Americanah

Ifemelu stared at one of the photos, a profile shot in black-and-white, the woman’s head thrown back, her long hair flowing behind her. A woman who liked her hair and thought Curt would too.

“Nothing happened,” Curt said. “At all. Just the e-mails. She’s really after me. I told her about you, but she just won’t stop.”

She looked at him, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, so certain in his self-justifications. He was entitled in the way a child was: blindly.

“You wrote her too,” she said.

“But that’s because she wouldn’t stop.”

“No, it’s because you wanted to.”

“Nothing happened.”

“That is not the point.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re already upset and I hate to make it worse.”

“All your girlfriends had long flowing hair,” she said, her tone thick with accusation.

“What?”

She was being absurd, but knowing that did not make her any less so. Pictures she had seen of his ex-girlfriends goaded her, the slender Japanese with straight hair dyed red, the olive-skinned Venezuelan with corkscrew hair that fell to her shoulders, the white girl with waves and waves of russet hair. And now this woman, whose looks she did not care for, but who had long straight hair. She shut the laptop. She felt small and ugly. Curt was talking. “I’ll ask her never to contact me. This will never happen again, babe, I promise,” he said, and she thought he sounded as though it was somehow the woman’s responsibility, rather than his.

She turned away, pulled Curt’s baseball hat over her head, threw things in a bag, and left.

CURT CAME BY LATER, holding so many flowers she hardly saw his face when she opened the door. She would forgive him, she knew, because she believed him. Sparkling Paola was one more small adventure of his. He would not have gone further with her, but he would have kept encouraging her attention, until he was bored. Sparkling Paola was like the silver stars that his teachers pasted on the pages of his elementary school homework, sources of a shallow, fleeting pleasure.

She did not want to go out, but she did not want to be with him in the intimacy of her apartment; she still felt too raw. So she covered her hair in a headwrap and they took a walk, Curt solicitous and full of promises, walking side by side but not touching, all the way to the corner of Charles and University Parkway, and then back to her apartment.

FOR THREE DAYS, she called in sick. Finally, she went to work, her hair a very short, overly combed and overly oiled Afro. “You look different,” her co-workers said, all of them a little tentative.

“Does it mean anything? Like, something political?” Amy asked, Amy who had a poster of Che Guevara on her cubicle wall.

“No,” Ifemelu said.

At the cafeteria, Miss Margaret, the bosomy African-American woman who presided over the counter—and, apart from two security guards, the only other black person in the company—asked, “Why did you cut your hair, hon? Are you a lesbian?”

“No, Miss Margaret, at least not yet.”

Some years later, on the day Ifemelu resigned, she went into the cafeteria for a last lunch. “You leaving?” Miss Margaret asked, downcast. “Sorry, hon. They need to treat folk better around here. You think your hair was part of the problem?”

HAPPILYKINKYNAPPY.COM HAD a bright yellow background, message boards full of posts, thumbnail photos of black women blinking at the top. They had long trailing dreadlocks, small Afros, big Afros, twists, braids, massive raucous curls and coils. They called relaxers “creamy crack.” They were done with pretending that their hair was what it was not, done with running from the rain and flinching from sweat. They complimented each other’s photos and ended comments with “hugs.” They complained about black magazines never having natural-haired women in their pages, about drugstore products so poisoned by mineral oil that they could not moisturize natural hair. They traded recipes. They sculpted for themselves a virtual world where their coily, kinky, nappy, woolly hair was normal. And Ifemelu fell into this world with a tumbling gratitude. Women with hair as short as hers had a name for it: TWA, Teeny Weeny Afro. She learned, from women who posted long instructions, to avoid shampoos with silicones, to use a leave-in conditioner on wet hair, to sleep in a satin scarf. She ordered products from women who made them in their kitchens and shipped them with clear instructions: BEST TO REFRIGERATE IMMEDIATELY, DOES NOT CONTAIN PRESERVATIVES. Curt would open the fridge, hold up a container labeled “hair butter,” and ask, “Okay to spread this on my toast?” Curt thrummed with fascination about it all. He read posts on HappilyKinkyNappy.com. “I think it’s great!” he said. “It’s like this movement of black women.”

One day, at the farmers market, as she stood hand in hand with Curt in front of a tray of apples, a black man walked past and muttered, “You ever wonder why he likes you looking all jungle like that?” She stopped, unsure for a moment whether she had imagined those words, and then she looked back at the man. He walked with too much rhythm in his step, which suggested to her a certain fickleness of character. A man not worth paying any attention to. Yet his words bothered her, pried open the door for new doubts.

“Did you hear what that guy said?” she asked Curt.

“No, what did he say?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

She felt dispirited and, while Curt watched a game that evening, she drove to the beauty supply store and ran her fingers through small bundles of silky straight weaves. Then she remembered a post by Jamilah1977—I love the sistas who love their straight weaves, but I’m never putting horse hair on my head again—and she left the store, eager to get back and log on and post on the boards about it. She wrote: Jamilah’s words made me remember that there is noth

ing more beautiful than what God gave me. Others wrote responses, posting thumbs-up signs, telling her how much they liked the photo she had put up. She had never talked about God so much. Posting on the website was like giving testimony in church; the echoing roar of approval revived her.

On an unremarkable day in early spring—the day was not bronzed with special light, nothing of any significance happened, and it was perhaps merely that time, as it often does, had transfigured her doubts—she looked in the mirror, sank her fingers into her hair, dense and spongy and glorious, and could not imagine it any other way. That simply, she fell in love with her hair.

Why Dark-Skinned Black Women—Both American and Non-American—Love Barack Obama