By
Henry Louis Gates
We always had a gas stove in the kitchen, in our house in Piedmont, West Virginia, where I grew up. Never electric, though using electric became fashionable in Piedmont in the sixties, like using Crest toothpaste rather than Colgate, or watching Huntley and Brinkley rather than Walter Cronkite.1 But not us: gas, Colgate, and good ole Walter Cronkite, come what may. We used gas partly out of loyalty to Big Mom, Mama’s Mama, because she was mostly blind and still loved to cook, and could feel her way more easily with gas than with elec- tric. But the most important thing about our gas-equipped kitchen was that Mama used to do hair there. The “hot comb” was a fine-toothed iron instrument with a long wooden handle and a pair of iron curlers that opened and closed like scissors. Mama would put it in the gas fire until it glowed. You could smell those prongs heating up. I liked that smell. Not the smell so much, I guess, as what the smell meant for the shape of my day. There was an intimate warmth in the women’s tones as they talked with my Mama, doing their hair. I knew what the women had been through to get their hair ready to be “done,” because I would watch Mama do it to herself. How that kink could be transformed through grease and fire into that magnificent head of wavy hair was a miracle to me, and still is.
Mama would wash her hair over the sink, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, wearing just her slip and her white bra. (We had no shower—just a galvanized tub that we stored in the kitchen—until we moved down Rat Tail Road into Doc Wolverton’s house, in 1954.) After she dried it, she would grease her scalp thoroughly with blue Bergamot hair grease, which came in a short, fat jar with a picture of a beautiful colored lady on it. It’s important to grease your scalp real good, my Mama would explain, to keep from burning yourself. Of course, her hair would return to its natural kink almost as soon as the hot water and shampoo hit it. To me, it was another miracle how hair so “straight” would so quickly become kinky again the second it even approached some water.
My Mama had only a few “clients” whose heads she “did”—did, I think, because she enjoyed it, rather than for the few pennies it brought in. They would sit on one of our red plastic kitchen chairs, the kind with the shiny metal legs, and brace themselves for the process. Mama would stroke that red-hot iron— which by this time had been in the gas fire for half an hour or more—slowly but firmly through their hair, from scalp to strand’s end. It made a scorching, crinkly sound, the hot iron did, as it burned its way through kink, leaving in its wake straight strands of hair, standing long and tall but drooping over at the ends, their shape like the top of a heavy willow tree. Slowly, steadily, Mama’s hands would transform a round mound of Odetta2 kink into a darkened swamp of everglades. The Bergamot made the hair shiny; the heat of the hot iron gave it a brownish-red cast. Once all the hair was as straight as God allows kink to get, Mama would take the wellheated curling iron and twirl the straightened strands into more or less loosely wrapped curls. She claimed that she owed her skill as a hairdresser to the strength in her wrists, and as she worked her little finger would poke out, the way it did when she sipped tea. Mama was a south- paw, and wrote upside down and backward to produce the cleanest, roundest letters you’ve ever seen.
The “kitchen” she would all but remove from sight with a handheld pair of shears, bought just for this purpose. Now, the kitchen was the room in which we were sitting—the room where Mama did hair and washed clothes, and where we all took a bath in that galvanized tub. But the word has another meaning, and the kitchen that I’m speaking of is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of your head, where your neck meets your shirt collar. If there was ever a part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no matter how powerful the chemical, no matter how stringent the mashed-potatoes-and-lye formula of a man’s “process,” neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis, Jr.,3 could straighten the kitchen. The kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, irresistible kink. Unassimilably African. No matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t de-kink a person’s kitchen. So you trimmed it off as best you could.
When hair had begun to “turn,” as they’d say—to return to its natural kinky glory—it was the kitchen that turned first (the kitchen around the back, and nappy edges at the temples). When the kitchen started creeping up the back of the neck, it was time to get your hair done again.
Sometimes, after dark, a man would come to have his hair done. It was Mr. Charlie Carroll. He was very light-complected and had a ruddy nose—it made me think of Edmund Gwenn, who played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. At first, Mama did him after my brother, Rocky, and I had gone to sleep. It was only later that we found out that he had come to our house so Mama could iron his hair—not with a hot comb or a curling iron but with our very own Proctor-Silex steam iron. For some reason I never understood, Mr. Charlie would conceal his Frederick Douglass–like mane4 under a big white Stetson hat. I never saw him take it off except when he came to our house, at night, to have his hair pressed. (Later, Daddy would tell us about Mr. Charlie’s most prized piece of knowledge, something that the man would only confide after his hair had been pressed, as a token of intimacy. “Not many people know this,” he’d say, in a tone of circumspection, “but George Washington was Abraham Lincoln’s daddy.” Nodding solemnly, he’d add the clincher: “A white man told me.” Though he was in dead earnest, this became a humorous refrain around our house—“a white man told me”—which we used to punctuate especially pre- posterous assertions.)
My mother examined my daughters’ kitchens whenever we went home to visit, in the early eighties. It became a game between us. I had told her not to do it, because I didn’t like the politics it suggested—the notion of “good” and “bad” hair. “Good” hair was “straight,” “bad” hair kinky. Even in the late six- ties, at the height of Black Power, almost nobody could bring themselves to say “bad” for good and “good” for bad. People still said that hair like white people’s hair was “good,” even if they encapsulated it in a disclaimer, like “what we used to call ‘good.’”
Maggie would be seated in her high chair, throwing food this way and that, and Mama would be cooing about how cute it all was, how I used to do just like Maggie was doing, and wondering whether her flinging her food with her left hand meant that she was going to be left-handed like Mama. When my daugh- ter was just about covered with Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O’s, Mama would seize the opportunity: wiping her clean, she would tilt Maggie’s head to one side and reach down the back of her neck. Sometimes Mama would even rub a curl between her fingers, just to make sure that her bifocals had not deceived her. Then she’d sigh with satisfaction and relief: No kink . . . yet. Mama! I’d shout, pretending to be angry. Every once in a while, if no one was looking, I’d peek, too.
I say “yet” because most black babies are born with soft, silken hair. But 10 after a few months it begins to turn, as inevitably as do the seasons or the leaves on a tree. People once thought baby oil would stop it. They were wrong.
Everybody I knew as a child wanted to have good hair. You could be as ugly as homemade sin dipped in misery and still be thought attractive if you had good hair. “Jesus moss,” the girls at Camp Lee, Virginia, had called Daddy’s naturally “good” hair during the war. I know that he played that thick head of hair for all it was worth, too.
My own hair was “not a bad grade,” as barbers would tell me when they cut it for the first time. It was like a doctor reporting the results of the first full physical he has given you. Like “You’re in good shape” or “Blood pressure’s kind of high—better cut down on salt.”
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence messing with my hair. I defi- nitely wanted straight hair. Like Pop’s. When I was about three, I tried to stick a wad of Bazooka bubble gum to that straight hair of his. I suppose what fixed that memory for me is the spanking I got for doing so: he turned me upside down, holding me by my feet, the better to paddle my behind. Little nigger, he had shouted, walloping away. I started to laugh about it two days later, when my behind stopped hurting.
When black people say “straight,” of course, they don’t usually mean liter- ally straight—they’re not describing hair like, say, Peggy Lipton’s (she was the white girl on The Mod Squad), or like Mary’s of Peter, Paul & Mary5 fame; black people call that “stringy” hair. No, “straight” just means not kinky, no matter what contours the curl may take. I would have done anything to have straight hair—and I used to try everything, short of getting a process.6
Of the wide variety of techniques and methods I came to master in the challenging prestidigitation of the follicle, almost all had two things in common: a heavy grease and the application of pressure. It’s not an accident that some of the biggest black-owned companies in the fifties and sixties made hair products. And I tried them all, in search of that certain silken touch, the one that would leave neither the hand nor the pillow sullied by grease.
I always wondered what Frederick Douglass put on his hair, or what Phillis Wheatley7 put on hers. Or why Wheatley has that rag on her head in the little engraving in the frontispiece of her book. One thing is for sure: you can bet that when Phillis Wheatley went to England and saw the Countess of Hunting- don she did not stop by the Queen’s coiffeur on her way there. So many black people still get their hair straightened that it’s a wonder we don’t have a national holiday for Madame C. J. Walker, the woman who invented the process of straightening kinky hair. Call it Jheri-Kurled or call it “relaxed,” it’s still fried hair.
I used all the greases, from sea-blue Bergamot and creamy vanilla Duke (in its clear jar with the orange-white-and-green label) to the godfather of grease, the formidable Murray’s. Now, Murray’s was some serious grease. Whereas Ber- gamot was like oily jello, and Duke was viscous and sickly sweet, Murray’s was light brown and hard. Hard as lard and twice as greasy, Daddy used to say. Mur- ray’s came in an orange can with a press-on top. It was so hard that some people would put a match to the can, just to soften the stuff and make it more manageable. Then, in the late sixties, when Afros came into style, I used Afro Sheen. From Murray’s to Duke to Afro Sheen: that was my progression in black consciousness.
We used to put hot towels or washrags over our Murray-coated heads, in order to melt the wax into the scalp and the follicles. Unfortunately, the wax also had the habit of running down your neck, ears, and forehead. Not to mention your pillowcase. Another problem was that if you put two palmfuls of Murray’s on your head your hair turned white. (Duke did the same thing.) The challenge was to get rid of that white color. Because if you got rid of the white stuff you had a magnificent head of wavy hair. That was the beauty of it: Mur- ray’s was so hard that it froze your hair into the wavy style you brushed it into. It looked really good if you wore a part. A lot of guys had parts cut into their hair by a barber, either with the clippers or with a straight-edge razor. Especially if you had kinky hair—then you’d generally wear a short razor cut, or what we called a Quo Vadis.
We tried to be as innovative as possible. Everyone knew about using a stock- ing cap, because your father or your uncle wore one whenever something really big was about to happen, whether sacred or secular: a funeral or a dance, a wedding or a trip in which you confronted official white people. Any time you were trying to look really sharp, you wore a stocking cap in preparation. And if the event was really a big one, you made a new cap. You asked your mother for a pair of her hose, and cut it with scissors about six inches or so from the open end—the end with the elastic that goes up to the top of the thigh. Then you knotted the cut end, and it became a beehive-shaped hat, with an elastic band that you pulled down low on your forehead and down around your neck in the back. To work well, the cap had to fit tightly and snugly, like a press. And it had to fit that tightly because it was a press: it pressed your hair with the force of the hose’s elastic. If you greased your hair down real good, and left the stock- ing cap on long enough, voilà: you got a head of pressed-against-the-scalp waves. (You also got a ring around your forehead when you woke up, but it went away.) And then you could enjoy your concrete do. Swore we were bad, too, with all that grease and those flat heads. My brother and I would brush it out a bit in the mornings, so that it looked—well, “natural.” Grown men still wear stocking caps—especially older men, who generally keep their stocking caps in their top drawers, along with their cufflinks and their see-through silk socks, their “Maverick” ties, their silk handkerchiefs, and whatever else they prize the most.
A Murrayed-down stocking cap was the respectable version of the process, 20 which, by contrast, was most definitely not a cool thing to have unless you were an entertainer by trade. Zeke and Keith and Poochie and a few other stars of the high-school basketball team all used to get a process once or twice a year. It was expensive, and you had to go somewhere like Pittsburgh or D.C. or Uniontown—somewhere where there were enough colored people to support a trade. The guys would disappear, then reappear a day or two later, strutting like peacocks, their hair burned slightly red from the lye base. They’d also wear “rags”—cloths or handkerchiefs—around their heads when they slept or played basketball. Do-rags, they were called. But the result was straight hair, with just a hint of wave. No curl. Do-it-yourselfers took their chances at home with a concoction of mashed potatoes and lye.
The most famous process of all, however, outside of the process Malcolm X describes in his “Autobiography,” and maybe the process of Sammy Davis, Jr., was Nat King Cole’s8 process. Nat King Cole had patent-leather hair. That man’s got the finest process money can buy, or so Daddy said the night we saw Cole’s TV show on NBC. It was November 5, 1956. I remember the date because everyone came to our house to watch it and to celebrate one of Daddy’s bud- dies’ birthdays. Yeah, Uncle Joe chimed in, they can do shit to his hair that the average Negro can’t even think about—secret shit.
Nat King Cole was clean. I’ve had an ongoing argument with a Nigerian friend about Nat King Cole for twenty years now. Not about whether he could sing—any fool knows that he could—but about whether or not he was a hand- kerchief head for wearing that patent-leather process.
Sammy Davis, Jr.’s process was the one I detested. It didn’t look good on him. Worse still, he liked to have a fried strand dangling down the middle of his forehead, so he could shake it out from the crown when he sang. But Nat King Cole’s hair was a thing unto itself, a beautifully sculpted work of art that he and he alone had the right to wear. The only difference between a process and a stocking cap, really, was taste; but Nat King Cole, unlike, say, Michael Jackson, looked good in his. His head looked like Valentino’s9 head in the twenties, and some say it was Valentino the process was imitating. But Nat King Cole wore a process because it suited his face, his demeanor, his name, his style. He was as clean as he wanted to be.
I had forgotten all about that patent-leather look until one day in 1971, when I was sitting in an Arab restaurant on the island of Zanzibar surrounded by men in fezzes and white caftans, trying to learn how to eat curried goat and rice with the fingers of my right hand and feeling two million miles from home. All of a sudden, an old transistor radio sitting on top of a china cupboard stopped blaring out its Swahili music and started playing “Fly Me to the Moon,” by Nat King Cole. The restaurant’s din was not affected at all, but in my mind’s eye I saw it: the King’s magnificent sleek black tiara. I managed, barely, to blink back the tears.