The Surrender of a Cornrow Sistah

Safiya Miller

"One...two...three...four...", she sat still as several white classmates gathered around her head counting her cornrows one by one. Her scalp screamed with the careless touch of each of their fingers. She calmly and silently continued working on her artwork despite the pain throbbing through her tender, freshly-styled head. Her mother had just finished braiding her hair the night before, and that two hour process of strain, stress, and patience is one she always dreaded. The constant ripping of the comb through her kinky 4c textured hair made seconds feel like minutes, and minutes as hours. She winced every time her mother's fingers crawled to the front of her scalp, restarting a new three-strand braid connected to the roots of her head. Her mother's fingers danced, methodically repeating the steps: under, over, through, under, over, through. In and out they weaved through the thickness of her mane, never skipping a beat or misplacing a hair. Each braid stood tall, slightly different than the others, but no less intricate. With each cornrow her mother completed, the tight pressure in her head and scalp made it increasingly difficult to wiggle her face muscles or even blink. "How much longer? My butt hurts." she asked, with her arms draped over her mother's knees. "Hush child, you're almost done." her mother calmly responded. One braid at a time, her mother continued working magic with only three strands of hair. Like the artwork circling the art room, her cornrows are art lining her head, and the artistry and skill encompassed in the entwining of hair should be obvious even to the naked eye. "Sixteen...seventeen...eighteen...nineteen!", the children exclaimed as they reached the last cornrow. Many emotions flooded through her as a classmate stated in jest, "It's perfect! She has nineteen braids and there are nineteen of us. Everyone could rip out their own braid and use it as a paint brush!" She joined in with the laughter with the other kids, but inside she loathed the thought of uprooting all her hair. She struggled to find humor in an image of her bald head while her white classmates used her hair, her personal form of art, as their tool. She imagined everyone using her hair, a feature they could not possess, and leaving her bald, barren, with nothing. Unlike the pictures and clay artworks being honored on the walls of the art classroom, the class found humor in destroying and stripping her of the artistry that decorated her head. In that moment she hated her hair, as it's distinctiveness forces its possessor to stand out without permission; all of the attention was focused on her, Harmony laughed with her peers, hiding her insecurities and self-doubt.