TL

Age: 80+ years

Occupation: Retired Nursing Assistant

TL, originally from Guadeloupe, lived in Dominica for the first several decades of her life. She recounted how women and girls styled their hair when she was younger and in the West Indies.

“When I was a child, they didn’t have chemicals, so you used to use [the aloe plant]. We used to pound it, then put it in water and strain it through the cloth, then use the water to wash our hair. We used coconut oil or castor oil to comb it — in Dominica, we would grow it,” she said. “We used mostly natural things.”

While TL’s story began differently than those of interviewed women from the United States, it arrived at the same point. Children’s hair was usually plaited, but adult women pressed their hair with a hot iron. They wanted curly, coily, or kinky hair to appear smooth, silky, and as straight as possible.

Since there were almost no white people (except for traveling missionaries) in the islands, TL does not believe that women pressed their hair to emulate white women’s hair. Instead, she believes that they wanted it to look “nice” and “neat.”

Even still, it is necessary to consider why hair must be straight to be perceived as nice and neat.

TL said that there were mixed-race (white and Black) people in the islands, and they were considered to have “good hair,” while hair that strayed from this ideal was labeled “picky hair.” These ideas suggest that their perception of “nice” hair was influenced by a eurocentric beauty standard, despite the absence of white people. Perhaps the straight-silky-hair ideal was still present from the colonial era and so deeply ingrained in the culture that it seemed like their own ideal or even like a fact.

When TL immigrated to the United States, she found a new way to keep her hair straight and silky: the relaxer. She began perming her hair because it was an easier way to manage it. For example, it would stay straight in the rain.

Today, TL loves and appreciates natural hair, and her favorite style is braids.

“I like to see braids because it shows history of the Black people,” she said.

However, TL wears wigs because the years of hot iron and chemical use caused her hair to thin and eventually fall out. She said she would prefer to wear it natural or in braids because she likes her own hair. Even still, she has made the best of it. She has various wigs to select from and has recently switched to gray wigs because she likes the gray color better for her age.