Lockdown Taught Me to Care for My Natural Hair

After years of ignoring and being ashamed of my hair, the coronavirus pandemic is forcing me to reassess our relationship.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I miss the salon. Which isn’t to say that I miss the many minutes or sometimes hours spent waiting for the hairdresser to take you, even though you arrived for your appointment early; or the punishing heat of the dryer, which makes you hot behind the ears and sweaty at the nape of your neck; or the inevitable rough tug of the hairdresser and the urgent apology — Sorry! — as she combs through a stubborn tangle.

What I do miss is the security of someone handling my hair and understanding it, appreciating it.

It took a few weeks into lockdown for me to realize that my hair, natural and shaped into a short tapered cut, would become a challenge. One day, before a Zoom call, I looked in the mirror and saw my hair as I, the ultimate city dweller, see nature — wild, overgrown, endlessly intimidating. I tucked it under a baseball cap.

It’s been years since I’ve had to really consider my hair. My hair is a mystery; I never actually learned its coils and kinks. For most of my elementary and middle school years I had box braids or cornrows. I’d sit in the salon for six, seven, eight hours as the hairdresser pulled my hair tight against my head, her fingers working nimbly and every so often, as she torqued her wrist, the knuckle of an index or middle finger playfully kneading against my scalp.

Afterward, my hair was plaited in clean lines, with not a strand out of place, set in its orderly brown rows. For hours my scalp throbbed, as though it had been run over by rakes.

When I got my first chemical relaxer at 13, I struggled to find the words to explain to my white best friend what had been done to my hair. It was like a perm, but it did the opposite, I told her. My hair now looked somewhat like hers.

My entitled white-centric suburban upbringing, in a home where my black parents barely mentioned race except to occasionally cast casual aspersions against other “black folks,” had a profound effect on me: I saw whiteness as a familiar comfort and blackness as enigmatic and foreign, something to be ashamed of. So when I arrived at my predominantly white college, away from home and my salon, I didn’t know where to find a new space for myself, or for my hair.

It was mostly weariness that curbed my relaxer treatments. I hated the scalp burns, which formed irritating scabs, and the panic I felt when I began to feel my roots.

But my natural hair made me uneasy. When I looked at myself, so uncertain in my brown skin, I wondered how I should think of myself. How much of my blackness was defined by the stubborn fact of my hair? I studied it, made a class of it, researching articles and videos featuring women more versed in their hair, whose blackness was not just their hair but their whole selves and who showed no fear in that. I learned twist-outs and just let the hair grow and grow.

Sometimes my hair fought back. When I eventually returned to salons years later, one hairdresser gruffly raked his comb through my dry knots, and the pain made my eyes well up with tears. I was too embarrassed to say a word.

But I did find stylists who treated my hair with such ease and nonchalance that I found it astounding. A chic, pricey salon in SoHo offered a black hairdresser who carefully examined my hair with her fingers, then transformed it effortlessly. The rest of the day I kept touching my hair, amazed at its texture, surprised that what I was experiencing was and always had been mine.

My current stylist is a black woman my age whose own hair is different each time I visit — every three to five months, when I can put it off no longer. She always scolds me when I come in, for waiting too long between cuts, for not detangling it well enough or conditioning it often enough. But I’ve relished the comfort of becoming her regular client, how I can walk in and she knows me and my hair, just the cut I need.

I can say “the usual,” and we’re speaking the same language: my tapered cut, with shaped up edges and retouched highlights. When she shows me the mirror in the end, she can read my silence. I’m always shocked and unsure at the transformation; though I go through it often, I’m forever skeptical. Yet she knows that too, and waits for my face to relax before I finally say, “Looks good, thank you,” brush myself off and rise from her chair.

The last time I visited, in December, I said it was perfect, and she smiled at me, saying, “You feel like yourself again, right?”

I’ve missed that — feeling like myself again. On those days I was able to quiet the internalized self-hatred which sprung from white-dictated beauty standards, I imagined that my hair — comfortable and confident in its nakedness, cropped up in tiny pops of tight curls — spoke itself loud and lively. A head of hair that is sprightly, enthusiastic and undoubtedly alive: That is me.

I had forgotten this. But the coronavirus has forced me to consider my hair again. It has outgrown its tidy cut and is expanding in all directions. It’s contrary and doesn’t pay me much mind as I sit with it and let it test my patience. I’ve tried to wrestle it into cornrows, but the hair seems to fly out from under me and wiggle itself out of my reach. My arms already tired, my hands awkwardly fumble each time, tripping over each other like a person stumbles over the words in a new language.

How does one lose such fluency in herself? I try to learn my hair, but hesitate, as though its complexity is too much to fathom.

Yet for all of the things my hair is, it is not actually unfathomable, or a mystery, or the woods, or any other metaphor I use to avoid saying that in my hair I see my blackness, and in this America, that sight sometimes makes me afraid. Right now, of course, there are bigger things to fear, and there are countless black women at this very moment washing and combing, twisting and locking, braiding and curling and deep-conditioning their hair, with a plastic cap or satin wrap crowning their head. It’s not necessarily effortless, but it is an act of acknowledgment and care.

When the pandemic dies and stores and shops start to reopen, I’ll return to my salon to get my normal cut and will feel refreshed and familiar. Until then, I’m trying every day, washing and combing and conditioning, each act so terribly small and yet monumental.

This week I’ve succeeded in flat twists. They’re mediocre at best — sloppy, uneven, imperfect. I’m starting to think that’s just fine.

Maya Phillips (@mayabphillips) is the 2020-21 Times Arts critic fellow and an author, most recently of “Erou.”

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