MY CROWN OF GLORY

My maternal grandmother is mulatto, the daughter of a white man from Selma, AL and a sharecropper. Born in 1929, my mulatto grandmother experienced her share of racism and prejudice. She birthed a great deal of children. Of the four girls, my mother was the only one that chose to relax her hair because she was 17, because it was the fad, because…Watching my mom, now, and seeing how she feels about her hair, the phrase “creamy crack” has never been truer. From what she told me, her curl pattern was much looser than mine and arguably more acceptable in society. Still, she relaxed it when she was 17 and never looked back.

My father’s from Texas and in a lot of ways, he’s proud of his African heritage. Living in Atlanta, he takes a trip home every year for the Juneteenth celebration. (My mother told me it’s basically Texas’s version of Mardi Gras--that the celebration is something you just have to be there for.) My mother told me horror stories of when she would go home to Texas with him on vacation. How his mother and her friend would stand over her while she slept, asking my father if my mother’s hair was really hers while at the same time ragging on women who have “nappy”, “bad” hair.

Now, I had a relaxer for as long as I can remember. According to my mom, my hair has been relaxed since I was a year and a half old--barely able to do more than sleep, cry, poop myself and babble about nonsense. She said she was tired of fighting my hair and listening to me scream bloody murder every time she combed out my coarse 4C hair. Part of me believes that she relaxed it to keep my father from insulting me and ruining my self-esteem.

I first started thinking about going natural my senior year in high school. My hair was unnaturally thin and limp. It clung to my head in the most unflattering way. It was brittle no matter how much I moisturized it with wicked split ends. I was so over trying to manage it but my mom wasn’t having it. I left for college in the fall and all was well…until it came time for me to get a relaxer. Like I said, I had been thinking about going natural for almost a year before I finally did it. So when it came time for me to get a relaxer in October, I just didn’t get one. I convinced my mom to let me prove that I could take care of my transitioning hair. She gave me until the New Year to decide whether or not she was going to slap a relaxer on my hair or not. My mom isn’t one of those people who believe that just because I turned 18 and no longer live at home full-time, she can’t tell me what to do. I personally believe when I’m 30-something years old and in labor, I’ll have to ask my mother’s permission before I can push the baby out.

I fought my absolute hardest those first three months. I switched to a sulfate-free shampoo and invested in moisturizer to help with the breakage and dry relaxed hair. And it did. I quickly mastered the art of flexi rods, setting my hair each night before I fell asleep. I loved my hair for the first time in years. Sure, the curls didn’t always come out right and rain was a total nightmare, but I wouldn’t trade a minute of the struggle I went through. My roommate and I made a joke that the reason we had to work so hard while transitioning is because our hair was mad at us for all the years of chemical abuse. Once I went home for Christmas Break, my mother never made a solid decision. My father saw me for the first time since I began transitioning. He said nothing to me about my hair, but when my mother came to visit in February, she told me how my dad and she are convinced I’ll relax my hair by next summer.

In March, five months since I began transitioning, I started thinking about big chopping. My natural hair was now two and a half inches long and getting thicker by the day. My relaxed hair was becoming harder to manage than my natural hair, dreading up every chance it got. This too was a long fought battle with my mother. After two months of pleading I finally did it this past Tuesday. Once my hairdresser finished and handed me the mirror, I just smiled. She and a woman sitting under the dyer smiled with me and told me I wasn’t truly natural until I ran my hand over it. So I did. I remember thinking I look like Lineisy Montero, the Dominican model who was on the cover of Teen Vogue last summer. Judging by the look on my mother’s face when I got in the truck, I think she was hoping I wouldn’t go through with it.

To be completely honest, a small part of me didn’t think I would either.

Seven months of transitioning.

Seven months of late nights, staying up to work on research papers, setting my hair immediately afterwards (I believe the latest I stayed up was three in the morning--maybe four?). Seven months of being called Harriet Tubman because I had on a headwrap over my protective style. Seven months of being asked if I wanted a relaxer. Seven months of hearing my dad’s true thoughts second hand…

Seven months.

They were all worth it once I saw the remaining relaxed hair polluting the salon floor around me.

Like I said, all I could do was smile.

My mother thinks the main reason I decided to go natural and stick with it is to prove to myself and everyone else that I am “black enough”. The thing is, I never had to prove it. Nothing I or anyone else does will change the fact that I am and will always be black enough.

I often hear people call transitioning and being natural, a hair journey. But it was so much more than that. It was journey to relearn how to love myself. I was told all my life that I was perfect just the way I was--just the way God made me. My mother tried to convince me that becoming natural “wasn’t for me”, that guys wouldn’t want to talk to me because my hair was “nappy”, “unkempt” and that I wouldn’t be beautiful with my natural hair. I asked her, “If God doesn’t make mistakes, why was the hair I grew from my head, not beautiful enough, not perfect enough to leave it as God sculpted it (with coils so tight some were almost straight)?”