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  The increasingly Afrocentric look I sported invited all sorts of criticism. Some said that my identification with Black culture was “just a phase,” while others, mostly white students, told me I shouldn’t dress the way I did because they felt it was disingenuous or just looked silly. While walking through the cafeteria one day, proudly wearing a dashiki and a headwrap, I passed a table full of white girls and heard one of them say, “Who does she think she is, wearing all that stupid African shit? She’s not Black!”

  As I continued to make my way toward the Black table, my friend Nikki, who was a member of the BSA and a star of the women’s basketball team, wheeled around and confronted the girl. “You’re sitting there talking about Rachel’s outfit while you’re, probably getting a yeast infection from wearing those skintight jeans,” she said loud enough for everyone within twenty feet to hear. “Besides, Rachel’s a lot Blacker than I am, so deal with it!”

  A smile took over my face. This was the first time anyone had recognized and defended how I felt. Hearing Nikki say that made me feel good, whole, understood, like I’d finally found my place in the world.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hair II

  THE VOICE OF CAVALRY FELLOWSHIP, which Spencer had introduced me to and which I regularly attended, had a Black pastor and a white pastor. The congregation was mixed as well, with approximately two to three Black people for every white person. Paying as much attention to racial reconciliation as it did the basic tenets of Christianity, the church served as a bridge from where I came from, fanatically studying the Bible, to where I wanted to go, promoting racial and social justice.

  Unlike the sleek modern megachurches of today, VOC was housed in a plain-looking building in West Jackson. What it lacked in glitz and glamor it more than made up for in heart and soul. It may not have had any big-screen TVs or a deluxe PA system, but it did have a dedicated flock and an exuberant gospel choir. The congregation would encourage anyone in the choir who came up to the microphone, shouting, “All right now!” or “Sing it!”

  Members of the congregation were also encouraged to clap—whether they possessed a sense of a rhythm or not. This often led to some humorous moments because, as I soon discovered, Black people and white people in the South tend to clap a little differently. Whereas Black people are inclined to clap on the second and fourth beats of every note, producing a sound that aligns with the music, white people have a habit of clapping on one and three, which sounds at best sluggish and at worst jarring. Some musicians, including Justin Bieber, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, have gotten so thrown off by people in the audience clapping on one and three during their concerts they’ve had to stop mid-song to educate them. While playing “Come by Me” for a clapping-challenged audience in England several years back, the famed singer and pianist Harry Connick Jr. found what has to be the best solution to this problem when he added an extra bar to each note during his piano solo, forcing the audience’s clapping to land on the right beats. During services at VOC, I found myself instinctively clapping on two and four. Not everyone was so fortunate, but the clapping always sorted itself out, with no one ever feeling isolated or ashamed.

  Some members of the congregation, myself included, felt like there was more energy waiting to be released beyond singing and clapping, so we decided to form a praise dance team. Dancing wasn’t a part of my life when I was growing up. Simply walking in a “provocative manner” was forbidden, so dancing with swaying hips and gyrating thighs was out of the question. The closest I ever saw someone in my family get to dancing occurred while I was accompanying Larry on a drive into town. When a song he liked came on the oldies station, he started lurching his neck forward and backward in a robot-like fashion not unlike the dancers in The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” video.

  I soon saw the energy I devoted to the VOC dance team pay off, when we began to receive invitations to perform at venues besides the church, including Belhaven’s chapel. The “Reconciliation Dance” was a crowd favorite and one that often moved people to tears. One of the other members of the dance team, LaShawnda Wilson, wore a white leotard and white skirt and I wore a black leotard and black skirt, and at the end of the dance we wrapped our arms together and combined our hands in a single fist as a symbol of Black and white uniting in love.

  Donna Pollard, a thirty-two-year-old Black woman who’d worked at VOC for five years, was the dance troupe’s organizer and choreographer. I became her assistant, often helping her make the costumes for our performances, and as I did I began to spend more and more time in West Jackson. That I felt so at home there, coupled with an awkward living situation on campus—my roommate started skipping classes and sleeping for days on end after she injured her hip and saw her dream of dancing professionally come to a crashing halt—encouraged me to move to West Jackson after my freshman year. That summer, I shared a bed with a VOC intern at Antioch in a room cooled only by an incredibly noisy fan. Before the start of my second year at Belhaven, Donna and her husband Sam offered to rent me a spare bedroom in their home, not too far from Antioch. Sam even found me an orange 1977 Toyota Corolla that only cost five hundred dollars. With its seats ripped to shreds by mice, it was a real “hoopty,” but I sewed some new seat covers for it and it never failed to get me to and from campus. Better still, it was all mine.

  Many American towns are divided in two by railroad tracks—there’s usually a “right side” and a “wrong side”—and Jackson was no different. The railroad tracks separated rich from poor and white from Black, helping to enforce the unofficial segregation that still lingered there. I chose to live on the poor Black side of that line. I was breaking the color barrier by living in a Black neighborhood, but I didn’t move there because I was a white missionary. I wasn’t trying to be a “white ally” or a “white savior.” I wasn’t trying to make some sort of contrived social statement. Quite the opposite. My decision to live there felt natural and organic. I was simply moving to where I felt most comfortable, a place where I could be myself.

  Rich white people considered the neighborhood in which Antioch and the Pollards’ house was located to be “the bad part of town,” but I never saw it that way. To me, it always felt like home. I was rarely able to walk more than a block or two without bumping into someone I knew. By the time I moved off campus I knew more people in West Jackson than I did at Belhaven. As a consequence, I felt safer there than I did in the white part of town, where I was unknown and few people cared about me.

  The needs of the community I’d moved to quickly became my own. One of the biggest concerns was that too many young kids were hanging out on the street unsupervised. Typically they were being raised by single mothers who had to work all day and couldn’t afford to pay for after-school care. This phenomenon was especially prevalent and troubling near West Capitol Street, which tended to attract people who were a little shady or down on their luck. Drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and homeless people frequented the area at all hours. That nearly all of them were Black gave West Capitol a reputation for being a place where white people would be wise not to go.

  Young children who lived in this neighborhood faced a variety of perils, ranging from not being able to get their homework done to being placed in life-threatening situations. When I heard that Capitol Street Ministries provided a food pantry and some other basic services, I decided to start an after-school program in conjunction with it. The service I offered was perfectly matched with a need, and within just a few weeks I was looking after twenty-five elementary-school-age kids. I helped them with their homework. I organized games for them to play. I handed out snacks. I taught them art. I even redid a few two-strand twists or braids that had gotten messed up during the school day. I was a nanny, babysitter, and big sister once again.

  The volunteer work I did in West Jackson, when combined with the racial justice work I was doing on campus, my Afrocentric appearance, and my growing appreciation of Black historical figures such as Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, led e
ven more people, both Black and white, to assume that I was a mixed-race or light-skinned Black woman, that I was an albino, or that as a child I’d been adopted and raised by a Black family. They stopped identifying and relating to me as a white person, and because I was untroubled by the idea, was in fact pleased by it, I didn’t bother to correct them.

  Being seen as Black also made social interactions in the community I lived in much easier. Black people related to me in a more relaxed way. Instead of putting up a wall and thinking of me as an outsider, they treated me as a member of the community, part of the family. I would laugh at jokes told at the expense of white people and lodge some pretty fierce critiques about white culture myself. I didn’t act scared, stiff, or too privileged to relate, all telltale signs of being a white outsider. I blended in, not by wearing a disguise or being deceitful, but simply by being myself. It felt less like I was adopting a new identity and more like I was unveiling one that had been there all along. Finally able to embrace my true self, I allowed the little girl I’d colored with a brown crayon so long ago to emerge.

  As happy as I was to be seen as Black, it was still confusing, awkward, painful, and isolating for me at times—because who was I going to talk to about what felt like a major life transition? One of the few people I felt comfortable discussing my rapidly changing identity with was Donna. As I tried to reconcile how I felt, how I was born, and how I was being viewed by others, I had numerous conversations with her about race and identity. We would stay up late and talk, conversations that often ended in tears. It was Donna who I chose to be with the night of my twenty-first birthday. Determined to get drunk, I brought home a bottle of Manischewitz, which I was familiar with from celebrating Passover every year, thanks to Ruthanne’s Zionist obsession, and Donna sat with me while I sipped from it. We talked deep into the night, but I only got about a third of the way through the bottle before I felt sick and went to bed.

  A deeply religious woman, Donna would mention certain passages from the Bible as a way of suggesting that my feelings about my racial identity might just be a phase, but she also seemed to understand when I told her that I didn’t feel white and that I felt a stronger connection to Black people than I did to white people. She often told me that when it came to hairstyles and clothing, “to copy is to compliment,” an assessment I took as permission to embrace the exterior expressions of my feelings. I could live with this appraisal of my journey, but I also feared it, as I realized that very few people in the world knew me as well as Donna did and that my evolving appearance could be seen by others as cultural appropriation.

  Cultural appropriation is a tricky subject. It’s often viewed as one of the great sins of our times—an indefensible act of racism—as it typically involves people from a majority ethnic group borrowing cultural elements from a minority ethnic group and exploiting those elements for fun or profit. The NFL’s Washington Redskins using a profile of a Native American as a team mascot is a good example, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why. Using an image of an ethnic group in the same way other teams use animals or icons turns those people into stereotypes, reeks of neocolonialism, robs that group of their intellectual property rights, and promotes racist behavior. Turning people who have suffered for generations into a brand isn’t showing reverence for their culture; it’s giving it the finger. As obvious as this example is, there are countless others that are less so (but no less annoying and offensive), including white musicians stealing blues riffs from Black guitar players or rapping about the trials of life on the streets.

  While living in West Jackson, I dedicated no small amount of thought and reflection to understanding cultural appropriation and examining my life to ensure that I was making authentic choices, not offensive or insincere ones. When it comes to cultural appropriation, it’s important to know which acts cross the line and which don’t. As with many nuanced subjects built on the foundation of past wrongs, not everything that’s called appropriation is false or inauthentic. Thanks to air travel, the internet, and global trade, the world has grown smaller. As it’s done so, diversity has increased, and so have cultural exchanges. Without such borrowing, Americans wouldn’t know the joys of eating sushi, doing yoga, or wearing a pashmina. Examining one’s intent and getting permission and guidance from the cultural source is the best way to judge the appropriateness of the action. Mocking another culture is obviously wrong, but how can applauding it be viewed as anything but positive? Historically, one of the most common ways racists mocked Black culture was by wearing blackface (or attending performances by those who did), but anyone who knew me then, particularly Donna, could tell you that’s not what I was doing.

  When Donna and I weren’t talking into the wee hours, we were educating each other on practical matters. I shared my recipes for pot roast and homemade rolls with her, and she taught some of her unique methods of hair styling to me. From the moment I’d stepped off the plane and into Jackson’s airport at the start of freshman year, I’d fallen in love with all the creative braiding patterns I saw. Within a month of being in Mississippi, I’d seen nearly every version of updos, braids, twists, locs, and weaves.

  One night I mentioned how beautiful I thought braids were, and Donna asked me if I’d like her to braid my hair. Up to this point, I’d been hesitant to wear my hair in more than two braids, thanks to that passage in 1 Peter 3:3 that discourages adornment of any kind and Larry and Ruthanne’s insistence that it was a “falsity.” Equally important was my desire before I started wearing such a culturally specific style to get permission from the Black women who knew me best.

  Well, here it was.

  In the entire VOC community, no one had a better reputation for doing hair than Donna. She could lay edges, braid any pattern you suggested, and apply a relaxer without burning your scalp or causing breakage to your hair. Not letting her braid my hair would have been like passing up an opportunity to discuss politics with Barack Obama.

  Donna was the first person to braid my hair, and it was a seminal moment in the evolution of my identity. White girls in Mississippi simply didn’t do that. At first, she just braided the back of my blonde hair in jumbo box braids, but soon I was rocking a full head of individual box braids and getting creative with them, wrapping them in scarves or wearing them in updos. Before long, I was braiding my own hair and just having Donna help me with any hair in the back I couldn’t reach.

  There was a beauty store in West Jackson dedicated to Black hair care products, and in it I found everything I needed to keep my braids looking good. Goldstar Beauty Supply was like Wonderland to me. Bobbles, beads, ribbons, clips, moisturizers, detangling products, gels, relaxers, waxes, hair mayonnaise, wigs, braid hair, wefted hair, weaving caps, weaving needles, weaving thread, and lighters for burning the ends of braids—Goldstar had it all.

  I wore braids most of the time I was at Belhaven. To me, they were beautiful, and I felt beautiful wearing them. I also wanted to show the young Black girls I worked with at Capitol Street Ministries and those I saw at church every Sunday that all textures of hair, like all shades of Black, were beautiful. When it comes to braiding, there is no “good hair” or “bad hair,” only good braiders and bad braiders. Braids are the great equalizer, leveling the playing field between women born with fine, wavy hair and those with thick, kinky hair.

  One day after church, I saw Donna’s five-year-old daughter Jessica running her hands through a white college intern’s hair. I could see it on Jessica’s face: she wasn’t merely paying the intern a compliment; she was enchanted, as if her small Black fingers had found the pinnacle of beauty. Then she touched the stiff crochet braids in her own hair, and the look of rapture vanished and she hung her head.

  There’s a long history of European colonial powers forcing native people they’ve driven from lands they’ve conquered to cut off their hair. For some Native Americans, identity is so entwined with their hair they describe it as being a manifestation of their thoughts and an extension of themselves. They
believe it should only be cut under very specific circumstances, typically mourning the loss of a loved one. This didn’t stop the teachers at the boarding schools the Bureau of Indian Affairs established in the 1800s from chopping off Native American children’s hair as soon as they set foot on campus. Likewise, white Christian missionaries in the colonial era often made African women cut off their braids.

  This same sort of callousness has frequently been directed at Black women. In her 2006 book From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care, anthropologist Lanita Jacobs-Huey hinted at the significance of Black women’s hair when she described it as “a window into African American women’s ethnic and gender identities.” What often appears in this window doesn’t bode well for the mental health of Black women. In a culture where white has long been exalted as right, naturally kinky-curly hair has been associated with unattractiveness and intractability. After being conditioned to believe this lie during the Plantation and Jim Crow eras, many Black women came to view straight hair (and everything else that was white) as being more beautiful and more closely linked to success than coiled hair. In the early part of the twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker, a Black entrepreneur and the daughter of two former slaves, recognized the pressure Black women felt to adhere to white standards of beauty in order to survive economically and socially as an opportunity to create a commercial empire. Her “Walker System” for straightening hair was so popular she went on to become the first female—and first Black—self-made millionaire in the United States.