It’s one of those hot summer days in the city. The kind where ice cream trucks make multiple rounds and someone on the corner opens up the fire hydrant. Neither the screen door nor the rickety fan in the corner of our closed in front porch do much to help with air circulation.
“YOU’RE KILLING ME!” I scream, pinned between my mother’s knees. “I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!” The kids out in the street and the adults on neighboring open porches pay the tortured screams no mind and above me, my mother continues to force a comb through thick, tangled sections of hair. I ignore the box of tissues placed in front of me out of defiance, letting tears and snot freely fall down my face.
To say I had a sensitive scalp would be an understatement. Wash days as a young child were few and far between. Not the bathing kind, but the hair kind. I’m talking months. At least two. More often three or four. At one point, five or six.
“I’ll wash it when I start to smell it,” my mother would say, the clarity of the way she spoke disguising how exhausted she always was.
My grandmother, aunt, mother, and sister often went to the salon on the same day. Saturdays. Every other weekend. They would return with fresh perms and naturally colored dyes to disguise any gray or white. I’d hear about all the other ladies at the salon, all odd in their own way, all passing along gossip about even more people I didn’t know.
“Why isn’t Anna going to the salon yet?” my sister asked one day when I must’ve been nine or ten.
“I can’t unleash her onto someone else. Gloria would ban us for life,” my mother said, referring to the family hairdresser.
But eventually, my day did come. By ten or eleven, I was deemed too old to be looking the way I was. I needed to be beautiful and one became beautiful at the beauty salon.
The salon looked like something straight out of the 1970s. It probably hadn’t changed much since then. The place was a family affair. Gloria inherited it from her mother. And when I walked in she stared me down with her hands on her hips.
“You’ll get as much trouble as you give to me, young lady,” she said with a smile.
“Are you going to set my head on fire?” I asked, referring to the burning feeling of perm chemicals that would transform my tangled hair into something straight and floppy and less susceptible to rainfall.
“No,” she said. “Your mom made me promise.”
The ordeal went about as well as one could hope. Yes, there was crying. But the screaming was restrained. Everyone was amused telling me that all of this is just part of being a young lady.
Over the years, the tears and screaming stopped. But the flinching and grimacing would remain.
“Sensitive scalp?” a hairdresser in New York asked me not long after starting on me. But she ended up being far more gentle than Gloria had ever been. So gentle that the steep price of the appointment seemed well worth it.
“Can you skip the heat part?” I asked a few months later at the start of my second semester in college. “I heard heat is bad for hair.”
“It can be. If you do it for a long time,” she said.
“Is every two weeks since I was fifteen a long time?”
“Yes,” she said.
So my head transformed into something more reminiscent of my younger self. Clean but very bushy. Barely restrained into a sort of a small bun now that I’d lost so much length for not straightening it. I liked the new look.
Living out of a suitcase for months at a time is a very efficient way to cull any non-essential things from one’s life. For me, that manifested the most in clothing. I was never a shopaholic nor a fashionista, but I have been known to go shopping as a way to destress… most notably at the end of college exams. My closet was filled with more cheap sweaters and sweatshirts than anyone should have. And what spurred me to just keep accumulating plain polo shirts and turtlenecks? No idea. But when you come home after one… three… six… nine months living out of a suitcase, your closet at home starts to make a lot less sense. So brought on my somewhat minimalist purge.
The second change that being a more or less full-time touring professional brought about was hair maintenance. Suddenly scheduling a hair appointment every two weeks becomes a chore when you’re in a new city every day. And good luck squeezing that in on a show day. Instead, that meant I’d need to dedicate my few off days going to a new place and hoping for the best. SoI bought a few hair supplies and my off days were alternatively spent doing the very same thing to myself that would have me screaming bloody murder as a six year old. And even with myself in control, that was a pretty unappealing way to spend what little free time I had on tour.
“Does your boyfriend know you’re doing this?” the barber asked me. The shop had an old fashioned feel to it as most places in the city did. It also smelled strongly of tobacco. Black owned and operated, pictures on Google Maps suggested. And it had a woman working there too which sealed the deal.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Do your parents know you’re doing this?” she asked as a follow up.
“I mentioned it.”
“Because you’ve got such beautiful, long, thick, healthy hair.”
“I was never good at taking care of it. It takes too much time to make having this much hair make sense if I can just cut it all off every so often.”
It’s a slow day at the barbershop. A weekday afternoon. The men who work there keep glancing at me as if I’m going to burst into tears with any pass of the clippers. But I make easy conversation with the woman. As usual, I am asked about my life. What I do. She is impressed. She brings up a charming man who delivers mail to the barbershop saying she thinks I’d be perfect for him.
“I’m not up for sale,” I say.
“Such a smart and beautiful girl like yourself shouldn’t be alone,” she says, turning me toward the mirror. “Should I keep going?” she asks, referring to the length. It’s still a good two inches long. The afro didn’t look bad but this wasn’t what I was here for.
“I want it cut like I’m being shipped off to fight in France,” I say.
Finding a barbershop on the road is a lot easier than finding a salon that does hair for black women. Short hair on black women isn’t even uncommon. But even then, a lot of people aren’t expecting me to walk through the door if I make an appointment for a standard haircut.
“We only do men’s hair here,” a barber in one of the many overly decadent casino resorts in Las Vegas tells me. I point to my head, sort of surprised I need to tell this to a man who is very young, hip, and gay. At this point, my hair is probably half an inch long.
“I just need you to make this shorter. A size two would do it. Like the one you’ve got sitting right there,” I say, gesturing to a nearby workstation. “It will probably be the easiest haircut you do all week.”
After some more convincing, I get in the chair. He asks if I have kids. I say no. He asks if I am married. I say no. He asks if I have a boyfriend.
“Not on my life agenda,” I say.
“You have such a pretty face and such soft hair. You shouldn’t be hiding your beauty like this. Nobody wants a difficult woman.”
In Atlanta, a man nervously holds the clippers above my head.
“I’ll start by just cutting a little bit to see if you like it first.” I stare at him through the mirror.
“My hair is already extremely short. Size two. It’s what I always get,” I say.
“Still… you’re a woman.”
“So my lack of male pattern baldness ensures that no matter what you do, my hair will grow back,” I say, aiming for levity. I succeed.
It’s a typical snowy day in Fargo when I call the barbershop conveniently located next door to my hotel which is good when the high is 23 degrees.
“What name should I put the appointment under?” the man on the phone asks.
“Anna Williams,” I say. A pause.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t cut lady’s hair.”
“My hair is already very short. It’s identical to a man’s hairstyle. It’s maybe half an inch long now and I just need a size two all the way around, no frills.” He grumbles a bit but says okay.
I walk in at my scheduled time to an empty barbershop. I call out hello and a few minutes later, an old white man shuffles out. He stares at me.
“We spoke on the phone earlier. About a 12:30 haircut,” I say.
“And I said I don’t do lady’s hair,” he said. “But if you insist.” He motions toward the chair.
“Size two,” I say. He says he only has a size three and a half and one and a half.
“One and a half,” I say.
He grabs the three and a half and starts hacking at my skull like a toddler trying to mow the lawn. He’s grumbling under his breath and sighing repeatedly. I knew going forward with this particular situation would likely result in a half decent story, but I still gave the guy the benefit of the doubt since he’d probably been cutting hair longer than I’d been alive.
“Is everything alright?” He grumbles again. “Have you worked with this texture before?” I ask. He grumbles again and falls silent for another thirty seconds.
“Your hair is clogging up my clippers,” he said before batting a stray chunk of curls away. I ask if he wants to stop. He grumbles but continues.
It ends up being the worst haircut I’ve ever gotten by far. Nothing was the same length. Nothing was smoothed down. He didn’t even brush the fallen hairs off my apron causing it to dump all over my clothes.
“Twenty dollars,” he said. Then adds, “That’s what I charge everyone.”
“I don’t expect to be treated any differently,” I say.
Ten minutes of standing in the frigid weather and a four minute Uber ride later, I enter a black barbershop. I tell the tale of the day’s hair journey. The guys there have a good laugh but in no time, I’m fixed up good as new.
The barber takes out his business card.
“For the next time you’re in town,” he says. “A beautiful lady like you is always welcome here.”
Getting my hair shaved was always a battle as well. And something I've learned to not go to the male barbers for. I was once literally given a cartoonized male hairline.