Tick, Tick, Tick. Swoosh. The flame on Grandma’s stove ignited. As a child, I’d brace myself for the impending heat to my hair. Clink. The straightening comb would collide with the stove as she rested it directly in the flame on the stove burner.

“Hold your head down.”

“Hold your ears.”

“Grandma, sorry.”

Iron collided with my dark brown skin, and I let out a soft “ouch.” The burn was painful, but Grandma loved me. She would straighten my hair for special occasions. I admired her art and experience. Grandma kept me from having burnt ears, a burnt neck, and singed hair. Living with Grandma and Grandad with Mama on the West side in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood after the divorce felt like a privilege—to have those times with Grandma combing through my hair. Grandma’s touch was gentle, even with her time-worn hands. Her dark brown hands had known manual labor—sharecropping labor in the Mississippi Delta where elementary school lessons were for the privileged. Free Black girl’s lessons in Merigold, Mississippi were in the fields instead of going to elementary school. I could tell that Grandma had been through shit. She was calm and reassuring. Mama and Aunt Diane burnt me more often when they straightened my hair. But Grandma had control—the ability to keep calm under pressure. I knew Grandma as a Baptist church “Ursher” on Sundays and blues woman every other day. And my brother John-John told me that when that man in the neighborhood tried to threaten Aunt Shirley, she ain’t call the police. Grandma chased that man with a pistol. I witnessed her stand between a gunman and Michael in the kitchen. Grandma handled things. The straightening comb was a step up from a generation who had once used clothing irons to straighten hair back in Mississippi.  

I thought the straightening comb looked archaic: a black iron handle with tiny metal teeth set closely together. The comb turned orange like a cattle brander when hot. I’d seen cattle branded in those Western movies with A-list stars like Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando that I watched with Granddad. In those movies, white men dressed up in cowboy costumes and fought against other white folks masquerading as Indigenous people for our colonizing, Hollywood pleasure.  They conquered and explored and assumed ownership of everything around them in those films; mutilation by iron was just the prequel to the cattle’s eventual chopping into tiny bits of capitalism between greedy teeth. I don’t know why Granddad liked those movies, considering our family oral history says that we have some Indigenous roots. He proudly told me stories of Indigenous heritage, naming specific nations and stories, but I have forgotten the specifics. Many Black people have claimed to have Native blood, and I have yet to find out if Grandad’s stories were true. I do know that his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi has a rich history of Black and Indigenous relationships. I don’t think he understood the years it would take to undo this harmful indoctrination from those films. I watched the mutilation—the mockery of culture and Indigenous people slaughtered. The films showed that colonized land was like a fiery furnace. Grandma’s stove during straightening sessions was like the fiery furnace, heating assimilation through my tiny curls. That fiery furnace heated iron to brand my ancestors. They were stolen from their land and used as agricultural power. Grandma was a sharecropper. And her freedom would depend on living in and beyond that mutilation.  

But the straightening comb was no match for my natural hair. It rebelled—in the humid Chicago summers, when heavy rains fell in spring, and as minutes passed in any day. My hair kinks always crept their way back in. By the next day, my hair would revolt to an in-between stage like voice cracks in puberty. And I could’ve just let nature take its course and allow my hair to run wild and radical like Angela Davis’s afro. I could’ve let my hair lock up like Bob Marley’s Rastafarian thick strands that swung free with him as he danced to revolution songs. I could’ve chosen to join my hair kinks in their resistance and free them to stretch in all their intended capacities. But as a child I didn’t know the power of the rebel. Resistance was outside of what I knew. I knew not what it meant to be unapologetically Black and beautiful.

Parents in my family and neighborhood knew to tame rebellion. I felt as if someone was always watching, ready to jump in and punish my parents for unkempt children and for the look of anything other than the proper well-polished child. Appropriate hair was just as important as not making any sudden moves during a police officer encounter. It was as important as a firm handshake. Hair was the difference in receiving welcome versus suspicion, acquittal versus conviction, or life versus death. Compliance with society was somehow tied up in the taming of my tight and wild, dry, youthful curls. I would often see my parents and others react with a force that I couldn’t clearly see as a child. I now know that my familial oral history passed down through generations was versed in how we survive in a society as unwanted visitors on colonized land; look the part, dress the part, talk the part, be politely Black or else.  
 
Clever, sharp neighborhood kids’ roastings kept me ajar of the ramifications and pain of natural hair.  And I had the kind of natural hair that made good material for hair jokes, because the world taught us that Black self-hatred was funny as hell. 

“Yo’ hair is so nappy I took a nap in it.”

“You got a kitchen in yo’ hair.”

“You baldheaded!”

And at age nine, I had arrived at what seemed to be a rite of passage, but I was indifferent. Straight, long hair was supposed to be my aspiration. Mama’s hair was naturally manageable, wavy, and people would say that she had “good hair.” Her father, Granddad, came from a mother of mixed race; his side of the family was light-skinned. Mama says that she was part Irish. So, Mama’s inheritance was not my great great grandmother’s big white plantation house in the South she visited as a child and not the checks that Grandad got from the oil found on the land where my ancestor’s big white house once stood. She inherited hair that white folks and some Black folks deemed closer to the standard of beauty. I inherited Dad’s more African, spongy hair: hair that dried quickly, broke the teeth on combs, and made me look unkempt, if not “tamed.”

Before my first hair relaxer, I had mostly worn pigtails. Mama would part my hair symmetrically: pigtails on all sides of my head. After the divorce, Dad tried to do the same when I stayed at his house. I had collections of colorful barrettes and ponytail holders to accentuate my do. My hair was to always be drenched in hair grease to put the comb at ease and to give my hair that fresh, shiny kempt Black girl’s look. That was the look of youth, however. I was becoming a big girl at age nine. Mama thought I needed more lasting taming.

Dad and Mama agreed that assimilation was best. Yet, they disagreed on mostly everything. And they had their own ideas of what assimilation meant. Mama was okay with my use of “finna” or other Black Chicago lingo. Dad corrected it. “You need to master the King ’s English before you use the other language,” he’d say. Dad knew the power of language—the power in being able to code switch. Mama and Dad would argue about clothes and shoes Mama would buy my brothers John-John and Shad. When she bought them Major Damage brand outfits, all hell broke loose. Everybody wore Major Damage on the Westside: the drug dealers, the blue collar workers, kids, everybody. Yet, Dad wanted us to look different—to stand apart and not give those outside forces any reason to mistake us for a criminal, to kill us, to arrest us. Dad had made it out, mastered code switching and knew the blueprint to be successful. My brothers’ hair was to be nicely faded. No cornrows, even though our family photo album shows young Dad sporting braids.

Mama let us wear Michael Jordan gym shoes and join the latest trends in our neighborhood in the 90s. Jordan shoes could make us targets and people got killed for them, but not having Jordans or off-brand shoes made us targets too. Wearing Pro Wings, knock-off brand shoes, was like having nappy hair. And ain’t nobody wanna deal with the roasts and the violence from not assimilating. My shoes, my clothes, and nicely-done hair, kept the bullies off my back. Mama understood that. Brands and the pursuit of capitalism exploited us and masqueraded as protection. It still does. But big-picture thinking on a micro level can be hard when you just trying to get by and you just want to be a part of your culture. Mama ain’t want us to forget the culture—to forget where we came from. She embraced Grandma and Granddad's language and their sacrifice for family. I saw Mama embrace that, even when her choice to move away from Chicago and get married to Dad put her on the outskirts of the norms in our family. Mama’s assimilation was like Grandma’s—embracing the good, the bad, the ugly because we in this shit together.          

Mama and Dad disagreed on whether I was ready for a hair relaxer at age nine. Dad called me his “only little girl” as a child, before my younger sister Imani was born and after Dad remarried. He took joy in putting my hair in pigtails with colorful barrettes on his weekends with me. I don’t remember if he thought I didn’t need a hair relaxer because of my age or what he thought about women with natural hair.  I think he believed that I was too young and that hair relaxers came much later.  I am not sure what Mama thought, but I knew it was a concoction of “I can do whatever I want with my child.” She wore a hair relaxer, even though her hair was straighter than mine. My parents’ relationship was toxic. Their kinks would never be straightened. Their divorce was the reason Mama and I lived with Grandma. My first hair relaxer was only a little over a year after. I don’t remember if Mama ever asked me if I wanted the hair relaxer. But the relaxer was good pain—necessary pain?     

In 1991, on the day of my first hair relaxer, I sat in the chair atop the telephone books so that I could reach the sink in Grandma’s kitchen while Aunt Diane put relaxer in my hair. The intense smell of chemicals in my hair rushed up my nose. My hair began to feel heavy. Each hair follicle became covered and weighed down by thick, white gook. Fingers in my hair pushed against the grain of my natural kinks. Soon tingling. Then, pain—good pain? The temperature around my small head rose.

“It’s beginning to burn,” I told Aunt Diane.
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The burning sensation meant that my hair was relaxed, a state where my natural fro of tight, dry, strands had become new. My hair began to feel like red ants biting at my scalp. Aunt Diane told me to sit on my knees so that I could reach the sink to wash out the chemicals. I leaned my head back into it.  I could hear water flowing from the sprayer down into the drain as Aunt Diane waited for the water to get hot. As the water hit the surface of my head, I felt the difference. There was no resistance to the flow of the water as it moved through my hair. New dangling, straight hair dangled on my neck, and the water droplets against my burning scalp felt relieving as the chemicals washed away. When my hair was wrapped, blow dried and curled, I knew to smile. And I felt indifferent about the results. Unlike the hair relaxer, the pain and the mutilations could not be washed away in Grandma’s kitchen. As an adult, I have chosen to rebel. But as a child, I did not know that rebellion was good pain—necessary pain.