Loving and Hating the Ginger (Memoir - your life in hair)

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there, hair, shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy
Hair, flow it, show it
Long as God can grow, my hair


Somewhere in the boxes of my mother’s “The Life of Angie” memorabilia, lives a ratty, navy blue folder from St. Anthony Catholic School. In this folder is my kindergarten “Me” project. There are little coloring sheets decorated with scribbles in my unsteady, five-year-old hand. Pages about who we live with, what our mommies and daddies do for work, what we want to be when we grow up (I apparently wanted to be a nurse!) and then there’s the page where we describe ourselves. Are we tall? Short? What color are our eyes? Our hair?

I am ___________________________.

I have _________________________ eyes,

and my hair is _____________________.

In the last blank, I wrote in my unpracticed hand the word "gold." Yep. Gold. I went through a period where I was adamantly opposed to my red hair. It was awful. It was terrible. It was…weird. This was all turned around one day by Opa. I was visiting my grandparents’ house and my mom told them about my latest drama. He sat me on his lap and we had a little chat.

“Ja, Anchie. Your mama said you no like your hair?”

* snuffle * “Noooooo!”

“You know my sister Elly, she has the red hair, too.”

“I know.”

“And my brother Anthony. And Elly’s little girl Mikey. They have the red hair.”

“I knoooowwww.”

“But you know what?” His bushy eyebrows rose as he looked me in the eye. “It’s not red!”

?????

“It’s gold!”

!!!!!

“Ja! It’s gold! And it’s only for the special people. Like you, and my brother and sister, and your cousins.”

“Gold? Hair?”

“Ja, Anchie! So you should always love your beautiful gold hair, and don’t you let anyone say anything bad. You hear?”

“Yes, Opa!” I slid off his lap and ran to Oma’s dresser for her little silver mirror and smiled at my gold hair.




“Excuse me, miss?”

“Yes?”

“Can I axe you somethin’ real quick? A favor?”

“Okay. What is it?”

“Can I touch your daughter’s hair?”

“Excuse me?”

“Please. Can I touch your daughter’s hair?”

“Sure, go ahead!”

The wrinkled hand gently caressed the crown of my head, the elderly black woman’s skin thin as tissue paper and soft as butterfly wings. She closed her eyes, smiled, and sighed.

“Thank you, miss.”

“You’re welcome…but can I ask why?”

“Oh, miss, red hair like this? Your baby’s gonna have good luck, and now I can too. Thank you so much, miss.”

“Yes, ma’am…I hope you do have good luck!”

This actually happened more than once to my mother and I as we walked through the French Quarter on weekends or waited for Mardi Gras parades to pass. The first time, she admits, was pretty weird, but after that she didn’t think twice about granting the simple request of these adorably superstitious ladies. I just liked the attention!




Question: What do two bored girls do on a Saturday night when it’s raining and nothing’s good at the movies? Answer: Go to Walgreens and buy hair dye!

That’s what Jen and I did one weekend during the spring of my junior year. I had been dunking my head in bowls of super-concentrated black cherry Kool-Aid for weeks, but it washed out in a few days and turned the shower floor red (which didn’t exactly please the mother figure). We decided it would be just brilliant to go ahead and do something more long-lasting. Of course I couldn’t do something subtle or close to natural. I chose black. Superman black. The darkest, deepest black available. It was actually called “blue-black.”

I loved it. For about a week. Then I realized it looked a little out of place on my pale, freckled skin. Then I noticed that red roots were starting to peek. Then I discovered that it wasn’t lightening even a little bit. Then we tried to strip it out, which gave me leopard-print hair. Then that led to cutting off about eight inches of it. Then my new cut looked like the butt-end of a red chicken.

Once the growing and stripping and trimming and conditioning was all said and done, I got myself back to my normal, ginger self. I’ve dyed it again here and there over the years since, but never so drastically, and usually with immediate regret.




Now I love my red curls, even when I hate them. And I hope my Petite Rouge loves hers.