Hair-Raising Adventures

By Carrillee Collins Burke

As a teenager, eons ago, I was like many of my friends: unhappy with my appearance, and my imaginary culprit was my hair. Floating through grade school and junior high, my appearance didn’t seem to matter so much. But being a freshman in high school was different. Boys were different. And boys mattered. A lot!                                        

While I messed for hours attempting to turn my fine, straight, mousey brown hair into a curly crown of glory, my naturally curly-haired friends desired theirs flat and straight. So they spread their hair on an ironing board and pressed it flat with a warm iron.

I went through a stage of using my mother’s antique curling iron, created by my blacksmith grandfather several greats back, with handles he whittled from a birch tree limb. The heated prongs gave me a decent stiff curl, but always with a scorched odor. After several episodes of burned hair I went on to something else.

My grandmother showed me how to use strips of cloth as rollers. I dampened a strand of hair, wrapped it around my finger, then pulled the rag strip through the circle and tied it in a bow. Next morning when I combed it out I had nice fluffy hair. So I was beautiful for the school day if it didn’t rain or the humidity rose or it happened to be gym day. Oh for hair spray and a decent setting gel. But that was in the unknown future.

That year, a neighbor who watched my struggle for curls, invited my mother and me to visit her beauty shop for a professional perm. The curling machine was a scary sight. Rollers attached to electric cords that hung from a machine overhead were left on too long and blistered my scalp at the crown, leaving a small bald spot for several weeks. I whined that I looked like a clown from the circus as I combed hair over the spot and worried I would be bald forever.

Soon after, those curling machines vanished and a new way of doing perms came into being. Of course, the Toni home perm was available, too, but it never seemed to work well for me. And, oh my gosh, the chemical smell that wafted around you for days was horrible.

Later, hard plastic curlers came into existence. Wearing them to bed made for a sleepless night, but what beautiful curls they created. That was before we covered our wet hair with pin curls or the soft sponge curlers that came along later.

How easy and time-saving it would have been if ponytails had been the fad or we wore the pigtails we wore as children. In West Virginia, where I lived, we teenagers followed the fad, whenever or wherever it came from. The newest craze in clothes, music, or hair usually came from California, which dared to lead in experimental things. If I had spent as much time with my school lessons as I did messing with my hair to no great avail, I would be a genius today.

Finally, setting gels came on the market, but someone discovered that Jell-O worked just as well and was cheaper. I guess I didn’t get the instructions correct the one time I tried it because it turned out to be a disaster. I wet a strand of hair and rubbed dry lime Jell-O into it and rolled it on extra small plastic curlers. What I should have done was use half the amount of hot water used for Jell-O dessert and dissolved all the granules. I also should have used non-flavored Jell-O.

Anyway, the next morning when I combed my dried, stiff hair, grains of Jell-O and sugar flecked my shoulders and the floor. But my hair was actually nappy; that is until the weather turned rainy while I was on the school bus. My beautiful nappy hair began to change. By the time I walked in the rain to the school building my hair was a wet tangled, sticky, green mess.

Jell-O ran down my neck, shoulders, back, and down my face and streaked my starched white blouse. Miss Reber, the school secretary, who always stood in her office doorway watching us scholars troop in, spied me at my locker. She yelled, “My God, child, you’ve turned green. Come here!”  

I cried as she took me into her office bathroom, shampooed my hair; and combed my bangs down on my forehead. Then she combed my shoulder-length hair, straight. When it dried, it curled under and around my neck like a pageboy . . . well, almost. The left side turned under and the right side flipped up. She tsked, tsked as she worried over making it work.

Then Miss Reber, whom we all secretly called Miss Grouchy, gave me her blue button-up sweater to wear over my stained blouse. She was elderly and small so her sweater fit me perfectly. I received more compliments that day on my hair than I’d received in my entire teenage life. That was the beginning of a new style for me.

When I explained to Miss Reber what I’d done, she said, “A beaten egg white would have worked better.” But after my problem with Jell-O, I was afraid to try it.

We tried everything in those days to be attractive, not realizing being natural was the best attribute, and boys didn't care anyway.

Mayonnaise was a great conditioner. Lilac scented toilet water was an ideal rinse and it smelled good. Fresh lemon juice or vinegar gave hair a shine. In the late forties, we used what we had on hand.

I think the most torturous thing I did to my hair was try to lighten it. A professional bleach job was expensive and I lacked the funds. So I soaked the ends of my hair for an hour or more in undiluted Magic, a potent household bleach. I couldn’t believe my hair didn’t lighten one bit. Instead, it frizzed so badly the damage had to be trimmed off, shortening my slow-growing hair several precious inches.

Today my hair is gray. It’s usually twisted into a bun. I wear bangs on my forehead. The pigtail of my youth has returned for women and men alike. So sometimes I braid my hair. I’m no longer unhappy with my hair. Age gave me the wisdom to understand that my looks are not who I am. I forgave God a long time ago for making me, me.

And I’ve learned to deal with it.

[Carrillee Collins Burke, a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, lives in Sarasota, Florida, with her novelist husband, E.P. “Ned” Burke. She has won numerous writing contests and her byline has appeared in many magazines. Her short story, Country Girl, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and became the basis for a book of prose and poetry of the same name. Her recent chapbook of poetry is called Window To My Heart.]