Shaved

Almost a year ago, I shaved my head.

Over spring break, I lived in an abandoned elementary school, working for an anarchist group that was gutting homes in New Orleans. On the top level of the school, Katrina refugees had written messages to God on the chalkboard as the waters rose. They were airlifted out, but the chalkboard still read, “We trust in You, let us live, Jesus.” and in a child’s scrawl in pink chalk, “I love you, Lord.”

We slept in the downstairs classrooms, on green cots, lined with plastic to prevent us from catching lice. Around the school, we all wore bandanas and caps, hiding our natural hair, just in case. We looked like converts to a new religion, with our similar headscarves, our muddy, reeking clothes, and our tired bodies. We only took off our bandanas at night, when we went to the French Quarter and pretended to be a normal spring break.

But bandanas notwithstanding, I got lice on my last full day. Before dinner, the nurse filed through my hair, her gloved fingers tugging and pulling. She looked apologetic when she handed me a bottle of chemical shampoo, pointing me towards a private shower in the gym. I stood in the gym shower for over an hour, washing, combing, and picking through my hair, pulling tufts of hair onto the wet tile floor. I felt infirm. My scalp was cold. There was so much hair on the ground.

On the 17 hour ride home, wearing two hats and feeling like a leper, I debated shaving it all off. At home, that would be unthinkable. No woman shaved her head. Girls in my high school straightened, toasted, toasted and drowned their hair into a lovely chemical shine. Hair took time. Extreme, artificial care was the definition of beauty.

I want people to like and trust me, and I was afraid that shaving off my hair would make people mistrust and think less of me. Strangers would think that I was a skinhead. My boyfriend would dump me. No one would dance with me until I looked like a woman again.

Then, when I came back to college, I realized how much college wasn’t home. No one would make fun of me here. My boyfriend had long hair, and given our close contact, it would be hard not to contaminate him or something he owned. Shorthaired women weren’t rejected: here, they played rugby.

Despite my use of the nit-killing shampoo, I still felt the lice burrowing into my scalp when I showered. Worse, my hair felt dead. Battered and abused, it hung limply past my ears, thinned on top. It was a strange mop of fiber, not another limb of my body, the way it used to feel. For most of my life, I had long hair, falling down past my butt, a dark brown color. It was one of my very few sources of pride, as I’ve never been a very pretty girl. My hair stood out, it was old-fashioned and ungainly, but somehow lovable. I could be a damsel.

The night before spring break officially ended, I decided to shave it all. After setting down a plastic bag tarp, I started chopping with construction scissors as my boyfriend took photos. After I only had odd tufts of hair poking up, my boyfriend shaved the rest. It felt amazing. I felt as though each inch of scalp was laden with millions of nerves that the razor was delicately tickling. And it stayed like that.

When the hair grew back, it was silky soft, impossible not to stroke. The hair grew fast, thick, and darker than before. Each morning, I looked like a different person. I felt more open, I felt more alive. The windows were opened and the ceiling was peeled away. I was myself, in ways I can never describe.


(March, 2007)