush it back in long swipes and then weave it into a power braid, usually with a Native American leather tie. When he is painting a canvas, his hair can go wild, one half black, the other half white, with strands of hair everywhere. But mostly he prefers to wear it pulled back and tight. Forceful. Controlled. No loose ends.

During big fights, we have been known to throw hair into the ring. “I swear,” my husband said once, “I will cut off my hair! Just like you did before you gave birth to our son. Cut off all your hair without even telling me!”

I've learned that hair in arguments is always a dangerous thing. And so are promises. So I didn't tell my husband about my plan to grow out my hair as a guerrilla-tactic response to his critique of my so-called corporate hair. At the end of October, I stopped cutting and coloring it and started wearing it curly. A gray streak came out over the right side of my head. I was shocked by how quickly the gray took over. My young staffers told me the streak made me look kick-ass and powerful. I hated it because it reminded me that I am over fifty. My staff noticed, but my husband didn't for quite some time. Hair grows slowly, and he's an artist and in his own world, not focusing on me the way my colleagues do at the office.

The truth is that the promise to honor my husband was also a promise to honor my younger self. I am hopeful that a woman who wears her hair long and wild like Sonia Braga is saying something about feminine beauty. She is saying that it is imperfect, unpredictable, and that the wild-hair thing is a thing of beauty, not a look to be shunned and blow-dried away. After years of keeping my hair in order both in length and in color, I wanted to show that wild women exist behind masks of perfect hair.

Since the promise, I haven't cut my hair (except to trim it slightly to get it to grow more) for six months. I haven't had hair this long in eighteen years. I haven't worn it curly so many days in a row in over a decade. And I love it. I feel younger and, yes, sexier. Where has German been during all this time? I think that because the change in my hair was so gradual, he got used to the new me little by little, without any fanfare.

AS I WRITE
this I am traveling back from a week in my parents' home in Mexico City, where I went to purposely disconnect. I left their home only twice. I was content just to bask in the shadow of the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl volanoes. And during all those days, I never once tied up and clipped my hair. I let it be as wild, long, and curly as it is.

And yes, I do this for love. Because I love myself more like this and because this way I show my husband my love, not in words or deeds, but in hair.

As soon as I got home from Mexico, German saw what had been before his eyes for months. He told me that he loved my hair. I smiled and said I was glad he noticed but I didn't tell him why I had done it.

That weekend, late one night when the moonlight came in through our Harlem apartment window, I stood next to a candle I had lit and saw the shadows of my long, curly, loud hair. I called German to the bedroom and said, “This wild head of hair is in honor of you,
mi amor
. This is the real me. The real Sonia Braga in me. And I love you for inspiring me to bring her, and me, back to you.”