by Taye Foster Bradshaw

Created on: February 26, 2008

Every since I was a little girl, living with my father, step-mother, and three step-sisters, there was the Saturday morning ritual of doing the hair. The ritual would start with each of us getting our hair washed on Friday night, plaited, and left to dry naturally overnight. My long, curly, half "good", half "bad", thick hair would still be wet in the morning. My sisters, more natural African hair would be dry and ready to be burnt into submission.

I would watch and cringe as my step-mother put the Royal Crown on the sections and take this hot, searing iron that resembled a fire poker, and tug their hair into submission. The girls would hunch their shoulders and scrunch up their eyes every time that flaming comb would come near to their ears and nape of the neck. It was a painful experience, but the result was shiny, slick, and straight hair - just ready for rollers and Sunday morning.

My ritual was a bit different, I would be sent to go play and just wait for the thick braids to dry. When the other girls were all in foam rollers and head scarf, it would be my turn. My step-mother would get comfortable in a big chair in the family room with a basket full of "afro-combs", fuller brushes, rollers, pins, and Afro-Sheen. She would come each section, oil my scalp, brush it, and then roll it up in the Goody pink. The process would take about an hour because my mixed nuts heritage included Creole-Cherokee-French-Spanish-German Jewish-Afro Caribbean and a few other mixes, it all came together on my ten-year-old head full of curly, thick, deep brown, bottom-of-the-shoulder hair.

Once my step-sisters and I entered our teen years, we were intrigued with the flips and the hairstyles of Charlie Angels and Dallas ladies. We begged and pleaded for perms. I didn't know what I was asking for. A trip out-of-town to a home salon resulted in about 6 inches of my hair being chopped off because the home stylist couldn't figure out how to make my hair like the magazine style except cut it off, I was horrified. The end was a curly little flip like Halle Barry before her cropped style. My natural mother's family, where my mixed heritage comes from, were horrified the first time they saw the permed me, they all were angry at my step-mother. My father wasn't too happy either because he thought a woman's hair was her crowning beauty. He just shrugged his shoulders and went with the flow. Every woman in the house except the youngest now had a fresh perm in time for Easter Sunday.

The soft

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