Free Mixed: My Life in Black and White by Angela Nissel Page B

sit me between her legs, part my hair down the middle (which took about half an hour in itself), and put each half of my hair into a ponytail holder. She’d then braid both ponytails and hold the end of the finished braid with her thumb and forefinger while opening a plastic barrette with her teeth. Finally, she’d snap the barrette on the end and flatten any flyaway strands with Luster’s Pink Lotion.
    Those braids would last from two to three hours. On other kids, braids were the cactus version of hairstyles: very little maintenance and they still looked good. My hair expands like a balloon if there is any humidity. If the kid sitting next to me spills his juice box—poof—the liquid on the floor causes my hair to enlarge. Every single day I’d leave the house with two braids and two barrettes and sometime between the Pledge of Allegiance and the first bathroom break one of my barrettes would pop off, unable to sustain my swelling, expanding hair.
    The first time my barrette flew off, Sister Mary let me look for it. The second time, she tolerated the boys’ laughter as they ducked to avoid my airborne barrette. The third time—when my plastic barrette flipped behind the radiator and melted, making the room smell so bad we had to evacuate and have class in the church—she sent a letter home with me, suggesting a safer hairstyle.
    After the note, my frugal mother tried to cut my hair according to a do-it-yourself book she borrowed from the library. Pink faces, not much lighter than mine, stared up from the pages. She sectioned off and started chopping into my hair with craft scissors, brushing back beads of sweat and taking deep breaths.
    “We have to find a Russian Jew!” she’d scream in frustration, throwing the scissors down. Apparently, one of her coworkers told her that Jewish people, especially ones from Russia, have a grade of hair like mine.
    Finally, after hours of parting and cutting, being unable to find a salon in the yellow pages with a “We specialize in Russian-Jewish hair!” ad, she surveyed my head and sighed. “I guess this is all right.”
    It was not all right. I looked as if she’d bent me over the sink, thrown my hair into the garbage disposal, and powered it on. Without my Catholic school uniform, I looked homeless. I had an AfroCurlMushroom; it was shaped like a chef ’s hat, with random pieces very blunt cut and some long pieces in the back.
    After sleeping on it, my mother decided to keep me home from school the next day and call in some hair troops. “They’ll arrest me if I send you out looking like that,” she said. She wasn’t far off. (Many years later my brother’s wife told me that her white mother would try to style her hair using a thin-tooth comb made for fine hair. Desiree would squeal like a pig as the comb snagged its way down her tight curls. The neighbors, hearing Desiree’s screams, assumed that her white mother was abusing her and called the authorities. Several combs later, Social Services showed up on the doorstep. They wrote it up as just another case of white mother, black child, and let Desiree remain in her custody.)
    Luckily, no one called the cops when my mother Grace Jones’d my hair, but no one, even salons in the best part of the city, could offer a solution to fix it either. Even after it grew back in, when she took me around from hairdresser to hairdresser, no one wanted to touch my hair. Instead, they offered suggestions.
    “Take her to the Puerto Rican neighborhood, they have crazy hair like hers,” the local hairdresser said.
    “I
think
I can work with her texture, but I’d have to charge you five times my rate because it’s going to take all day,” a high-class stylist said.
    The last place my mother tried was the Hair Cuttery, figuring it would be discrimination if they refused to do my hair. Apparently, it’s not, so long as they are polite about it. After the all-white staff corrected their initial looks of shock, the only available