Letter To My Hair Poem by Amena Brown

I first noticed you when I was about three. My friends mom carved and twisted you into rows punctuated with tinfoil and beads that was the first time I learned you could swing. I loved you then.

Until grandma tried to get me pretty for church and you would not cooperate so we grazed you up and branded you with a hot iron comb. You fought and you hissed and finally submitted. You laid down, you let us have our way with you. You decided to bend and curl as we instructed you and I felt sorry for you and maybe you felt sorry for me too.

For tips of ears and back of necks sacrificed, for innocent hairs singed, for pain tolerance learned, for curling iron forehead scars for holding down my ear for the fear that I'd be burned.

School started and I began to resent you. See back then high side ponytails were in.

I wanted you to behave the same as the strands of Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. I realized I was neither brunette nor blonde, that you had no intentions of going along with us.

I was angry with you. Forced you against your will, pinning you down, holding you tight, tying you up until it hurt both of us and I cried because I was pretty sure I hated you.

It seemed you were never what I wanted you to be. You would not lay, only stand. You would not blow in the wind, only lean against it, so I decided to get you fixed. For twenty years, I subjected you to concoctions that I hoped would teach you not to be yourself. To convince you for the rest of my life to just be like someone else. I hoped it would teach you that to be yourself isn't okay, isn't enough to remind you that there is a norm and you need to conform so you did until I noticed you trying to push past who I've made you into and for the first time in a long time I remembered the beautiful. I realized I had wronged you then maybe it was time to let you be so I cut you loose. I let you grow. I learned your frequency. You didn't want to be branded and burned, subjected. You just wanted to be free. You wanted to teach me how to love because learning to love my curls would help me to love my bare face and brown skin and round curves, would help me to heal the kind of hurt a grown woman carries from being a little black girl.

Loving you is teaching me to love that little girl and the grown woman she grew up to be. I am watching you grow and as you grow, I do too. You remind me every day that we are both beautiful.