Puffy Hair and Dark Skin

The sixth grade, eleven years old and trying so hard to fit somewhere. The in thing in my world right now is the pink ladies club… It is a group of six girls, white pretty and perfect. Perfect hair, perfect make-up and the only to have a cell phone because they are new mind you. New as in all six girls share one phone. I happen to befriend one of them through my dad.

He set a play date with a woman he sold a car to. I was so embarrassed he did this. His excuse was, you’re new to this neighborhood and to these kinds of people. Meaning white people proper people, he’d say. See my mother at one time my father’s wife was half black half Cherokee woman had just died. So we moved in with my dad his current white wife and their 2 white new children. Until then I lived in the Chicago projects with my black Cherokee mother, Anyway play date time and dads rules never admit your black if the ask which they did say you’re a Spaniard for some reason saying Puerto Rican was wrong to. Anyway after abut 15 minutes into the play date Christine Lynn Robelia still my friend today pulls out a new port cigarette. And says I’m gonna teach you to smoke. My mom says I have to be your friend. So to be a pink lady you have to be down with the same things when you go to school you’ll meet the other pink ladies. We smoke we take turns with Wanda’s cell phone, she rich so you gotta pretend you like her. On Friday we all wear the same outfit I tell your dad to take you to get one and I’ll go with. She looks at my hair and says Sunday come over and I’ll iron this cotton ball on top of your head. Everyone will hate your nappe hair.

Sunday came and the iron is too hot and is burning the ends of my hair like really burning it so we walk to the pharmacy and buy an eight-dollar straightener a perm. Christie says her one black friend does this to her hair every month. The instructions say and wait now it burning so we wash it out and already it feels bad like straw no longer curly but like a broom. When she blows it dry it’s as if I stuck my finger in a light socket. So now she wants to iron it again, and the whole time I am wondering why I am doing all this to be a part of a group I’ve managed to live out of my whole eleven years. It’s my dad, he wants me to be more like them. So Monday came my hair is this big afro and I hide from my dad all morning sneak out the door with a big purple bow around my huge afro and go to school. Christie comes to me and says I like it, you want to smoke? No one says anything bad about me or my hair, and when Wanda tries to give me her pink head band I tell her no because purple is more grown up, pink make me think little girls, plus Prince loves purple. Christie and I have been best friends for 30 years, my dad still has his ideas but he’s old and probably won’t change and I love him anyway. He seems to be growing some.

That my why I did it, crazy moment, the first amongst many, but the one that made me like my puffy hair and dark skin.

-Verna Sealey