Editorial 7.2, February 2005, by Deirdre Helfferich Generational Locks of Hair and Love “Here,” said my mother, handing me a small pile of beautiful woven straw, leather, plastic, wooden, and silver hair fods and accompanying wooden or ivory or plastic spikes, “you’re the only one in the family now with long hair, so you should have these.” She had inherited some from my grandmother; others were pieces she had collected over the years. She later gave me three gorgeous enameled wood hair needles for Christmas, capping my collection. I had a few of my own, of course: a beaded sealskin barrette given to me one Mardi Gras by the Native woman who made it, down at the Eagle in trade for a feather mask; a bird scapula and bone spike attached with a string. I was touched by her gift, and saddened. My mother’s decision to cut her long, lovely hair had repercussions beyond the usual conservative reaction of the child to a change in her parent. It wasn’t her appearance that bothered me—Mom looks pretty good in her new haircut, and it isn’t really that different from the way she’s always worn her hair, up in a bun on the top of her head, bangs swept up and away from her high forehead in arches trained assiduously over the years to behave and look good doing it. My sister had cut her hair short years ago, settling into a pixie-like haircut that is extremely flattering. I don’t think she’s had long hair since high school. I kept mine long, mostly, periodically getting it trimmed to my ears, some styles as flattering as my sister’s and mother’s short haircuts, some making me look my husband’s Tante Mimi. (Think a Germanic Aunt Mabel with a longish crewcut, and you’ll have an inkling. Actually, even Tante Mimi didn’t look that square-headed, but I sure did. Bleah.) I have always loved my mother’s hair, and hoped mine would grow the same way hers did. I can see vividly in my memory’s eye the formal high school portrait she showed me (she still has it somewhere), taken in her senior year, with white-blonde hair swirled up in a knot, her shoulders just slightly exposed by the wrap the photographer gave her (and all the other senior girls) to wear for the sitting, her features just ever-so-slightly softened by a clever adjustment of the camera, looking off to one side in an unchanging moment of movie-star glamor. The photo is in black and white. I remember her brushing her hair out in the sun after a shower, golden blonde with streaks of strawberry blonde and sandy brown, gradually darkening over the years, then acquiring striking drifts of silver and white until there was almost nothing else left. I have many memories of her putting her hair up in pony tails, French twists, braided knots, loose buns, sleek tight rolls, long braids; held up with bands and bobby pins and an assortment of hair fods, many of them the very same ones she gave to me this midwinter. The ones I didn’t recognize were the ones my grandmother owned, false tortoiseshell and rhinestone, graceful if somewhat garish tools to capture and hold the hair. Grandma’s hair was thin and short and curly for much of the time that I remember her. I can imagine her with long hair, but only up in a bun, like my mother’s. I don’t ever remember seeing her with long, loose hair. Somehow, receiving those cunningly designed and useful ornaments from my mother’s hands made me understand that my grandmother, Anne, is gone, only a memory, and not a very strong one at that. She lived over 3,000 miles away from me, or I from her, I suppose, and I didn’t see her very often. My hair is more like my grandmother’s than my mother’s, finer than Mom’s and now thinning on my scalp, as Grandma’s was, so that you could see the skin through the hair despite the best efforts of the old ladies’ hair stylists to make the hair seem as thick and opaque as possible. I remember hoping, as a teenager, that my hair wouldn’t age the way hers had, that my hair would stay thick and long and regal, like my mother’s, and at least hide my skull from view. I have widow’s peaks now. They are uneven and somewhat patchy. We both have gray hair, my mother and I. I turned before she did, like my father’s sister Alice, whose long, shining, and silvery hair entranced me. I look a lot like Alice, and never knew that I was like my grandmother, too. Knowing this now, I feel closer to her and to my mother, despite the fact that the latter is a few thousand miles away at the moment, basking in the Hawai’i sun for three months. I wear the hair fods she gave me, indulging in her ritual of brushing and twisting and placing the hair on the head, and I think with love on my maternal ancestors. | ||
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