By Christy Hyman
I was a loose natural for 4 years and I enjoyed that journey from start to finish. I enjoyed the twist-outs, braid-outs and occasional faux pas’ I had from time to time with my natural hair. Between looks of astonishment from passers-by to catcalls of “Soul Sista!” and “Erykah! Jill! Or Angela!” the loose natural I donned was rocked with the utmost pride and confidence.
Contemplating the Change
As my life goes, new experiences breed new worldviews and levels of inquiry for me. I was in my second semester of graduate school in history, and as I pored over primary sources of runaway slave ads, I could not help but notice the graphic references to enslaved runaway’s appearance, “She was bacon colored with a lip inclined to curl”, or he was “pop-eyed” and had a “downcast “ look about him. Oh how could I forget Harriet, who was “rawboned, light and moved like a cat”. It astounded me how, the most idiosyncratic features could prove an unwelcome circumstance for an enslaved person trying to secure an escape. As usual this information would affect me greatly and I thought of my own appearance. I wondered how I would be described. I then thought about the contemporary lense that many people look through with regards to the gaze of black men and women today. How having locs sometimes is enough to get handcuffs thrown around your wrists and your person or vehicle searched.
Locs themselves in some locales are enough to “fit the description of a perpetrator” sadly. As I pondered this, I decided I would embark on yet another iconoclastic journey. I wanted to break this image that many people have that locs somehow represent criminality or deviant behaviors.
Now before anyone thinks that I believe all people attribute locs to negativity, I will share with you about a time I met an elderly European American gentlemen who, after admiring my cornrows proclaimed that “many blacks have dreadlocks and most of them are either drug dealers or drug users”. I informed him politely that, many blacks in academia also overwhelmingly sport locs and they most certainly are not inclined to criminal behaviors nor drug use within their social milieu. He studied me briefly afterward and the conversation tarried to another course. And then there was also the unpleasant time my ex-husband was detained while walking down the streets only because he had long locs…..he had not committed any crime, but he apparently “fit the description”. He was released from the police car but forced to walk back to my house as the officer followed him in the policecar. He never did get those black-n-milds.
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