In the sky, fog rolls over the hills and through the busy Oakland streets. I’m sitting at a café window, watching, as morning people hurry past while holding their to-go cups, and listening, as the barista grinds coffee and steams milk behind me.
There’s a sweet middle aged woman who I think lives on this block, I saw her multiple times during the month walking back and forth enjoying her day, doing errands, getting snacks, walking her dogs, and here she is again.
If you return to the same café long enough, you’ll see familiar people and their routine, their quirks, their personality, and I’d like to think, a peek into their inner lives.
The woman wears a denim button-up long sleeve and denim skinny jeans and sneakers. She smiles at everyone, even when she crosses the street. Her hair is brown, mussy and brushed through. I can’t help but wonder if she’d enjoy some luscious juicy curls if she had been given the knowledge on how to encourage them.
In my head-canon, being raised primarily in white spaces, there’s a clear timeline of before and after curl-knowledge. And it’s the older generations who are most left behind on these things. As younger generations unlearn restrictive ways of how to be, discover themselves, then share that information online like wildfire.
I recognize myself in the woman’s hair, I can see the flatter areas where she reflexively pats down over and over again, and peeking out underneath are the curlier pieces she can’t get to. These are habits nearly impossible to unlearn.
Now I’m wondering, well, how did my curls go from “frizzy” and “messy” to normalized? And why the hell did it take so long?
In my writing group workshop yesterday my lovely writing buddy Didi was laughing, shocked, when I mentioned I’d been raised in Manchester, England, from ages 1-6. These were formative years for me. It’s where I had my first crush, and the first time I said, “I love you,” to somebody else besides family. It’s where sarcasm infiltrated my core being. My favorite memory—a borderline stereotype—was a trip to Wales with my parents, eating fish and chips out of an oily newspaper on the beach, and it was overcast as hell, cold, and the air was briny.
There was a cultural sentiment I felt strongly with hair when I lived in Manchester, and was cared for by English family, which is that hair was something to be tamed, subdued, and flattened, and even a small amount of puffiness from humidity was a disaster. What I gathered at the time, and from my grandparents, was that unruly waves and curls were perceived as “messy” rather than simply a genetic trait. It’s possible I could’ve had curls in my childhood photos if the goal wasn’t always to tame but instead was to evoke. To bring out a curl on purpose was a whole philosophy we did not have.