Black Men and Their Hair

Another hair story from the Black man's perspective, which is something we don't get to hear often, but Eric takes us through the journey of the naps, waves, straight, and laid hair.

I am going to be honest, y’all, this image was clickbait. Enjoy the read!

Once I had a baby with a bald man, and a few years later, I was bald myself. A better story would have been that the bald man made me go bald; however, a professional burnt off my hair due to chemicals.

As I read Eric’s story, I began to wonder when Black men face hair insecurities like Black women do, who holds space for them to express and be reassured?

I also thought about my Daddy with his long wavy hair that he kept cornrowed in straight backs with a NY Yankee’s fitted as his signature look. As he aged, he began balding on the top under his hat, and I can’t help but wonder if the hat was a cover-up like my hats were when I shaved my head bald.

Let Eric and me know in the comments how his story resonated with you or made you think of a particular Black man in your life growing up.

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Naps, Waves, Straight, and Laid

Written By Eric Payne

“I don’t know why you’re putting that mess in your hair,” my dad said to me condescendingly while I was in high school. I was looking at myself in the mirror in the dining room, the biggest mirror in the house, examining the curls at my hairline that shot skyward with the help of my brush. It was Chicago in the Eighties. I was a junior in high school. House Music had a grip on the culture.

“Easy for you to say,” I retorted without breaking the mirror’s hold on me. “Everyone can’t have fly-away, Gordon Parks hair like you.”

My father had a full head of hair that blew every which way with the wind, and he was constantly combing his spun silk back into place to resemble a squarish Afro. This trait showed up in a smattering of his seven brothers. The darkest of them all had the wildest hair, truly resembling Gordon Parks.

Meanwhile, my mother was at the hairdresser’s every Saturday. She spent most of her day there getting a relaxer, then a curl, then back to relaxers once more. Me? I was burning through so many cans of Dax, Murray’s, and Sportin’ Waves that I was probably single-handedly helping to pay their light bill. I had a whole arsenal of Dianne’s brushes. While Mom obsessed over her hair, I did the same. I upgraded from the heavy pomades of my youth that accumulated more dirt than produced waves to the chemical wonders of an S-Curl. What an upgrade it was! Waves and curls were unlocked! You couldn’t tell me nothing! Not a damn thing! Damn the way it initially smelled. Damn how I kept accidentally burning my scalp when I snuck into our single bathroom late at night and applied it with the cheap plastic gloves that came in the box. Damn how my hair got dry and brittle from the treatment. I had been cutting hair since the sixth grade. One of my many hustles. There was no amount of damage those chemicals were doing to my hair that I couldn’t cut away, and I could always grow more hair. I was young.

Dad, an academic by profession, scoffed. He got up from his chair in the living room and went down into the basement. I barely noticed as I was still transfixed on myself. He returned to the dining room with a five-by-six photo of himself. He threw it down on the dining room table like a winning book in a game of Spades, finally snapping my attention from me.

It was a black and white photo of him looking almost the same as I did at that moment in time. He wore a tweed jacket, a white shirt, and a tie. He had a tidy, short natural that looked as coarse as it wanted to be. I studied the picture, and he studied me. A snarky, haughty grin began to spread across his face because Papa ain’t raise no fool.

I looked at the picture, then back at him, then back at the picture.

I thought, uh oh.

I asked defensively, “When was this?”

“College,” he answered. “Hair changes over time, son.”

“Well, that was you,” I snapped, refuting the evidence he threw in my face. “Again, Mom’s hair is different than yours,” inferring the difference between my African American mother and his Native American one.

“Daddy had hair like that,” he volleyed and repeated his initial opinion through a chuckle. I then remembered my father’s afro proudly defying gravity during my wonder years of the Seventies. Why this ninja sat there quietly while I brushed my head incessantly for years, I’ll never know. It was one of several instances where he didn’t put me on to game — game that could’ve spared me a lot of time having to figure things out on my own. Appearance was never a priority for him. Maybe he didn’t know how to. Maybe he figured I wouldn’t listen. Knowing who my father was, he knew how to train me, not nurture me. Not to mention, my mother spoke constantly about her hair not being good enough. It drove Dad and me crazy and would drive me, years later, to seek out women, for better or worse, who view their hair as a source of strength and pride, rather than weakness and shame. This is a whole ‘nother article on its own. It took me playing with chemicals for him to state his case.

I wouldn’t stop playing with chemicals anytime soon after that eye-opening encounter with Dad. To this day, my prom pictures cause my friends to fall over laughing at them when they see my “Detroit Red” special sitting on top of my head. I eventually stopped after I went to college in New York. House music took a back seat to hip-hop, as caesars, bald fades, and flat tops arose from the ashes and broken ends of chemicalized updos.

Years later, I got an unexpected question from a friend:

“Why your hair look like that?”

“Look like what?”

Most of the cats I ran with were well over six feet tall and could easily see above my five-foot-eleven frame.

“It’s straight on the top and wavy on the sides. You have like multiple textures going on at the same time.”

I shrugged. “It’s my hair,” I answered, remembering my time with my father. I smiled.

In my late twenties, a bold decision to shave it all off while on a cruise in the Caribbean with my ex-wife was met with surprising approval from her and many of the women in my family on both sides. I kept it shaved from then on, and now I spend almost no time in front of the mirror primping, except to trim my mustache, goatee, and the beard I grow during the winter months.

Without any hair on my head, I learned my value emanates from within, not from the hair growing out of my head. But I’m so glad that today those with waves, bumped and picked fros, naps, locks, twists, curls, and more, now celebrate what they have. Subjugating what grows out of our heads is for the birds.

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