Getting Done Up When You’re Coming Undone

The truth was I knew I wouldn’t go anywhere or do anything—too afraid of the spread of COVID-19, too brainwashed by being a thirty-year-old good girl, too in pain myself to have the energy refusal takes, too ashamed of my attachment to my father to draw any attention to myself. Instead, I fantasized about something much more palatable, that is, any kind of salon service: getting my bushy eyebrows hard-waxed or my ravaged nails manicured clean. My family, caught up in the mores of Black respectability, would have considered this smoothing of my outward presentation an acceptable use of my time.

Mostly, though, I thought about getting my hair braided. I wanted to, without an appointment, trot up the steps off 125th Street, ring the doorbell, wait for at least ten minutes, take the staircase to the uninviting second floor, then walk through the deserted corridor into a stuffy fire-hazard of a room. All I wanted was to sit in that crowded space for anywhere from four to ten hours. I wanted the impossible: I was 500 miles away and the salons were closed. (Let me, again, underscore my militant interest in fantasy while two days before the funeral, hundreds of white people in Michigan staged "Operation Haircut” in front of the state Capitol.)

For most of last summer, my braids swayed around my body, like my own personal procession. (This was in fact new to me. I had kept my hair short-short-short since graduating from college in 2011 but in 2019, seeing what gay online dating had put me through, I embraced the monstrous femme in me.) In May, the day after the semester ended, in a collaborative gesture, I showed my hair braider a picture of Rihanna at a Buju Banton concert in Barbados. Rih had big fat knotty braids and was wearing a yellow-and-gray checkered suit. In a snapshot that circulated of her and Buju, she had one particularly unruly braid parting her face, like a snake ready to poison. In June, the most provocative of professional sports teams, my Toronto Raptors, won the NBA championships. I honored Kawhi Leonard with some straight-backs of my own, edges laid like whirlpools.

By July, I wanted to match my hot-and-bothered interior with my exterior. I got small braids that took forever, and my stylist miraculously intertwined platinum blonde into my regular 1b color, like a twist soft serve. I liked the small drama of turning a corner, hearing the abrupt stop of heartbeats. At a hotel downtown, a white man said he “had never seen anything like it.” By August, the heat was excruciating, and I was traveling—to Montreal and Jamaica—so I got auburn cornrows to keep my fake hair out of my face. Simple, I thought. But it turned out I wanted to see less of my face and I styled them most of the time with a zebra-print bandana. September it was back to school and, probably because I wasn’t teaching that semester, I wanted something “teacherly." I got a 90s shoulder-length bob. My mother approved.

That catalog of inner brawn was last summer. When this summer came, my hair was longer than it’s been for ten years, and also less touched. During the pandemic, already strained bonds are pressurized, waiting to explode. People often talk about community in rosy terms, obscuring the messy struggle over resources in the stranglehold of austerity, the handling of shit. (You know, Black men just love to idolize the barber shop as a sacred masc space, as if heteropatriarchal desire is a kind of prayer.) Capitalist modernity is at once a threat to the rituals of salons and a recognition of them: the lengthening of the working day, the refusal of translation, the gossip about clients, the ingenious stylization, the ungovernable choreography, yuppie cruelty, collective silence.

As I was coming undone, I wanted, at the very least, for my hair to be done. All I really wanted, I think, was an excuse to dream, to get away from my family, to get taken care of in that neutral, uncomplicated, transactional and tenable way that the exchange of money goads to promise. I wanted spontaneous pettyisms. I wanted the blasé simultaneity of sharing space with strangers. I wanted detachment.

If this sounds like a cutesy, romantic, and uncritical nostalgic picture of the hair braiding shop, it’s probably because it is: when, sometime last summer, I was at that same place I now so desperately longed for, I wanted to get out so badly I seriously considered leaving before my full head was done. I could endure the immense physical discomfort, but I saw a grown woman, wise and unhinged, cry over her tender head that day and, overwhelmed by projected shame, by her vulnerability, I managed to suppress a sudden anxious episode. But I stayed, groping my way through the dark, just as I stayed by my dad’s side, just as I stayed at the funeral, and in staying, I felt like a brand new person.

Tiana Reid is a writer and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.