Stories from the fringe: hair in a West Indian style and fashion

Rooftops Jacob Lawrence, 1943

Hair salon sign, Bitok T. Pierre

I remember going to the market in Sheffield when I was four. We’d take special trips to buy knick-knacks for my hair. Ribbons from those bright-coloured reels - red, yellow, gold-threaded. I loved it when my mother plaited my hair in two. That way it would move, which was fine, because it was close to my friends, who were all white.

You had to have ribbons. Now it’s just clips.

My sister is seven years older, and when she came over from Jamaica, my mother asked her to plait my hair in the morning. It was terrible. She did it Jamaican-style, with the plaits all bunched up and a ribbon slapped on my forehead. But recently I saw a photograph from Jamaica showing girls going to school with hair like that, and it looks really cute…

The smell of Blue Magic always makes me think of Saturday afternoons as a girl. I’d go with my mother to a friend’s, a very blousy woman called Doris, and she’d have her hair done in the front room. It was invariably packed. Doris had three large hair-dryers, the kind you sit under – she was very up to the minute.

In those days, my mother would have her hair pressed. No such thing as an hour-long appointment. People would spend the day. We’d be happy if someone had brought another child, so then we’d go off and play.

New York children playing Raymond Depardon, Harlem 1981

Otherwise, we’d sit nearby and try to act disinterested. There’d be music in the background but it was mainly the gossip I listened to. The things I heard! ‘Auntie is seeing another man’, women who’d had private things done – never said out loud, it’d be just a movement of the lips, and as a child I’d have to pretend I hadn’t noticed: my mother didn’t encourage me to listen to gossip. But I’d hear the most libellous conversations… Mainly about men, how bad they were, or news about someone’s daughter getting married.

My mother would have her hair washed, dried and fixed, then parted and gently oiled, ‘greased’, as it’s called, with Blue Magic. Then there’d be a little lamp, three inches or so high, and on top of the lamp was an iron comb or curler, like a long scissor, and it’d be managed with a fierce clattering, and the more clattering the more experienced – I remember that so clearly, the clattering of the curling tongs.

Hot comb Annie Lee

So the hair would be pressed - with the tongs just hot enough to glide through the hair, and then there was this Blue Magic smell. The blue made the blackness of the hair shine blue-black, really gleaming shiny.

There’d be the smell of soup being cooked while everyone had their hair done. They’d make pea soup, or lamb’s neck soup, or beef. It got very steamy, the air all spicy and fragrant. But it didn’t do anything for me then. I’d rather have had fish fingers and beans. Now the older I get, the more I find my body is calling for West Indian foods. In those days I didn’t want anything to do with identifying with all that.

Hairdos, gossip, and great pans of soup. That was Saturday morning.

The kitchen beautician Ruth Russell Williams

Good and bad hair

Good and bad hair isn’t just a West Indian thing, it’s an American thing too. They call it ‘nappy’ head. Hair that has tight curls, doesn’t move, is ‘nappy.’ So if you have nappy hair you have a bad head, and that’s not good. ‘Good hair’ is what you want. Hair that’s long, straight, silky, maybe permed or coolie, like Chinese, Indian, any kind of Asian hair – ideally pretty, smooth, shiny hair. But it’s how you’re born. Genetics. Where your parents come from.

They’re old expressions, but if a sixteen-year old black girl walked in and I said she had ‘good hair’, she’d know exactly what I meant. If you have children, you want them to have ‘good hair’ because it’s easier to comb, so there’s no fighting.

Woman combing hair Kent Reno, Ivory Coast 1980

Goddess braids

When my sister came over from Jamaica, she was thirteen or fourteen. It was the sixties, and all the beehives were about. Weaving had just arrived. It was the new thing. Bits of hair that aren’t real woven into your own hair. It’d take ages, with all that gossip. When she came back she’d look lovely, with her hair put up. But it’s completely changed now. You can have extensions added all over the place and no-one’s any the wiser.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ hair applies to men, too. But the barber-shop experience is completely different. Unless you have a child or brother, you don’t get to see it. I’ve been there with my son and my step-father and boyfriends. I love it. It’s the funniest place to be. Very theatrical, like a set-piece show.

We’ll get there around 11 o’clock, and there are all the set characters – the old guy who’s there all the time, been there done it, and he’s the comedian, knows everyone’s business. Talking in a deep Barbadian accent thinking I’ll not understand. I sit there and try and look nice, but I can’t help but smile when he talks about old things, things gone past, and he’ll use an expression your mother or uncle might’ve used, some way back Jamaican expression. It’s probably like visiting the launderette in Yorkshire, where the women are all cracking jokes. It’s often all about class.

You next sugar, Annie Lee

If hair makes me black, i must be purple, photograph by Costa Manos

Black power and protest hair

Black hair in the seventies was all about Africa, black power, knowing your roots - Car Wash style. I remember a friend of mine went to America for a couple of months. She was African, and she came back with an amazing hairstyle – nappy hair pulled tight back off her face and parted, with two bunches at the back. My hair was probably in a ponytail at that time. Straight, and swept back, or maybe in an old Victorian roll-over style. But this girl was just so hip and fashionable. I was beside myself with envy.

Pam Grier as Coffy

Anyway, on the day she came back to school, the headmistress summoned her, and asked her to leave – because of her hair. It wasn’t dyed or anything outrageous. It was just natural black hair, up and nappy.

The afro was coming in at this time. Like that girl being asked to go home on account of her hair, the afro was seen as a kind of rebellion. But it was just natural black hair, that’s all it was.

There’s no protest hair like that now. Now when I see a Rastafarian I don’t always take it to mean they’re religious. A friend of mine has dreds and with him it’s just a laid-back thing, a fashion. But in the seventies, real Rastafarianism was certainly what it would mean. When my mother was young in Jamaica, Rastafarians were persona non grata, even though that’s where they came from. ‘Dirty rastas’, they’d call them. They were making a protest within their own community, walking the plank, not wanting to wash their hair.

There's history in my hair photographed by Bruce Davidson

It’s a bit different with Rastafarian women, who tend to cover their hair with lovely, elegant, colourful wraps. A Rastafarian friend of mine cut his hair because his father died. He was quite a strict Rastafarian. He had dreds right down beyond his waist. Cutting it was a sign of grief.

My own hair has been up and down so many times. One time, I had it cut right off in a kind of Cleopatra look. I was having a life-change, and wanted to be different, stand out, be sharp. I went from very long hair, to hair cut close to my head. I remember how the stylists in the shop were all staring – but the freedom of a new look! My husband was quite taken aback. ‘You’ve done it!’ His jaw dropped. I think he was impressed.

I’ve had everything done to it. Another time, I left him in the morning with short hair and came back that night with it right down my back – a twenty-six inch long pony-tail. It was real hair – people sell it. It’s charged by the pack, according to length. ‘I went to work with a wife with cropped hair,’ he fell about laughing, ‘and I come back and find Naomi Campbell in my kitchen.’

Bola Gibson, Head of Operations and Publishing at openDemocracy, gets her dreads retightened by Junior in Brixton, London. Photographed by Flora Roberts

Technicolour hair photographed by Eileen Perrier at the Black Hair and Beauty Show Project

Madam C. J. Walker commemorative stamps, issued in 1998

We were obsessed by hair when we were little. Do you know the cardigan story? It’s a thing all black girls do. We’d watch Top of the Pops and dream we looked like Pam’s People, those dancers who’d swish their hair about. So you’d put your cardigan on your head and fasten it so that the two sleeves fell down like great big bunches. We’ve all done it, when we were about four and we wanted to pretend.

Another memory was of plaits – Bo Derek style, in the film ‘Ten’. She looked horrid but she brought it to the forefront. We were all up in arms about this, because Africans had been doing it for thousands of years – so how dare she!

Hair salon sign, Bitok T. Pierre

At the school prom Edward Keating, 1994

But I cried one night about that hairstyle. I had it done for my birthday. It took about eight hours. Plaiting in cornrows, then beading. You had to have patience. But taking it out on your own. Not good. The plaits are so thin, it’d take hours and hours. You could end up with a mass of tangles. I got so frustrated once because I was going out and I wanted to have my hair washed and pressed and I couldn’t get the plaits out so I was crying and in the end I cut great chunks out of my hair – cutting and hacking it away, just to get free of my own hair.

Now when I get my hair done it’s more like visiting a therapist, or having a social session. I’m often there from nine o’clock in the morning until late. There’ll be parties going on while I’m getting my hair done. It’s very relaxed, Jamaican-style. I remember one time at a party, standing with a girl I didn’t much like. We both had our hair done at the same salon. Frosty atmosphere as we checked each other out. She thought she was so ‘it’. Then another girl came into the room looking a complete mess, with her hair all over the place, and we both focussed on her at the same moment, and then looked at each other and fell about laughing. We’ve been best friends ever since. We just thought we were the bee’s knees. It was a joint bitch. So many of my friends come from the salon, in one way or another. It’s like a networking thing.

Extensions, Annie Lee

My favourite memory of hair is from when I was five – when my mother pressed my hair. ‘Don’t say anything to your step-dad,’ she told me, and took me to the outside loo along with the pressing comb and lamp. We had to go outdoors so my step-dad wouldn’t smell it. He’d have said she was trying to turn me into a big woman, meaning an older woman than I was, because I was only little. I wanted my hair pressed so much that I didn’t even mind the massive spiders that lived in that outside loo.

So she pressed it and put it in ringlets. I was so up for it. I was going to be a bridesmaid, and I was going to look big. It was the first time she put the hot comb in it. It was so exciting.

Links and Lineages, Paul Goodnight

Some of these images are from Black Hair : Art, Style, and Culture, edited by Ima Ebong