Читать книгу Bodies That Work - Tami Miyatsu - Страница 17

Hair care in the United States is, as in all societies, a cultural construct that comprises both artifact and artifice.²⁶ As Wendy Cooper notes, hair is second only ←24 | 25→to skin as the body’s most racially defining feature: “Its texture, its color, and, to some extents, its distribution vary widely between races.”²⁷ The author and cultural documentarian Candacy Taylor claims that hair plays a significant role in creating ethnocultural identities: “Practically every ethnicity has developed a specialized product or procedure to change their hair texture, and as a result, beauty shop culture is a window into contemporary understandings of race, segregation, and integration.”²⁸ Hair salons—often racially segregated—can, thus, serve to (re)produce ethnic culture.

Incidentally, progressive African American hair culture dated from premodern Africa. In West Africa, the ancestral homeland of many African Americans, hair was socially and culturally significant.²⁹ In the early fifteenth century, in African tribes, such as the Wolof, Mende, Mandingo, and Yoruba, hairstyles were an elaborate tool indicating “marital status, age, religion, ethnic identity, wealth, and rank within the community.”³⁰ Hairstyles also signified beauty and fecundity, particularly for women.³¹ The task of grooming was sacred to the Yoruba, who believed that hair—being at the very top of the body and, thus, nearest to the gods—was a medium for humans to communicate with the gods and spirits.³² Time-consuming, skillful hair grooming commanded respect in African cultures, and hairdressers were considered cultural creators in such societies wherein hair had enormous significance.³³

In early twentieth-century black America, as in premodern Africa, hair was culturally coded, albeit in a different fashion. With an increasing emphasis placed on appearance, hair became a symbol of a person’s social consciousness and aspiration. McKay aptly says, “The texture of the Negro hair is not merely a physical appearance [but] it is also a social importance” and that people were even “categorized according to the quality of [their] hair.”³⁴ For some African Americans, hair was a part of “genteel performance.”³⁵ Tiffany Gill maintains that African Americans’ genteel performance reflected “the debates happening in African American politics concerning the best approaches to confronting racism and its attendant economic disparities.”³⁶ For African Americans, well-groomed hair implied a means of group survival and was an expression of their commitment to alleviating racial tensions.

African American women responded to hair fads more subtly than men because for progressive black women, hair was a stronger gauge of racial and gender performance. As African American authors Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps note, as a representative of the group, progressive African American women shared a mission of individual and collective social upliftment by pursuing sophisticated New Negro Womanhood, and hair was one of its determinants.³⁷ Therefore, for ←25 | 26→African American women, groomed hair was much more than a product of vanity: it was a means of presenting a new black identity.

As a hair care promoter, Walker emphasized that she owed her invention of hair culture to her African American ancestral heritage. In her often-cited self-invented story, Walker ingeniously connected her work with Africa.³⁸ She claimed that she had dreamed of a black man of large stature who told her the secret formula for the care of black women’s hair. “Some of the remedy was grown in Africa,” said Walker, “but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”³⁹ Tananarive Due, a biographer of Walker, claims that the substance that Walker was referring to was organic sulfur, or methylsulfonylmethane, which is known to improve “allergies, constipation, and problems with parasites,” “[maintain] normal metabolism,” and “[supply] the building blocks for the production and repair of the skin, cartilage, ligaments, and tendons.”⁴⁰ Walker also shrewdly cited her mother’s wisdom as having been passed down from her African foremothers: “Don’t want you gittin’ wet, Sarah, but this sulfur will clean yo’ head without no water.”⁴¹

These stories assumed her link with Africa that provided her grammar with historical and geographical importance. Walker’s cultural enterprise materialized what Paul Gilroy called the “black Atlantic,” the locus of the black modernist consciousness rooted in and routed through the Atlantic.⁴² “The telling and retelling of these stories [of loss, exile, and journeying],” writes Gilroy, “plays a special role, organizing the consciousness of the ‘racial’ group socially and striking the important balance between inside and outside activity—the different practices, cognitive, habitual, and performative, [which] are required to invent, maintain, and renew [an] identity.”⁴³ Walker’s narrative of African beauty culture served “a mnemonic function” of inventing, maintaining, and renewing racial identity by “directing the consciousness of the group back to significant, nodal points in its common history and its social memory.”⁴⁴ Thus, Walker’s diasporic saga supplied the missing link between African and African American hair cultures.

Her fixation with Africa was also a strategic demonstration. This approach burnished her reputation as a businesswoman because she intentionally adopted the idea of Booker T. Washington, her business role model and a respected African American leader of her time.⁴⁵ Washington was interested in “the training of black Americans for service in Africa.”⁴⁶ In the early twentieth century, Washington sent two groups of Tuskegee graduates to Africa “to teach cotton raising to the natives.”⁴⁷ Walker later shared Washington’s dream to build an industrial school in Liberia, and her will directed that “certain provisions” be made for the establishment and maintenance of an “industrial and mission school on the continent of ←26 | 27→Africa.”⁴⁸ With regard to this, some may say that she capitalized on Washington’s fame by following suit; nevertheless, her concerns about their African brothers and sisters and descendants of their common ancestors strengthened her self-proclaimed status as a black woman leader and an heir to the hair culture of her African American foremothers.

Walker had a transatlantic vision of disseminating her Africa-oriented American hair care. In February 1919, she listed “England, France, and Italy” as her destination and indicated “Buy & Sell Toilet Preparations” as the purpose of travel on her passport application.⁴⁹ Submitted just after World War I, her application to travel overseas was denied by officials, who were on alert against any anti-government activities.⁵⁰ Although she never accomplished her transatlantic ambition, both the Caribbean and Central America became a part of her realm, and her company shipped products to agents in Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba.⁵¹ Subsequently, the reputation of her methods reached Europe through Josephine Baker, a famous African American performer based in Paris, whose coiffure, the Eaton crop, allegedly originated from the Walker System.⁵²