This is from "Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987" by
Alice Walker.
As some of you no doubt know, I myself was a student here once,
many moons ago. I used to sit in these very seats (sometimes still
in pajamas, underneath my coat) and gaze up at the light streaming
through these very windows. I listened to dozens of encouraging
speakers and sang, and listened to, wonderful music. I believe I
sensed I would one day return, to be on this side of the podium. I
think that, all those years ago, when I was a student here and still
in my teens, I was thinking about what I would say to you now.
It may surprise you that I do not intend (until the
question-and-answer period perhaps) to speak of war and peace, the
economy, racism or sexism, or the triumphs and tribulations of black
people or of women. Or even about movies. Though the discerning ear
may hear my concern for some of these things in what I am about to
say, I am going to talk about an issue even closer to home. I am
going to talk to you about hair. Don't give a thought to the state
of yours at the moment. Don't be at all alarmed. This is not an
appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own
experiences with our friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain
and amuse you.
For a long time, from babyhood through young adulthood mainly, we
grow, physically and spiritually (including the intellectual with
the spiritual), without being deeply aware of it. In fact, some
periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize
that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or
weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur
to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to
us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually
becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow,
we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia
of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to
becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But
what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. I
remember the waves of anxiety that used to engulf me at different
periods in my life, always manifesting itself in physical disorders
(sleeplessness, for instance) and how frightened I was because I did
not understand how this was possible.
With age and experience, you will be happy to know, growth
becomes a conscious, recognized process. Still somewhat frightening,
but at least understood for what it is. Those long periods when
something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath,
unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the
periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize we
are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all
probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
A few years ago I experienced one such long period of
restlessness disguised as stillness. That is to say, I pretty much
withdrew from the larger world in favor of the peace of my personal,
smaller one. I unplugged myself from television and newspapers (a
great relief!), from the more disturbing members of my extended
family, and from most of my friends. I seemed to have reached a
ceiling in my brain. And under this ceiling my mind was very
restless, although all else about me was calm.
As one does in these periods of introspection, I counted the
beads of my progress in this world. In my relationship to my family
and the ancestors, I felt I had behaved respectfully (not all of
them would agree, no doubt); in my work I felt I had done, to the
best of my ability, all that was required of me; in my relationship
to the persons with whom I daily shared my life I had acted with all
the love I could possibly locate within myself. I was also at least
beginning to acknowledge my huge responsibility to the Earth and my
adoration of the Universe. What else, then, was required? Why was it
that, when I mediated and sought the escape hatch at the top of my
brain, which, at an earlier stage of growth, I had been fortunate
enough to find, I now encountered a ceiling, as it the route to
merge with the infinite I had become used to was plastered over?
One day, after I had asked this question earnestly for half a
year, it occurred to me that in my physical self there remained one
last barrier to my spiritual liberation, at least in the present
phase: my hair. Not my friend hair itself, for I quickly understood
that it was innocent. It was the way I related to it that was the
problem. I was always thinking about it. So much so that if my
spirit had been a balloon eager to soar away and merge with the
infinite, my hair would be the rock that anchored it to Earth. I
realized that there was no hope of continuing my spiritual
development, no hope of future growth of my soul, no hope of really
being able to stare at the Universe and forget myself entirely in
the staring (one of the purest joys!) if I still remained chained to
thoughts about my hair. I suddenly understood why nuns and monks
shaved their heads!
I looked at myself in the mirror and I
laughed with happiness! I had broken through the seed skin, and was
on my way upward through the earth. Now I began to experiment: For
several months I wore long braids (a fashion among black women at
the time) made from the hair of Korean women. I loved this. It
fulfilled my fantasy of having very long hair and it gave my short,
mildly processed (oppressed) hair a chance to grow out.
The young woman who braided my hair was
someone I grew to love--a struggling young mother, she and her
daughter would arrive at my house at seven in the evening and we
would talk, listen to music, and eat pizza or burritos while she
worked, until one or two o'clock in the morning. I loved the craft
involved in the designs she created for my head. (Basket making! a
friend once cried on feeling the intricate weaving atop my head.) I
loved sitting between her knees the way I used to sit between my
mother's and sister's knees while they braided my hair when I was a
child. I loved the fact that my own hair grew out and grew healthy
under the "extensions," as the lengths of hair were called. I loved
paying a young sister for work that was truly original and very much
a part of the black hair-styling tradition. I loved the fact that I
did not have to deal with my hair except once every two or three
months (for the first time in my life I could wash it every day if I
wanted to and not have to do anything further).
Still, eventually the braids would have to
be taken down (a four- to-seven-hour job) and redone (another seven
to eight hours), nor did I ever quite forget the Korean women, who,
according to my young hairdresser, grew their hair expressly to be
sold. Naturally this information caused me to wonder (and, yes,
worry) about all other areas of their lives.
When my hair was four inches long, I dispensed with the hair of
my Korean sisters and braided my own. It was only then that I became
reacquainted with its natural character. I found it to be springy,
soft, almost sensually responsive to moisture. As the little braids
spun off in all directions but the ones I tried to encourage them to
go, I discovered my hair's willfulness, so like my own! I saw that
my friend hair, given its own life, had a sense of humor. I
discovered I liked it.
Again I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself and
laughed. My hair was one of those odd, amazing, unbelievable,
stop-you-in-your-tracks creations--not unlike a zebra's stripes, an
armadillo's ears, or the feet of the electric-blue-footed boobie--that
the Universe makes for no reason other than to express its own
limitless imagination. I realized I had never been given the
opportunity to appreciate hair for its true self. That it did, in
fact, have one. I remembered years of enduring hairdressers -- from my
mother onward--doing missionary work on my hair. They dominated,
suppressed, controlled. Now, more or less free, it stood this way
and that. I would call up my friends around the country to report on
its antics. It never thought of lying down. Flatness, the missionary
position, did not interest it. Being short, cropped off near the
root, another missionary "solution," did not interest it either. It
sought more and more space, more light, more of itself. It loved to
be washed; but that was it.
Eventually I knew precisely what hair wanted: it wanted to grow,
to be itself, to attract lint, if that was its destiny, but to be
left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.
What do you think happened? (Other than that I was now able, as an
added bonus, to comprehend Bob Marley as the mystic his music always
indicated he was.) The ceiling at the top of my brain lifted; once
again my mind (and spirit) could get outside myself. I would not be
stuck in restless stillness, but would continue to grow. The plant
was above the ground!
This was the gift of my growth during my fortieth year. This and
the realization that as long as there is joy in creation there will
always be new creations to discover, or to rediscover, and that a
prime place to look is within and about the self. That even death,
being part of life, must offer at least one moment of delight.
(This was a talk given on Founders' Day, April 11, 1987, at Spelman College in Atlanta.)
Source:
http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Falls/8860/ceiling.html