But the other thing with relaxers is that the hairdresser has to rely on you telling them when the chemicals start to burn. So if you’re saying, “I’m good, I’m fine,” they’re all, “Shit, leave it on, then.”
The burn is incredible, let me tell you. You start to squirm around in your seat. You’re chair dancing—because your head feels like it’s on fire. Eventually, you have to give in because you can’t take it anymore. Not this time. In my world, if there were degrees of “good blackness,” the best black girl was light skinned with straight hair and light eyes. I don’t have light eyes and I don’t have light skin, but at least I could get in the game if my hair was straight. No pain, no gain.
This day I was going to break my record. I would withstand any temporary pain to finally be pretty.
“You good?” my cousin said about fifteen minutes in.
I nodded. I wasn’t. It didn’t matter.
A few more minutes went by. I could feel the chemicals searing my scalp. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I told myself this pain was only temporary. When people at school saw me, I would be so grateful and proud of my strength. Every single minute counted.
“You good?” she said again.
I nodded. Finally, I began to bawl, then weep, then scream. My cousin raced me to the bowl to rinse me out.
“Dammit, why didn’t you tell me?” I ended up with lesions on my scalp where the relaxer gave me chemical burns. I was willing to disfigure myself in order to be deemed “presentable” and “pretty.” To be truly seen. At twelve, I had not been once called pretty. Not by friends, not by my family, and certainly not by boys. My friends all had people checking them out and had their isn’t-that-cute elementary school boyfriends. I was completely and utterly alone and invisible.
What was it like for my mother to sit there for hours upon hours, watching these black girls she wanted to raise to be proud black women become seduced by assimilation? And then to see her child screaming and squirming with open sores on her scalp because she wanted her hair to be as soft and silky as possible. My hair turned out like that of any other black girl with a tight curl pattern who’d gotten their hair relaxed and styled: medium length, slightly bumped under, except with lesions that would later scab.
Even after I was burned, with each trip to my cousin’s salon, I carried with me the hope that this would be the week I was going to look like the pictures. That misguided goal remained unattainable, of course, but I could always tell the difference in the way people treated me when I came fresh from getting my hair done professionally.
“Oh my God, your hair looks so straight.”
“Your hair looks so nice that way!”
Translation: You look prettier the closer you get to white. Keep trying.
If I didn’t have my hair done professionally for school picture day, I didn’t want to give out the prints when they arrived. There are years where my school photo is simply missing from the albums because they were given to me to take home. If I didn’t look within a mile of what I thought of as “okay,” I just didn’t give the photos to my mother. I was not going to give her the opportunity to hand that eight-by-ten glossy to my grandmother so she could frame it next to photos of my cousins who had lighter skin and straight hair.
I would tear the photos into pieces, scattering images of myself in different garbage cans to eliminate even the chance of piecing my ugliness together. “No,” I said to myself, “you’re not gonna document this fuckery.”
BECAUSE I’VE DONE SO MANY BLACK FILM PRODUCTIONS, HAIR HAS NOT always been the focal point of my performance. But on white productions, it is like another actor on set with me. A problem actor. First of all, they never want to hire anyone black in hair and makeup on a white film. Hair and makeup people hire their friends, and they naturally want to believe their friend who says they can do anything. “Oh yeah, I can do black hair,” they say. Then you show up, and you see immediately that they don’t have any of the proper tools, the proper products, and you look crazy. If you ever see a black person on-screen looking nuts? I guarantee they didn’t have a black person in hair and makeup.
I figured this out right away on one of my very first modeling jobs, when I was about twenty-two. It was for a big teen magazine, and they said, “Come with your hair clean.”
I actually washed my hair. Now, if you ask any black performer who has been around in Hollywood for more than a minute, “Come in clean” means you come in with your hair already done. That way, they can’t screw you up. You come in pressed, blown out, or flat-ironed. Otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble.
I didn’t know that. My dumb novice ass showed up for my first big modeling shoot fresh from the shower. This white woman was literally trying to round brush my hair and then use just a curling iron to get the edges straight.
“You don’t look like how you looked in your modeling photos,” the hairdresser said. She hair-sprayed my hair and then put heat on it. My eyes got wide. She was going to break my hair right off of my head. I said nothing and did anything but look in the mirror. I didn’t have enough confidence to say, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Step away from my hair.”
She did her damage, then leaned back to take in her efforts. “You look beautiful!” In fact, I looked nuts. Then I had to do the shoot, and proceeded to be documented for life looking like a crazy person. It was the bad school photos all over again—but I couldn’t tear up all those magazines.
When I started acting, my hairstyle determined how people saw and cast me. I played a teenager for a hundred years, so I kept a flip. That flip said “All-American Nice Girl from the Right Side of the Tracks.” As I was booking more jobs and meeting more and more hair and makeup people who didn’t know what they were doing, I made a choice to grow out my relaxer. Now, the trope in African American hair-story narratives is that this is when I became “woke.” It’s not. I grew out my relaxer because my hair was so badly damaged, it was split to the scalp. If you’re on a production that does not believe in diversity in the hair and makeup trailer, it’s a lot easier to let them style a weave than let them touch your real hair. I was also then getting a lot of attention from the type of black men that every black woman is supposed to covet, and a good number of those particular men had been conditioned to love long hair. These two things went hand in hand—I was being chosen and validated.
I stopped using my own hair probably after 7th Heaven, in the nineties. I have always had very good weaves, so when I cut my weave for Daddy’s Little Girls and Breakin’ All the Rules, people thought I was just “crazy experimental with my hair.” No, I am just crazy experimental with hair that I can purchase. After a certain point, when my natural hair was long and healthy, I just put it up in a bun. I didn’t politicize my choice. It was another option, that’s it.
Then, because of work, wigs became so much easier to use and offered me more flexibility. My hair is braided down underneath, and every night I pop the wig off. Sometimes I leave the set rocking my own braids like Cleo from Set It Off. I still wash my hair and rebraid it. Then I can pop that wig back on and go to work. The less time I have to be in hair and makeup, the better.