Me, My Hair, and I (17 page)

What interests me here is the part of the story Freud suppresses. The mother's vulva,
surrounded by hair
, is the external sign of a hidden origin, our first residence in utero, the place from which we were all expelled during the contractions of labor and birth. Isn't this bit of anatomical news also startling for children? Phallic sexuality is clearly involved in the Medusa myth, and the snake as an image for male sexuality is hardly limited to the Western tradition. (In Taipei in 1975, I watched a man slice open a snake and drink its blood to enhance his potency.) The Medusa story exists in several versions, but it always includes intercourse—Poseidon's dalliance with or rape of Medusa, and subsequent births. In Ovid, after Perseus beheads the Gorgon, her drops of blood give birth to Chrysaor, a young man, and Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. In other versions, the offspring emerge from the Gorgon's neck. Either way, the myth includes a monstrous but fecund maternity.

Hair has and continues to have sexual meanings, although whether there is any universal quality to them is a matter of debate. In his famous 1958 essay “Magical Hair,” the anthropologist Edmund Leach developed a cross-cultural formula: “Long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or partially shaved head or tightly bound hair = restricted sexuality; closely shaved head = celibacy.” Leach was deeply influenced by Freud's thoughts on phallic heads, although for him hair sometimes played an ejaculatory role as emanating semen. No doubt phallic significance has accumulated around hair in many cultures, but the persistent adoption of an exclusively male perspective (everybody has a penis) consistently fails to see meanings that are ambiguous, multilayered, and hermaphroditic, not either/or, but both-and.

One of the many tales I loved as a child and read to Sophie after our hair-braiding ritual was “Rapunzel.” The Grimm story has multiple sources, including the tenth-century Persian tale of Rudaba, from the epic poem
Shannameh
, in which the heroine offers the hero her long, dark tresses as a rope to climb (he refuses because he is afraid to hurt her), and the medieval legend of Saint Barbara, in which the pious girl is locked in a tower by her brutal father, a story that Christine de Pisan retells in
Th
e Book of the City of Ladies
(1405)
,
her great work written to protest misogyny
.
The later tales “Petrosinella” (1634) by Giambattista Basile and “Persinette” (1698) by Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force are much closer to the Grimm version (1812), which the brothers adopted from the German writer Friedrich Schultz (1790).

In all the last four versions of the tale, the action begins with a pregnant woman's cravings for an edible plant (rampion, parsley, lettuce, or a kind of radish—rapunzel) that grows in a neighboring garden owned by a powerful woman (enchantress, sorceress, ogress, or witch). The husband steals the forbidden plant for his wife, is caught, and, to avoid punishment for his crime, promises his neighbor the unborn child. The enchantress keeps the girl locked in a high tower but comes and goes by climbing her captive's long hair, which then becomes the vehicle for the prince's clandestine entrance to the tower. The final Grimm version, cleansed for its young audience, does not include Rapunzel's swelling belly or the birth of twins, but “Petrosinella” and “Persinette” do. When the enchantress realizes the girl is pregnant, she flies into a rage, chops off the offending hair, and uses it as a lure to trap the unsuspecting lover. The heroine and hero are separated, suffer and pine for each other, but are eventually reunited.

Rapunzel's fantastical head of hair figures as an intermediate zone where both unions and separations are enacted. A pregnancy begins the story, after all, and the lifeline between mother and fetus is the umbilical cord, cut after birth. But an infant's dependence on her mother does not end with this anatomical separation. Rapunzel's hair or extensive braid is a vehicle by which the mother-witch figure comes and goes on her visits, an apt metaphor for the back-and-forth motion, presence and absence of the mother for the child that Freud famously elaborated in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
when he described his one-and-a-half-year-old grandson playing with a spool and string. The little boy casts out his string, accompanied by a long “oooo,” which his mother interpreted as his attempt to say “
fort
,” gone, after which he reels it in and joyfully says “
da
,” there. The game is one of magically mastering the painful absence of the mother, and the string, which Freud does not talk about, serves as the sign or symbol of the relation: I am connected to you. Rapunzel's hair, then, is a sign of evolving human passions, first for the mother, then for the grown-up love object and the phallic/vaginal fusion between lovers that returns us to the story's beginning: a woman finds herself in the plural state of pregnancy.

The story's form is circular, not linear, and its narrative excitement turns on violent cuts: the infant is forcibly removed from her mother at birth, then locked in a tower, cut off from others, and jealously guarded by the story's second, postpartum maternal figure. After the punishing haircut, Rapunzel is not only estranged from her lover, she loses the sorceress mother. Notably, Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force reconciles the couple and the enchantress in “Persinette,” an ending that is not only satisfying but one that dramatizes the fact that this is a tale of familial struggles.

A child's early sociopsychobiological bond with and dependence on her mother changes over time. Maternal love may be ferocious, ecstatic, covetous, and resistant to intruders, including the child's father and later the offspring's love objects, but if all goes well the mother accepts her child's independence. She lets her go. Rapunzel's long hair, which belongs to her, but which may be hacked off without injuring her, is the perfect metaphor for the transitional space in which the passionate and sometimes tortured connections and separations between mother and child happen. And it is in this same space of back-and-forth exchanges that a baby's early babbling becomes first comprehensible speech and then narrative, a symbolic communicative form that links, weaves, and spins words into a structural whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end, one that can summon what used to be, what might be, or what could never be. Rapunzel's supernaturally long cord of hair that yokes one person to another may be assigned yet another metaphorical meaning—it is a trope for the telling of the fairy tale itself.

My daughter is grown up. I remember combing and braiding her hair, and I remember reading her stories, stories that still live between us, stories that used to soothe her into sleep.

Two Hair Stories from One Life

MYRA GOLDBERG

“
T
hink about what you're
really
interested in,” I told the writing class. “As opposed to what you
should
be interested in.” This was an evening writing class of grown women. We had a retired surgeon, a man, but he quit when we didn't accept him as an authority on anything but medicine. It was the 1980s. I don't remember why I asked them this question. Only that I'd been struck when a friend quoted her friend's question: “Do you want to know what I think? Or do you want to know what I
really
think?”

Writing, I thought, is what you
really
think. And what you really want to think about. “I'm interested in hair, for example,” I said to my students. “I sit on the subway and plan new hairdos for people. Also, I keep track of my students' constantly changing hairdos.”

Everyone started talking at once to her neighbors, telling stories. They stayed late. The next class, I brought a tape recorder.

“Hair,” I said. “We're going to go back to talking about hair.” Everyone was enthusiastic. I was exhausted by the time this class met. I taught undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence all day, then made extra money with classes like this one. For most of these women, it was a time to be with other adults and free of their kids, free to find out what they really thought. I had no kids but had bought an apartment in preparation for one. “Get a piece of the rock first,” a friend had advised.

“Hair? Like on our heads?” asked the woman who'd missed the last session.

“Oh, absolutely.” I told them a version of my own life lessons in hair: Learning to make a pageboy (seventh grade), Audrey Hepburn's bangs (eighth grade), a dancer's bun until junior year, then something tousled through college. Long, straight, center-parted hair until I noticed that most of the woman on the pro-choice march on Washington had the same hairdo. Each change promised more than it delivered. I would be a different person with my new do, I felt when young. I would feel different but be the same person, I felt later. People would regard me differently with a new hairdo, so I would feel different inside, still later on. At last, I settled for looking a little different, but not much. Hair became hair, not transformation.

“I've been thinking about hair since this group met,” I told them. “I went home last week and said to the man I live with, ‘Oh, we had this wonderful meeting, we accidentally started talking about hair at the end. Now we're going to talk about it next week.' I could tell by the quality of his silence that he couldn't hear what I was saying, which made me tongue tied.”

“I've got a hair story, if you want one,” said a woman who rarely spoke in class. “I'm thinking that maybe I'm going to get my hair cut. That's my only story about hair. Also, when my grandmother came to this country—she got married, you know, over there, and all her beautiful hair got cut off, which was what those Jews in Europe did. But secretly, she knew she was coming here, so she grew it a little under the wig. And when she saw that Statue of Liberty, she took off her wig with her children beside her and threw it into the harbor. After that she never cut her hair. Her hair was black and long. My grandfather brushed it. Everybody brushed her hair.”

“My aunt always wore a turban,” said our neurologist. “I thought she was bald. Nowadays I'd think that turban was East African, Caribbean, but this was Atlanta in the nineteen fifties. Anyway, we had this box of photographs at home, and one day I found her there, with this gorgeous skin and coppery hair, ringlets. Good hair, in the parlance. ‘Did she have a sickness?' I asked my mama. ‘Hiding that hair?' ”

“Also, when you were talking about language,” said the woman who rarely spoke. “I don't speak hair language: layers and blunt cuts and so on. At the beauty parlor, they want to know in that language what you want them to do to you. My husband says unless I know the language of each trade, all I can do is submit to them.”

“What else can you do?”

“Insist on something you can't describe,” said the neurologist with the aunt from Atlanta. “Or use pictures, from those magazines.”

“My mother, from the time I was seven or eight, was absolutely obsessed about her hair.” A teacher from Queens. “Which I now realize she must have communicated internal states of being through, which I didn't think she had. My mother—not that I blame her—growing up in the most banal and horrible Irish poverty, will not spend more than twelve dollars for a haircut.”

“Where does she get them?”

“Astoria.”

“My mother, the only negative comment she'll make about people directly is about hair. She wouldn't go around to my brother's house in Atlanta and say you dress terribly, but she will tell him he needs a haircut.”

And so we moved from hair to hair and mothers, which turns out to be a topic grown women have a lot to say about. My mother's hair, like mine, and like her mother's, grew in wavy circles, which made it easily cut into something tousled, but too wavy for a proper American flip, pageboy, or shag. My mother's mother came from Russia as an anarchist and became a suffragette here, taking wages from my grandfather, when she worked in their store, and saving them so my aunts and mother could go to college. “I want my girls to be accomplished,” she said, and they were accomplished, a writer, a painter, and a translator. They carried a European disapproval of excessive interest in one's looks, along with a belief in yogurt, Russian literature, social justice, and exercise, from one generation to another. For me to suggest this frivolous topic for a class was a departure from my family's values.

As it turned out, I made a written collage from the tape, then a theater piece, performed at Sarah Lawrence, then downtown, then in DC, in a theater festival, where the comedienne before me sat drinking beer on a toilet seat and nobody in the drunk and disorderly audience seemed interested in hair that night. As if to honor the values of my mother and grandmother, I'd sprinkled the piece with references to slavery and language, as if I were showing how big, how not trivial, the subject was. At that point in history,
feminine
was still a synonym for
trivial
. I'd had my own nontrivial experience with hair in Japan.

“In Hiroshima,” I told the women, “where I went on a trip, there was this sign in this museum.
JAPANESE WOMEN VALUE THEIR BLACK HAIR
. This is the atom bomb museum, and the picture here is of a woman with most of her scalp bare. I stared and I stared. Her whole life is ruined, I thought, no one will marry her and she can never have children. Then something American, tastelessly pragmatic, but smart, came over me. Why doesn't she just forget her shame and buy a wig, for God's sake, I thought, and get on with her life and solve her problems?”

I said that. I felt that. At that time, my own problem was a yearning for a child, so I took my own advice and adopted a daughter.

AND THAT WAS
that for hair, for a while. Writing can take what is obsessive, conflicted, or riveting and put it behind you. Hair dropped into the category of the familiar itch. I noticed hairdos and inquired after the hairdressers who'd done them. But hair was definitely the background music to my life with my daughter, whose birth mother's hair was blond and straight and whose African American father, who was in the air force, had a buzz cut. He was married with kids. She was eighteen and looked like an Appalachian Virgin Mary when she handed Anna to me in the chapel, and I looked like a sympathetic, Semitic, guilty, older arty type, in a quilted fake Appalachian jacket. Anna looked like a large, beautiful baby doll.

Before adopting, when I mentioned difficulties I might face raising a biracial child, people often started talking about hair. I thought that was silly. How hard could doing a kid's hair be? In fact, the actual doing of the hair was less difficult than the reception we got for her hair. This is like race, which Americans tend to think of as skin color, or mean words, or something from the past, rather than as a system and history in which some people are rewarded and others held back. Meanwhile, like it or not, we all operate within a system. Our system was a visually different mother and daughter. If I could wear my hair tousled and rough cut, Anna could not. When I made her fat braids like Pippi Longstocking's, they would damage her self-esteem, according to her white pre-K teacher. Her halo of curls was too boyish, according to a neighbor. Nobody had told my mother what to do with my hair. But instead of staring them down, I looked for someone knowledgeable to guide me and found Madeline, a fabulous teenager from a Dominican family. Dominicans are New York City's best hairdressers these days. They come in all skin colors and hair types and know how to do the hair of girls like Anna, a Mixed Chick, according to her shampoo bottle.

Watching Madeline do Anna's hair, I could see I was unable to let Anna scream for the sake of a smooth crown and a tight ponytail. Apparently, excessively tight-pulled hair, by my standards, was bottom-line respectability for hair like Anna's. So Madeline did Anna's hair, and I helped with Madeline's college essays and applications. Meanwhile, Anna would stay over at Madeline's family's house, and they would all take care pulling and combing and washing and listening to her scream. When she returned, she looked like a proper what? Dominican? Black girl? Biracial daughter of a white mother?

When Madeline got placed on the waiting list at Mount Holyoke, I wrote a letter for her. I mentioned my position as a professor at a sisterly school. I mentioned her resourcefulness, intelligence, and fortitude. I did not mention that she knew what to do with my daughter's hair. Mount Holyoke took her and her skills. She went on to become a doctor, a PhD, and a mother of three. I got left alone with Anna's hair just as she entered kindergarten. Then the chair of my department, a close friend, died, and I took over his responsibilities at work.

Once or twice, in my grief and distraction, I noticed Anna scratching her head but thought nothing of it. There was a lice epidemic in the kindergarten class, and a distraught mother spread the rumor that the epidemic was Anna's fault. (These epidemics run through early childhood. Who starts them is impossible to trace. God, maybe.) The angry mother went to the principal and suggested they call the Bureau of Child Welfare on us. Another former student called to warn me. An African American mother called too. “Lice don't like our hair,” she said, meaning her and Anna's hair, no doubt. “They don't like the oils we use.” But I didn't use these oils on Anna's hair.

Then she added, “But you really must do something about that hair.”

I hired an Orthodox Jewish nitpicker to pick the nits out. I poured olive oil over Anna's head to get rid of whatever the nitpicker had used. I found a Dominican salon, which cut off a lot of her hair. I took Anna to FAO Schwarz to make up for the loss of her hair and bought her a doll and doll carriage. Earlier on, we had both considered FAO Schwarz a museum instead of a store. The distraught mother told people not to invite Anna to their children's birthday parties. Another, a therapist, jostled Anna when she came into the kindergarten class.

By now, I felt I lacked a lot more than hair skills. I felt I'd missed the part of life—was it in seventh grade?—where you learned to defend yourself. I couldn't defend my child or teach her how to be the kind of person who didn't get messed with. Maybe African American mothers were braiding that kind of knowledge into their daughters' heads.

I blamed my high-minded family, who thought you should rise above petty insults and focus on the big picture, whatever that was. Then I met with the teacher and the principal, whose reception was lukewarm and who promised no help. At the end of the year, I moved Anna to a self-consciously integrated private school, where the parents were better behaved, mostly. By now, I can see that people are often at their worst in the midst of child rearing.

WHEN ANNA REACHED
high school, she did her own hair, did it beautifully, and went back to public school. There were other issues. The black kids thought she was rich, and the white kids admired her for being ghetto. A former friend pushed her down the school stairs, then threatened to have her boyfriend bring his gang around. The girl's boyfriend was a drug dealer. I went to the principal about the staircase incident and the threat. He was noncommittal. If in the earlier hair incident I felt the teacher and principal were confused about this odd couple, mother and daughter, I now felt this man considered Anna overprivileged, compared to her friend. It was Anna's friend who needed his help, he signaled. We were on our own.

“Tell Natasha, if her boyfriend touches you, I'll drop a dime on him,” I told Anna. I had learned this line from a hippie relative with experience in the drug trade.

“Oh, is that how we do it?” she said. It's hard to express the emotion in this exchange, as if Anna had been waiting her whole life to find out how people like us stood up for themselves. We didn't get into fistfights or join gangs. I barely had the time for drama. Unlike the mothers of some of her friends, I didn't say, I'll kill that kid when she gets home. Once, I had taken her iPod away as a punishment but felt ridiculous. Now, making this threat, I knew I wouldn't carry it out. I didn't believe in the drug laws. I didn't believe in the prisons. Still, a threat is valuable until it isn't.