by Gina Yashere
When Taiwo felt generous, she’d do mine too, and I’d also be blessed with flowing tresses, which I maintained longer by not moving too much or going near water, including the bath, as any moisture and my hair would shrivel up like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, and I’d be returned to ugly duckling status in a hot minute. Those few days I was able to maintain that straightness, I felt on top of the world. My hair was thick, but when it was straight, it outranked most of the dark-skinned girls’ hair length at school, and they marveled at it. I felt almost popular. I stomped through school those days tucking my hair behind my ear, untucking it, and tucking it again. I couldn’t wait to be allowed free use of the hot comb, and when I finally was, I abused it. The smell of the sizzling 1980s Black hair staple Luster’s Pink moisturizer permeated the house as I fried my hair on an almost daily basis. I’d press my hair as straight as I could get it and slick it back. I looked like James Brown and Barry White had had a baby. But to me, I looked good, as long as I didn’t get caught in the rain.
On my sixteenth birthday, Taiwo told me to get ready as she was taking me somewhere. After she’d left home, our relationship had improved. She sometimes returned to take my brothers and me out, showing us random acts of generosity and kindness. One year she took us to Wimpy for burgers and milkshakes. This was a big deal to us. Mum never believed in eating outside our house unless it was a school meal, so we hadn’t been to any kind of restaurant. That day we’d gorged on cheeseburgers and huge ice-cream sundaes called knickerbocker glories. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven, all previous mistrust towards our older sister dissipating with each bite.
This time she took me to a hair salon. We walked in, and the place was bustling with Black people. People getting blow-dried, getting their hair braided, straightened. It was wondrous. Taiwo wished me a happy birthday and explained that she would pay for me to have my hair relaxed. The first hair-relaxing chemical was invented by accident by Black inventor Garrett A. Morgan, in 1909, while he was trying to figure out how to reduce friction between the needle and wool of a sewing machine. From there, he tested it on a dog and then on humans, after which it became a worldwide phenomenon, and a tool for Black women to fit into white beauty parameters. I was overjoyed.
Taiwo informed the receptionist of our appointment in fifteen minutes’ time, and we walked to a waiting area. Three hours later we were called over by the woman who was to be my stylist. “So we ah go relax all ah dis?” she asked in her strong Jamaican accent.
I nodded and looked up at Taiwo, who took charge. “Yes, we’re going to relax and style, please.”
“All right.” She began to comb through my hair, which hadn’t been hot-combed for a few days. “Rahtid, your hair tick nah rass!” (“Wow, your hair is thick!” for those who don’t speak Jamaicanese.) She separated my hair into bunches and began applying the relaxer cream from the roots to the tips. My excitement grew. I was going to leave here looking like a million bucks.
As the stylist smeared more and more relaxer on my hair, I began to feel a tingle on my scalp. No problem, I thought. This must be normal. The tingle increased to a small burning sensation. You’ve never had your hair done before. It’s fine. Stay calm.
Within five minutes my scalp felt like it was on fire, being stung by a thousand bees, and being set on fire again. I winced inwardly, clenched my fists, and tried to breathe through the pain. I was afraid to speak for fear of embarrassing my sister and having her put a stop to the outing. I needed to get this hair done, so I was going to suck it up, no matter what.
“How you feeling?” the stylist asked.
“Okay,” I squeaked.
“Good. We leave it on another twenty minutes, then me ah go wash it off.” Jesus Christ.
I sat in agony, sweating, which made the burning even worse.
Taiwo came over from where she sat reading a magazine behind me. “How does it feel?”
“It’s burning a bit.”
Taiwo called the stylist back. The stylist put her hand in my hair to check how well the relaxer had taken. That small manipulation of my hair released another set of flames shooting into my scalp under her fingers, and I nearly jumped out of the chair.
“Okay. Time fi take it out.”
She led me to the basin, I put my head back, and she began washing my hair out. I asked her to use ice-cold water, but my scalp exploded like the top of a volcano every time her hands rubbed my head to wash out this devil cream. Finally, she poured a neutralizing shampoo on my head for the extremely alkaline cream, and Oh! Blessed relief! It was like she’d dipped my head in a pool of Pepto Bismol. The flames died down. The rest of the appointment went without incident. My scalp throbbed, but my hair had taken the relaxer, and I was rewarded with the longest, straightest hair I’d ever had. The stylist curled my hair, and I floated out onto the street with my sister, ready for my future as a Black debutante. I thanked Taiwo profusely and went home.
In the morning I tried to remove the silk scarf that I’d used to tie my hair and maintain my style the night before. It wouldn’t come off my head. It was stuck. I was confused. I peeled it off and looked in the mirror, and was faced with the reflection of a burn victim. My head looked like Freddy Krueger’s face. It was covered in weeping scabs, and my beautiful hair lay clumped and buried under large discs of dried pus.
Taiwo arrived at the house within the hour. She had to face my mum’s fury at what she had let these people do to my hair. I felt bad for her. She had tried to do something nice for her younger sister, and it had ended in disaster. She took me straight back to the salon.
The Jamaican woman was unapologetic. “Why she never tell me she ah bon?” I told her, “How was I supposed to know that burning wasn’t normal?” They washed my hair again and did their best to separate the clumps from the scabs, and fortunately there was no damage to my thick hair, just my scalp, which would heal in about six weeks. Just in time for my hair to grow enough that I would have to go back and burn it all over again.
My scalp never stopped getting burned. I’d go, burn my head, let it heal, burn it again, on and off for the next twenty-five years, pausing only when I had dreadlocks for three years, when I followed the London band Soul II Soul, whose style was Funki Dred. Such was the allure of that creamy crack.
You cannot cook yams with your anger, no matter how hot it is.
With a mother like mine, normal teenage experiences were obviously off the table too. I remember, when I was fifteen, a popular girl in my class announced she was having a birthday party, and we were all invited. Normally there were two of us who were left off these invites: myself, as by now everyone knew my mum didn’t let me go anywhere, and Annie. Annie was from a family of Indian Muslims. Her parents were also extremely strict, and we bonded on our shared experience of missing out. I took comfort in having someone else who was suffering the same indignities as I was. Misery loves company.
Popular Girl sidled over to me. “You should ask your mum. She’ll let you come to my party, ’cause you’re only across the road from us.” This was true. Popular Girl lived less than a hundred feet from us. We could easily see her family home from ours. I figured I had nothing to lose by asking. The proximity of the party would surely put my mum’s mind at ease if all she was worried about was my safety.
I spent three days putting my case and rebuttals together and waiting for the right moment to approach Mum with my party proposal. All the housework was done, she’d eaten, the boys hadn’t gotten into any trouble, and she’d just finished a particularly good episode of Dallas. This was it. I sat down beside her.
“Mummy, one of the girls in my class is having a party at her house next Saturday.”
“Is that so?”
“Her parents will be there, and it’s just across the street at 52. Can I—”
“No.”
“But it’s right across the street.”
“And so? Are you arguing with me? I said no.”
End of discussion.
The n
ext day at school, everyone excitedly discussed their outfits for the upcoming party. Annie walked into the classroom looking sad. Popular Girl turned to Annie. “You can’t come, then?”
Annie frowned. “No.”
I began to commiserate with her, though I was internally glad to have a fellow outcast. “Me neither,” I began, “’cause my mum—”
“Psych!” Annie interrupted. “My mum and dad said I could go! My brother’s gonna drop me off and take me home!”
Everybody cheered and rushed over to hug the excited Annie. I slinked out of the room in despair.
The day of the party arrived, and I still held hope that my mum would have a change of heart. I made sure all my chores were done perfectly, I was as well behaved all day as I could possibly be, and I had secretly selected an outfit of black jeans and a burgundy Fred Perry tracksuit top that I had gotten for my birthday, which was the only vaguely fashionable name-brand thing I owned. I had it laid out on the bed, for a quick sprint and change the moment Mum changed her mind. I sat in the living room, opposite my mum, looking as desperate and sad as I could, as the music for the party began. Mum turned up the volume of the TV. Before long, you could hear the loud and excited chatter of teenagers in the street as they made their way to the party. Mum carried on watching TV as if she couldn’t hear it. I sat fidgeting opposite her, becoming increasingly desperate.
The doorbell rang. I went to open the door. Michelle Berry, one of the popular girls at my school, who lived in the council flats nearby with her mum and younger sister, stood in the doorway with Beverley, another girl from school.
Both of them were known to my mum, as we’d been attending the same schools since we were eight.
“Who is that?” my mum asked from the living room.
“It’s Michelle and Beverley.”
“Oh, hello, girls.”
“Hello, Mrs. Iyashere.”
The girls came into the front room to greet my mum. “We’re going to the party across the road, so we just knocked to see if you’re coming.” I didn’t know whether Michelle was trying to help me or just testing the limits of my mum’s overprotectiveness, but I could have hugged her at that moment. I stared at my mother imploringly.
“She is not going.”
“Oh, okay. Have a good evening. Bye.” And they were gone.
I spent the rest of the night peeking through my bedroom window, watching my school friends having the time of their lives. I was heartbroken. This couldn’t possibly be about my well-being. This felt like cruelty. I couldn’t get my head around it. My mother could have watched me partying from the comfort of her couch and still ensured my safety. My mum could have shouted for me to come home from the comfort of her couch, and I would have heard her from anywhere in that party. The party was so close that my mum could have slapped any illicit alcohol out of my hand from the comfort of her couch. But I still couldn’t go.
I remember truly hating my mother that day.
* * *
Most kids look forward to weekends. They wax lyrical about all the fun things they have planned that school simply gets in the way of. Hanging with friends, playing in the park, riding their bikes. For us, weekends were two days of being stuck at home doing chores and homework, and trying to entertain one another. Friday evenings were stew night. Every Friday after school, while other kids excitedly ran off to begin their weekends of fun, I returned home to spend the evening in the kitchen with my mum, cooking the stew that would feed the entire family for the next seven days.
This was before the days when everything had to be refrigerated as soon as it saw air, for fear of death. In the 1980s African household, one pot of food could be left out on the stovetop, being repeatedly heated, and providing sustenance like a magic porridge pot, until your wooden spoon scraped against the burnt remnants on the bottom. Funnily enough, none of us ever got food poisoning and died. Nowadays, if you leave anything out of the fridge for more than ten minutes or keep anything one hour past its “consume by” date, you have to eat it in a hazmat suit while being injected with antibiotics.
This stew usually contained chicken, oxtail, and various other meats, depending on what was available at the butcher’s that week. All the meat was bought fresh, so the chicken feathers had to be singed and plucked, and the meat had to be cleaned and prepared for cooking. This was a laborious process that took hours.
Helping Mum with the stew was one of my chores. Taiwo and my mother had done it when I was younger, but when Taiwo began working, when I was twelve, I was inducted into kitchen duties.
My mum was a hard taskmaster, and cooking was not a bonding experience. I remember getting shouted at a lot. I’m left-handed, and clumsy, so being stuck in the kitchen on Fridays from 4 p.m. till midnight with an impatient Nigerian woman who was trying to prepare me for marriage was not anybody’s idea of a fun weekend. I also couldn’t understand why the process took so long. I felt Mum dragged it out just to punish me. It was torturous.
After a year of suffering these eight-hour cooking marathons, I persuaded Mum to allow me to cook the stew alone. She was skeptical but agreed. I got that preparation and cooking time down to two hours, and though Mum was suspicious, the stew tasted almost as good as hers, so she couldn’t complain.
I had regained some of my Friday evening. Saturdays, though, she’d find us something else to do, like sweeping the stairs. That doesn’t sound like much, but our house at that time was five stories of swirly patterned carpet. And vacuum cleaners were an expensive luxury. Why have a vacuum cleaner when you had kids with hands? We would sweep dust from each stair with a small dustpan and brush . . . one . . . by . . . one. My brothers and I were each given a flight. And my mother checked every step. We’d often try to skip some, sweeping every other one, but if my mum found one errant piece of lint, we had to start again from the top. That was half a Saturday in one fell swoop, or should I say sweep. After we finished, we’d all sit upstairs at the windows looking out onto the street, watching our friends riding by on their bikes or just meandering in groups to the local adventure playground. We were like the Flowers in the Attic.
The highlight of the weekend would be getting sent out to buy paraffin. In ’80s London, central heating was a thing of the future. That was some Tomorrow’s World, Doctor Who shit. That was for rich people. Most people’s homes either had one open fireplace in the front room that the whole family would huddle around or were heated with dangerous tin boxes with a wick inside that you filled with a highly flammable liquid and then lit with a naked match. These were paraffin heaters. As kids, we’d be sent out to buy gallons of paraffin from the shop (yes, back then corner shops had paraffin pumps), then have to carry those heavy containers home, trying not slosh it on our clothes, as the distinctive smell lingered. And when we went to light the heater, there was the danger of lighting up like Michael Jackson’s hair on a Pepsi commercial. But these errands were an opportunity to get out of the house, and we jumped at those small outings.
The heaters sucked the oxygen out of a room while warming it, and released noxious fumes to boot, so we flirted with danger. There were quite a few deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning from these heaters, but we knew no different. London of the 1300s had the plague. London of the 1980s had paraffin heaters.
One time my brothers were fighting in their bedroom, so my mum separated them. Sheyi slept in the front room that night. Come morning, Dele emerged from the boys’ room unusually woozy, and covered from head to foot in soot. On running into the bedroom, my mum discovered that the paraffin heater had malfunctioned in the night, and the whole room was coated in black soot. Dele had been breathing it in as he slept. He survived the night on a minimum amount of oxygen, but had the boys not been fighting, and had both slept in the room, one or both of them would have died. We slept in coats without the paraffin heaters for a few weeks after that. But when the winter became too bitter to bear, we went back to flirting with death. We cleaned those heaters and kept it moving.
A child who has no mother will not have the scars to show on his back.
Despite that imminent danger within our household, my mum’s fear of the dangers outside knew no bounds, and she had no problem keeping us in line with physical discipline.
When visiting other people’s houses, most African kids were forewarned by their parents that if they were offered anything to eat, the correct answer was “No, thank you,” lest their parents look like they couldn’t afford to feed their kids. Well, Mum never taught us that lesson, and we had to learn the hard way.
One day my mother took my brothers and me to a friend’s house. The woman put a plate in front of us stacked high with all the best biscuits in the world. (Biscuits in England are cookies, Americans.) There were chocolate digestives, custard creams, and bourbons. The kinds of biscuits my mum kept under lock and key, and only brought out on rare occasions. Putting those in front of us was like watching a man crawling through a desert for three weeks, then putting a bottle of Pellegrino in front of him. My brothers and I dove headfirst into those biscuits, and if that wasn’t embarrassing enough for my mum, we fought over them like animals, and after all of the biscuits were eaten, Sheyi picked up this woman’s fine china plate and licked it. All this while the woman raised her eyebrows and commented wryly, “Your children really like biscuits.” Which my mum translated as “Did you not feed your children, you negligent woman? They are positively feral!”
Beating.
In fact, that was the longest rant and worst beating we ever had in our young lives. My mother’s fury was unparalleled. She was mortified and furious. We learned our lesson: whenever we were offered food during future visits to people’s homes, we broke out in a cold sweat and ran screaming in the opposite direction. To this day my brothers and I still laugh about that beating.
Now, I can already hear some bleeding hearts filling up their lungs to shout, “Abuse!” and wringing their hands about the propensity for violence within the Black community. Shut up. The practice wasn’t unique to Black people. Every TV show or sitcom produced in England that had a school with a headmaster in it depicted a dude with a cane who took a little bit too much pleasure in caning kids on the buttocks. White people. Corporal punishment wasn’t banned in UK schools till 1986, and kids were still getting “slippered” in private schools even after that. Teachers used plimsolls, slippers, and various other footwear on the asses of other people’s kids for the longest time. Again, white people. The nuns in my school, whizzing around like evil penguins on flying carpets, slapping kids on their thighs—all white people. Way prior to that, King Edward VI of England was said to have had a “whipping boy.” These were a popular accessory among European aristocrats and royalty, apparently. So basically, in the 1400s, if you were a white child who was wealthy or posh enough, when you transgressed, you could have another child take your beatings for you. At least Black people had the decency to beat the kid who’d actually fucked up—and belonged to them.
