Thus braiding someone’s hair is indicative of ideal care and love, the concrete contribution of one woman to the success of another.10
Why are these expressions of black female solidarity becoming more pronounced again today? Perhaps it is a combination of factors: a recognition of what we have lost and the will of the global decolonization movement to try to address this; a reclaiming of our inherent beauty and worth as we embrace our hair and other maligned features; renewed activism, the loud, resounding cry that black lives do indeed matter and the subsequent self-care conversations; LGBTQ gains, the decentering of patriarchal norms and the competition they encourage; the rejection of respectability politics and the new networks of support and solidarity that are emerging through social media.
I also know that we must do everything within our power to nurture this nascent revolution, to ensure that it does not devolve into performative showboating on social media, and more important, as factionalism deepens, we must not turn on each other. As Lorde urges us, “We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit, because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.”11
As social creatures, we all need to be touched. Breastfeeding, babywearing, hugging, holding hands, all of these tactile exchanges have much to offer us in terms of emotional stability, well-being, and happiness. Many African cultures are traditionally quite tactile, although perhaps they are not perceived as such. One central expression of this is found in hairdressing culture: attending to our uniquely textured hair was an important and enjoyable part of the culture. How did it come to be reimagined as burdensome?
WORKIN’ 9 TO 5
Most ordinary people, irrespective of race, struggle to maintain a good work-life balance, or one in which their self-care needs can be easily met. We are chronically “time poor.” Yet, instead of causing outrage, if not revolution, this enforced scarcity of time is reimagined as progress. The appropriation of our personal time becomes evidence of aspirational metropolitan living, the idea of “the grind” almost fetishized.
Almost everyone but the very rich can relate to this absence of personal time. In today’s society, most of us feel the intense pressure of this. However, where lack of time relates specifically to hairstyling, the balance is tipped in favor of our straight- or wavy-haired sisters. While white women can quite reasonably rock the tousled, just-got-out-of-bed, shabby-chic effect, the hair that grows from my head does not accommodate such a laissez-faire approach to grooming.
For black hair, the costs of not having enough time are higher. Can you imagine running a brush through your hair and being done? As I write this, I’m feverishly making impossible calculations about how I’m going to get my hair done tonight, in preparation for tomorrow morning, trying to manufacture time out of a schedule that just doesn’t permit it.
Our society operates more or less around the demands of the nine-to-five workday. In this context, it is black women who are told we need to straighten our hair, or feel we need to, because we simply do not have time to maintain it in its natural state.
It is black women who are demanded to do the labor required to make ourselves look presentable. But this is a culturally specific presentability that isn’t easily achieved without, at worst, risking cancer or fertility issues or, at the very least, chemical burns. Why is it that the only way black women can look “professional” is contingent on producing a poor facsimile of white women’s hair? What more poignant example is there of the necessary assimilation required in conforming to a culture not designed for certain bodies, not designed for my body to fit into easily?
The slave system was certainly not concerned with the provision of time for black women to do their hair, and the industrial working day we have inherited isn’t much more sympathetic. Capitalism has repurposed time with the accumulation of capital as the central aim. Anything that disrupts the maximization of profit becomes subversive. For black women, when our hair became a burden, reclaiming the time to do it became in itself an act of rebellion. In fact, one of the most practical justifications for relaxing black hair is that far less time is required to maintain it.
The labor regime of Southern field slaves is the one we identify as the archetypal slave experience. Working hours were delineated by how much light there was. Africans worked from can see to can’t see. If the moonlight was bright enough, you would pick cotton through the night. In such an environment adequate care of the hair was all but impossible.
It was only on Sundays, the “day off” (which was in reality the day for activities such as the subsistence farming many needed to survive), that slaves could find any time for grooming and styling, with whatever implements they could locate. In the words of a former slave, James Williams, “the onlies time the slaves had to comb their hair was on Sunday. They would comb and roll each other’s hair and the men cut each other’s hair. That all the time they got.”12
We know that black hair needs to be carefully combed, parted, and braided or twisted to prevent it from matting, knotting, and tangling. Once it becomes tangled, which it does easily, the process of detangling can be time-consuming and painful, and this would have been exacerbated by a lack of necessary equipment available to the enslaved Africans: “we carded our hair ’caze we never had no combs, but de cards dey worked better. We used de cards to card wool wid also, and we jes wet our hair and den card hit. De cards dey had wooden handles and strong steel wire teeth.”13
The “cards” referred to above sound innocuous. They are not. They are nasty, sharp instruments used to prepare fleece for spinning. Recently, I was filming at Cromford Mill in Derbyshire. The British Midlands was a central location in the Industrial Revolution and Cromford Mill was the place that revolutionized both cotton manufacturing and the very concept of the factory. Given the implications for the manufacture of cotton on the lives of the enslaved, it was a fitting location to have my first real-life encounter with a cotton card.
The formerly enslaved Aunt Tildy Collins describes the use of cotton cards on enslaved children in an attempt to comb their hair straight:
Us chilluns hate to see Sunday come, ’caze Mammy an’ Granmammy dey wash us an’ near ’bout rub de skin off gittin’ us clean for Sunday school, an’ dey comb our heads wid a jim-crow [colloquial name for the cards].
You ain’t neber seed a jimcrow? Hit mos’ lak a cyard what you cyard wool wid. What a cyard look lak? Humph! Missy, whar you been raise—ain’t neber seed a cyard? Dat jimcrow sho’ did hurt, but us hadder stan’ hit, an’ sometimes atter all dat, Mammy she wrap our kinky hair wid thread an’ twis’ so tight us’s eyes couldn’t hardly shet.14
The use of the term “Jim Crow” for a tool used to comb is thought-provoking. In the 1870s and 1880s, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the former Confederate States of America. This was upheld by the United States Supreme Court until 1965. This choice of a name that emphasizes the “separation” associated with the parting and detangling of black hair has its antecedents in Yoruba, where one of the names for a comb is ooya, which means to be apart or separate.15 Accordingly, if someone sends a comb to a lover or a friend, it means that they have separated from them.16