We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,16
light skin, long hair. I checked none of the above. Of my sisters, I looked the most like my father, and I think he wanted no part of that. As for my mother, only now do I understand that she made a decision to never praise my looks because she grew up being told her looks would be enough. They weren’t. Young Theresa Glass was encouraged to build a foundation on the flower of her beauty and simply trust that it would remain in bloom long enough to win the security of a good man. Her thoughts on the books she read voraciously would only spoil the moment. “Shh,” they said. “Just be pretty. When you get a man, talk all you want.”
So my mom was the nineteen-year-old virgin who married the first guy who said he loved her. And by the time she had me, she’d realized that marriage was not the end-all. He didn’t want to hear her thoughts, either. Looks had gotten her no-fucking-where.
I couldn’t lighten my skin to be considered beautiful like her, but I thought that if I fixed my hair, I had more of a fighting chance at being told I was pretty. At age eight, I begged my Afro-loving mother to let me start straightening my hair with relaxer, which some called crainy crack. Twice a month on Saturdays, she begrudgingly took my sisters and me on the hour-long drive from Pleasanton to my cousin’s salon in Stockton for the “taming” of my hair.
My mother had rocked an Angela Davis Afro in the seventies and did not approve of these trips to the salon. Yet she repeatedly caved to our demands that we straighten our hair, a political act of surrender on her part, or simply maternal fatigue. Either way, my desire to be seen and validated by my white peers when it came to my hair had the power to override her beliefs as a mother.
I cut out pictures from magazines to show my cousin what I wanted. If I was the Before, the straight-haired, light-skinned women in these pictures could be my happily ever After. One day when I was twelve, I brought a picture of Troy Beyer, the biracial actress who played Diahann Carroll’s daughter on Dynasty. She was basically Halle Berry before there was Halle. I didn’t even know that she was biracial, and I didn’t know what work went into making her gorgeous straight hair fall so effortlessly around her light-skinned face. I just wanted to be that kind of black girl.
“This is what I want,” I said.
My cousin looked confused, but shrugged and went to work. The deal with relaxer was that it was usually left on for about fifteen minutes to straighten hair. It’s a harsh chemical, and the way I understood it was that no matter how much it itched or burned, the more I could stand it, the better. If fifteen minutes means it’s working, then thirty minutes means I’m closer to glory. At thirty-five minutes I might turn white!
But the other thing with relaxers is that the hairdresser has to rely on you telling them when the chemicals start to burn. So if you’re saying, “I’m good, I’m fine,” they’re all, “Shit, leave it on, then.”
The burn is incredible, let me tell you. You start to squirm around in your seat. You’re chair dancing—because your head feels like it’s on fire. Eventually, you have to give in because you can’t take it anymore. Not this time. In my world, if there were degrees of “good blackness,” the best black girl was light skinned with straight hair and light eyes. I don’t have light eyes and I don’t have light skin, but at least I could get in the game if my hair was straight. No pain, no gain.
This day I was going to break my record. I would withstand any temporary pain to finally be pretty.
“You good?” my cousin said about fifteen minutes in.
I nodded. I wasn’t. It didn’t matter.
A few more minutes went by. I could feel the chemicals searing my scalp. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I told myself this pain was only temporary. When people at school saw me, I would be so grateful and proud of my strength. Every single minute counted.
“You good?” she said again.
I nodded. Finally, I began to bawl, then weep, then scream. My cousin raced me to the bowl to rinse me out.