AB’s hair is chesnut brown with streaks of auburn that only show up when in the right amount of light. Her curls are loose yet defined. They are the curls that the kinks of my hair long to be. Her hair can be brushed into subtle waves. When wet it will spring back into its natural curl but longer. Thankfully, she will never experience the burn of the hot comb, curling iron or relaxer. I live vicariously through her and let it lie as she flips it back out of her face with a grown up flair that it is apparently inherent in those with blessed with long hair. My mother worries that AB will become vain about her hair, while I worry that I will become (have already become) vain about her hair.
While pregnant, I wondered incessantly about what she would look like. What would her coloring be? Would she have her father’s blue eyes and my kinky ‘fro? Would she be a beautiful mix of the two of us, or would the concoction of the two of us come out all wrong, uneven, a sign of our failed relationship?
I gave birth to white baby with straight hair and big brown eyes. I deconstructed her parts into mine and his until she was no longer a baby but simply another belonging to be divided. I got the eyes, the nose, the smile. He got the ears, the eyelashes, the feet, the build. We split the hair – the curls from me, the texture (or lack thereof) from him. Her complexion has darkened thanks to sun and age; however she is still, and forever shall remain, darker than him but lighter than me.
Despite finding these elements of me in her, I still fail to see the resemblance. But then, I think about how I don’t think that I really look like either of my parents. There are no “spitting images” in my family. There are glimpses and fragments that appear and disappear. Wispy ghosts of resemblances.
This hair gives her anonymity. I like that she can slide through cultures with an ease that I cannot. She has been mistaken for a Latina (Dominican, Spanish, Mexican, you name it), an Indian (her surname, apparently, is quite common in India), and a Native American (“Oh, she’s got that Cherokee blood, right?”).
This mixture of African, Irish and Italian has given her a worldwide hue. I imagine her with her long multiracial hair tied up in a knot at the nape of her neck, backpack filled to the brim, notebook and pen in one hand and a camera in the other, traveling the world. I imagine that I have presented her with a key that will allow her to traverse this globe and be accepted by all. I picture her slipping in and out of cultural identities as she currently slips in and out of imaginary worlds from Sesame Street with Bert and Ernie to Priscilla’s Pink Planet.
She is the physical manifestion of what I wanted to experience in my youth. There is no pressure upon her to be black. There is no pressure on her to be white. She can be a chameleon and choose whatever she wants to be. This is my unintentional gift to her. This freedom that stems from the absence of kinks.
