For Fed-up Gurls Who've Considered Loc'ing When the Chemicals Got Too Rough

Happily sporting my 80s Long Island 'big hair'

1984

It was a glorious year: the first Apple Mac went on sale to the general public, Band Aid recorded Do They Know It's Christmas, Joe Kittinger became the first person to successfully cross the Atlantic in a helium balloon, four astronauts slipped on some jet packs and made the first untethered space walks, the summer Olympic games were held in Los Angeles, and.... Oh, yeah! I almost forgot. I was on my fiftieth perm.

The Perm

Otherwise known as a permanent, chemical hair 'relaxing' and straingtening treatment. It's used by curly- and kinky-haired gurls and guys the world over. The active agent is either a strong alkali or a so-called 'perm salt' (amonium thioglycolate).

It stinks. And I mean that both literally and figuratively. On the literal end, it really does smell awful. And -- for me anyway; to each her/his own -- I regret ever having gone down the chemical route and am sad I was too young in the 60s and 70s to have made my own decisions about my hair and to have embraced the natural hair movement, like so many were doing then.

1967 in Jamaica (West Indies, not Queens)
with my tiny natural curly fro

I don't blame my mother for 'getting me permed'. It was the common thing to do then, if you had a child with 'unruly' hair that took too much time and caused too much pain to keep in a 'decent' state for 'leaving the house'.

Mom couldn't manage my hair -- she worked hard, commuting to a desk job in Manhattan, while trying to build a cosmetics business in her spare time -- and I wasn't able to either. So even though my dad was set against it, at about 12 years old I was first taken to a salon in Brooklyn to have a lovely woman named Norma perm my hair for the first time. And I got my touch ups every few weeks for every year after that, usually on Long Island, usually by Mrs Bryan or Mrs Cann, pro beauticians whose families also relocated from Jamaica to Long Island and whose daughters were also my friends in school.

pre first perm

I was happy. I loved going to my friends' houses to hang out and get my hair done 'right' (and complete and utter and total PROPS! to Mrs Bryan and Mrs Cann for keeping my hair lovely, thick and healthy all those years).

It wasn't just about the hair, I was happy to enjoy the entire social and communal spirit of 'getting your hair done' back in the 70s and 80s. If I could have travelled through life with Mrs Bryan or Mrs Cann doing my hair forever, I would never have even thought of going natural. It wouldn't have occurred to me. I had no damage from at-home chemistry-and-kitchen hair experiments (completely and luckily missed out on that particular teenage right of passage), it was affordable (well, despite my after school jobs and earning my allowance through good grades and chores, Mom & Dad always 'paid for my hair', so as far as I was concerned it was affordable), and I quite simply liked how it looked.

It never occurred to me to change. That simply was how my hair was done. That was My Hair.

1990s

Well, that was My Hair until I had to pay for it on my own.

Yes, adulthood, leaving the nest (or flying the coop, however you thought of it), going off to college, working and studying and a little bit of partying too, and keeping up a perm on my own dime. That was expensive.

I bounced from salon to salon to salon around Manhattan -- never thinking to do my hair myself, because I'd just not been raised doing anything to it myself -- using whatever student discounts or coupon deals I could get hold of. The time in-between touch ups got longer and longer until I started to discover my roots. Again, I mean that both literally and figuratively.

Then one day I auditioned for and got cast as Dionne in our campus production of Hair, and I had to get me some.

Hair.

Hairhairhairhairhairhairhair.

Real hair.

Natural hair.

I needed an afro.

Sadly, the VHS tapes of that show my dad recorded have long ago gotten lost in moves from house to house, state to state, country to country, continent to continent, and I can't find even one photo to show you the GLORIOUS afro that I managed to grow-and-tease out of a head of hair that had been chemically relaxed for the better part of a decade.

You'll just have to take my word for it. I got me a 'fro. And my love-affair with natural hair was born....

Nineties to the Noughties

Mi familia (including my cute tiny Grandma), circa 1997

.... but I had to keep my love a secret for some time longer, because I'd gotten to that period of life when it was time to leave college and get a job. 

I had to look 'professional', so I began to hit the bottle (of hair chemicals) again, learning (out of financial necessity) to do most of my touch-ups at home.

I sported that straight-again look for a couple decades more until my daughter's hair started to grow in these absolutely gorgeous curls, and I wanted to join her. I thought what a shame it was that I never had the chance for my hair to grow natural and free like that.

Also, I didn't want to set a 'bad' example for her in relation to loving her natural hair. I wanted her to revel in her natural coils and kinks, not to think that when she got older she would have to straighten her hair like her Mum's.

So I decided to join her in hair freedom, and we've been natural curly gurls together for most of her 10 years.

And now that she's starting to experiment with her own hair (blow or air dried mostly; neat updo or wild child windblown), I've decided it's time for me to take the step I've long wanted to -- time to get locs!

More on that in later posts.

Thanks for reading along with the blog this far -- really pleased you've joined me on this journey.

I'll be back very soon with more of what I'm learning and how I'm 'growing' (yes, again, both literally and figuratively).

Until then, please enjoy this very cool video of how black hairstyles have changed through the decades: