My fair skin and stringy hair excluded me from being included in your sisterhood. For I was always told, ‘I wouldn’t understand since I have that white girl hair.’
But my Ancestry test concluded there’s more Congo that flows through my DNA than of my ancestors from Finland which only read 1%.
I am not my hair is what she shouts to the world as she shaves her once beautiful hair off to rock her imperfect rounded scalp. Or decides to loc her hair in beautiful strands of natural tangles.
Quite often I was told that my hair is so pretty and how lucky I am but my hair hasn’t brought me much luck for the tickets I scratched only left me missing that extra dollar or two.
This hair also brought hands that after you ate you felt it was a mission to decide if my hair was actually mines or fake because touchy it with sticky hands could somehow tell you the truth.
But as my skin that’s too light to be black but too dark to be white shouts, ‘I’m not my hair’ you look at me funny as if I’ve lost my place.
Then there’s the wide eyes and confused looks asking , ‘Why would you do that to your hair?’
Because, ‘I’m not my hair’…. I’m not defined by the hair that somehow determines my day. Sometimes it’s too messy to go on a date. I’m not my hair, my skin tone or my DNA those are just parts of my story that made me this way.
Now my hair is becoming free like me… allowing her to have a mind of her own with a huge identity. My hair is messy but finding it’s way. Finally my hair has now become part of me as we express our freedom to just be…
Grecia Chasteen 