When we started, most black hair shops had gas stoves. Every hair operator had her own gas stove and you would put these hot irons on the gas stoves and most black businesses had a very heavy grease . . . most of the manufacturers felt that the only way to handle a black customer’s hair was with this very heavy grease which was made of yellow petroleum and mineral oil and beeswax.
And it sort of laid the hair down . . . the weight alone! And by the time they used these heavy pressing irons, the hair was really controllable. Unless you got a drop of water to it.
But because they had gas stoves and this, what I call axle grease, the shops were always smoking . . .18
A frequent side effect of using the traditional hot comb is burning and the damage associated with it. Hot combs were generally heated to more than 149ºF, and in a domestic setting this was usually done straight off the stove. Anyone familiar with the process knows that, because you straighten right down from the root of the hair, regular use increases the likelihood of severe burns and even scarring. When we consider the Hieronymus Bosch–like hellscape conjured by Cardozo, is it any wonder that the hot comb represents yet another instrument that invokes feelings of stress and anxiety in me?
While her legacy might not be as well preserved as that of her former employee, Annie Turnbo Malone (née Turnbo) is one of the people largely responsible for creating the earliest commercial hair straighteners for black women. And it was Annie who utilized the pyramid scheme typified by Avon sales, whereby women recruited other women as salespeople and made a commission from their recruits’ sales as well as their own. This system enabled Annie to transform her company into a hugely successful national concern.
Malone’s parents’ story was even more dramatic. Malone was the daughter of escaped slaves. We are so bombarded with stories of black pain that we almost become desensitized to the horror, but let it sit with you for a moment: escaped slaves. If you can’t imagine it, I assure you there is nothing like reading an escaped-slave notice describing someone that could be you to help sharpen your powers of imagination. I’ve read two recently to that effect: Escaped: a bright mulatto with a sullen countenance (I actually have a relatively cheery countenance, but I suspect slave Emma might have felt different); and a well-spoken mulatto, with a port-wine stain on chin and neck, who may attempt to pass as free. Reading that one, my hand automatically went to the port-wine stain that covers my own chin and neck. It was the strangest feeling. The realization that, regardless of any of my talents, abilities, personal hopes, dreams, or ambitions, had I been born a mere century earlier, I might have been the property of another human being—well, that feeling has never really left me.
We are further assisted in the imaginative process by the similarities between the Turnbo family’s escape and the journey of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s troubling masterpiece Beloved. While writing The Black Book, Morrison said, she came across the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who in 1856 escaped from Maplewood Plantation in Kentucky to Ohio with her husband and four children, and it was this story on which Beloved is based. Around the same time, Annie’s parents took a similar route, escaping out of Kentucky and down the Ohio River.
Margaret Garner didn’t get her freedom. A day later the family was apprehended. But Margaret was determined. Her family would return to Maplewood only over her dead body. Grabbing the closest implement, Margaret murdered her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife. She was overpowered while attempting to do the same to another child. Valuable property must be protected at all costs, and the posse of white men subdued her. Her subsequent trial transfixed the nation.
Margaret is documented as saying, “I’d do it again,” Morrison told the Paris Review. A detail I was not aware of, and one that the casting of Oprah Winfrey in the film adaptation obscures, is that Margaret was a “mulatto.” Black women were systematically raped by white men during slavery and well into the twentieth century. As a result, many of the enslaved were mixed race. The world of plantation slavery divided “livestock” into different categories based on their quotient of black blood. A mulatto had one black African parent, one white European parent; a quadroon had one black and three white grandparents; an octoroon was one eighth black; and so on.
The historian Gary Nash explains that, in the US, “raising the social status of those who labored at the bottom of society, and who were defined as abysmally inferior, was a matter of serious concern. It was resolved by ensuring that the mulatto would not occupy a position midway between white and black. Any black blood classified a person as black; and to be black was to be a slave.”19
There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that John P. Gaines—Margaret’s previous owner, before he sold both her and the plantation itself to his younger brother, Archibald K. Gaines—was Margaret’s father.
Lucy Stone, a white feminist and antislavery campaigner, documented the trial. She commented that Margaret’s two older boys were listed on the census as Negro and possessing visibly African features. However, her two youngest daughters, the nine-month-old baby and the two-year-old whose life she look, looked virtually white. The implication was that Archibald K. Gaines was not only Margaret’s uncle and owner, but also an incestuous rapist and the father of the two almost-white little girls.
On the closing day of the trial Stone took the stand to defend Margaret. She highlighted the sexual abuse that was the unspoken factor in the case. Calling upon the court to remember the faces of Margaret’s children and to compare them to that of Archibald Gaines, Stone told the packed courtroom:
The faded [pale complexion] faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?
In Reminiscences, Levi Coffin, a Quaker abolitionist, noted the commissioner’s reply: this was “not a question of feeling to be decided by the chance current of his sympathies; the law of Kentucky and the United States made it a question of property.”20
Margaret’s fate was sealed.
This was the true horror of Maplewood Plantation and the true horror that America has been built on. Despite the relative material advantage and privilege that lighter skin could and often did confer, it can never be historically assumed. The American social historian J. C. Furnas explains that interracial children in the US generally fared far worse than in other New World countries. Whereas in colonies like Haiti, mulattos occupied a middle caste between black and white, in the US and other English-speaking countries, terms like “mulatto” referred to appearance rather than status. The United States had passed laws ensuring that mixed-race individuals occupied the same legal status as blacks, regardless of whether one was a recent arrival from Africa or indeed descended from several generations of African Americans. Furnas continues that there was “not an old plantation in which the grandchildren of the owner are not whipped in the field by his overseer.”21
While mixed-race slaves might have been overrepresented as “house Negroes,” the assumed benefits of this status are debatable. In Margaret’s case, both she and her children were probably the product of rape. This type of horror was generally compounded by the threat of living among resentful white female family members seeking to avenge a husband’s infidelities.