Free The Wisdom of Hair by Kim Boykin

wanted to use those pretty, long curls to tie him to the chair. Judging from the look on his mama’s face, she wanted to do the same until he grew out of whatever phase he was going through.
    I gathered his hair in my hand like a ponytail, held my breath, and cut the length of it off. Mrs. Cathcart kept a supply of pink and blue grosgrain ribbon on hand, and if he’d been the kind of child to sit still, I would have tied a blue ribbon around the fat lock and given it to his mama for a keepsake.
    I held the little boy down by his shoulder with one hand and gave it to her with the other. “Oh,” her voice quivered. She looked up at me like the veil had been lifted. “He’s not a baby anymore.”
    As big as that child was, he hadn’t been a baby for a long time. “Stop squirming now, Johnny.” I said it nice. “I can’t finish your haircut if you won’t be still.”
    Without his baby hair to protect him, the little boy’s mama was getting really mad. “John Thomas Baldwin, if you don’t sit still, this woman’s gonna cut your ear off.”
    And then it happened. I don’t know how, I didn’t even see it, but he made one wrong move, and part of that little brat’s ear went sailing across the room.
    Now, you would think after all of the threatening that woman had done to her son that she wouldn’t have gotten so mad at me. But her baby was screaming and crying. He bled like I’d snipped a major artery, and she started shrieking at me, calling me every name in the book. Mrs. Cathcart was mortified by the whole exchange and immediately picked the sliver of ear up in a sanitized towel. The woman nearly fainted when Mrs. Cathcart handed it to her.
    “Now you get hold of yourself,” Mrs. Cathcart said sternly. “Zora, bring the first-aid kit, and tell Mr. Cathcart to bring some ice.”
    I brought the kit to her along with a large box of Band-Aids that was sitting on top of it. I expected her to bandage the boy up, but instead she took the smelling salts out of the little foil packet and waved it under the nose of the hysterical woman, who sat down on the floor but finally seemed to have come to her senses. Even the little boy had quit crying and was trying to look at himself in the mirror. Mr. Cathcart hurried out with an ice tray and cocked the handle so that the cubes spilled out on top of the piece of ear and onto the open towel on the woman’s lap.
    The woman looked at the towel like someone had put a bloody stump in her lap. She pointed to me. “You need to fire her.”
    “You ought to have raised your boy better. Even you told him to be still or I was going to cut his ear off,” I snapped.
    “I don’t care. I want you fired.”
    “Shut up, all of you,” Mrs. Cathcart screamed. “Nobody’s getting fired and nobody can cut hair like it’s a moving target. Now, you get this…this…get it on down to the emergency room right quick.” Mrs. Cathcart bound up the towel with a big red rubber band. “They’ll sew it back on good as new, but you’ve got to get over there in a hurry or it won’t take.”
    The woman nodded her head like this all made perfect sense to her. “But we don’t have no car.”
    Mr. Cathcart drove the two of them to the emergency room. The doctor said if it was a finger they could sew it back on; it wouldn’t take because the ear is just made out of cartilage. I could have told them that.
    When Mr. Cathcart came back he complained all day long about the woman being indigent, that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. He was afraid that the hospital would make the beauty school pay for it, or that the woman might hire one of those ambulance-chasing lawyers. But none of that happened. As a matter of fact, the little boy still came to the school even after that. Everybody snickered when they saw him sitting so still in the chair, afraid to breathe, especially when the scissors glided around his ears. If I’d been his mother, I would have let him wear the bowl cut to cover up