Race Relations

What, you say? Two posts in two days? Well, like any new project, I expect to have great enthusiasm for this for another week, then will drop it like last year's perfume. It just so happens that I am moved to write about something so pivotal to our society, so central to our image of ourselves, that not writing would be a breach of civic duty. The topic is race. The context...

wait for it...

you won't believe the importance...

is hair.

Wait, don't feel let down! I swear that hair is relevant to this important societal issue. I may have to contract the bounds of the discussion though, and clarify that I really want to reflect on race relations in Annapolis Maryland.

This has come up because after 20 months without a haircut, and after a thoughtful gift certificate from my husband, I decided to return to the hair salon. I stopped getting my hair cut because I was busy. I also take slight subversive pride in my low maintenance lifestyle: no more than 5 minutes for makeup, outsize efforts to buy clothes that don't require ironing, out of bed and out the front door in 20 minutes or less if I have to. So anyway, what with one thing or another, no hair cuts. Finally this spring, I started to believe that the burgeoning belly required some balance, perhaps provided by a coiffed head of hair. Four months after coming to this decision, I called to make an appointment. Now despite being generally low maintenance, and truly enjoying the engineering hat I usually wear, I occasionally find my inner girl, and she was rarin' to go. A week has been spent in quiet reverie over the new hairstyle. Would I go for a Jennifer Aniston: simple, yet glamourous? No, more like an Angelina Jolie: voluminous, luxurious, the kind of hair that clearly walks around with a Brad Pitt next to it. A pixie cut, like all those cute models with their supershort hair? Perhaps not so good for balancing the burgeoning belly (and the permanently burgeoned derriere). So, the Angelina it was. Then I got a call yesterday afternoon (while having my eyes dilated): "it's the salon, we have to cancel your appointment." In one second my little fantasy of luxurious locks waving about my face, eyes mysterious behind large glam sunglasses, lost some air. So what is it, sick hairdresser, no power, schedule conflict? No friends, it's not any of that. "We have to cancel because none of our stylists can work with your hair. We don't have anyone who does relaxers anymore."

So let's pause a beat and consider the general devastation: 20 months of buildup, a week of unmoored fantasizing, and the salon that I've visited (infrequently, but faithfully) for 5 years can't do my hair. The appointment had originally been a two-parter: one person for the perm, and my "regular" for the cut and style. So I asked if I could still get the cut and style. Nope, apparently it was decided that my hair couldn't be cut without the relaxer. The appointment is cancelled, the dream is over, the whole thing is called off. They did refer me to the salon next door though, where the woman who used to do my perms now works. I got ditched by a hair salon because my hair isn't relaxed, and they don't employ anyone who can handle it. To put this more plainly:

It is 2008 in the United States of America, and my salon "Doesn't Do Black Hair."

The last time this happened to me (oh, yes, it's happened before) was in 1997, when I first moved to this segregated enclave. I just picked a salon out of the phone book and went. They at least didn't want to admit their shortcomings, and after giving my a fairly bad cut and blow dry, admitted that they didn't usually (ever) do black hair. For a girl from the Tidewater, this was a bit of a mystery. We might have to blame it on my expatriate upbringing, or more likely on the extreme social weirdness of Annapolis, but for some reason I didn't know until 1997 that salons could be segregated. In good old Newport News, they taught me all about the intricacies of prejudice (black, white, yellow and brown), but there are so many types of people there that you'd have to work pretty hard to find a salon that refused your business for having the wrong hair texture.
So after moving to Annapolis, I went through a small odyssey, looking for someone to do my hair. Given my infrequent impulse to have anything done at all, this took years. For a while I had a woman in a "black" shop, and she was pretty good. The main problem with her was the whole barbershop experience, where a cut and style could take 3.5 hours. My inner girl just isn't strong enough to get me through that more than a couple times. I have things to do, structures to analyze, and I can't sit in a chair reading mindless fluff and fending off gossipy questions about my personal life for an entire afternoon. Then I found a lovely place just around up the street from the house. The proprietor was awesome, she would agree to any experiment with the hair, she wasn't too expensive, and I started getting my hair done all the time. Then within a year, she was gone. Shop closed, no forwarding address. So I finally washed up, battered and broken, at the salon in Eastport. They had diverse stylists and clientele, and I was set. (Ha, ha, small girl type hair dressing pun there.) All set until yesterday, when I got the boot. Rather than take my money, they sent me chasing after a former employee.

So that's it, my profound thought for today about race relations in Annapolis. I know I didn't actually write about race that much, about the explicit and implicit discrimination that is part of the social scene in Annapolis, but I think I prefer to let you do that sort of hard work for yourselves. Let's just say that when I get my hair done next month, with the former employee of my former salon, I won't walk out with the Angelina hair waving behind me. The expression on my face isn't going to imply that I have temporarily mislaid the Brad Pitt accessory, but obviously, given the fabulous hair, it must be around somewhere. Instead, I'm going to ask for an Oprah, and my expression will say something like, "I'm so fab and successful that no one would dream of declining my business. This hair adorns the head of a woman that will take your 1950s style discrimination and shove it down your cringing throat. Now out of my way, I've got code to write and a helicopter to design."