A Metaphysical Operation, Part 2

Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims

(Page 8 of 8)

To avoid the cost of a barber, Malcolm gathered materials himself eggs, potatoes, soap, a rubber hose with a sprayer, rubber gloves and apron, a jar of petroleum jelly, and a can of lye. A clerk at a drugstore knew the routine so well that he asked, "Going to lay on that first conk?" Malcolm grinned and proudly replied, "Right!" He didn't grin during the actual procedure. Mixed together in a quart jar, the ingredients formed a yellowish, jellylike "glop." Thanks to the lye, the jar felt hot to the touch. A friend of Malcolm's warned him that the compound burned the scalp and added, "But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair." The pain turned out to be excruciating. Malcolm emerged with his original color undiminished but its natural texture replaced by "this thick, smooth sheen of shining red hair . . . as straight as any white man's."

In this context the term conk is probably an altered version of congolese, a name for a hair-straightening compound produced from copal (resin) from trees in the Congo. In the United States during the 1920s, it became a popular method for straightening hair so that it would look less "Negro" and thus more acceptable to white society. Years later, Malcolm X said of his first conk, "This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh with lye, in order to cook my natural hair until it was limp, to have it look like a white man's hair." After becoming a Muslim, he rejected the style and wore his hair closely cropped. Frequently he denounced the popularity of conks and also of such humiliations as blond wigs on black women. Malcolm admired performers like Sidney Poitier and Lionel Hampton because they wore their natural hair. Many others succumbed to the fashion and wore conks not least among them a wild and original performer named Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard. In time, as the Afro and other hairstyles became expressions of pride during the later 1960s, the conk was considered a regressive curtsey to white society. Eventually it faded away. Many black women, however, still straighten their hair, including influential figures such as model Naomi Campbell and actress Halle Berry.

Like Samson's trim at the hands of Delilah, like the Rastafarian version of the Nazirite legacy, both Malcolm X's first conk and his later rejection of the style prove a remark by the Spanish novelist Julio Cortzar: "A haircut is a metaphysical operation."

The Etiquette of Deciduousness

If ever there was a topic likely to send male commentators into raptures of hyperbole, it is women's hair. Occasionally the poetic exaggeration simply does not work. Consider, for example, Longfellow's odd imagery in "The Saga of King Olaf":

Not ten yoke of oxen
Have the power to draw us
Like a woman's hair.

The seventeenth-century English writer James Howell had employed the same sort of comparison squared in a letter written in 1621: "One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen." Such analogies sound like advertisements for the tensile strength of women's hair. Alexander Pope expressed the same sentiment without the livestock: "Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, / And beauty draws us with a single hair." Another poetic description conjures equally awkward images, Stephen Foster's "I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair, / Floating, like a vapor, on the soft summer air." Was it Jeanie or her hair that was floating? Poetic exaggeration aside, most of us consider hair appealing only when we see it in the mass and on the appropriate head. For some reason we generally regard a single hair as distasteful rather than beautiful.

The American ecologist Aldo Leopold once wrote that pine trees earn the reputation of being "evergreen" by exploiting the illusion that governments employ overlapping terms of office. Evergreen plants lose their needles slowly, dropping dead ones as new growth emerges. This way they avoid the naked phase of their deciduous neighbors. The human head knows the same trick; if we did not constantly grow new hairs to replace those falling out, we would all be bald. The term deciduous refers to a falling off during a certain stage of growth, and on occasion it is applied to antlers or even to the wings of insects. Perhaps we ought to apply it to ourselves. Like cats and dogs and pine trees, we shed. We lose an average of fifty to one hundred hairs every day, the normal rate of deciduousness increased by such activities as combing. It is interesting to imagine what myths would have evolved about hair if we shared a trait common to many of our fellow mammals hair that grows in synchronous cycles. We would shed a great deal of it at once in periodic molts.

Occasionally we leave our shed hairs in inconvenient places. Traditionally a suspicious hair on an unfaithful spouse's clothing can be as damning as lipstick on a collar. Criminals have been convicted on the evidence of hair found at the scene of a crime, especially with the growing accuracy of DNA testing. In the 1992 edition of her Etiquette, no less an authority than Emily Post advises on the proper response when encountering a stray hair. Immediately after admitting that there is no rule for choking on a bone and even advising that during the crisis one might forgo etiquette, Post provides guidelines for anyone encountering foreign objects in food. Ideally, one should remove the object and continue eating. "If," however, "it is such that it upsets your stomach (as a hair does to many people), leave the dish untouched rather than embarrass your hostess in a private home." And she reassures us that, in a restaurant, it is appropriate to discreetly inform the server. From etiquette to "bad hair days," the ancient symbol of nature's power has been reduced to social trivia exemplifying our tamed new view of ourselves.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Sims has written about science and culture for newspapers and radio, and for magazines ranging from American Archaeology to Creative Loafing. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts and Adam's Nave.