The Re-Birth of Nap

Until last Christmas, my 85-year-old grandmother and I feuded for five years over whether black is beautiful. She is a short, dark woman, with kinky, gray hair who has been trying for seven decades to lighten her skin. When I wanted to hit below the belt, I would remind her that Michael Jackson had unlocked the secrets of skin whitening and suggest that she contact him for advice.

For four years, the gist of Grandma's argument was that I should straighten the nappy Afro I was growing. I had stopped straightening my hair when I went away to college because I was tired of trying to conform to white standards for female beauty.

Grandma's arguments were so patently racist she sounded like she had been possessed by the deceased founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Her mouth didn't froth or anything, but often she'd narrow her beady eyes and upchuck a loogie on me and my black pride. "Black people look like monkeys," she would say. "Everybody knows white women are the most beautiful women on the face of this planet."

My nappy Afro had dashed my hopes of ever watching TV in peace at her house. Then at Christmas 1999, I inadvertently cast a spell over her that forced Nathan Bedford Forest to retreat. I got dreadlocks.

I had started locking my Afro a few weeks after visiting her the previous Christmas. I could tell she loved my new look. "What's that called?" she asked, frowning.

"Locks," I said. "You like it?"

"Look all right," she mumbled and we watched the rest of the "Family Feud" in silence.

While the views my grandmother expressed dismayed me, they were reasonable for someone whose black features have been subjected to 85 years of white ridicule. Tell a person she's a monkey long enough and threaten to lynch her if she doesn't believe you. It's strange how she'll start to agree.

To mitigate white reproach and the reproach of brainwashed fellow blacks, African-Americans have been covering their kinky hair, gelling it straight with animal fat, or frying it straight with hot combs and chemical relaxers since the inception of slavery.

"Black women straightened their hair to survive," said stylist Michelle Robinson of Oakland, California, who now locks hair. "We had to work in white folks' houses. Who was going to let us do that with a nappy head of hair?"

Then, during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, the unprocessed Afro became a common black hairstyle. When the movement dissipated, many black women returned to straightening their hair.

But in the past five years, particularly in urban areas, large numbers of black women and men have begun to embrace natural hair again. Chemical relaxer sales have been in a slump since 1997, according to market analyst Packaged Facts, who attribute the product's sluggish sales to "the popularity of low maintenance natural [unprocessed] looks." As it was during the Black Power Movement, it's now hip to be nappy. And dreadlocks, or more precisely -- their manicured cousins, twisted locks -- seem to be at the forefront of this development.

In black neighborhoods across America salons and stylists specializing in hair locking are cropping up every where. Go into a beauty supply store serving black communities and vying for shelf space with the hair straighteners, you will likely find any of five new pomades released within the past five years for locking black hair.

"Four years ago, there were two salons in Baltimore that locked hair," said Tyra Jackson, the maker of the pomade Princess Kayla's Natty Dreadlock. "Now there are over 20, all of which sell Princess Kayla." Jackson retails her product through 80 vendors, including the California-based, upscale health foods chain store, Whole Foods.

In addition to Baltimore, the upsurge in hair locking is apparent in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, where the salons and stylists who pioneered twisted locks originated the style. When I asked the founding mothers (most of the stylists are women) to disclose their business' sales, they all demurred. But they eagerly assured me business was booming. "We work hard every single day!" said Rosario Schuler-Ukpabi, the proprietor of the Oakland-based Oh! My Nappy Hair.