Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri

Author:Emma Dabiri [Dabiri, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141986296
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Cardozo family’s experiences are far removed from those of typical black Americans of that time. Margaret talks about a trip to Paris with another sister, Emmetta. In the 1930s, the ‘beautiful’ (i.e., almost white-looking) Emmetta Holmes, née Cardozo, enjoyed a successful modelling career with the New York Mirror, an opportunity impossible for a woman who looked identifiably black. Emmetta even had a spell working as one of the iconic Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. At that time, Ziegfeld wouldn’t have hired a Negro performer, so the implication is that she passed as white. Her story reminds us of the power of hair to confer racial status. You see, Emmeta had a secret shame, one that had to be rigorously policed. As Elizabeth explains:

I was always the best at kinky hair because that was what I had started with. If I do say it myself, I could do a beautiful job of giving what they call the hard-press. With so much skill with that pressing iron and so little grease you’d take a very hard kinky head of hair and you could press it so that it almost looked like straight hair. One of the reasons that made this so important to us, to get that look, was because the sister who was with the Follies had kinky hair. She didn’t look like she had kinky hair, because she had the features and everything of a white person or a foreigner. So it was very necessary for her to know exactly what to do or what to have done with her hair.

She had someone who would do it, but sometimes she would perspire, and maybe you know what that will do to pressed hair. She knew exactly how to handle it. I used to say that she went down under the skin before it even got to the roots. When you looked at her hair it was a satin finish. It was beautiful. It was real art. I don’t think people do that much anymore because very few people want their hair pressed that thoroughly. [my italics]

‘She went down under the skin.’ A painful image, suggesting something elemental, cruelly disfigured, of blackness kept at bay, the cost of external acceptance in a world not of our own design.

As well as potentially passing as white to model, Emmetta had trained as a hairdresser, which suggests the level of social status offered by the profession:

[In 1927] we inherited a few thousand dollars. We thought we wanted Meta to learn a trade that would keep her occupied and have a little bit of glamour to it, so we decided that she should go to Paris and learn the beauty trade. I stayed there six weeks and at that time it was a very nice time to be in Paris because it was the time of Josephine Baker and all of the beautiful entertainers were in Paris at that time.

Don’t forget that France had established itself as the home of the hot press and the marcel wave.

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