Free The Wisdom of Hair by Kim Boykin Page A

his disfigurement, but his mama always insisted the boy’s ears were cut out, standing there with her arms crossed and her feet spread apart, daring him to move.
    Mrs. Cathcart always gave the other children who came in twoanimal crackers after their haircut. “One for each hand,” she would say, but she always handed that little boy the whole box and let him take as many as he wanted. I think it was her way for thanking him and his mama for not suing the school.
    Even after all that craziness I still loved to cut hair. I never cared much for doing perms because they smell awful, and I’m not great at color; that’s Sara Jane’s forte. But it was about this time I began to feel, just like Mrs. Cathcart said, that I had been called to fix hair for the rest of my life.

10

Back home, I didn’t listen to music much. Whenever Mama played her records, I’d put a fat rubber pencil eraser in each ear to muffle Judy Garland’s show tunes. After a while, I didn’t need the erasers to tune out the music. But beach music was different. It had a sweet, soulful sound that always made me dip my shoulders and shuffle my feet without even realizing it. Sure there were radio stations who played folks like Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and the king of pop, Michael Jackson, but if you lived anywhere near the beach in the Carolinas, beach music was still tops.
    As much as I hated drinking when I was living with Mama, it never bothered me that drinking had become Sara Jane’s and my favorite pastime. Every night the wine was cheap and cold, and went down as easy as those sweet piña coladas we used to drink on dollar night at Shag Daddy’s Beach Bar in North Myrtle Beach.
    Sara Jane and I had been celebrating again. We were alwaysfinding something to celebrate, and sometimes, when we couldn’t think of anything to cut loose over, we just turned the music up real loud and celebrated ourselves. I remember that Saturday night we were cleaning up the kitchen. General Johnson and the Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” was on the radio; it had become my own personal battle hymn where Winston was concerned.
    “Give me just a little more time,” Johnson crooned, “and our love will surely grow.”
    Sara Jane took the other end of my old checkered dish towel and we shagged along with the General as he belted out the chorus, pleading, “‘Give me just a little more time, and our love will surely grow. Baby. Please, baby.’” Scooping up my wineglass, I tried to drink and shag at the same time but made a mess.
    “Shuffle, ball, change,” Sara Jane reminded me when my feet stopped moving, like I knew what that meant. I just watched her feet and tried to make mine do the same.
    Sara Jane wanted to call the radio station in Myrtle Beach and request “With This Ring” by the Platters, which was her and Jimmy’s song. I wouldn’t let her because it was expensive to call long distance back then, so she settled for Clarence Carter’s “Too Weak to Fight,” which came on right after a commercial for Drink and Drown night at Shag Daddy’s and a wet T-shirt contest at another beach bar called Jimmy Mack’s.
    I knew Sara Jane Farquhar had opened my silverware drawer at least fifty times since we’d started being friends, but she never once saw Emma’s little gift I’d hidden all the way in the back. I never really expected Sara Jane to see the dress boxes that were still in the same places Emma had stashed them, but she had been comingto my place almost every day for almost three months and never once saw that little present.
    “Sara Jane, you always wash. It’s your turn to dry and put away.”
    She took a clean dishrag out of the drawer by the sink, shagging and twirling around me until she was beside the drain board. She went on and on about Jimmy, stopping just in time to close her eyes and cock her head to the side as she mouthed the chorus “too weak to fight.” I talked about school, feeling like