He was eight and I was six, and we were trying to find a way to make our somewhat unruly hair look more like our friends Bobby’s and Lisa’s, nice and flat and straight. We had discovered that if you cut off the top portion of our mother’s stocking, it became a tool to silkiness. We would pull the thigh of the stocking over our heads, down to just above the eyebrows, and tie the top part like the end of a sausage. If we put the stocking on after a bath and slept that way, the next morning we’d have smooth hair, and though it looked a little awkward, we knew early on that with flat hair, all would be good in the world that day. My new country didn’t understand my home country’s hair. I was a mixture, a mestiza of Mexican, Caribbean, Spanish, Indigenous, and African (still no DNA proof, but this is my best guess). So my hair was unruly. Curly. Frizzy. Loud. My birth country was Mexico. My new city was Chicago.
What do You think about Me, My Hair, And I (2015)?
