Freedom in Naturality
Words by Nichole Shaw
I’m 10. All I can remember is how everyone shifted in their seat and gawked at me, my skin darker than their alabaster “purity,” which I so envied at the time. We were talking about the Civil War. I was the only mixed girl in my class, the only Other, the only person left looking in from elsewhere. I don’t remember much of the actual lesson my fifth-grade teacher discussed in class —
only that my classmates never stopped staring at me.
Staring at my kinky hair rolled up into a bun. Staring at my mixed skin as if it had the answers for how to respond to atrocities such as slavery — as if any mention of the Civil War would automatically jerk me out of my chair, because the war on slavery so divided me from within that I could never be content. That the teacher’s lesson of the war on race would cause me to grow feverishly triggered, unleashing the fury of my Black brothers and sisters — Black brothers and sisters who suffered systemic racism and a slavery that stripped their humanity away from them. It still does.
What's a Black girl without the weight of whiteness?
I remember the aching feeling that I was supposed to say something. That I was supposed to represent my entire Black community because they were one of the races who fought to be seen, that I fought to keep hidden, afraid of letting my Black dot make a splash in a sea of white.
Afraid to be Black when
the only time I saw white mix with black was when
it was trying to be Black without consequence.
How was I to speak for an entire people?
I couldn’t even speak for myself.
I’m 18, but I felt like we were in the '60s — the time when my Black ancestors fought for treatment that transcended racial boundaries and were instead met with violence from the mind and body. A time when they fought to be who they were unapologetically. A time when they fought so I wouldn’t have to be afraid of who
I am. Turns out we’re fighting that war still, and this war is both a white and black division I struggled to survive from.
Heat swelters on the backs of thousands of
Blacks. They struggle within societal constraints,
Swirling around in their grief; hot and dark.
Dark heat drips down the back of their necks, matting Black to their
Scalp. They rage against the construct of
Race, Status, Gender.
He had a dream.
I have a nightmare.
I was never a good actor, falling short of fitting into the stereotypical black identity and the white superstructure of this country. I was white enough to not be Black, but Black enough to not be white.
How could I belong when my skin ostracized me in every community?
There is a Civil War that has already ended, and there’s one that is still going on today. Tensions between Black and white squeezing the noose around my neck. The internal warfare ripped me from my own skin as I fought to erase what I was, from who I was. I walked back from the pod-style bathrooms into my college dorm room, water dewed my kinky curls. I was slowly becoming more comfortable with presenting my Black self — my Black hair — to society at large. I was on the cusp of no longer feeling the pressure to assimilate.
— even though everything I had ever known was taken from me
My father, my whiteness, my Blackness,
my privilege, my marginalization,
my identity itself.
Walking into my dorm room, curls tight and thick, I’ll never forget the disdain that dripped out of my roommate’s white mouth as she commented on how “cool” it was, her white eurocentric beauty standards bleeding into the conversation, wondering how I was to tame this apparent nappy mess of a head.
She suppressed my Black image in what she thought was her white space — a space where I couldn’t straighten my mixed hair, because “it smelled like that black people hair;” a space where I would do her makeup and style her blonde hair and hide my coconut oil and pull my hair tight into a bun before walking
back from the showers. I tried to morph myself into a white image — I kept trying to appear whiter, more “appropriate,” less “racially charged” to keep the race relations in my own living quarters tolerable, despite the intolerable yearn to embrace a part of myself I never really had before.
I couldn’t stand it.
And I shouldn’t have to.
To die without speaking to my experience,
I silence the entire voice of a mixed community,
both black and white, enabling a system of
isolating disjunction.
I’m 22 now, and every city I’ve ever lived in has championed “inclusivity.” But, that didn’t mean shit when it was all superficial and performative activism. I am subject to the fondling, touching, squeezing, molding, poking of my Black hair. It’s some sort of fascination people have for the “Other.” They don’t understand it, so they invite themselves to try — always without permission or consideration for how those actions will affect me.
Are you ostracized?
Remember when I was the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Angry Black Woman?
Remember when they told me how "cool" it was that my Blackness oppressed me — y'know, so I could pay less for college tuition?
Remember when they were jealous of my Black curls, so they pulled on them until my scalp itched with the prickle of restraint against their ignorance?
Remember when I was tied up in that jump rope in fourth grade because my skin didn't look like the other kids?
— too Black to fit in with the white; white walls, whiteboards, white people.
Remember when they told me to be proud, because I was a strong Black woman, and then I went home and the salty liquid that secreted from my eyes dripped down my skin in the same streams the showerhead created, flowing down my skin like a babbling mess?
Remember when —
I can't remember the last time someone didn't look at me
differently because of my hair, my Black hair.
Do you?
I wear my hair out in its natural form despite the hushed whispers mumbled at the back of my neck, or the hole on my left temple that was drilled by the glare of the middle-aged white man on the street. My coiled curls frizzed up in the humid air, damp with an impending rain. It’s loud and bold Blackness demanded attention from the man on the street who did a double-take when he saw me, the girl who quirked her brow at the wildness of my very nature, and the small child who smiled up at me with two missing front teeth.
“I am dripping melanin and honey. I am black without apology.”
—Upile
My chest heaves with the added weight of this Blackness. It feels terrifyingly awful. I feel entirely Black.
It feels right.
My hair is a part of me — it shouldn’t be controlled, shouldn’t have to be.
Natural hair was distant from the embrace of pride, culturally.
Perhaps because whiteness was safe, and Blackness wasn’t, still isn’t.
I stroll down Madison Street, through the underpass of the railway, and onward.
My curls are tighter than they ever were, chocolate in color, Black in nature.
The wind sweeps through and messes up the part I had.
People still stare when I stride into their line of vision.
People still ignorantly make comments or touch my hair.
People still look uncomfortable at my difference.
But I am no longer afraid.
I won’t let the system tame me.
I am free.