One month after Stephen died I graduate from law school. I’d had to slap blinders on my eyes, on my heart, to get from his funeral to my thesis and through final exams. Next up is the bar exam, which I’ll take in July.
I’d accepted a job offer with Cooley Godward, which meant I’d be starting my law career in California and would therefore have to take the California Bar Exam, which vies with New York’s for the title of being the most difficult to pass. Many people retake it. Many times. To have any chance at passing this three-day exam, you had to study like hell for eight weeks straight.
I was adamant about passing on the first try. The lawyers at Cooley Godward were counting on me to pass. I wasn’t going to be that Black person who didn’t pass the first time.
Bar study begins a week before graduation. I set up a grid of how many hours I have to study each day and which topics I need to cover. I need no distractions for these eight weeks, including the regular hassle of caring for my impossible hair. So for the third time in my twenty-six years I take myself off to a Black hair salon and for the first time I ask for a real Black hairstyle: braids. Seven hours and $200 later I have them, a gleaming set of thin long ropes that spring out from my scalp like a dome. I shake my head from side to side, enjoying the swish they make against my shoulders and the way they look the same whether I swing them to the left or the right or catch a glimpse of them from the back. Gone are the frizzy bits, the untamable sections. My new braids are as beautiful as they are expensive, and yes, as I’d hoped, they are very simple to care for.
What I hadn’t counted on was how differently I’d be treated with these braids. I take the same bus and subway lines to and from my apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. Go to the same grocery store and restaurants. But some white strangers now glance warily at me on the sidewalk, pull their bodies and arms away from me and into themselves as I walk past. At the Star Market a white mother looks over at me and then puts a protective arm around her child while keeping her eyes on me.
It is wild. Like taking a high-power microscope to racism and seeing it writhe and wriggle under the glaring light. And it is depressing.
I know from experience and academic study of these issues that one’s life—my life—as a light-skinned biracial Black person is one of relative racial privilege. My skin that in winter wanes from brown paper bag to high yellow and my so-called white way of talking assuages whites who might otherwise have been fearful of me. Seven hours spent getting braids in a Black salon somehow overrides this, and catapults me onto a higher level on the Blackness spectrum. At least in the eyes of some whites in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For years I’d been trying to be more Black to fit with Black people while simultaneously trying to pass as white enough to avoid the judgment of whites. But these braids are making me seem more Black to whites—which I’d never known was my goal; only in the experience of it do I begin to understand how important this is to me.
I know for the first time that I’d craved to be Black in the eyes of whites. I’d never belonged with or to whites, so being seen as Black by whites was a way to definitively belong somewhere to something and someone, even while my actual relationship to the Black community was still tenuous. In this sense my braids feel like an upgrade. A promotion. An invitation past the bouncer into the club. My braids actively do away with the ambiguity I’d struggled with for most of my conscious life. They look white people in the eye and say, “Yes I’m Black” in ways my own vocal cords and life experience have never articulated. Until sporting the braids, I’d been drawn in pencil. Smudge-able. Erasable. With the braids I am redrawn in ink.
I cherish them for four months through studying for the Bar Exam and a few months beyond, but next up is a law firm in Silicon Valley where Black hair is considered unkempt even in a place boasting “casual Friday” dress. I remove the braids myself and go back to blowing my hair dry and smoothing it straight with an iron.
When I take the braids out, my identity’s temporarily strong outline begins to fade. I move west, start work at Cooley, and right before Thanksgiving I learn that I passed the California Bar Exam on the first try.