Read Online An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson - Free Book Online Page B

tears of nerdy joy to my eyes. We were studying the Latinate roots of English; without any previous instruction, I was nailing those prefixes and suffixes left and right. When she got to “-ject” and I yelled out “to throw!” we shared a wordless moment of egghead bonding. In front of the entire class, she came over, took my hands, and looked me in the eye. “Young lady,” she said, “you are going to learn so many words this year.” I accepted that like a blessing. That fifth-grade experience sustains me still.
    The problem was spiritual survival. White-girl hair alone nearly made me beg to go back to Benton.
    The pressing comb was an implement Mama, a master of the sewing and crochet needles, the spatula, the spoken word, and mechanic’s tools of any arcane type, never conquered. She’d never “had” to use one either on herself or her two eldest daughters, but Wina, Necie, and I had thick, unruly “bad” hair that left her perplexed and our ears and necks scabbed.
    Worse than the pressing comb was the actual process of washing our hair. We had neither a shower nor shampoo (unless Daddy found some), so we washed our hair with bar soap in the sink. Conditioner, like lotion, was a white folks’ luxury I never even heard of until my mid-teens. So my hair was a bushy, tangled mess nearly impossible to comb unless I was clamped, howling, between Mama’s legs. We lost enough hair in the process to make wigs for a whole chemotherapy ward. She’d put my hair in pickaninny braids because it took a full day for my mangy mop to air-dry, during which time I couldn’t leave the house because of my shameful braids. Woe betide the girl who tried to press damp hair—it sizzles and fries like bacon.
    Finally, when it was dry, we got to sit in a kitchen chair next to the stove while Mama slathered on more Vaseline and dragged a heavy metal comb, red-hot from lying in the gas burner, through it, essentially frying our hair. Like most of my generation, I spent my girlhood with burns on my forehead, ears, and the nape of my neck. The least moisture makes African-type hair shrink and shrivel, so often after only one sweaty day’s play in the humid air, it would “go back” to its natural state. Rain was my fiercest enemy. Fat, tangled, nappy roots swelled and bulged and made me hate myself. This battle black women fight with our hair is a large part of the reason why so few black women over the age of thirty can swim—chemical relaxers had yet to be invented and we simply would not subject ourselves to the public humiliation of nappy hair.
    Washing and pressing my hair was a childhood trauma I still shiver over. I learned to hate it when the white kids at school would sniff the air and try to trace the source of the smoky smell while their own hair wafted on the breeze. I didn’t hate them. I hated that part of us that was so deficient as to require the application of fire. I finally came to fake washing my hair. I’d just dip my two or three braids in water, maybe lather them up a little with soapsuds, then let Mama press my filthy, soap-scummy hair. But my hair, our hair, was only one of the many things to be ashamed of. My big, fat nigger nose. Ugly, gnarled nigger toes. Blackened elbows and knees. The ashiness that threatened to envelop my entire body unless I coated myself with Vaseline every moment, it seemed. I envied the women of Saudi Arabia those handy veils they wore. Being deprived, I had to settle for long sleeves, closed shoes, and knee-length skirts regardless of the weather. A hand to cover my smile and the spreading nigger nose it produced. Habits I couldn’t break until my thirties.
    I learned many things at Wade. The first was that I was poor. The second, that I was low class. I learned that some mothers stayed home and that some fathers wore suits to work. It turned out that not everyone wore used clothes from