Roots And Culture

“Where do you get your hair done?”

Mary had just arrived that month, transplanted from Kenya to Kent because of her new husband’s job at a local hotel. The question didn’t surprise me; I knew it would come eventually. It had to. There weren’t many people she could have asked, seeing as the question was actually, “where can I get my hair done?”. In our village there was me, and Donna. Kind of like a black girls’ support network. Only Donna always went up to a woman’s house somewhere in London and came back with a head full of new plaits and visible gridded scalp, and it was like a glorious mystery to me. She sometimes told me before she went, and I would order a box of relaxer so that I could straighten my hair at home, back in the days when I was chemically dependent. Now, Mary had enough to deal with, learning the language of life in rural England, without having to make her way up to the sprawling metropolis in search of a hairdresser on her own. From where we stood, the A2 and A20 stretched down to us like dark, hairy arachnid arms, reaching out to us, pulling us in. I knew that the closer we drew to the spider-city’s southern belly, the more they became cluttered with shopfronts offering fried chicken, money transfers, minicabs and, of course, hair. Hair in all forms. Hair to buy. Hair products. Hairdressing. But not just any hair – our hair.

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