Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul Page 13

  My first hair affair intrigued my friends who wore perms. One even got offended when she didn’t get an invitation. It wasn’t that I had anything against her— some of my best friends wear perms.

  “So is my hair not nappy enough?” Jean asked me. For obvious reasons I didn’t think she’d be interested in attending, but she knew that I invited another friend, Karen, who also wears a perm.

  “My hair is nappier than hers,” Jeanwhined, and to prove it she proceeded to part her relaxed hair with her fingers to show me her new growth.

  I couldn’t believe I was actually watching a straight-haired sister trying to out-nap another straight-haired sister.

  I was flattered and amused. Jean wanted so much to be invited to my nappy hair affair that she tried to produce enough kinks to qualify for admission. I told her that wasn’t necessary and invited her to come anyway.

  She never showed up but twenty others did. At three o’clock, women with skin kissed by the sun gathered in my backyard on that warm spring Sunday afternoon and transformed it into a garden of locks and twists, Bantu knots, braids and Afros in full bloom. To set the tone I posted a sign in the kitchen:

  “Welcome to my Happy Nappy Hair Care Affair. Make yourself at home.”

  “Find a seat on a chair on the floor. Help yourself to whatever you brought to eat, but don’t bother me because I’m getting my hair ‘done.’ So you best find someone to do yours.”

  The message was clear. This was an unstructured, self-serve hair-care affair. My home is a no-shoe zone, and my guests seemed more than willing to shed their footwear and get on common ground. They deposited their potluck dishes in the kitchen then returned to the backyard where they gravitated toward my deck. They briefly exchanged greetings then moved quickly into conversations about hair.

  Every conceivable topic was covered. They swapped hair-care recipes, how witch hazel reduces buildup in locks and how lemon juice keeps them tight. They shared hair taboo and superstitions.

  Eventually the women got around to what the gathering was all about. They chose partners and got busy grooming hair. We worked to the sounds of reggae, merengue and jazz.

  It was beautiful. Some worked while standing, others sat in stair-step fashion, palm rolling, twisting or otherwise fussing over the head of the person in front of them.

  Their arms were extended like branches of a family tree and moving nonstop. Watching them work reminded me of the painting Links and Lineage . The painting by Paul Goodnight, a Boston-based artist, depicts a family tree of black women—from the elderly matriarch to the youngest girl—engaged in the ritual of grooming each other’s hair.

  What was happening on my back deck was like seeing Goodnight’s painting come to life.

  Denise, one of the “token permies,” was so moved by what she was witnessing that afternoon that she asked for us to take her back to her roots. She asked me for a pair of scissors.

  “Does anyone know how to cut hair?” she asked. She insisted that one of us cut away all traces of her relaxed hair.

  Annette, a willowy artist, accepted the challenge and took the scissors. Now, the only real experience Annette had cutting hair was when she cut her own locks and used them in her artwork.

  Denise wasn’t worried. “If there was ever a time to do this, it is today,” she said as she settled into a chair.

  Annette handled Denise’s head like it was a sculpture in progress. Formost of an hour Annettemeticulously snipped and shaped until all that was left on Denise’s head was a short, wooly layer of virgin hair, softly framing her face.

  It was a nappy work of art, which drew applause from the sisters who watched fromthe sidelines and a warmhug from Denise, who was ecstatic over her new natural look.

  “I feel good,” she squealed as she peered into the mirror. “I feel light. . . . I feel free.”

  Watching Denise’s transformation after Annette’s shearing was a powerful moment. I didn’t want the evening to end. Apparently my friends didn’t either. The last one left at 1:30 A.M.

  As I said, I had no grand intentions when I had my first Hair Day. I didn’t even think beyond the first one. Yet it evolved into something more than I ever thought it would be.

  Now everyone has gotten into the act. Brothers and children also join us for a little nap nurturing and my Hair Day gatherings have spread to many cities in the United States and abroad. My hair affair has become a real family affair. And that’s all good.

  Linda Jones

  4

  MY SISTER,

  MY FRIEND

  These women heal us by telling us their

  stories, by embodying emotion that our

  everydays can’t hold.

  Elisabeth Alexander

  A Cup of Tenderness

  Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

  Toni Morrison

  I could feel my cheeks burning a fiery pink in the January wind as I scraped the glacier of ice from my windshield. What was left of the warmth in my hands slowly turned to tingle as the crusty ice chips melted on my gloves. Once I had scraped a few basketball-sized holes to peer out of, I scooted into the driver’s seat, grateful to grab my steaming mug of coffee from the roof of the car. I cupped it between my frozen fingers and breathed in slowly. This was the daily moment of truth.

  “Come on, gal,” I said, touching my hand to the dash and adding a silent prayer for good measure.

  Her protests were louder than usual; the Oldsmobile engine sounded more like a horse neighing than any modern mode of transportation. She sounded like I felt. It was clear she needed a cup of tender loving care. I wish I could afford to give it to you, gal, I thought. I pumped a little gas and turned the key once again. Again she faltered. Third time’s a charm I allowed myself to hope and once again turned the key. The engine growled to life, and I pumped the gas quickly—just enough to keep her hungry engine-belly full, but not enough to kill her.

  It was getting harder and harder to hope that she would last.

  Hardship, however unwelcome, was not new to me. I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains, a culture of hard knocks, hard work and hard winters. When I was seven my father orphaned the children in our family by killing my mother in an alcoholic rage and then turning the gun on himself. I grew up in my native Appalachia with first one relative and then another, but I learned how to cope. It was a rough place, at times devoid of tenderness, but I had survived it. This year, however, made those times feel like pleasant memories.

  My dear husband of twenty-five years, Roger, was fighting for his life in a cold city hospital bed. I wanted more than anything to be able to stay in the hospital with him, to encourage him and to soothe the pain he was enduring daily from his treatments for leukemia. But the illness did not make the pressures of the world disappear. My son was still at home, a senior in high school, and he needed to be fed. The electricity bill had to be paid, the house payment had to be made, and gas had to be put in the tank for my nearly one-hundred mile daily round trip from home to work to hospital. I was beginning to feel the way I had when I was a child. It was all up to me, and I was alone. And so I went to work every day, rolling out of the chair at the hospital where I had spent the night with Roger, or rolling out of bed at 4:00 A.M. at home where I had done some laundry and tried to make time for my son over a dinner of sandwiches. By lunchtime each day I could drop wherever I stood. My body and soul longed for relief, for someone to offer a cup of tenderness to help refresh me.

  I splashed water over my pale white face in the restroom to revive me when I arrived at work; I didn’t have to worry about smearing my makeup, no time for such luxuries in my life.

  “Brenda.”

  I looked up to see my co-worker Darlene. Her chestnut-brown skin was furrowed with concern, and there was tenderness in her soft brown eyes. She cast one furtive glance over her shoulder and then she took my hand and pressed some tightly folded money into it. I looked at it in astonishment. I opened my mo
uth to say something, but she wouldn’t let me. “Do not tell anyone I gave you this money,” she said. “Just go and get your car fixed, and let me know if you need any more.” And then she turned and left.

  My astonishment was soon replaced by wonder. I knew very little about Darlene. As so often happens with people from my generation, the few friends I had were white.

  Darlene and I were from different worlds. I had grown up in the Appalachians where African Americans did not live, and where prejudice and hatred thrived. The high school I had graduated from still carried the mascot name “Rebels” and marched onto the field under a Confederate flag. And although I did not consider myself racist or prejudiced, I became aware of how isolated I was from people who were not like me. Darlene had looked beyond my white skin, beyond my Southern accent and seen the need not just for financial support but the true need I had that lay beneath the surface—she had stepped over the invisible boundary, and she became my friend.

  As the months passed our friendship thrived; although I must admit she was the strong one. Her support was unwavering when my beloved Roger died. She offered a cup of tenderness each time I was down, and when the dating scene started calling my name again we shared hours of laughter and a few tears over dates turned sour. Darlene never mentioned the money again and never asked me to repay it. I began to feel like I had known Darlene my whole life. Like an early morning mist, our cultural differences evaporated.

  Darlene was my teacher; she educated me about love. Darlene stepped across the chasm of racial prejudice and the unknown that so often divides us to teach me that we have a responsibility to the human race to provide a cup of tenderness when and where it is needed most. And because of Darlene, my cup runneth over.

  Brenda Caperton

  Sistahood

  Family faces are mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future.

  Gail Lurnet Buckley

  When I was a child, I hung onto my big sister’s every word. To me, she was Nefertiti, ebony and regal, and I tried to be her kindred spirit at any cost. Recently, I was reminded of that when I saw a copy of the print Sistahood by the African American artist Charles Bibbs. It was as if that painting triggered long ago memories, a family wish list that had to do more with emotions than things of materialistic values. It whispered to me thoughts about my own sistahood with my sister, whose love had been signed, sealed and delivered from the time her four-year-old fingers touched the ballooning expanse of our mother’s belly to feel me.

  When my sister became as “grown as she wanted to be,” the term the elder women in the family used to christen teenage girls, words began to latch on to me about our comparison. “She’s got some beautiful black skin,” or “Those big eyes of hers are gonna make some man walk into a brick wall,” or “She’s got that fine hair that makes pressin’ it a breeze.” We were a study in contrasts, but I didn’t mind. I was proud that she was my big sister, enjoying running home to our mother to brag about how many fellows whistled, winked, and nearly ran into that brick wall because of their flirting with her.

  We lived in a Brooklyn housing project on the fifth floor. We shared a back bedroom with two twin French provincial beds filling up the expanse of the room. As the introverted one, it was more my haven than my sister’s. While she seemed to want to escape the confines of our bedroom and our apartment, I longed to be in it with my books and my imagination. When she was not there, I would try on her clothes, her new shades of dime store nail polish and eye shadow, and most of all sneak and read the latest entry in her diary. Her life was more interesting than mine, and I assumed it would always be that way. She was the one who took modeling classes and drama classes and joined all of those black awareness clubs in the community. She was the one who wrote about Afro-wearing boys walking her home from school and giving her a tender kiss. It didn’t matter, though, because I knew that even if my sister’s life dared her to journey in a different direction, she’d never abandon me. Our sistahood was nonnegotiable, or so I thought.

  When I finally caught up with my sister and became the woman that I now am, I realized that we had done nothing to safeguard our sistahood. Somewhere between our marriages, our children, our careers and even our painful storms, we lost track of each other. We came together for family functions or other social occasions, but we seemed to do a dance of pretense. “She’s the writer in the family,” my sister would often brag to one of our long-time-no-see relatives or a sister-friend she happened to bring with her. But she often only heard about what I had published through the grapevine, through our mother who made a point of calling each of us each day. We sidestepped the fact that sometimes we didn’t speak to each other for six months at a time. We shrugged it off to being busy that neither of us knew the color schemes of each other’s living room, what photos were in each other’s family albums, or what home-cooked aromas filled each other’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.

  Other women had become our sisters throughout the years. Other women had begun to fill up those sisterly spaces once reserved for each other.We shared our tumultuous storms with those sisters we had adopted along the way instead of letting each other’s arms be the familial balm that they were intended to be. It was my sister’s adopted sisters who were there to help her heal after years of domestic abuse at the hands of her ex-husband. It was my adopted sisters who helped me heal from the pain and the shame after my two sons, her nephews, were incarcerated. Wasn’t it our mother who instilled in us that blood was thicker than water? Didn’t movies like Soul Food inspire us to renew and rekindle what we once shared because we were all we had?

  It would have probably remained that way, our sista-hood fragmented, if our mother hadn’t become critically ill. She had been suffering from a debilitating heart condition for years, and her prognosis wasn’t good. When the doctors finally told us that our mother had only days to live, my sister and I began a vigil in her hospital room. We talked about everything, but it was talking about childhood memories that lessened our pain. We talked about those times that we wished could have lasted forever, knowing that we were beginning a new chapter in our life, life without our mother. “You remember when . . . Girl, I will never forget the time! . . .” our words long held began to freely tumble out. As our mother drifted off into a deep sleep, our conversations continued in the near-empty hospital cafeteria over a late meal that always ended with a piece of cake as we laughed about having our mother’s sweet tooth. We began to realize how much we missed each other and how this was the best send-off we could give our mother.

  After our mother died and we buried her beside our father, my sister and I knew we had an unfinished painting to complete, and we finally understood the process. True sistahood was an art. Its canvas had to be brush-stroked with the vibrant colors of our presence, the deepest hues of our forgiveness, and most of all the fiery splash of our love in order to become a masterpiece so aptly entitled, “Sistahood.”

  Jeanine DeHoney

  Who Is Helping Whom?

  How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all these.

  George Washington Carver

  The apartment door unlocked as usual, I let myself in.

  Viola was not there, at least not where I typically found her, in her wheelchair in the living room. I followed the light through the half-opened bedroom door. There she sat on the floor beside her bed—with no way to get back up.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied with a smile, “just my feelings.”

  I thought of my first visit as her physical therapist. She had been propped up in bed with a thick crocheted blanket over her two short stumps of legs. But no one would have noticed, she postured herself with such dignity.

  I learned she had been the pastor of a church while she raised two girls and stood by an alcoholic
husband. At night while her family slept, she remained on her knees. In the end they all prospered and called her blessed.

  Years later, cut down by diabetes, her stature remained just as tall. In contrast, I had recently experienced my second divorce and the weight of it had bent me over. As I trudged along inner-city streets to provide home health care, seldom did I look up to smile at passersby. I felt more worthless than the local drug addicts.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” said Viola, bringing me back to her present needs. “Somehow, I just slipped off the side of my bed, but I’m fine, really I am,” she said, her eyes bright. Despite her words, I knew she had landed with a terrible bump. Her hospital bed stood high off the floor, and she had had no way to break her fall.

  I reached in her direction. “Let me help you.”

  “It might hurt your back to pick me up,” she said, “and I don’t want to be a burden to you.” She seemed like Joan of Arc in the flames, more concerned about her executioner being burned than herself. “My son-in-law will soon be here to lift me.”

  Although my eyes gazed downward at her, my heart looked up to her. I realized she was debilitated in body, certainly, but not in spirit.

  For many weeks I continued to provide therapy. As I exercised Viola’s muscles, strength not only flowed into her body but into mine as well. Eventually she met all her treatment goals and the sessions ended—but not the friendship.

  Like a moth around a Tiffany lamp, I was drawn to her radiant pecan-colored face. She spoke of her life and her family. When she spoke of her Lord, it was not as a preacher would, but as one who had had a personal encounter. I visited her often and even brought my children to absorb her light.

  “What did you think about Viola?” I asked them.