Back to my roots

After several decades of largely unsuccessful experimentation with various and sundry implements of trichological torture, I have learned to accept the fact that I have big hair.

Hair this size is admittedly a bit passé (a bit being about two-and-a half decades) and tends to conjure up images of aging beauty queens and reruns of “Hee Haw.” This state of being is not entirely by choice. Due to a freak twist of genetics, I got the only head of too-thick, half-curly, utterly unruly hair on either side of my family.

Scissors provide no relief; the shorter I cut it, the bigger it gets. Lacking sufficient dexterity and coordination to embrace the flat iron generation, I am resigned to beat it into submission every morning through the application of enormous hot rollers and copious amounts of defrizzing product.

Given the width and breadth of said hair, I consider myself fortunate to have been born and raised in the South, where such styles have been in unrelenting vogue for generations.

It is true that big hair is a condition not entirely isolated to the southeastern United States. I understand that I may well have legions of hirsute sisters populating coastal New Jersey. And, of course, there was the Big Hair Epidemic that gripped the nation throughout the whole of the 1980s. Certain pockets of the Midwest struggle in its grasp even today. But in contemporary America it is a style most closely associated with the Deep South. Having lived here my entire life, I will admit that this stereotype is not without merit.

During the course of my 40-some-odd years I have witnessed hairdos high enough to intercept NASA communications and wide enough to block out the August sun. Natural born volume is an asset for those seeking to join our particular sorority, but genetics are not nearly as important as motivation. That which Mother Nature does not provide can still be acquired ... for a price.

I spent a fair amount of my childhood in beauty shops with my mother and grandmother. Teasing was a popular styling method back in those days, but this was not a coiffure one could easily achieve at home. Ladies of the day had to seek out the skilled ministrations of a professional “beauty operator.” For the benefit of the uninitiated, teasing involves separating the hair into sections and back-combing it until it stands straight out, as if utterly terrified of the scalp. In order to get their money’s worth, women frequently encouraged their beautician to be particularly aggressive: “Now, you pack that teasin’ in tight, honey, it’s got to last me through Revival next week.” This procedure was not without consequence. A good tease job often left its subject teary-eyed and moaning from the resultant scalp inflammation.

I’ve often wondered if the undercurrent of religion that permeates virtually every aspect of Southern culture is to blame for the suffering that generations of women willingly endured to torture their hair into stiffly lacquered halos.

Pretty hurts sometimes.

My grandmother was never a teaser. She would stop in the local beauty shop for an occasional wash-and-set, but she left her more complicated hairdressing needs in the hands my mother. Not my grown-up mother, mind you. By the age of 8, my Mamma was regularly giving Toni home permanents and dye jobs to my grandmother and a number of my grandmother’s friends. She may well be the only hairdresser in history who had to stand on a stepladder to reach her client’s scalp.

I’m not sure what would possess my otherwise highly intelligent grandmother to allow a third-grader to apply caustic chemicals to her head, but by all accounts Mamma had quite the talent for it. She still does.

When people sometimes ask me where I get my red hair from, I reply, with no discernable trace of irony, “from my mother.” This is the God’s honest truth ... at least technically. I do get my red hair from my mother, every 10 to 12 weeks since I was 17. I’m an honest person on balance, so I figure this one tiny sin of omission regarding the fact that my hair color comes from my Mamma not by virtue of genetics but by way of four applications of Miss Clairol mixed up in an old dog shampoo bottle is a forgivable little white lie.

Mamma’s own natural hair color is, in fact, a mystery to me. It has been so many shades and permutations of blonde during the course of my lifetime, from ditchwater to Harlow platinum, that I am certain I wouldn’t recognize it if I saw it. It might prove to be a rather disturbing experience, actually, like the time my cat saw me in a vintage Dolly Parton wig and leapt off the balcony of my apartment. Thankfully, the kitty survived the fall without injury, and I learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of accepting an invitation to any gathering characterized as a “Tacky Party.”

There was a brief, glorious time when my hair was naturally red. Unfortunately, it was between the ages of 2 and 6, so I was far too young to take full advantage of it. It was the early ’70s and Mamma had taken a break from double-process bleaching and gone red herself for a time. I have a framed photograph of the two of us taken at Disneyland, circa 1974. There we were, floating along in a paddleboat, double crowns of lustrous copper gleaming like the setting sun in a desert sky. It was the Happiest Hair on Earth.

But, in the words of the immortal Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. By early adolescence my hair had morphed into a shade of brown never before seen anywhere in creation except on the backs of swamp-dwelling rodents. And Mamma eventually decided that blondes have more fun after all.

Needless to say, Mamma does her own color, too. She’s never asked me to assist. I used to wonder if Mamma ever felt like she got the short end of the rat-tailed teasing comb, bearing the coiffure burdens of three generations alone. But as I matured I began to understand that this is a source of pride for my mother — she is the architect of one of our most dearly held rituals. And as far as she was concerned, a kitchen was just a beauty salon where people occasionally prepared food.

The women in my family never shared recipes or cooked together. Cooking was a means to an end, not a bonding experience. “Let’s eat and get it over with,” my grandmother famously said every time the family gathered together for a meal. I once watched as my mother made banana pudding, marveling at how she could concoct such a difficult dish without the assistance of a cookbook. When prepared properly (i.e., from scratch), this delicacy is comprised of gently softened vanilla wafers and thick slices of just-ripened banana cradled in a sea of slow-cooked custard. I looked on as Mamma crowned the pudding with a mountain of freshly whipped meringue, carefully sculpted into glistening peaks.

“I want to learn how to make that,” I said. “What’s the recipe?”

“Hell if I know,” Mamma answered, with a shrug. “You’re in my light.”

So ended my only attempt at a cooking lesson from my mother.

A family is defined by its traditions as much as its shared genetic history, bound together more tightly by the shared experiences and memories of its members than the vagaries of recombinant DNA. Three generations of our memories have been made in kitchens laden not with the fragrance of baking pies or roasting meats, but the acrid aromas of hair color and permanent solution.

As she tops off my roots with a fresh coat of paint, Mamma and I talk sometimes about nothing in particular, but mostly about the past: the time my grandmother dressed up as ghost to scare Mamma and her brothers away from the creek when they were children and my uncle, in defense of his younger siblings against the unearthly specter, hit her in the head with a rock. How we struggled to figure out the Metro system on our first trip to Paris, wasting a full half-hour of precious vacation time as I attempted to explain to the information agent (in half broken French, half mimed gestures) that we needed to get to the Motte Pique station when, in fact, we were already in the Motte Pique station. The way my grandmother interrogated my mother’s teenaged suitors as to both their intentions toward her daughter and the condition of their tires, deftly establishing her position as a five-foot-tall alpha dog no one with good sense would dare to cross. The fun we had that last Christmas before my older brother died, riding the Pink Pig at Rich’s department store and gorging ourselves on onion rings at the Varsity drive-in, blissfully unaware that by summer’s end our family would be unalterably shattered.

Almost three decades have passed since Mamma first gave me my red hair. If she finds any gray in my roots, she is kind enough not to mention it. If the color drips a bit too close to my eyes, I quietly wipe it away and pretend not to notice that her hands are not as steady as they once were. If either of us ponders the fact that my decision not to have children means that the good hair and the memories will die with me, we do not speak of it.

Five years ago, Mamma suffered a massive stroke. A tiny blood clot lodged in the speech center of her brain, nearly rendering mute the quick-witted woman known for an acid tongue wrapped in an Alabama accent. Extensive therapy restored much of Mamma’s language, but the aphasia that makes it difficult for words to move effortlessly from brain to tongue persists and will never entirely leave her.

A few months after she was released from the hospital, I caught Mamma staring at me, her brows knitted together. “We need to do your hair. Your roots are grown out nearly to your ears.” By this time, I didn’t even notice the stops and starts as she struggled to get the words out.

“Are you sure you want to? I can get it colored at a salon for a while,” I offered. The stroke had mercifully spared her paralysis, but the fine motor movements in her left hand were still diminished. My primary concern was that if the task proved too difficult, she would be frustrated by yet another reminder of what she had lost to the brain injury.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I had made a misstep. Mamma’s cheeks reddened and her lips flattened into a grim line.

I wasn’t sure what insulted her more, that I had questioned her abilities or that I suggested paying to have my hair colored. There are three things the women in my family have never, ever paid for: chemical processing, lawn maintenance and interior home painting.

“You’re afraid I’ll screw up your hair! You think I’m feeble!”

There’s an interesting thing about aphasia — its symptoms are often momentarily ameliorated by anger. These words flowed like a raging river.

“That is not true!” I protested. “I just don’t want you to overtax yourself so soon.”

OK, it was a little true. But a botched color job wouldn’t advance her stroke recovery one bit.

“I may have had a s-stroke,” she faltered. I watched as her fingers spelled out letters against the air, a technique the speech therapist had taught her to help find the words when they would not come. “But I ... can ... still ... DO GOOD HAIR ... dammit!”

And do good hair, she did. The application was a little shaky at first, but the end result was just as fine as it ever was. We didn’t talk much that time, as Mamma worked in the Miss Clairol concoction. I’ll never know what she was thinking, but I was considering how close I had just come to losing her. I imagined what it would be like to walk into a salon and ask for the first professional dye job of my life. I swallowed around the lump in my throat, certain that I would have cried the whole time. But then another thought occurred to me, and I couldn’t help but smile.

Get my hair colored in a salon? Mamma would come back from the grave before she’d let that happen.

HOW WE GOT THE STORY
In my spare time I occasionally teach creative writing classes. Atlanta native Pamela Wright is among a group of students who have taken my classes a few times, and it has been gratifying to see her writing evolve. This essay, like others she's written, was full of laugh-out-loud moments. But she took a poignant turn here that gave the piece an added layer of complexity not seen in her work before. As beautician Truvey Jones says in "Steel Magnolias": "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion." And that's just what Pamela achieves here — humor and pathos with a touch of Southern sass.

Suzanne Van Atten
Personal Journeys Editor
personaljourneys@ajc.com