Sadie’s Hair
My grandmother’s hair was invisible, smothered beneath the sheitel, wig, Orthodox Jewish women wear to prove modesty, prevent any show of pride, an unbecoming indulgence in a woman. Learning to read was also an indulgence, lest knowledge beyond a landscape of dirty clothes, endless meals to cook, crying babies, cleaning the meanest of dwellings, be revealed. Was her hidden hair a hopeful mass of springy curls seeking escape or worn down and thin from the confines of her life? All eventualities of liberation were curtailed by the patriarchy. Was there anger, resentment, hostility then, finally, resignation? The decision to leave the Russian shtetl was her husband’s based on his fear of the pogroms but it birthed her unarticulated hopes for her daughters. When you cannot read, a path reveals itself through hearsay and intuition, the mythology of America a river to float on to a destination that may crack open the prison door. So yes, the flight by night, the furtive packing of what they owned in sacks tossed over their shoulders, the Cossacks, the Carpathians, the steppes, the bloody feet, the ocean, the unknown language and streets and employment all endured for the smallest of possibilities.
My mother’s hair was a tightly controlled sheath, its exuberant auburn her only sin of pride. Though gray at twenty-five she dyed her hair until the day she died. Auburn was her only scream of defiance, yet it was closely cropped against her skull, as confined as her life. My mother’s impoverishment was an echo of the Shtetel’s. Its meager dwellings had been replaced by tenement sanctuaries for rats and roaches. Her possibilities defined by dead-end clerical jobs. Her life was a steep staircase whose highest landing was unachievable. Though forced to leave school by sixth grade, she had reached the first floor and learned to read. She glimpsed the surrounding world, frustratingly beyond her, its presence unfolding on the stained pages of five-cent books, lovingly treasured. Her fingertips touched education, the prison key, and she guided my fingers there. She said, again and again, “Be proud of your beautiful curly hair. Let it distinguish you.”
My kinky hair is now white, a gauzy curtain shot through with light. Its shadow on the sidewalk is stark, a dark etching of something abstract. It is moody, responding to fluctuations of temperature like a sulky diva, rising into little mounds of softness or in tendrils around my head like an octopus escaping. My kink was hated by my first husband. I confined it to a maze of wire-rollers each night, a corporal confirmation of knowing my place. It fringed my shoulders in choreographed waves of stiffly hair-sprayed gold, the designated color of male desire. It was later chemically altered to acceptable straightness, the bitter scent of obedience rising from it. I understood this was evidence of surrender; there seemed no other means of survival for me, though my two sons’ futures were guaranteed. Then in an unexpected juxtaposition of longing and the explosion of the women’s movement, I embraced the heretical, got a graduate degree, and allowed my kinky hair to reestablish its dominance. I cut the umbilical cord of matrimony and claimed freedom in a patriarchal world.
My granddaughter Sadie’s hair is a lion’s mane of thick, unruly curls that she changes at will with a hot iron. Her world is a confluence of traditional and alternative rites of passage. There are new complexities of ideas to develop, moments to seize, possibilities open to her as a young woman. Sadie’s hair can be frivolous with friends or tied back and constrained when running track, but the choice is hers. There are still the incessant demands of how to be, and the battering ram of conformity often strikes a winning blow but also sometimes loses to adolescent rebellion. Her relationship with patriarchy is a particular kind of synthesis, both accepting and withdrawing. She is too young to make most decisions with an adult understanding, but they’re made with a certain freedom her Russian-Jewish foremothers fought to have. For some years Sadie’s hair was controlled and denied its true nature, but lately, it is almost always a rush of the tendrils that mark my own hair, as, intoxicated with the joy and ambiguities of being young with plans of college, she steps out into the world with her curls a flag of independence.
