“The Story of My Hair” (excerpt)
By Bahiyyih Davis
It isn't long before my hair makes its comeback, bigger and badder than before. It's surpassed my shoulders again and strengthened. I struggle with it, lay down the law in the morning, then tie it up and away.
I'm in the eighth and a full-on teen now. I can't bypass mirrors like I used to. If I try they wink at the corners of my eyes and call me back. I stare not sure what I'm looking for. Maybe waiting for the image to change into something amazing like those 3-D pictures I can never get inside. It's frustrating, like those pictures, a mirror now requires great focus and a perspective that maybe I don't have. Other people see spaceships and life at the deepest parts of the ocean and parades of dancing circus animals. They say, “Oh yeah!” and get excited. I spend great spans of time standing there, appearing to be sucked into them but not breaking past the surface, only seeing a jumble of meaningless dots, seeing a girl with too much face and dry tangles spilling out of their cage, seeing nothing to get all happy about.
Something drastic must be done with me. So I'm in the kitchen under towels and tin foil. My mother is worrying birdlike over my hair, hovering around to lift and relift the shiny pieces. We do not want singe or breakage.
This bleach is serious, the sting of it filling our wide kitchen. It's Saturday. We are watching Lifetime, Television for Women and waiting for the blonde to really, really show. My scalp is beginning to burn but I bounce my knees through it. After, I will soak the pale strips in red and green dye the consistency of mayo, one color per side of my head. And tonight I will wear my blue polyester that buttons, and my ripped jeans shorts, my Rainbow Brite legwarmers, and duct-taped combat boots. I will blacken my lips with eyeliner and this will be punk. I will leave the dyed pieces dangling out of my ponytail into my face and attach baby barrettes to the ends. I'm crazy over a white boy who may notice me more if I buzz bright like Christmas.
My mother, nervous, keeps looking again and again for the change. “It's ready, she insists,” but it's golden and I want it to be sunshine.
When it's done I stand in front of the long mirror smiling. I wish I could do more but she still has possession over most of me and I can't ruin myself completely until I'm eighteen or out of this house. The dye will wash out in six to eight weeks. The bleach will grow out, or get cut once it's made its point.
I get dressed in my room so fast that I get sweaty under the arms and on the rim of my scalp. We pick up my friend across town and drive back to the West Side towards the Get-a-way. The Get-a-way is a playground for teens.
“Your hair. You did it. I love it,” my friend says. She was the one to suggest it, even though her own is limp and blonde, just the way her parents mixed it. She wears the same clean, unripped pair of jeans and a white shirt and flat yellow Converse. The fact that my hair has surprised her makes me look at it from different angles in the mirror the whole way, doubting myself and what I've done and where I am going.
When we are here my mother passes me five dollars and says to be careful under her breath. Look for her at ten-thirty. I get out and away from her Volkswagon as discreetly as possible.
Punks from around the city are streaming in through the open gates, colorful and pierced through the face. Inside the playground there are swings and one slide, monkey bars and a low-beam, equipment that sits desolate and silent except weekend nights when local bands play on the small wooden stage. It's called a battle but usually it's not as confrontational than that. It's tucked back in the woods where there are no real neighbors, only a housing project down the street where noise is constant and no one can complain. Saturday is our night. Kids from my neighborhood will flock here tomorrow for hip-hop, but this year I am thirteen and not one of them.
There are shooting stars in the navy blue sky and a big blond man at the entrance. He holds a flashlight beam onto the smiling face of my I.D to make sure I have a teen in my age. He looks quickly from me to my picture to match them.
“I just dyed my hair,” I whisper, and feel dumb. He studies it once more and waves us in.
The music starts up as we walk in under the bridge. The screech of an electric guitar, the smashing of cymbals. I jump. The singer has a bleached mohawk running through hair that's dark and buzzed on the sides. He looks like a skunk and his singing comes from the top of the throat instead of the belly. Anyone can do this, I think, but I want to like it and see some beauty in their chaos.
White boys are plentiful, but the only one I love is tall and thin and has dirty blond hair that comes into his eyes. He tosses it away by jerking his head and grins slow and crooked, has minty teeth and a straight nose. Most of all he has these blue eyes like clean pool water. His name is Jason and he's fifteen and doesn't look my way except for accidents.
“Look up,” my friend says, and there he is, hanging over the bridge behind us with a Super Soaker.
“You guys wanna get wet?” he asks.
We yell and run away giggling but not far. He isn't the type of boy to squirt us anyway. He winks and disappears and I have to have a seat at a picnic table by the Port-a-Potties.
“He's so into you,” my friend says, her voice sad, and her face drops. I shake no. I want her to make an argument for it but she shrugs. She likes a boy too and is eyesurfing the crowd to find him. I think he has glasses and purple hair but I'm not sure 'cause I don't pay attention. I just adore Jason and want him to come talk to me and pull me aside and when we get married I want to have a whole team of his skinny pale babies.
The crowd isn't into the music. There isn't even an audience. People wander around the maze to smoke and do flips off the blue, plastic swings. My friend and I do slow circles around the fence that holds everything. I'm looking for Him in all the places where he could be. If he's left I'll want to call for an early ride.
My friend is kicking the rocks. “You look cute tonight,” she sighs, but I itch like I'm in a costume. If I ever go to Chicago like this the black side of my family will sigh and shake heads at each other. Then fix me a plate.
I love the red and green pieces but I hate the rest of me. Like the lower half of my body that stands out. White girls are obese, or small, fragile and flat, never in between, they have bodies with no imagination. They are simple and easy to handle. But I haven't even had my period more than a year and already my hips are wide enough to easily shoot out a screaming ten-pounder. Besides that, my butt is round, fleshy, and unjeanable. And my nostrils spread too far. And my hair, despite its new colors, is still the texture of a big ball of brown hay and cannot be smoothed or suppressed. When I overhear some white kid talking about “that black guy,” I realize he doesn't see me or doesn't know what I am, which is so much worse than the possibility that he just doesn't care, and my heart races like I'm trying to hide in a closet and footsteps are right outside my door.
So my white boy will never ever like me. If he did he wouldn't know what to do. I'm used to the short, muscular black boys who are my neighbors, who pound on my back door twice daily, chase me on their bikes, and tell my mother that I'm sexy. Jason would be too shy to come near my house. He might try, but my neighborhood is too full of salsa music and corn vendors, rap music and flavor. He would run or stand frozen and pissing in the middle of Montague Street, until maybe a white cop spotted him and escorted him, shaken but safe, back over the river.
“I'm thinking of cutting it all off,” I say.
We are making a pendulum on two empty swings. A louder band has started and people have gone up front to mosh, which scares me.
“Don't,” she says.
“I might,” I threaten.
I won't. The night is cold and thin now. We wrap our arms around each other like scarves and jackets. We walk like this once more around.
This is the last band night of the season. We get to the gate and I don't see him. My eyes sting and start to fill. My friend is staring at her boy as he leans on a pole that supports this playground and laughs in the face of a girl whose black hair is interrupted in the middle by a thin pink streak. His hair is blue, not purple, and he doesn't wear glasses, or maybe he is somebody else.
“She's ugly,” I offer, but so is this friend.
“Let's just go,” she says.
There is a payphone outside the gate. If we exit we cannot reënter. I want to keep looking because I haven't seen my guy flirting with anyone, and there is almost an hour left, and he could just be hiding until the very last song when he will pop out and find me and we'll both smile and blush and share a certain special, maybe silent, magic. I have this Disney-faith in destiny and soul mates that is slowly slipping away from me, but I am trying to hold onto it by praying for him every night, like “please God, gimme Jason I-Don't-Know-His-Last-Name-Yet-But-I-Want-It,” and I think we are definitely meant to be together, because I've never loved someone this faithfully, for a whole entire summer, and if I just keep waiting and wishing on every shooting star I catch and every time I look at the clock and it is 2:22, or 3:33, and if I keep praying at night in bed in the dark with my eyes squeezed so hard that God must know I am serious, then something-something will happen to us. It kind of just has to. When she was nineteen at a college community potluck a tiny voice told my mom that she would marry my dad, and I want this voice to whisper to me. I can't think of anything sadder than turning fourteen and not being completely in-loved and loved by Him.
“Let's wait,” I say. “It's almost over.”
But she is gone. She saw an opportunity when the pink-streaked girl walked away to slip in. She's left me standing in the light by the entrance.
“Hey, where's your friend?” says someone directly into the back of my neck. My body stiffens because I am scared I'm imagining, but when I turn he is really, really standing there, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes all pooly blue and his head slightly bent towards his shoes like he might be in trouble. He has a sliver chain looped from the back of his pants to the front and old white shoes he's decorated with marker. I'm looking down at them to avoid eye contact, cheesing and blushing.
“She just went to talk to someone.”
I look over at her but she doesn't see me. She's laughing, looks like she's telling a story. She is a soon-to-be-diagnosed compulsive liar who will get me in trouble one day.
“Awww,” he whines. He just feels sorry for me. I stand on the outsides of my boots, looking at the singer, who's left the microphone now and is just jumping. “Well, c'mon,” says Jason, “come with me,” and he grabs my fingertips. We could be going anywhere but chooses the maze. There are no lights set up inside, an oversight that could be dangerous, but right now I am grateful for the dark, and I walk so carefully in the ghosts of his footsteps, concentrating all my energy into the three fingers on my right hand that he is holding, so I will feel how it feels to be held by him for a long, long time after he lets go.
My stomach is a mess. He looks back every few feet to smile and taste his lips at me. They are pinker and thinner up close. He is actually touching me, I remind and remind myself, grabbing for my whole hand now.
“Where are we going?” I don't mean to sound scared of him but maybe I do.
“Don't worry,” he says softly back. He inches his fingers up to bracelet my wrist for a second, then slides his palm into mine and our fingers lace. We've hit a spot where the moon glows through the floorboards above us. He's tall, and in the slow movement through blue light his hair looks shinier than any boy I've known. But before he can kiss me we come out at the other end of the playground and he quickly releases my hand like he is dropping it off. He looks around before sneaking in his pocket for a cigarette and a Bic. He holds them out to me as an offer. I shake my head, sad that I don't smoke.
There is a tear in the fence that he goes through. He holds his cigarette between his teeth and uses both hands to pull the chain-link big for me.
There are people in a group back here. My heart pauses and sinks. One of them is a girl named Kat who is big-boned but gorgeous. None of them have dyed their hair. They are all sucking on cigarettes and sitting in a peaceful clump. He introduces me and I watch my name come out his lips in smoke rings. I can't believe he knows it and how to pronounce it and I feel like fainting so I press against the fence and it bows out to fit my shape.
“Sit with me,” he says, tapping a spot flat in the grass. But behind me my name is being shouted by the friend who left me.
I spin around and here she is, breathless. Her face looks oblong in the spot where she's standing between shadow and the humming orange light from the pole.
“It's ten-thirty,” she says.
We gotta go but I really, really don't wanna. “I'll be right there,” I whisper.
She looks at him on the ground and back at me. “Let's go,” she says again. “Your mom's waiting.”
My jaw breaks free from its sockets. I'm yelling at her in eye contact. “Gimme a minute,” I am speaking through my teeth.
She rolls her eyes and runs off, probably to tell that I'm back here with a cute boy and he's a smoker. I don't want to turn back around.
But he's already standing with a hand held softly on my hip. He gestures towards the rip in the fence with his hair and I follow him, burning. He opens it for me but doesn't come through. I look back and he lifts his cigarette as an excuse and an apology. But he fingers for me to come close. Then we are both leaning our heads on opposite sides of the cold black fence. He's still smoking, inhaling slow, blowing it out his mouth away from me. I know it is a disgusting habit, and inside his lungs are scorched, and we are surrounded by trees, and friends don't let friends start forest fires -but right inside this minute his addiction to lit tobacco is so sexy I feel sick. Our eyeballs are lined up. My brown could kiss his blue if we inched a little closer.
“You dyed your hair,” he says. “How come?”
I shrug and don't have any answers.
“It looks cool,” he says, and reaches into the small hole with a free finger to touch a green end. “But I think you were…like, even prettier?…before.” He looks at the toes of his shoes after he says this, and kicks at the dirt. When he looks up again he's smiling so hard that the weight of it makes him drop his head right back down. And I want to soak in this moment, marinate, carry his sweet juices home. But I hear my name again, coming over the trees. I just know my mother is wearing some papery, bright authentic African dress against her white-white skin and feather-light, layered brown hair, and before this sight can get to us I tell him I gotta go. Sorry, sorry. I'm power-walking away towards her shrill sound.
“Hey!” he calls.
I stop and look back and he's stomping out his cigarette.
I wait for him.
He hesitates, then waves, and I run.
