“If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed,” the comedian Paul Mooney, sporting an Afro, says in the documentary “Good Hair,” which won a jury prize at the Sundance film festival and comes out in October. “If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.”
Huh, I didn't know that about my Caucasian self. When I was an older camper at Camp Marydell, I was a junior counselor. One of our jobs was to make sure the youngest girls took their obligatory Saturday night shower. My camp was a Catholic one, all-girl, run by the Sisters of Christian Doctrine. It wasn't expensive and had a mixture of girls from New York City, which in the 70's meant we were all either White, Black, or Puerto Rican.
Moms being Moms, they sent us with industrial size containers of personal hygeine products - "just in case." Never mind what that meant, what it did mean was that on a Saturday night, I would have a line of little girls with wet heads, and various hair products, waiting for me to comb it out for them.
And the Black girls all seemed to favor Dixie Peach Pomade. I loved the smell of that stuff. I would grease their scalps for them, making sure to part the hair and get it in there, and then braid it up. The little White and Puerto Rican girls had the spray-on "detanglers" and I used a lot of that to work through stubnborn knots to make sure the hair lay smooth and damp across their shoulders.
All this time, and now I find out I was keeping the Black Women down!
To all those sweet baby girls . . . sorry.
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