There has never been any love lost between me and my hair. I
can't ever remember having long hair, even when I was a child. It was always
fairly short then, and now, it's really short, never below my ears.
Not so with our son, Jay, though. He was a true child of the
80s and had long hair, at least in the back. You may remember the mullet cut,
short on the sides and long in the back. That was Jay! I loved it, and every
time he went to the barber to get it trimmed, I'd say as he left the house,
"Don't let him cut it too short!"
"Don't worry, Mom. I won't."
He really had a "nice head of hair," as we say in
the South. Some mothers probably wouldn't have liked it, but I did. However, as
beautiful as it was on the outside, there was something very different
underneath.
If he lifted up his long hair to show you what was strange,
you'd see that the hair under his long locks was just as kinky as it could be.
For a long time, I attributed this to the fact that at one time he had had a perm.
I didn't like that, but he just came home one day with his hair curled. So I
kept saying that the curls were left over from the perm. But how long can one
last? Finally, I had to admit that his curls were natural, but where did they
come from?
My husband had the answer: Somewhere back in my history,
there were blacks. I didn't believe him, but that's what he told me. He said
that a certain photo of my great-grandmother proved that. He swore that she was
black. Not so, according to family stories. She was an Indian.
Fast forward to 1994. I had my students write their
autobiographies, and I wrote mine right along with them. All of us had great
family photos in our books. Of course, Grandma Wiggins, my Indian grandmother,
was right there.
The day came when we all had our autobiographies ready, and
everyone was reading everyone else's, really just looking at photos. A sweet
little black girl on the front row was reading mine. She called me over to her
and pointed to Grandma's picture.
"Who 'dis, Miz Young?"
"That's my great-grandmother," I replied.
"She black?" my student asked.
"No, she's an Indian."
My dear little student looked me, rolled her beautiful brown
eyes, and responded,"Unh hunh," being interpreted, "Who are you
trying to fool?"
Out of the mouths of babes. Who knows . . . maybe somewhere
down the line we'll have a beautiful dark-skinned, brown-eyed, curly haired
child instead of the fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, straight brown-haired folks
that populate our family now.
But how about Jay's hair? Did I continue to love it? Of
course, I did. It was on my boy, and he always looked handsome to me . . .
right up to the day he died at age 24. He still had that mullet cut, and
everyone loved it. As his friends passed by his casket on July 5, 1992, almost
to a person, they reached in and touched his hair in an effort to get it just
right, just the way Jay would have wanted it.
In my mind's eye, Jay is still 24, with a beautiful head of
hair, curls underneath and all.
