excerpts

From the introduction, by editor Lauren González:

What does a hurricane have to do with hair? I’ll get to that in a minute. What Submerged: Tales From the Basin has to do with hair is easier to define. Months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans’ three broken levees gave way to devastating floods, I solicited contributions from fiction writers, poets, and essayists to pull together a book as an act of encouragement as much as charity for the survivors of the storm and the ensuing floods. We needed a topic, though, a thread to unify the stories. Not a gumbo but a roux, something that would hold the book together. Submerged was to be a gift from women writers to women in New Orleans trying to pull their lives back together. The contributors and the recipients of this creative beneficence should relate, mutually, to the theme. One thing all women share is love or disdain (or both) for their hair. It delights and vexes us equally, often both on the same day. Women’s childhood memories are often rooted in stories about their hair, their mothers washing their hair in the basin, their aunts or grandmothers agonizingly braiding, brushing or pressing their hair at the kitchen table. Who hasn’t made a joke about a Flobee haircut? Some of us have even had them.

The title Submerged: Tales From the Basin was born of my own memory of my mother washing my hair as a child. Her enduring fear of water made her assume she’d passed that fear on to me. I wasn’t afraid of water, just the opposite. I lived for our Sunday drives just ten minutes away to sit at the edge of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, watching the tugboats push barge loads of coal, gravel, and fertilizer downstream. “Where are they going?” I asked, more curious about their destination than their point of origin.

My parents told me that the Mississippi let out “down by New Orleans,” then into the Gulf of Mexico where it mixes with the Atlantic Ocean. It took me years to understand why it didn’t drain entirely into the sea and I worried that some day it would. I wondered about this place, New Orleans, where the River wanted to go. I wanted to go there, too, and by way of tugboat.

When my mother washed my hair in the kitchen sink, she faced me and held the open side of her left palm against the back of my head, using her right hand to do the business of shampooing, scrubbing and rinsing. Her left hand was my insurance against drowning in the soapy water collecting in the basin (the faucet ran the entire time). Months after contributors’ stories started flowing in, a metaphor presented itself. When Gulf Coast homes, those 80 miles south of New Orleans, to the streets of New Orleans, to the ones in Pearlington, Bay St. Louis, Waveland, Pass Christian, Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, all the way to Mobile, Alabama felt what would be just the beginning of Katrina’s wrath on August 29, 2005, it was our government’s job to hold its hand on the backs of its people’s heads. If you’ve read just one article about Katrina in the past three years, you’re well aware that it failed. More on this in a bit.

From “Ethnic Hair Extra,” by Bonnie Richardson:

Back in 8th grade, in 1984, I got my first serious haircut—one from a stylist instead of a split-end trim from my cousin April. My dad, not my mom, took me to get my haircut because he, not she, controlled everything we did. Even when we went on vacations without him to visit my mother’s family, she’d have to call and get his permission for us to go anywhere beyond my aunt’s house where we always stayed. I never knew why he wouldn’t go with us, but I knew it wouldn’t have been much of a vacation if he was there, so I didn’t ask.

My dad thought he knew everything. He insisted that I didn’t have “Black hair.” He also insisted that tampons were not more comfortable than thick, bulky, sanitary napkins, but that’s another story. The idea that I would not have “Black hair” is completely ridiculous. I am Black. I have “Black hair.” So what if I may not need a straightening comb to get a comb through my hair; it is definitely “Black Hair” and it needs special care and attention: lots of heat and conditioning. I wanted to go to a hairdresser that could “do Black hair.” My dad took me to a White salon in the nearest White suburb.

Many White salons charged more to do “Black hair,” or as they now call it, “ethnic hair,” so they could charge extra, I believed, for anyone they didn’t like. Sure enough, we not only got charged more, but the stylist, whom I remember for her dismissive attitude and not her name, didn’t cut it straight and I hated it. “Snippy,” I’ll call her, said my hair wasn’t cut right because she couldn’t get my hair to dry straight enough for her to trim it. The reality is that she didn’t know what she was doing with my head. She took her Ethnic Hair Extra money and ran. I wouldn’t find a good stylist for nearly ten years.

From “Fitting Stereotypes,” by Anne Hays:

The first time I saw Sinead O’Connor on TV I thought she was a freak. I was 12, my brother was nine and the two us of were at my grandmother’s house kneeling into the carpet and staring up at the wood-paneled television set in awe. The video for Nothing Compares to You was on the screen. The shot only revealed her face, and I found it impossible to look away from her steady brown-eyed stare and her half-inch-long hair as she glared back with intensity. The remote control, practically the size of my torso, had long flat buttons one had to snap down to change the channel, which we would not do, not while Sinead O’Connor’s bizarre androgynous head floated before our astonished eyes. My brother was mesmerized. “Whoa, what?” he choked out. His long, slender fingers, which normally flicked outward in rhythmic motions while he talked or thought, rested against his knees as he stared at the set. “I think that’s a girl?” I suggested. I felt a strange lurching in my stomach. It was upsetting to see someone both magnificently beautiful and so weird. I knew she was doing something wrong, I mean duh. But she was doing it, wasn’t she? “It is,” my brother said, turning to me. And there she was on MTV.

I had always been a tomboy, everybody knew that, and everybody knew that I wouldn’t wear dresses, lipstick, earrings or anything pink. But everyone also knew that I was really a girl. Being a tomboy is like having a built-up persona; everyone living in the same town year after year has one. For instance, everyone knew my friend Marybeth loved horses; she owned the entire Black Stallion collection, many posters of horses, and went on horseback riding trips during vacations. For her birthday it was understood that her friends would buy her a poster, a book, or a T-shirt with a horse on it. Case closed. I was Anne Hays, the tomboy. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in college, when I shaved my head to resemble Sinead O’Connor’s famous haircut, that people’s perception of me seemed to click. I came out at the same time but everyone on campus knew without a doubt I was gay before I even said hi. It was wild. My look so closely resembled the stereotype of who I was that I seemed to have become entirely transparent, unless, of course, one couldn’t read the stereotype. Strangers assumed I was a boy. This was especially shocking and absolutely mortifying. I just wanted to be mesmerizing and beautiful. I didn’t realize that having this shaved head haircut would also make ordinary people categorize me as a “freak."