I loved amusement parks as a kid. For native New Jerseyans, it’s basically a tradition to go to Morey’s Piers and Raging Waters Water Park in Wildwood as soon as the weather is sunny. Until I was about eleven years old, I was too afraid to ride the roller coasters. I’d choose to go inside the fun houses instead. The large distorted mirrors would make me feel like I was an exaggerated version of myself, or even someone altogether different. The first things to grow enormously larger were my breasts; then it would be my hips and finally my butt. I was already a well-endowed kid, so there wasn’t much make-believe there. The fantasy came from watching little white girls giggle and whisper in each other’s ears as they posed in front of these mirrors, puckering their lips, leaning forward and placing their hands on their knees so that their butts pushed out. Their curvy reflections resembled my female relatives, and these girls loved it. They would laugh at how ridiculous they looked.
And as soon as they walked past the mirrors, they would go back to being stick thin and tall.
The face cutouts were another form of entertainment. I’d see kids, both black and white, whose parents had coaxed them into sticking their heads through the holes so that they could take pictures above the painted bodies on the board. These cutouts were always on top of white bodies. I never participated. Frankly, I thought it looked ridiculous: my black head on top of a white body. It was a deformity that I could not forget about in the land of make-believe. Since my mind couldn’t fantasize about this possibility, there was no way I was going to make my body reach a state of being, that being whiteness, if my mind wasn’t already there. After the cheerleader incident, that “state” had been marked off with barricade tape. Besides, if I wanted to transform, I was going to do so entirely. Anything less than that was not worth the trouble.
One of my fondest childhood memories is from when I was three years old. It was evening. A group of black women, including my mother, either stood or sat at the table in our kitchen. There was an almost mystical glow emanating from the overhead light. One of my mother’s longtime friends put me in a booster seat and, with a thin comb, began to divide my thick hair into sections and slather a white substance on it from the roots to the tips. When I was little, aside from my nose, my hair was the only evidence of my race. I barely had any melanin, and I burned in the sun; I was so much lighter than everyone else in my family and church community that people joked that I was the milkman’s baby or the daughter of a white man. But my hair was black, obsidian like ink, and grew into a massive afro.
At first, this application of what I later found out was a perm seemed okay.1 The product was cool upon my scalp, but then I began to twist and turn in my seat because that coolness turned into tingling and that tingling became a burn. I started to cry. I was immediately taken to the sink, my head placed underneath the faucet. Once the water hit my head, my afro flattened into loose strands that I could see rotating around one other in the stream. My mother’s friend ran her fingers through my hair and I hissed, noting how sensitive my scalp had become. What happened next is hazy, but it doesn’t really matter because that night began a tradition of more than a decade.
I grew up learning about “good” and “bad” hair. Natural hair was not a style that I saw as a child, unless you count the biracial, light-skinned black girls whose midback-to waist-length curly hair turned bone straight in the pool. I was told that I had “good” hair even though my hair was just as thick, if not thicker, than that of other girls, maybe because I am light-skinned and my complexion somehow mitigated the thickness of my afro.
That white beauty was the ideal was never formally taught to me. I learned it through warnings and observation. I noticed my white female classmates seemed more invested in the latest lip gloss colors than in their hair. Meanwhile, my eyes and those of my black female classmates surveilled whose hair might be fake, whose hair might be real. If a black girl’s hair didn’t touch her shoulders, someone might have easily called her “bald-headed” as an insult. If I impulsively wanted to jump in the pool, my mother would tell me, “You’re not a white girl, Morgan. You can’t just jump in the pool without letting me know.” So I began to pay more attention to the white girls I knew who could just jump into the pool and reemerge looking like bathing suit models or extras on Baywatch. They didn’t have to sleep with bonnets or scarves. They rolled their head around on pillows and allowed anyone to play with their tresses.
In the evenings, during Nick at Nite, I watched Marcia Brady of The Brady Brunch excessively brushing in front of the vanity mirror in the bedroom she shared with Jan and Cindy. Every day, on my TV, Marcia would wake up, but Carol Brady would never yell from downstairs that she was coming up so that she could do Marcia’s hair. That practice was strangely missing, planting one of the first seeds of difference in my head. My hair care regime was much more strenuous, and demanded more of my time, than Marcia’s.
The painstaking effort directed towards one’s hair is taught incredibly early, and it never lets up. Many mothers choose to plait their daughters’ hair to make it grow quicker and then, around grade school age or so, perm it to see its true length. From the age of three to around fifteen, I received a perm every four to six weeks. I started to go to a salon when I was around eight or nine years old. The hairdresser would apply the perm to my head, and within a matter of minutes, I would complain that it was burning.
“That’s okay, it’s working,” she would always say, and leave the room to take a phone call or eat Chinese or soul food in the sitting area of the salon.
I would clench the handles of my seat and tighten my entire body. My eyes would turn bloodshot, and I could think about nothing else but the pain, which was of a degree that I, to this day, have never experienced in any other situation. I silently repeated to myself, It’s working. It’s working. The burning means that it’s working.