Cack-Handed

by Gina Yashere

  I didn’t attempt to leave home again till I was twenty-three. And I still have never been to the Tower of London.

  A goal is but a dream with a deadline.

  Latchkey kids—kids who wore the key to their home around their necks, and who came into and out of their home by themselves, seemingly as they pleased—were horribly looked down upon by my mum but greatly envied by us kids. We were not allowed our own key until we were well into our teens. Somebody was almost always home to let us into the house after school, and when they weren’t, then tough—we waited until they were. We weren’t the kinds of kids who had friends over. As in never.

  We weren’t allowed to go to other kids’ houses either. My mother trusted no one. We socialized with each other in the house or with the kids of our aunties—who weren’t necessarily our aunties but my mum’s small network of friends from Nigeria, also immigrants to the UK—or with the kids of people who owed my mum money.

  My and my siblings’ social skills were mainly built from school, each other, books, and television. I was a voracious reader. I loved memorizing nursery rhymes. My mum nurtured my love of reading and bought me books as fast as I could read them, and she allowed me to join various libraries so I wouldn’t read her bankrupt. I was a massive fan of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, about a group of outdoorsy middle-class white kids who had many unlikely adventures. I identified with Georgina—“George”—the tomboyish girl in the group. I then graduated to fairy tales, then ghost stories, then horror. Stephen King and Dean Koontz are still my favorite authors to this day.

  I buried myself in American movies and TV shows too. Mum didn’t let us go out, but she let us watch pretty much anything we wanted, so my brothers and I shared a love of superheroes like Superman and Spider-Man, and The Hulk played by Lou Ferrigno, and cartoons—Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker. We also loved Knight Rider with pre–“The Hoff” David Hasselhoff, The Six Million Dollar Man with Lee Majors, and Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman, who was my first woman crush. I remember my brothers and me huddling together on the sofa at night, watching old black-and-white horror movies too: Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, and Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula.

  The dream to one day live in America was cemented by a short-lived kids TV show called The Red Hand Gang. It was canceled in the US after just one season, but somehow, a few years later, it ended up on UK television, as America’s sloppy seconds, and I loved that show. It was about a group of kid sleuths running around the streets of Los Angeles on cool bikes, solving crimes, and leaving the mark of a red hand on a wall wherever they’d been—it set my imagination on fire! Every kid in the US seemed to have nice clothes, skateboards, dogs, parents who let them go out and have adventures, and there always seemed to be a beach nearby to frolic on. Even the kids’ sweets were better than ours. Sure, England imported Bazooka bubble gum from the US, with the Bazooka Joe comic strips wrapped around the gum. But the toys you could order from the back of those comic strips—the catapults, guns, and action figures—were priced in dollars and only available to American kids. Oh, the torture!

  I felt victimized, seeing pictures of these amazing toys I could never have. I hated having been born in England, and dreamed of moving to the US, joining the Red Hand Gang, and enjoying the freedoms, sunshine, toys, candies, and general coolness that American kids seemed to have in abundance. I wanted Theo Huxtable as my big brother and Arnold Jackson as my friend. Diff’rent Strokes was on constant rotation in our house, and my brothers and I often cracked ourselves up shouting at each other, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

  This dream only grew as I got older and began watching TV shows like Melrose Place. Jesus! These same kids had grown up to live in apartment buildings with pools, where they’d hang out with all their cool, good-looking neighbors. Nothing like that existed in London. I was determined to have that life one day.

  “Why does your hair smell like chlorine?” Taiwo asked me one day as she was performing her weekly duty of braiding my hair.

  “’Cause I’m in a classroom with all of my friends and they went swimming today.” I secretly hoped the lie sounded casual and convincing enough to allay her annoying suspicion. I couldn’t tell my older sister that I was sneaking to go swimming with my class. At eight years old, I knew her envy and dislike of me was such that she was not to be trusted. She would snitch to Mum. I’d get into trouble and I’d be stopped from swimming. If there was any kind of school activity that did not involve me being on school premises, having a book in my hand, it was out. There was no way my mum was letting me near water, unless it was a bath at home. Any other type of water was frivolous and dangerous.

  I’m not sure what the situation is now, with all that the UK government has whittled away, but when I was a kid, swimming was part of the school curriculum. All school-age children were entitled to free swimming lessons. If your school didn’t have a pool, your class would be bussed to a nearby school that had one, or local private baths, once a week. There was a proficiency system in which you could earn various badges depending on your swimming skills. For instance, if you were able to swim the width of the pool and back, you’d get a green badge. If you could swim the length of the pool and back, you would get a blue badge. Then red, yellow, bronze, silver, and gold.

  Of course I wanted to go swimming with all my friends. Mum wouldn’t allow me to learn how to swim in case I drowned, which made absolutely no sense, but there was no arguing with her. No doubt to back up her assertions, she would have pulled out her scrapbook. “Do you see these children? They are dead, because swimming made them drown! Dead!”

  When my class did go to the pool, at first I stayed behind at school with the sick kids or the kids who had verrucae or other contagious ailments. Sometimes I was left in a classroom on my own, with one teacher as my babysitter. They usually felt sorry for me and didn’t make me do schoolwork but gave me different colored pens and allowed me to draw pictures, as some sort of consolation prize.

  This led to the first of a few deceptions I would undertake in order to escape my mother’s oppressive overprotectiveness. I had a friend, Vanessa, a little sandy-haired white girl with bangs, who sat next to me in class. She was sweet natured, and we often spent afternoons playing with ladybirds and caterpillars in the grassy area at the back of our school playground. One day she asked me, “Why don’t you ever come swimming with us?” I told her. The next day she opened her backpack and pulled out a half navy-blue, half sky-blue swimsuit with a frilly off-white lace skirt around the waist. “Mummy bought me a new costume. You can wear this, my old one.” I was ecstatic. She’d even brought along a spare rubber swimming cap for me. To this day, I don’t know whether she swiped it from the trash to give it to me or she’d told her mum she was donating the swimsuit to a poor, starving African kid. I didn’t give two shits that I was taking charity, which would have been an affront to my proud Nigerian mother, but I was grateful. At last I was going to swim!

  The following week, when the teachers were herding everyone onto the swim bus, I took the costume Vanessa had given me and climbed on with the rest of the kids. I strode with the confidence of a child who had permission from her parents to swim—I mean, why else would I have a swimsuit? I hoped the teachers wouldn’t ask. They didn’t. I rode that bus to salvation.

  I had my secret weekly swimming lessons for several months and was even able to qualify for my green and blue badges. Despite the rubber cap Vanessa had given me to keep my hair dry, that chlorinated water got in around the edges, seeping into my hairline and leaving that telltale smell my sister noticed. But she couldn’t prove her suspicions.

  My school had those old wooden desks you see in British movies from the ’70s, with large lids that could be lifted to reveal storage space inside for books, folders, and general school paraphernalia. This was where I stored my swimsuit. That thing never got washed. I’d wear it to swim, change out of it, and stuff it into my desk to dry ev
ery week. There was no way I was going to risk bringing it home to wash. But it didn’t take long for the swimsuit to start to smell and become moldy. I didn’t care. I’d put it on and get right into that pool with all those unsuspecting kids and swimming instructors. I’m still surprised that my school never became the center of a disease outbreak, and I didn’t go down in history as the Typhoid Mary of prepubescent fungal infections. Eventually, though, my suit began to fall apart. The skirt began to fray, the straps broke, then the crotch started to give way. By the time that costume finally gave up the ghost, it was held together by safety pins, Plasticine, and bubble gum—anything I could get my eight-year-old hands on. My benefactor and her family had since moved out of the area, and Vanessa was at another school, so when my little costume fell apart, that was the end of my swimming days.

  This is why to this day I have the swimming skills of an eight-year-old.

  4

  When the Laborer Is Praised, His Cutlass Begins to Cut More Keenly

  Hobbies were also a no-no in our family. Immigrants, for the most part, don’t understand the concept of a hobby. They move to a country and are consumed with hard work and providing for their families. They rarely have the luxury of non-work-related pursuits. My mum would often say, “Hobby? Who has time for a hobby? So you want to do useless things—for fun?”

  So there were no hobbies in our house unless that thing was useful to the family. During my first couple of years of high school, some school subjects were optional—electives. You were able to choose something of interest to you, like woodworking or home economics. As was to be expected in the ’80s, all the boys gravitated towards woodworking. Home economics—or cookery, as it was colloquially known—was mainly known as a girl’s subject. At first I was drawn to woodworking, but I had little patience as an eleven-year-old. I’d thought that I would be wielding a chainsaw and building tables and cabinets within a week, so when by the second month of class I’d only been allowed to pick up a hammer, I became bored and switched to home ec. It was a pretty easy class. More practical than theoretical, and yes, we did bake a lot of cakes. I discovered an affinity for baking. I had a sweet tooth already, and the opportunity to make my favorite things and have that be part of my education was a dream come true. Every week I brought home scones, apple pies, pineapple upside-down cakes, cream puffs, and sponge cakes, until eventually my mum, on tasting one of my creations, finally recognized my aptitude. “Every Sunday from now on you will bake cakes for the family!” She took the hobby I loved and turned it into a job. She bought a bunch of baking tins and ingredients, and every Sunday for the next couple of years I had to get up early and bake for the entire family. I resolved at that young age to stop learning things and to gain no more new skills that my mum could use to enslave me.

  Mum had very long, thick, beautiful hair, which Taiwo braided on a weekly basis, as well as braiding mine, as part of her chores. Mum implored me on several occasions to watch and help Taiwo, and learn from her, so I could take over when Taiwo left home. Hell no. I was quite a clumsy child, and I made sure to play up my clumsiness, so Mum dismissed me in frustration. I never learned to braid hair, and I haven’t baked a cake since I was fourteen.

  A single hair falling off your head does not make you bald.

  One of the lines in Lil Wayne’s 2008 song “A Milli” is “A millionaire, I’m a young money millionaire, tougher than Nigerian hair.” I reveled in that lyric, and whenever that song came on in the clubs, I’d proudly point to my head as I mouthed the words. But that pride was nonexistent when I was a child.

  I have had a love-hate relationship with my hair all my life. I have thick, tightly curled hair. On the hair-type chart invented in 1997 by Andre Walker, Oprah Winfrey’s hairdresser, which numerically grades hair types from 1A, the straightest of straight, to 4C, the tightest of curls, I am a 4C. My hair is super African. The nappiest of the naps. The word “nappy” has been used as an insult for centuries against the natural state of African hair in the US. In the UK, the insult was “picky”—a word that slipped into the language of Black people in England via the Caribbean. Both words have links to slavery. The thick, spongy texture of Black hair was used as another excuse to consider Africans subhuman, and therefore assuage any guilt about owning and using people like animals. Our skin and hair were deemed ugly, untidy, and dirty when put up against the idealized beauty of white, pale skin and straight hair. In the US, California and New York finally passed laws in 2019 banning discrimination based on one’s natural hair. We were discriminated against in work, school, the military, and even wrestling matches because of the way our hair grows from our heads.

  After centuries of this attitude being embedded in our psyche, Black women still hot-comb and put straighteners in their hair as early as they can to distance themselves from African “picky heads.” Mine is the type of hair that suffers major shrinkage. It can start the day full, luscious, and long, but one rainstorm, one too many sweaty encounters, one errant water hose, and my hair shrinks like a wool sweater in a hot wash.

  “Tough” was a word I heard a lot throughout my childhood when it came time to comb my hair. Out of the three girls (ultimately) in my family, my hair was the most tightly curled and most unmanageable, judging by the way my mother tugged, pulled, and huffed when she combed it. My hair broke many combs. The thick plastic combs with glitter inside them, wooden combs that were the thickness of small trees, even a couple of metal ones were bent out of shape by my picky hair.

  In the ’70s, conditioning hadn’t been invented. Well, if it had been, Black people hadn’t got the memo, as Vaseline was the hair treatment of choice, used to grease the scalp as the hair was braided. Actually, Vaseline was the Season-All of moisturizers—in my early childhood, it was used on my hair, my body, and my face. My brothers and I often went to school looking like three greasy brown M&M’s.

  My brothers didn’t get the benefit of a barber. That was an unnecessary expense when Mum had two perfectly good hands and a pair of scissors. Yup, a good fade was a thing of the future, but back then, all the Black boys at school had the same haircut. My brothers’ haircuts varied in quality, depending on how much of a hurry my mum was in.

  My mum tried with my hair until I was around nine. She never braided it. I remember being called a picky head a lot in school. I didn’t get to go to school in pretty buns and pigtails with colorful ribbons on the ends—my mum did a thing called African threading. This is a hair styling method used for centuries in Africa. It involves parting the hair into sections and wrapping black thread around each section from root to tip. Problem was, my mum would just cut the ends of the thread with her teeth and leave these threaded bunches sticking out of my scalp at various unflattering angles, so my head looked like a giant spider. Children are extremely honest, and cruel. So a couple of new nicknames were added to the collection I already had: Roots, upside-down tree head, and Anansi, after the West African folktale spider.

  Eventually, after much crying and begging, Mum gladly stopped threading my hair and passed on the responsibility to Taiwo, who had taught herself to braid. Cue even harder tugging and more comb breaking, but I gladly took on that pain if it meant I was no longer an uprooted tree. My hair had never looked better. When Taiwo was in a good mood, she experimented with different styles that matched the Caribbean girls at school. She even put beads in my hair on a few occasions. Hair beads were big in the Black community way before the white actress Bo Derek made them famous when she wore them in the 1979 movie 10 (cultural appropriation anyone?), and before Venus and Serena Williams kicked down the doors of tennis with their proudly adorned braids. I loved having beads in my hair. The weight of them, dangling at the ends of my cornrows, meant I could at least feel like I fit in with the other Black girls at school, and I could swing my hair like the white girls. And swing I did. At the end of each school day, there were always a few beads missing.

  Having Taiwo in charge of my hair meant I was at her mercy. If she decided I
had been disrespectful in any way or just irked her for any reason, she refused to do my hair, knowing that I couldn’t manage it by myself, and that once my head got into a bad enough state, Mum would notice it. My mother’s solution to my unruly hair was drastic. She would force me to sit down next to my brothers and would shear my hair off with the scissors. She didn’t have time for my knotted clumps, and she didn’t give a damn about my school cred. I’d be sent to school with a chopped-up, uneven mini Afro, at a time when Afros were no longer in fashion, Black Power or not, and all the girls coveted long braids. My school had a strict dress code, so I couldn’t even hide my mum’s butchery with a hat. I was a laughingstock.

  The trauma of begging my sister to plait my hair, before Mum got out the scissors, stayed with me for a long time. It was my own fault. I’d refused to learn to braid, to escape more housework, but I’d inadvertently screwed myself. I hated my hair for years. I ached for long, smooth tresses that blew in the wind, and through which combs and brushes glided, like in those Head & Shoulders commercials. But I had to wait until I was old enough to make my own hair decisions.

  This didn’t come till I was thirteen, after Taiwo left home and I was finally allowed to handle a hot comb by myself. I’d watched the many times when Taiwo used the large metal comb to press my mum’s hair straight and how my mum’s mane was transformed from a large curly halo into something long and shoulder-length. She’d grease up my mum’s hair, then pull the comb out of the burner flames on the stove and lay it on old newspapers to cool for a couple of minutes. After blowing on it a few times, she’d run it through Mum’s hair, accompanied by the sizzle of grease heating and the smell of hair being burned into submission.