Young and culturally isolated, I had no idea how to manage my hair, nor the shame it brought me. I often wonder if my mother ever saw the carelessness that my hair made visible. Was she too preoccupied with her own burdens to notice? Could she not feel the dryness, and the lumps and bumps, of the gnarly tangles in my head? Why couldn’t she just sit me down and brush my hair for two hours, the way Marcia Brady did on The Brady Bunch? Maybe in her bohemian, sixties-loving ideology she thought I looked free, like an adorable flower child. Maybe she didn’t know I felt dirty.
Having one Black and one white parent is complicated, but when you are a little girl with a white mother, largely cut off from other Black women and girls, it can be excruciatingly lonely. And, of course, I had no biracial role models or references. I understand why my mother didn’t understand how to manage my hair. When I was a baby, it was, well, baby hair, mostly uniform, soft curls. As I got older it got more complex, with diverse textures arising out of seemingly nowhere. She didn’t know what was happening. She was confused and randomly started cutting tragic bangs in my hair (believing bangs would behave in biracial hair is brave).
It was a disaster, and I felt powerless. At seven years old, I really thought maybe if she would just wash my hair with Herbal Essence, a hair fairy would come at night, and I would wake up and poof! I would have perfect hair like my mom or the girls in the commercials.
It took me five hundred hours of beauty school training to know even Marcia Brady’s hair wouldn’t blow with abandon with just shampoo. It takes professionals, products, and production, dahling—conditioners galore, diffusers, precision cuts, special combs, clip-ins, cameras, and, of course, wind machines. It requires a lot of effort to achieve effortless hair.
What I really needed was any Black woman, or anyone with some kind of culture, cream, and a comb! But even that wasn’t that simple.
One time my father’s half sisters staged an intervention of sorts, determined to “do something about that chile’s hair.” It was going to be an event. I was in the second grade when my father took me to my grandfather and Nana Ruby’s house in Queens.
Humor was a tool I used to cope, disarm, and defend myself. I also used it to express my point of view when I had no control. It was a tool I began to sharpen quite early and, to this day, utilize frequently. In the backseat of the car on the long drive to visit my father’s family, I overheard Alison, seated up front, grumbling to him about how I was absorbing my mother’s quirks and eccentricities (particularly those associated with white privilege). I think she thought I was out in the world “passing” with our white mother (as though a child could make that distinction).
And then, as if I weren’t there, she went on a tirade. I continued to stare silently out of the window at the dilapidated neighborhoods we had been driving through to get to Jamaica, Queens, from Long Island. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. Achieving an (I think) impressive impersonation of my mother, especially for a six-year-old, I groaned sarcastically in her characteristically slow, low, opera diva tone: “I see we’re taking the scenic route!” At which Alison snapped her head toward my father with an exasperated “See?” expression on her face. He stiffened, gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, and kept his eyes forward. For effect, I didn’t break my bored stare out the window. No one was entertained by my little impersonation. I tried.
Sweet Nana Ruby was my father’s father’s second wife, with whom he had a whole lotta kids, half aunties and uncles to me, who subsequently produced a gang of cousins, some of whom were around my age. My father and his father, Bob Carey, had a complicated relationship. Bob’s mother was from Venezuela, and it is believed his father was Black—mixed with some undocumented lightening factor, as he too was on the fairer side of what was then called the “Negro spectrum.”
Until I was about six years old, my father hadn’t spoken to his father in years. He was an only child and had a different mother than my grandfather’s other children, and as warm and as welcoming as Nana Ruby and her house were—and from what I could see, she showered my father with love—still, she was not his mother, and perhaps he felt like a bit of an outsider with them. I think he made the effort to mend things with his father for the sake of his own children as well as himself. He must have realized how isolated I was, living with just my mother in an all-white community that was becoming increasingly hostile to me. I needed to know some family.
And I am forever grateful for it, because that house was a warm place bustling with family life. I loved it there. The whole neighborhood loved my grandpa. He was a regular, fun-loving guy with a hearty laugh, who wore crew socks with his slide sandals. He had a little urban vineyard in his backyard in Queens. He grew sour grapes from which he made sweet homemade wine that he stored in the basement. Nana Ruby and my aunties always had something cooking in the tiny kitchen—chicken, greens—but the standout staple dish was rice and beans. I could eat whole plates of it. There was the clamoring of comforting noises:
