Final from Celina Ottaway's series:
LOVE, PRIDE AND SHAME FROM SHIRLEY TEMPLE TO AFROS AND CORNROWS -- A HISTORY TOLD BY HAIR May 9, 1999
Miss Madeline Seel stepped off the bus, walked up the steps of her front porch and checked her mailbox. Bills, junk mail, that was it. She flipped through the pile looking for an envelope from Philadelphia but it wasn't there.
Maybe tomorrow, she thought. She stopped briefly in her bedroom, and then as she did every day when she got home, she headed to the bathroom to check her hair in the mirror.
Not a hair was out of place, but Miss Seel patted it anyway.
Where was that envelope? Her daughter Jacque was suppose to send her pictures of her new granddaughter, Zaria. She'd been checking the mailbox for a week. There was something she needed to see.
She stared in the mirror again. Her hair was cut short and some of the strands were gray now. How the times had changed. Grandma, they called her. Grandma.
But some things hadn't changed.
Forty years later, she could still hear her mother's voice.
Lawd have mercy, I can't wait till them curls fall out your head, child, cause you just gonna break your neck in that mirror. Go somewhere and play. Get out the mirror.
The girl could still feel the way the soft Shirley Temple curls shook around her head as she twisted her neck back and forth.
It was the 1950s. Mother's Day weekend.
Madeline could hear her mother calling from the bed where a crippling arthritis kept her many days, but the little girl couldn't tear herself away. Madeline just sat there at her mother's vanity, brown eyes fixed on the face in the mirror with the Shirley Temple curls.
Most days, Madeline wasn't allowed outside, not even on the front stoop, without her hair combed into neat plaits.
The style was simple. Two plaits in back tied with ribbons that were bigger than the braids and one in front across the crown of her head.
If her older sister Elizabeth didn't have time to get to her hair, she could play, but only in the back yard. Her mother would sooner hang a sign around her daughter's neck saying, ``This child has no mother,'' than let her out on the front steps without her hair done.
Mother's Day and Easter her mother would send her next door to Miss Janola's to get her hair pressed into Shirley Temple curls. Big soft round curls like her dolls'. Well, not blond of course. But curls that you could comb out and that hung down your head and shook when you moved.
The rest of the year she wore her hair in plaits with all the contradictions of her life in middle-class black America woven into them:
The close warmth of sitting between your sister's legs as she works the grease into your hair, even if she is popping your head with the comb for all the mischief you made that day.
Your hair is your crown, your pride and your beauty, Mother always said.
Never shame your family by going out with nappy hair, looking like one of those poor girls who don't come from good people.
Love, pride and shame. It was all there. But on Easter and Mother's Day, topped with her Shirley Temple curls, she didn't have to bother with any of the braids' contradictions.
The curls would last two weeks, especially if she could steal some of her sisters' gray rollers and wrap them up at night.
Madeline couldn't help but smile whenever she thought of those savored trips to Miss Janola's.
Of course she did your hair with a hot straightening comb. You had more burns on your face than you had curls on your head. Back then, they just had a little hot iron stove and a cigarette hanging out of their mouth, and talking and gossiping about everything that happened in the neighborhood and burning your head all at the same time.
Madeline didn't care as long as she could come home shaking a head full of Shirley Temple curls.
Her mother would spread a bit of cocoa butter on her face where the hot comb had rubbed her and Madeline would spend the next two weeks in the mirror.
How times had changed.
The little girl with the Shirley Temple curls spent her 20s listening to the chants of ``black is beautiful.'' She watched Martin and Malcolm on TV. She grew herself the biggest afro she could.
When the time came to put her own daughters between her knees, the braids she wove were stylish celebrations of their African heritage. Cornrows, circular patterns and later, beads and barrettes.
She taught her daughters the same pride her mother had taught her and she never let them out of the house without their hair done. But sometimes she did it in an afro. Nappy hair shame was a thing of the past.
Just to have your kids there between your legs, laying on you and you feel the warmth of their body. They put their hand around your legs, holding on to you 'cause you got them sitting on a stool. It is such a bond there, such a bond. And you braiding away, probably looking at TV, sticking your finger in the grease and you are braiding it, braiding it, and they are holding on to you, sweating, whatever. It is such a closeness feeling that I didn't have the pleasure of having with my mother because of the arthritis in her hands.
Miss Madeline Seel's eyes grew soft at the memory.
She called her daughter Jacque in Philadelphia.
``Where are those pictures?'' she asked.
Turned out Jacque had gotten busy and forgot to send them. No matter. Miss Seel was going down to visit her in a week anyway.
She'd get a chance to see then. Her granddaughter Zaria was born with a head of full curly hair and Jacque had done it up with barrettes in the front for the pictures. It's a big beautiful afro, thought Miss Seel. She couldn't wait to get her hands in that hair.
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