History of My Hair

The History of My Hair

Redheads

My mother’s memory of my birth always includes the story that I slipped from her womb into her underpants in the hospital elevator on the way to the maternity floor, the first natural childbirth at the newly built Long Island Jewish Hospital. I was pink and fat, smiling, with full head of bright red hair. Mom claims she was delighted with her issue. It was my finest hour. Tada ! A redhead !

Being a redhead has always been a defining part of my identity. My sister and brother were also redheads. Michael was the first. By Mom’s telling, he was scrawny with arms that were horrifyingly long and had a shock of blondish red hair. He made my mother, who had just turned twenty-one, cry and ask “are you sure this is mine?”. His hair turned a carroty red color by the time he was four or five. I was next, and Amy was the youngest. She arrived as a petit and pretty ginger, the last redhead of the trio.

Mom was a brunette who wore her hair in a sophisticated french twist, and she was the most glamorous woman in my life. Dad had brown hair until he lost it, young, in his twenties, attributed to genetics and his anxious disposition. Michael, Amy and I were the three redheaded aliens. We expressed two recessive genes each. My father’s mother, Malka, or Mollie, was known for her bright red hair. When she was a girl in White Russia, men used to yell “Fire !” when she walked down the street. By the time she was my grandmother she had lost the red and had beautiful dark chestnut hair streaked with gray, I used to caress her soft dangling earlobes and could easily imagine her younger self who could stir the blood of the local men. I was told that my maternal grandfather, Izzy, also from White Russia, had red hair, but it was very hard to imagine that as he, like all the men in my family, had the bald gene.

If each of our parents carried one recessive gene, we are told that there are only a one in four likelihood to produce one red haired child. When my family went out to friends and relatives, we were known as Ann and Chick’s three redheads. My mother had to explain the roots of our red hair to everyone who didn’t know the story. Amazing that you had three redheads, people would say. That made me feel special but not always happily, especially as I got older, and the age when fitting in was the most important thing.

Redheads stand out. People love or hate us. We are carrot tops, copper tops, match heads, ketchup, Chuckies, We comprise two percent of the worlds population. We don’t fit in. We are famous for our transparency. Everything stands out on our pale skin, freckles and bruises and burns. We can’t hide our shame, the delicate capillaries in our neck, face and chest open up and turn us tomato red at the slightest provocation. Our humiliation is on display for all to see . “Iren roshit! Hahahaha”, my 7th grade French class laughed as I blushed redder with each conjugation, pulse pounding in my ears. I cannot hide, I am inside out.

We redheads are also known for our thin tooth enamel and dentition that tend toward the yellow spectrum. We are known to be more sensitive to pain and temperature changes. Bees follow us. We were deemed to be unlucky by the ancient Egyptians and offered as sacrifices. We were burned alive as witches in the sixteenth century. Kicking gingers is ongoing in some parts of the world. No wonder our temperament is unstable and quick to anger which make us see red.

The Taming

My hair was shiny and silky until I was eight or nine years old when it started to turn redder, thicker and more unmanageable. My mother would put it in pigtails or braids and tied elastics with colorful balls at the ends that I called my “cherry-balls”. I would love to to suck on the ends of my braids and pop the plastic balls in my mouth, pretending they were candies. My mother would make sure that I brushed my hair out every day into a smooth plaque and I became adept at braiding it. As a pig tailed redhead, Raggedy Anne, Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking were my doppelgängers. I knew we were not pretty like the others, but we were special and had we shared secrets.

One summer when I was seven or eight I spent the whole summer in a children’s camp, away from my mother. I slept in a wooden bunk with ten other girls. We slept in narrow cots so close to each other we could hold hands. I didn’t take the braids out or brush my hair for the entire summer, Once a week my bunk would go into the shower-house for group showers, naked and giggling , squealing when the cold water began to spray us down. I would wash my short frizzy bangs and the frizzy ends of my braids, and be done with it, I didn’t give a care and no one else seemed to notice as my braided pigtails became more and more matted together.

I would hike and play and swim and sleep with my braids in, and over the course of that summer that seemed to go on forever, I felt free. I heard the wind whistle in my ears when I ran and knew I was the fastest of runners, I could swim forever under water. It was amazing how high I could jump. I was super strong and loved to wrestle to show off my strength. I derived great pleasure from pinning my bunkmates to the wrestling mat until they would beg for mercy and I would be merciful. I was no longer a girl. I was a centaur, a prince, an apache warrior. I had superpowers. I stood in an ice cold lake and felt intense pleasure as it rose up my thighs and exploded inside me. In the course of that summer, my braids became dense and matted ropes, I couldn’t take them out to brush them even if I had wanted to.

When the summer was over, and I got back to my mother’s house, I knew right away I was in trouble. She grimaced when she saw me and had me sit outside on a rock. She left and returned carrying a large steel comb that I don’t remember ever seeing before. She drove the metal comb into my scalp and ripped through the dense matted wads of hair, tearing out the clumps of hair that refused to separate , undaunted by my blood curdling screams. I was outraged by her mercilessness, but submitted, helpless to my domestication .

Curl Free

The earth is orbiting around the sun. I am twelve and a half years old and getting ready for my Bat Mitzvah. I don’t remember the haftorah that I practiced for months and chanted for the congregation . Actually it was only half of a haftorah because our middle class neighborhood had so many babies in the 1950’s and 60’s that benei mitzvot were churned out at the rate of four a week at Hillcrest Jewish Center, our “shul with a pool” in Flushing, Queens. Two boys every Saturday, and two girls most Friday nights.

For thirteen year old boys, Bar Mitzvah is the traditional crossover point from boyhood to manhood. The generations before ours, the Bar Mitzvah was no big deal, it was expected that the boy would show their achievement of jewish learning by chanting a portion from the torah scroll and interpreting it in a dvar torah for the community. It was not a huge celebratory event on those days, but a first participation as a man in religious life, wearing a tallit and counting in a minyan, and followed by pulling his weight as a breadwinner or going on to be a scholar of Torah. “Today I am a man” was the traditional proclamation. It was a big celebratory event for a first generation Jewish families climbing up the ladder of post war success. Elaborate parties with a rented hall, a band, dancing and a choice of entree was de rigger. Congratulatory presents were raked in, serious ones like books and pens and Israeli bonds:”Today I am a fountain pen” was the joke.

For Hillcrest girls, the Bat Mitzvah was ambivalent Jewish girls could attend Hebrew school along with the boys. But upon becoming a Bat Mitzvah at twelve, they were not entitled to Torah rights: in other words, they could not read directly from the torah or even touch it, nor wear a tallis nor count in the minyan. Nor could we say “Today I am a woman” without derision or an urgent trip to the pediatrician.

I have amnesia regarding my haftorah, something about wanderings in the desert? I don’t remember the other girl with whom I shared the other half. I have no idea what my interpretation was in my dvar, whether it was profound or inane. The Rabbi of our shul met with us for a few minutes to discuss it the week before , and I have a vague recollection of him looking at me with eyes half closed and nodding in wise counsel or, more likely, profound boredom. I do remember a great deal of thought and consternation about what to do with my unorthodox hair.

As the earth rotated around the sun, my hair was rotating around its axis. The curl comes from an asymmetric, elliptical follicle, a dominant trait. Frizz was complicating the curls in an adventure in multidirectional physics, and my hormones were signaling distress. I knew I was not pretty, but I was going to try my best to have a hairstyle

Hair shapes were a thing the early sixties. Beehives were big, either smooth and sleek or gently tousled, backcombed and sprayed with lacquer. Flips and pageboys geometrics and pixies were all in fashion. Straight hair was the domain of rich girls, folksingers and mods. The girls with long flowing blond, brown and even ginger hair were goddesses with magical powers to me. They lived in a different universe than me. Exotic scantily dressed women seductively combed their long flowing straight and wavy hair over the side of a waterfall on TV. I worshiped those women.

Weeks before the Bat I tried some hair experiments. It escaped from being wrapped tightly in ace bandage overnight. It singed from the hot comb I borrowed from my best friend. It reverted after being slathered with green hair gel and rolled around frozen orange juice cans. “Curl Free”, shouted the ad. “The cool creamy lotion the lets you comb curls right out of your hair. The cure for hair that’s uptight”

Hair is protein with cysteine. Cysteine is a sulfur containing amino acid that forms strong bonds with other sulfur containing molecules. These are held together with disulfide bonds. The more disulfide bonds the curlier and kinkier the hair. Water or heat cannot break these bonds. Breaking the bonds requires a chemical agent, a “relaxer”.
Ammonium bisulfate, breaks the egregious cysteine bonds. I hadn’t yet taken chemistry, all I knew was that Curl Free was the hair straightener, as the ad said, “for big girls who really need it”

I was in the kitchen with a pink plastic cape around my neck, mixing up a viscous pink goop with an acrid sulfuric smell, slathering it in sections on my head, combing it through with a large pink plastic comb, feeling the cold and then beginning of a burning sensation penetrating my scalp. I was ready for the relaxing to begin.

The evening of the Bat I was ready and radiant standing on top of the half flight of stairs of our split level in my shiny white jacket and skirt ensemble. I had on my first pair of stockings, and I could feel the metal of the garter straps digging into my thighs. My scalp was still stinging from yesterday’s highly successful experiment: cysteine bonds broken, my hair was shiny and astoundingly, amazingly curl free.

I affixed a bow to my newly relaxed tresses and walked down the stairs and out to the synagogue to praise Hashem. After the kiddush of sponge cake and maneshevitz in the shul basement, we walked back to the house. I opened my big Bat Mitzvah gift in front of the small group of family and friends. Today I am a …set of electric rollers and a facial steamer.

The Cut

Laura was an artist from back home in Queens who had lots of secrets that I wanted to know. She was a printmaker and her work looked to me like ancient hieroglyphs, with spirit animals and women with muscular and hairy thighs that made me feel like putting my hands in warm mud. She and my brother had a thing together so I held my crush a secret even to myself. She wrote to me and asked if I would like to travel to Colorado and New Mexico with her for my nineteenth summer.

We bought a bright blue plastic tube tent at a ninety nine cent store, which we strung between two trees by a river in Taos . It miraculously held up in blazing sun and torrential rains while we slept with our heads at opposite ends, our hips and thighs grazing. We could hear the thrumming of the water over the rocks all night long, night after night. We made friends with two women, lovers, who were staying next to us in a refurbished ambulance. One of the woman had her breast removed from cancer and moved about the campground with one breast and a scar and without shame. She told us the amazon women would cut off a breast to better shoot their arrows. We went out into the dry red sagebrush to trip with them. l never saw so much sky in my life. I called my father and mother from a phone booth on the side of the highway and tried to tell them how beautiful it was where I was. My father said, from Queens, “Its beautiful here too, come home immediately”

We met men and bathed in the hot springs. My hair was long and wild and so tangled I couldn’t put a comb through it . It had been turned from red to a copper color by the strong New Mexico sun. The smell of sulfur from the hot springs went down to the roots of my hair and into my follicles. By the New Mexico stream, I asked Laura to cut my hair off completely.

She cut it short, then shorter, until I could feel air currents on my scalp for the first time. I laughed, why did it take me so long to do this?

When we got to Colorado we lived in an A frame on top of a mountain, where the altitude made us dizzy. Laura would stay on the mountain and draw and bake and I went down the mountain every morning at four AM to a diner on Interstate 95 where I served coffee and hashbrowns and eggs and chickensteaks to miners and construction workers and families traveling cross country. My hair was an inch long and I could feel the mountain air on my scalp. I came home one afternoon and Laura was laid out on the deck, unconscious, with her fingers stiff from dough that had been baked onto them by the sun, each finger a miniature loaf. We shared a bed, sleeping side by side the rest of that summer, thigh to thigh. On weekend nights I would put on the turquoise earrings I bought with my tip money, and we would go to the rowdy local bar and dance with miners and cowboys. The summer was soon ending. One night, we both woke up in the middle of the night, turned, and reached for each other. Later we laughed, why did it take us so long!