A Dreadful Event

For two weeks in the summer before my first year of high school I attended the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a camp that offers two weeks of intensive study in multiple disciplines from ballet to drama to creative writing. I had auditioned for the orchestra on my French horn and was accepted. But this story is not about my experience playing the horn, although it was memorable. My first time attending the institute (I went two other summers), however, affected my life unexpectedly.

I saw her for the first time in the cafeteria. She was a painting student. I don’t now remember what she looked like or what she was wearing at the time, but I do remember one thing—her dreadlocked hair. The bumpy, frizzy, thick locks fell down her back almost to her waist. She had a few of them tied up to keep them out of her face. What beautiful hair, I thought immediately. Soon after that came the personal resolution, I want and will have dreadlocks someday. She was the first person I had ever really seen with dreadlocks. I’d definitely never seen them on a white woman before. Unaware and probably naïve, I didn’t think of the stereotypes associated with white dreadlocked females (pot smoking, free loving hippie chicks). They were simply beautiful to me.

I got home from camp and researched like mad. I read about the history of dreadlocks and how to make them and what you should put in them and what you definitely should not put in them (Elmer’s glue) and where I should buy products. I discovered a Canadian based company called knottyboy. The website was like a dreamland. They had all the information I would ever need. Even how-to-dreadlock videos! They sold natural shampoos and beeswax and conditioning spray and all manner of decorative beads. The bright orange background of the site added extra oomph and said to me, “Get dreadlocks! They are fun!” Oh I will, I told knottyboy. I will get those dreads someday. I was scared though. Dreadlocks are permanent (unless you want to spend hours combing your hair after applying knottyboy’s dreadlock remover), and they are a statement. There is no hiding them under a piece of clothing like the tattoo on my back. If I got dreadlocks, it would say something about me. The question was what? The truth was, I didn’t really care what it would say about me. I only cared that I thought them beautiful.

And then I did a silly thing after my first year of high school. I cut all my nice, long hair off in favor of a Beatles-inspired atrocity (not for the Beatles, just for me). I had, yes, a bowl cut. I don’t remember why I did it. I went temporarily mad. My long hair would have made some meaty dreads, but my resolution to get my own set of locks must have waned with time. It was instead time for funky (and not especially flattering) short hair! I’ve always preferred having long hair, although cutting all your hair off can be liberating. Your heard feels so light and you almost believe you could float away. But beware, you might end up with a bowl cut (sorry fellow females, it’s just not a good look for us 99% of the time).

No matter, hair grows (which is what I tell people when they raise their eyebrows at the news that I’ll have to shave my head to get rid of the dreads). And fortunately, my hair grows rather fast so just a year later it was long enough. I’d spent my sophomore year missing my hair and rebuilding my resolve to get dreads. The no-turning-back-point came when I pushed submit on a knottyboy order. My starter kit would arrive in a few weeks. Can’t not get them now.

I like being dramatic occasionally, so I decided to put the dreads in the day before my junior year began. I asked my sister, Clara, and best friend, Emily, to assist me. For five hours I sat in the upstairs bathroom and endured hair-yanking pain. Getting dreads is not necessarily a fun experience. The dreader must grasp a section of hair and backcomb to form a gnarly tangle. Then the dreader massages wax into the poofy tangle, rolling the dread back and forth with the palms to create as even a strand as possible. We took breaks. I even went to IHOP with a half-dreaded head (that’s how much I don’t care what people think I look like). Finally, at the end of those five hours I had little, ugly, frizzy baby dreadlocks. They stuck out at odd angles, stiff with fresh wax.

In your first year of dreaded life, you must wake up early in the morning for hair maintenance. You must palm roll daily and backcomb at the root every other day to encourage locking and tightening. I rewaxed once a week. Sundays became hair washing day, a bigger ordeal for me than usual because I had to start drying my hair for ten minutes. If you don’t dry your dreads properly, they could eventually mildew. When people already might assume that you don’t wash your hair, you don’t want the smell of mildew rising from your head. I slept with pantyhose over my head for a year so that I didn’t rub my dreads against my pillow and loosen them. Dreadlocks are a big investment. For a while. Eventually, you feel like you have enough wax in your hair so you skip a week. You grow lazy and stop backcombing the roots. Years pass and you stop doing anything to your hair all together. You wake up and go. Sure, once a week you pull out the shampoo, wash, and carefully squeeze as much water out of your sponge-like dreads as possible, but styling gel and curling irons become obsolete objects in your dresser drawers.

(to be continued at a later date...)