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This is a paper I wrote for my History of Textiles Class about the history of my own hair. As you read, keep in mind that this is a reflection of my own experience. I do not intend to write the history of dredlocks, just the history of my own dredlocks. Enjoy!

Atena O. Danner
History of Textiles 5/01

All About My Hair

I have dredlocks. Dredlocks are wonderful. It is more than a hairstyle; it's a part of my life. I approached my locks the way some people approach tattoos. I thought long and hard about it, considering the statement I was getting ready to make, ready to commit for the long haul. I even twisted a 'test lock' for myself, to get a feel for what it might be like. And something like a tattoo, removal of dredlocks involves a rather extreme solution, but rather a shaven head as opposed to laser surgery. "Locking down"-for some-represents the evidence of action taken. They have done something. They have made a decision and committed to a way of being, and usually for quite a while. And unlike a haircut, time does not reverse the effects of the decision-- it enhances them.

Non-African People with Dreds

Okay, this is really personal. I am not saying that "dreds" can't look okay on non-black people- even good at times. I won't say that they shouldn't do it. What I will say is that I honestly cannot think of them as real dredlocks. I feel like they need perhaps another name. My hair (and the hair of most people of African descent) will find it's way to dredlocks if I leave it alone. It's as though my hair wants to be dreded. My dredlocks took time and careful development. They required me to have a remarkably higher understanding of my own hair. They required me to be able to let go of all sorts of hang-ups and cultural conditioning. Their structure does not involve special creams or wax or never washing my hair. My dredlocks cannot be washed or coaxed away, they can only be separated. The decision to do this to my hair was based solely within myself and was one that I was prepared to live with for years, throughout my adulthood. I am not usually convinced that these things are true of the non-black people I come across wearing "dreds". Sometimes, but not usually.

My dreds began when I was nineteen years old. Sophomore year of college, I had just moved out of my mother's apartment and into one of my own. Whether I knew it or not at the time, I was deciding to engage in a kind of transition ritual. I had actually been thinking about dreds for years, but wanted to weigh my decision carefully, and not begin them before I was ready. 'Before you were ready?' you may ask. Well, in order to explain that, I must give a bit of background about black American women, our hair, and myself.

Afro-logy: My definitions of Black American Hair Culture

I have kinky hair. Very full, very tightly curled. Most black American women do, but many of them have become experts at hiding that fact at all costs. Usually if you see a black American woman with straight hair, it has either been chemically straightened or if you hold a flame to it, it will melt, because it is plastic. Sometimes natural hair is substituted. Kinky hair is in general American society, not a positive trait. In black American society it is explicitly, clearly and often out-loud labeled as bad. Bad hair. As opposed to good hair which is-guess what? -Straight. And preferably long and God willing, light colored. Sound familiar? Well, due to what I estimate as a failure to be properly debriefed after the epoch of slavery, the ideal for most black American women in terms of hair is the hair of white people. Unfortunate, as that is the exact opposite of what we have. Dredlocks are matted "locks" of hair created by an intensified interlocking of the extremely tight curls characteristic of African hair. They are the epitome of what is 'bad' about our hair. They are a proclamation of acceptance of that, and make the wearer of them not only a traitor against so many black women and their best kept secret, but also to some, a self-proclaimed agent of 'badness'.

But then, there is the other side of the coin where I am sung to and followed by eager strangers, and complimented in the streets. These incidents have increased a great But then, there is the other side of the coin when I am sung to and followed by eager strangers, and complimented in the streets. These incidents have increased a great deal since my locks took form. What is it about my hair that has helped me achieve this other level of acceptance? A good question. There are many dimensions to this relationship we have. There's the horror of me admitting to the world that we don't have straight hair. That reflects our piece of shame. Beyond that, we have a significant piece of pride. Where things have improved is where my newly recognized beauty is validated. On guard against any more denigration, embracing what is already inside of us is in many circles, a good thing. To these people, wearing dredlocks is considered to be an embrace of afrocentrism. For people who recognize this, I am achieving a goal-making progress. As well as that, there is an added level of confidence that I have in myself. Now I feel good about my hair, the way it looks. This is reflected in the way that I carry myself and I am sure than at least some of my admirers can sense that.

I spent many years involved in a long, dramatic battle against self-loathing rooted in my very scalp, and I began this battle somewhere between the ages of two and three. It was not until I was around maybe fourteen did I even entertain the notion that I might involve dredlocks with my own hair. That's when I shaved my head for the first time (admittedly harboring a tiny hope that my hair might grow back differently). When I was around sixteen, I began to think that I would like to have dredlocks, but I still wasn't willing to let go of the option of straightness.

Somewhere, in the time between my sixteenth and seventeenth year, I declared war on hair attitudes (still one of my braver endeavors) that confounded everybody. One day while at school, in some fit of frustration I released my hair from it's precariously tucked and tied down style of the day. It was too straight to have any puffiness, but not straight enough to lay down flat. It was in a very awkward place and a friend said to me, "You should just leave it like that." So in a mad fit of rebelliousness, I did. My hair was different every day. I refused to style it. I had already sworn-off chemical relaxers. (I have endured multiple chemical burns rendering my scalp mute in a few places where hair would not grow for years.) At school I began to be often called "Buckwheat' or "Don King" or "Wild Child", and other such names. My hair had been telling me for years that it was contrary to the idea of submission, and I finally began to listen. The only styles I would impose upon my hair were various kinds of braiding, and I began to experiment with different styles and different colored extensions for fun. I began a process of cracking myself out of the imposed mold of expectations placed upon me to maintain my hair according to a strict regiment of rules, and getting closer to a place where the question was not 'if dredlocks', but rather, 'when.'

So after a few years hanging out between braided hair and pure wilderness, I decided after moving out of mom's place than there could be no better time for transitions than then. To me, "locking down" meant a new level of maturity. I was entering into a new era in my life.

The second time I shaved my head was the time prior to locking down-I had spring fever and had wanted to do it for a while. When I finally decided to, I received quite a bit of opposition from my mother. One of her arguments was that I "hadn't taken time to really get to know my hair", or something like that. I had spent the previous two years "getting to know my hair." I'd spent more quality time with my hair playing and experimenting than most people ever will. And it was not until I went through that could I achieve a true sense of comfort with the next move forward. In my life, nothing has ever been as simple as a hair cut. Every change made to my hair has been as calculated and considered as a chess move. My hair is an institution in my life and it has been lodged into my psyche.

So, now I have this part of me which is a record of all that happens in my life. Any other part of my body dies and leaves me, but they are like ghosts, dead things activated into a newer, more astounding life. A life that frightens and fascinates people, from which stories are drawn out, and small legends created. I have not quite achieved the level of legendary, but in the sphere of the world surrounding me, there is a definite sort of mythology that I observe in people's reactions to me. My hair is a guarantee to them that I have some interesting story hanging about me. "Are you a model?" "Are you African?" "Are you Jamaican?" "Rastafarian?" "You look like Lauren Hill!" (I look no more like Lauren Hill than Chelsea Clinton looks like Tori Amos. Before the dreds, it was Angela Basset or Erykah Badu. The analogy applies in either case). "Are you an artist?" "A poet? -Yeah, see, I could tell. You have that look about you..." I'm on the fringes or the edges of something, because I am outside of the normal. "Your hair looks so good-I could never do that to my hair..." Alas, and alack. I am admired as I step up into my display case, and left alone to take the shit as well as the applause. The ever interesting often admired, carefully observed "other." Again and again.

Beauty Standards & Gender Issues

My hair exists in its own dichotomy. People either want me to hide it or they want to thrust their hands into it and sensuously massage it. (People will sometimes do this without permission, similar to the way people take the liberty of touching pregnant women's bellies without asking.) My hair has sort of a quality of the enchanted about it. It possesses the magic that is contained in any mass amount of hair, while having the added excitement of being unlike any mass of hair that most are familiar with. I exist in a validated exoticism. When I was sporting a shaven head, I was in the realm of the exotic, but it was dangerous. My not-having hair potentially created a gender-identification crisis for anyone passing me by, as they could not safely assume my affiliations with femininity and/ or heterosexuality at a glance. Now, with this abundance of hair, I at least had a shape of hair that could more easily be related to female. Really, my hair could easily be that of a man, but I estimate that there is a formula adding up to woman-ness that having hair fits into better than having none. So my exotic appearance as a woman with hair is less potentially alarming than that of an exotic androgen. The androgen represents both possibility and uncertainty. People have been known to fear both freedom and the unfamiliar, so the more comfortable people feel identifying my gender, the safer they feel.

The "Safe Zone"

I recently realized that I have, in a way, subverted the system of Black American hair ethics. Amidst my rebellion against the hair culture I have found a way to enter into it safely, because whether intentionally or not, I have been able to achieve one of the "Hair Infallabilities" in traditional black American hair culture: length. Length, straightness, and light color are the safest places for a black girl or woman's hair to be. I actually have some light color as well. In a twisted kind of way, even though I have announced my nappiness to the world, since it is now long and light, I'm something of a safe zone. As hard as it sometimes is to believe-the world is changing for black women. Something has happened that has made it possible for us to walk down the street with shorn heads held high, without being pointed and stared at and given directions as to "what we need to do with our hair." Sometimes. We can have masses of hair unstraightened and get professional jobs, have relationships, and be regarded as beautiful. Sometimes. Sometimes this is because the ever-changing winds of trend and fashion blow us in this direction, but sometimes, it's because it's what we choose. And sometimes is better than the previous 'never' that we had been dealing with for quite a long time. We have begun to be able to do not what is dictated, but sometimes, sometimes what we want to do.

My Best Friend

My best friend Vonetta started my locks in February 1999. She took my short hair and twisted it into the small beginnings of locks, as well as coaching me through the next couple of months of "locking down." She began her locks a more than a year before I did. We wove our hair into our relationship and it has bound it fast. In fall of 2000, I spent almost 2 months making a quilt for her and her first child whom she was anticipating that winter. I took all of the looser locks on my head, pulled them out, wrapped them in silk and wove them into the baby blanket. Everyone in my weaving class was amazed, and in spite of the typical revulsion associated with hair that has been removed from the body, all proclaimed it poignant and beautiful. My friend Vonetta and I share our hair history, having spent many hours talking about dredlock philosophies, scoping for sexy heads of locks, and talking about our utopian children and how they would have dredlocks and be so beautiful. We bleached our hair together, producing a set of similar but distinct heads of hair, mottled with varying shades between brown and yellow. We shared moisturizers and oiled each other's scalps. When she moved away, I would imagine her in Texas and how long her hair must be getting. My hair is evidence of my relationship with my best friend. When we measure lengths against each other, it's not to merely measure the length of our hair, but to gauge the length of our dredlock experience.

How have things changed since dredlocks?

I have come to the curious understanding that my hair is not to be cut. This is not really a decision that I made, but rather-like many-one that the hair made for me. Before I began the locks I never liked to have my hair cut, but then it was because I never wanted to lose any of the length I might have achieved. Now I feel as though I'd be interrupting some sort of growth some of life. Of course I realize that my hair is really dead cells extending out of my scalp. But something is different now. Once, a friend of mine cut one of my loosely connected locks off with a pair of scissors. She had been playing around with my hair and was trying to twist the locks. She came across one hanging on by a few strands and it was her reaction to remove it, as one would split ends, or dying leaves on a plant. I had to struggle a bit with myself not to be upset with her, and I wasn't quite sure why. But that is the only lock that has been removed from my head without pulling, and I don't ever intend to let it happen again. My hair has become precious to me. I take locks out all of the time, but cutting is out of the question. Perhaps I because I am so invested in the development of this hair, because I touch every one of my locks in order to cultivate their growth. And also, because this is the first hair that I've had that was 100% mine that I love completely.

I don't have to 'do' my hair. It requires a regular amount of maintenance, but if I keep it up consistently, then it requires little daily maintenance. I used to have to get up from half and hour to an hour earlier that I might have to make sure I had enough time to 'do' my hair.

People have stopped asking me: What are you going to do with your hair? Would you like the names of any stylists? When are you going to get a perm? Mind you these people were often strangers that I'd never even engaged in conversation, or worse still, people who I did not like at all taking pity on my nappy little head.

I've stopped fearing the judgement of other black women and actually seem to make some of them nervous. There is a gesture that I remember executing for years, compulsively: I would reach up and touch my hair just to see if it was in place and to pat or smooth it down if necessary. I'm sure I did this probably often enough to look quite obsessed. Now, often times when I encounter other black women, ones who have their hair straightened, something in me triggers a reaction and they will reach up-- just to check. It was a while before I realized that it was happening, but I began to watch for it, and sure enough, they were doing it. It is as though they fear that my hair is encouraging their own hair to rebel against them and revert to it's own secret state.

I am free of the neuroses associated with the constant need for one's hair to be "done." Much of my mental energy was taken up by the ever-pervasive worry of my hair's impossible upkeep. Not only was I never really driven to maintain my hair (doing my hair both worried and bored me to distraction), but my family was also too poor and too practical to spend extra money on having my hair professionally maintained on a regular basis. Beyond that, my hair did not seem to want to be tamed. If I received a perm, the smoothness and straightness (which was never quite as smooth or straight as anyone else's) would last usually no more than 2 weeks. On average, it should last about a month. So, I was often harassed about how my hair looked and developed an emotional nervousness about it that would last probably fifteen years.

I have developed a true distaste for the sight of black women with straightened hair. Their heads look violated to me. I respect their right to decide what to do with their own hair, but straightened hair seems so made-up and gruesome to me now, like dancers forced into steps that their bodies find unnatural. I do admit, however, as one of my aunts recently pointed out to me, it's really about finding what makes you feel good. Straightened hair does work for some women, just never again for me.

I can walk in the rain and the wind. I do not worry about submerging my head in water. Imagine having a bunch of broken eggshells glued back together and stacked into a tower and then attached to your head. I lived in fear of basically any of the principles of physics being applied to the space around my head. Now I challenge any kind of pressure to threaten my hair.

I am often complimented on my hair-often several times in a day. This is nice- a refreshing change.


My hair dresses me as much as my clothes do- more so even, because it is constant. My hair betrays the function of clothes though, because I am not defined by the dredlocks, but rather, what people interpret them to mean. They are more precious than any garment, but I wear them daily and vigorously. After building such a relationship with my hair, all through the years, I am pleased to finally have a situation that not only satisfies me, but provokes myriad reactions and has something of a personality of its own.



I was inspired to write this paper after reading an article in Vouge magazine by Veronica Chambers. It's been printed in a few magazines actually, look for it if you get the chance. Also, there's a pretty cool book out there called 'Dreadlocks'. It offers some really interesting perspectives on locks and the people who wear them. Much love to all of the nappy heads out there! AOD