One Blood by Denene Millner

Author:Denene Millner [Millner, Denene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-05-23T17:00:00+00:00

18

1981, in the summertime

LoLo wasn’t particularly good at cornrowing hair. In fact, it was the running joke among her friends, who could not understand how a Black woman who had worked in southern fields was incapable of doing even the most basic of plaits across her baby girl’s scalp. Knowing how to cornrow was, after all, practically a birthright; one submitted to the process while laid across laps or awkwardly bent between mother’s or big sissy’s knees as intricate parts were carved into enviable patterns on heads, and somehow, via some kinetic energy passed from the ancestors’ fingertips to one’s own, you did the same for your baby girl and she did the same for her baby girl and so on and so forth. This particular style was the mother of invention—on par with what the wheel was to transportation, what the cotton gin was to the pockets of white American men. Beyond the historical significance of the braided style, mamas with daughters who had that thick, curly, cottony hair with the propensity to stretch toward the clouds one minute and smush tight and viselike against scalps the very next, could get their daughters out the door in the morning with minimal fuss—could make it so they could have a little less dread about a hot, sunny, sweaty afternoon that, without the benefits of cornrows, could have one’s daughter tumbling back through the door looking like who shot John. Saved them both from ridicule and judgment from other Black women who considered an unruly head an assured sign of motherly neglect.

LoLo was grateful for Sarah, who, every two weeks back in Long Island, would happily “borrow” Rae and, over the course of a couple hours, turn a series of small three-strand plaits into hairstyles worthy of some history book on African princesses, or an Essence magazine cover. But Sarah was there and LoLo was here and so she had to do to Rae’s head what was achievable.

“Hold still now, and don’t you move them fingers,” she said to Rae as the little girl bent her body into the shape of a “C” between her mother’s knees. Rae presented her kitchen for unencumbered access to both her mother and the hot comb, and tried to talk herself into being a statue, but still, she trembled. LoLo watched as the stove’s flames licked the metal comb and, employing some kind of intuition, picked it up when she thought it was hot enough, and then pressed it against a folded paper towel. When she was satisfied that the comb was no longer hot enough to scorch that paper towel, she leaned into Rae’s body and slowly blew a stomach full of air onto the child’s neck as she glided the comb over the edges of her hair. LoLo knew how to deal with a hot comb. Curling irons, too. Every two weeks, she would scrub Rae’s hair in the kitchen sink, comb through the kinks with her best Afro pick, blow dry it, and, finally, press and curl the girl’s thick, kinky, curly mane into submission.

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