It’s this realization that they really don’t know. Any better. Or how it was done. The write it down rhythm is weird amongst us sometimes.
In elementary school in the 80s there was One unspoken constant that was part of the black girl experience across echelons in Cleveland & its surrounding suburbs…and that was
the summer braid up.
It wasn’t just our cousins in and out of town, it was the whole neighborhood, no matter the hair length, plus classmates and their extended families too. I believe it was a common sense survivor of all the cornrow styles of the 70s our moms rocked in Black is beautiful mode, practically applied to the exposed scalps of all the gorgeous lil Campbells soup kids they’d popped out.
You could do everything in braids. EVERYThing! And ya did! Ya ran, ya biked, ya jumped fences, played dodgball, swam- the #braidup was one of the truest introductions to our supernatural powers & prowess as kids. It was SUPERWOMAN HAIR for Us, fuck a bo Derek.
That was what Beyonce was rully keying everyone in our generation & under back into dangling her high yellow ass out the window of that money carlo-esque vehicle…
The unspoken yet ever-present experience of bona fide, palpable invincibility that came on the far side of sitting Some fucking where for ten hours, dozing off as a big cousin or auntie plaited you up right before the humidity hit hard for the dog days of summer, if your moms had waited that long to geterdone.
& nobody’s mama that iii knew was doing that gig. We were tenderhearted getting pressed and rope braided all school year as it was!
To add the gauntlet of the #braidup into an already strained, messy mother/daughter dynamic would have been atomic, ripping nuclear families apart due to the epic and rampant tenderheadedness that erupted end of school year and escalated until the sit down day arrived.
Besides, on my block our all our parents worked.
So everyone had an auntie, elder cousin or some friend of the family that was making all her Christmas present money hand over fist in June & July.
And us kids ran around with our hair whipping behind us like flags, cheering each other on about the new twists and innovations in braid patterns our scalps were emblazoned with for two weeks to two months, depending on how badass the braiderupper was. We were gangs of their calling cards happily shuffling amongst ourselves, free range like the feral latchkey kids we were, styling and profiling all the same, “ooh! Who did her hair?” a constant query from grown women who liked how their friend’s kids hur was holding up.
It was tortuous lol. ALWAYS lol. Because it was tight as fuck at first, our eyebrows in a perpetual state of surprise until they’d loosen up by the following first saturday. But then? Ooooooh, it was On!
The only thing more glorious than the freedom Of the braid up was getting back to school and all the girls showing off how much longer their hair had gotten due to nobody messing with it.
Even though most of my close friends were white, most of the girls I came up with in major works / honors were black…and the comparing notes and lowkey competing the first few weeks of school was common ground, wholly ours no matter our division on other aspects of the experience of being us in America.
It didn’t matter if your hair was short or long at the start of summer. The new extra inches were very real and championed. Alot of sitting still so we could leave our hair alone went into those inches lol.
& I’m a middy- a mid genXer- so my crew was the last batch that really wasn’t getting anything added in. They weren’t braiding us up with gel or all this latter day stuff. It was grease, from the then bougie indian hemp hair food that was the norm for us to the blue Grease and green grease of ancient lore…to OIL the scalp.
My sister’s only a few years younger than me but the changes started even with her due to the boom in synthetic braiding hair that gave all the kiddos the ability to be as Ashanti down their backs as their moms wanted them to be.
I remember the first time I did it after decades away.
I was back in New Orleans, well after my second time in Eleuthera and it was hot as fuck. & it had me dazed, walking around reupped like that. I’m talking “wakanda forever” purple flower rebirth level omg-ing. Even the colors looked more saturated. I was floating around punch drunk off of endorphins.
Anyone who is true thick hair tribe knows that sensation of the sun hitting your scalp for the first time in ages due to braids… but the breeze? Oh my Gahwd! There’s Nothing like it.
Fast forward ten years to now.
I have been absently doing it for small swaths of summer (& occasionally winter) writerhead seasons for a few years now, myself too. A kinder, gentler consciously more laidback variant of the movement. Trying out thr new tricks and techniques, always returning to what works for my hair. Not 80 to 120 braids of yesteryear. I’d clock in at 8 to like 18 max and be done with it.
But this time… this summer I have gotten explorative and scientific about it. Because I’ve taken the time to know and understand what I’m actually keeping vigil with in doing all this.
I get the ritual in a way that was not privy to me as a child and probably wasn’t even apparent to our neophyte parents. I am …getting the grins of great uncles and grandparents, the wisdom floods of joy you’d see them taking in their grandbaby generations at cookouts.
This was something that was taken From us, long time ago. That Their kids took back. Defiantly. Them doing Our hair like this was seen as a silent threat. Because it was ours. & was something others looked ridiculous trying to co-opt.
In a weird, wild and optically cool way, the braid up was like our festooned armour, as gorgeous as those roman helmets.
Which is why the first thing enslaving fuckers Did was shave all their prisoners of war bald and unnaturally install self-hatred about our hair into us AS a people.
Because we used to Express which tribe we were part of through our hair. ACROSS ALL OF Africa…
…and in the Americas.
Don’t believe me? Go to Palenque. Before they fuck up the frescoes “by mistake” like they loooove doing.
It was that we knew who was who once by the shorthand recognition of the ‘do.
Which I think is cool as fuck.
The civilized aboriginal Americans too. Think about it for a minute. Consider even the mighty Mohawk and its historical significance.
Everything you think you know about us and our hair is wrong. Poisoned by colonizers with no comprehension of us that didn’t cast our differences from them as demonic. Aboriginal Black AND red skinned folks. That whole “white settler fear of being scalped” shit? They had good reason to fear. It was due to their own behavior.
but that’s a whole nother post.
Even if you see Black girls rocking weaves and wigs…and you think you’re on some farcical high ground where you think they’re trying to have “your” hair…(if you’re that type of un-melanated but you’re here, may god grant you peace to go away, pervert)… what needs to be understood is that under 90% of those weaves and wigs is a wealth of ancestral might plaited protectively into little braids against their crowns.
THAT’S what the uproar that pops off is rooted in when these wig girls unfurl.
Why ever they’re wearing their wigs and weaves to work amongst those whose mainframes are triggered by anything outside of their norm aside…
understand their antecedents are sweet talking them against their scalps the whole time they’re having to live in a society that still NEEDED the CROWN ACT federally this far down the historical line of us all living together.
I see in the joyful reverb of my own memories of being one of those kids happily comparing braid designs cut into our heads … my ancestors who used to do the same when their communities crossed paths on both continents. I see through the mitochondrial gift of the mothers that led to me the eternal beauty in that energy shapeshifting across time, space and territory eloquently and effusively, and most importantly…efficiently.
All the way to the rhapsodic inevitability of where leaning into the art of life being Angel Brynner esthetically brings me marching fine, towards 49😁.
I was compelled to 41 plaits when I first played with this air conditioning in 106° a few ago. A happy medium from days of yore… but not the sweet spot I was looking for. Big Head, thick hair…tiny braids are more of a trial for the spliced peculiarities of Esmeralda up on my head, so it’s been about her happy place.
I happened upon her equilibrium yesterday and am Goldilocks-ing the fuck out on the far side of 11 hours in a zen state mixing in the grown assed platinum & palladium seasons Esmeralda is moving sensually into.
Felling spot-on: She’s softly bohemian, a lil bit rockNroll, swinging like a pendulum down my back, out of the flipping way.
#unconventionalapproach #AOLAB #thickhur #naturalhaircare #summerhair #braidup #knotlessbraids #pendulumbraids #oldschool
1986 6th grade summer #jumpropehair #dirtbikehair #knockingboysintoravineshair #ropebraids
#braiditup & #leaveitbe~ #rawhair #naturalbraids #nogel #feedyourscalp wild #hairgrowth #howyougetgrowthspurtshair