She is the daughter of the king of the Palace of Crystal, who lives on yonder island. Every morning, at the break of day, she combs her golden hair; its brightness is reflected on the sea, and up among the clouds.
—From the Slavonic fairy tale, “Golden Hair,” translated by John Naaké
Shay is sitting with her feet soaking in the plastic pedicure bucket when Caroline la Blonde shows up at La Joconde to have her weave resewn. There are constant arrivals at La Joconde, the most expensive beauty parlor on Naratrany: a white-tiled cubicle with a single sink, a rickety hood dryer, and a doorway that opens directly onto the dust and noise of the taxi rank at the crossroads of the Finoana market. Flies come and go from the zebu meat hanging like red rags at the nearby butchers’ stalls, wandering dogs push through the long strips of plastic shielding the threshold, ragged child vendors arrive with trays of fritters and samosas to tempt the two Malagasy beauticians: plump, solemn Thérèse, and her thin, vivacious sister, Gisèle.
Customers at La Joconde are a varied lot, many of them women of the island gentry—Malagasy, French, Italian, South African, Indian, Mauritian—who pull up in Land Rovers and gleaming SUVs with blacked-out windows. The salon is popular with anyone who can pay the price—exorbitant for Madagascar, but in euros, remarkably low—for the benefit of the sisters’ skilled hands, trained in Rome and Toulouse; for their beauty products imported from Nigeria and France. Women on vacation, desperate for a blow-dry or a retouch of nail polish, are initially terrified by the rudimentary look of the place, but soon find themselves reassured by the strict cleanliness and the intense, near-religious attention to details, which is the same in serious beauty salons everywhere. The aesthetic creed of Thérèse and her sister is summed up by the emblem on the plastic sign that swings amid the market dust and blazing sunlight outside the door: printed in crude two-tone brown and blue is the image of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, from which La Joconde proudly takes its name.
“Salut mes poupées!” calls Caroline as she swans in. She is the most gorgeous of the bar girls on the island this year. Small-boned and slender like most Malagasy women, but unusually tall, with that seductive Sakalava bubble-butt in tight white French jeans, a tiny nose, heart-shaped lips, commanding eyes, skin with the healthy gleam of dark syrup, and in contrast to it all, the source of her nickname: that dramatic fall of yellow hair to her waist. Hundreds of euros’ worth of natural blond tresses shorn from some distant Eastern European head, hair that cloaks Caroline in glory, all the more powerful because it is so clearly hers not by nature but by choice: a pirate’s swag of plundered gold arrived by who knows what channels from the far north. Outrageous, improbable hair out of a Grimms’ tale, which strangely suits her midnight beauty.
Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, thinks Shay. During this vacation stay, she has seen that head of hair many times around the island, gleaming like a banner through the kinetic shadows of dance clubs like Chanson de la Mer, and flashing by in the big Cayenne belonging to her latest lover. Caroline la Blonde is strictly deluxe. One never sees her on foot in the market buying a basket of manioc greens, or haggling at a used clothing stall. And she is serious-minded: said already to have used her considerable earnings from infatuated foreign men to build her family a sizable house in their village on the Grande Île near Port-Bergé.
Shay greets Caroline, and Caroline, seating herself gracefully in a wobbly salon chair, replies “Bonjour!” with the peculiar mixture of pride, deference, curiosity, and barely hidden resentment with which island women like Caroline address Shay, and other wealthy women of color. On Naratrany, Shay occupies a high-ranking position as the foreign mistress of a luxurious house, yet to Caroline she looks much like any mixed-race hussy who takes the boat in from Diego Suarez during the tourist season, to steal business from locals.
Normally the conversation would end here, but Shay, mesmerized by those rippling golden waves, which Gisèle is now deftly brushing out and clipping up to show the intricate pattern of extensions sewn onto braids against the scalp, exclaims: “Ils sont vraiment jolies, tes cheveux!”
And Caroline gives a little start of surprise at the compliment, and looks directly at Shay in the wavery mirror. “Merci!” she replies. Adding, with a mock-regretful sigh: “Malheureusement, pas les miens. Unfortunately, not mine.”
As if, thinks Shay, anyone were under any illusion that it was really your hair! But as Gisèle begins snipping the old stitching, and pulling out the tracks of extensions that will be resewn, Caroline catches Shay’s eye in the mirror and winks.
The squatting manicurist, a very young Sakalava girl who seems to be a relative of the two beauticians, is using a pumice stone to scrub Shay’s heels with agonizing slowness; manicures and pedicures take hours at La Joconde. To lessen the suffocating midday heat, the overhead bulb in the tiny salon has been turned off, and in the half-light from the doorway and the somber glow of the mirror frame, the arrangement of the five women in the small space seems deliberate, as if they are enacting a mysterious rite, or are part of an old allegorical painting.
They are all absorbed in what they are doing: the young girl with her knobs of neatly parted hair bent over Shay’s feet; beautiful Caroline, straight-backed, chattering noisily away in Malagasy, as, with a keen eye toward the mirror, she watches the weave swiftly stripped away, and her dark, sculptural close-braided head emerge; Gisèle, skinny in a floral sundress, her own hair straightened in a pert sixties bob, hands flashing in a graceful repetitive movement as if she is harvesting a crop, as she removes the lengths of golden waves, gives them a quick practiced shake, and drapes them over a hairpin stand; plump, ponytailed Thérèse, in green leggings and a ruffled top, deftly seizing each track of hair, swiftly shampooing it in the small rickety sink, then pinning it up on a rack that seems to be exclusively for weaves; Shay, the American spy, wearing batik trousers from Bali, her own hair a mass of natural kinky curls that her husband loves, but that she herself sometimes refers to as “the jungle.”
The long mirror seems to double the number of figures in the dim little salon and the crowded effect is increased by the models in the posters for foreign hair products pinned up on the walls: Nigerian women, Indian women, French women, all eerily submerged in their own perfection. But the hypnotic focal point of the scene is that disembodied blond hair, now being held aloft and painstakingly blown dry by both sisters in a way that suggests that they are handling a holy relic—Saint Veronica’s kerchief, thinks Shay frivolously, or the Turin Shroud.
She notices that Caroline ignores the extensions once they are off her head, and sits contemplating her flawless face and natural hair with the same complacent satisfaction she had when wearing the weave.
Shay pulls her other foot out of the bucket, and, as her endless pedicure proceeds amid the monotonous rise and fall of women’s voices and the tinny salegy music on Radio Fanambarana, she closes her eyes and falls into a reverie about blondes.
Like many women of color, Shay has been bothered by blond hair all her life. Since the time she noticed that her favorite fairy tales were filled not just with golden treasure but with golden tresses adorning the heads of imperiled princesses. Since elementary school days back in Oakland, when all the fourth-grade boys at Bentley had their foolish hearts tied up in the long yellow plaits of the Kosslowski twins. Since the afternoon when, shopping with her mother, Shay asks for a T-shirt in blue, her favorite color, and her normally considerate mother informs her that blue is for little blond girls.
A free-floating resentment of blondes is of course just part of the endless Black American discourse on hair: a wilderness of mingled opinion and tradition whose borders touch politics, aesthetics, folklore, shame, sex, and love. Shay has been immersed in it her entire life, especially when, at an early age, she begins experimenting with what grows on her own head. Braiding it, straightening it, encouraging its natural texture, growing it waist-length, or cropping it to her skull, dyeing it pink in high school, adding clattery beads—even trying out blond highlights herself, in the period when Black female hip-hop stars are going through a Marilyn moment.
But now at La Joconde, she is pondering what yellow hair signifies in Madagascar. Blondes, she muses, have always been fetishized in art and literature encompassing colonial themes, as emblems of sacred white womanhood—the apex of European civilization, shining in contrast to a tenebrous background of savagery as Fay Wray did in the grasp of King Kong. Even little Naratrany has had its legendary blondes. French residents of the island still talk of the daughter of the French sugar mill owner who in colonial days used to gallop her horse up and down Finoana Beach, pale tresses streaming in the wind. In an early guide to the Mozambique Channel, a Belgian marine biologist unprofessionally included a color print of his wife afloat in a transparent Naratrany lagoon, bright hair haloing her head like a Cyanea capillata.
And there is the one renowned Madagascar blonde whom Shay knows quite well: Helle, who has been visiting the Red House since the Senna children were toddling bare-bottomed on the beach. The arrival of Helle is heralded by the sputter of an ancient Land Rover at the gate, and the subsequent groans and quick disappearance of Senna and any other Italian man. “Cazzo, no, she’ll talk us to death! You deal with her, Shay!”
Then there will come a shrill warbling “Yoo hoo!” as over the threshold sweeps a tall, corpulent woman in her seventies, bundled into a safari vest, golf trousers, hiking sandals, a frilly blouse, and an old-fashioned graduated string of pearls. Her short, poodle-curled mass of whitening fair hair crowns an eager, sun-creased, unmistakably German face, which in its time must have been of show-stopping beauty. Born in Essen at the apex of the Third Reich, she was, at her postwar peak, a belated blossom of the Aryan ideal.
“Shay, my angel, it’s me, Helle! Just stopped in for a swim! You know, my beach over there at Havoana is terrible, just terrible. The villagers are still sneaking out to do shit on the rocks, you can’t imagine how unhygienic, the wretches!”
Helle chatters in English with only a slight accent, or in fluent French, since her long-dead husband, a shipping magnate who once owned much of northeastern Madagascar, was originally from Briançon. In her wake, bearing a basket full of beach towels and presents for the Senna children, trots a diminutive, round-faced Betsimisaraka chauffeur who looks about sixteen, and whom she refers to as “mon petit”—with such frequency that everyone calls him Mompty.
Helle, who passed much of her life out in the bush on the Grande Île, believes in good old colonial-style visits, the Kiplingesque kind where settlers are described as riding hundreds of miles across the wilderness to “see a white face.” She’ll breeze into the Red House of a morning, take an early swim and then lie soaking up sun on Finoana Beach, her huge breasts solidly propped in an old-fashioned balconette one-piece, her tow-colored ringlets spilling out from a kerchief tied peasant-style. She stays for a long, gossipy lunch, stretches out in a bedroom for siesta, takes tea with the Sennas’ neighbour Floristella—once, long ago, a lover of hers—and then, in high spirits, sits down to dinner with the Sennas.
She acts grandmotherly to the Senna children, bantering and flirtatious toward Senna, and effusively maternal toward Shay, who takes her with more than a grain of salt, convinced that only an accident of historical timing kept the older woman from being an ardent Grossdeutsch patriot. Undeterred, Helle—who adores visiting the Red House—heaps Shay with compliments, and offers her a constant stream of antediluvian advice on housekeeping in the tropics: how a proper memsahib does things.
“You have to be on guard every moment!” she tells Shay, sitting on the edge of a beach chair, and vigorously rubbing her huge, maculate knees with a towel, her breasts and curls bouncing, as Shay tries not to stare at so much exuberant Teutonic flesh discolored by so many years of subequatorial sun. “Your servants are children, and you have to take charge: not just to keep them at work, and to prevent them from stealing—they all steal—but to make sure they eat properly, and go to church. (The Muslims are observant, it’s the Catholics you have to push.) And you have to keep an eye on who they sleep with—you can’t have them making babies all over your compound—and guide them when it’s time for them to marry. I chose a wife for Mompty and he is very happy!”
Shay’s chest contracts with outrage as she listens to the recitation of these plantation homilies, but at the same time she finds it perversely fascinating to hear a voice straight out of another epoch—like watching a live tyrannosaurus lumber across the landscape. Helle herself is blithely unaware of saying anything untoward.
In the 1950s, her husband, Fabrice Gagne—a gnomelike, immensely rich trader who made his wily way unscathed from enjoying close wartime ties to the short-lived Madagascar Vichy government to enjoying close postwar ties to the fledgling Malagasy Republic—set up his ravishing young German wife in a palatial compound surrounded by coffee and clove plantations in the Atsinanana uplands near Toamasina. Lonely European men stationed in remote outposts traveled for days just to gaze at Helle at dinner in a low-cut evening dress. Her renown extended outside Africa, to some very high places. She tells Shay: “Once, in Venice, when I was at a concert in Piazza San Marco, the king—Vittorio—leaned back and told me a naughty joke right there in public. I had to smack him!”
And Shay knows the story to be true—that even kings became smutty little boys to punish, when Helle was at the height of her golden power. As Toamasina with its bustling port became Gagne’s fiefdom, his wife ruled the upper strata of European-Malagasy society from Antananarivo to Fort Dauphin. But as the twentieth century wore on, the nationalist revolution and old Gagne’s series of strokes arrived at the same time. After the government seized his plantations and freighters, Gagne ended his life half-blind and babbling on his veranda, overlooking a sea of dying coffee trees on land swiftly being reclaimed by starving villagers eager to plant manioc.
In his last years, he found comfort in the arms of Malagasy concubines, whom Helle had sometimes literally to chase out of her house. She talks scoffingly of this to Shay, advising Shay to ignore any little tropical amours into which Senna may stray. She titters: “You know what they are like, these Malagasy hussies! They’re simply a housekeeping problem—like bedbugs.”
Shay looks incredulously at her when she says these things, wondering if Helle has actually forgotten that she is talking to a Black woman. But it has long been apparent that Helle’s obsessive monologues are not really addressed to her, Shay, but directed toward a crepuscular lost dimension of history.
Nowadays, after years of widowhood, her beauty demolished by time and overindulgence in Three Horses lager, Helle comes and goes between Toamasina and the healthier climate of Naratrany. On the small island she owns a beach bungalow and, like all the other old-time Europeans, occupies her days with property speculation and complicated lawsuits against her neighbors. Everyone, villagers and foreigners, knows her, and she is greeted with a kind of amused homage along the dirt roads as she hollers greetings from the Land Rover, yellow curls still valiantly bobbing in the wind. Shay has always found it mystifying that Helle, living relic of colonialism, is so well liked among the Malagasy of all classes. Both the opinionated Madame Rose and the fastidious Bertine la Grande show her warm approbation, while burdened Mompty serves her as if she were an elderly relation. Perhaps this arises, Shay thinks, from the respect that islanders seem to have for people who are unabashedly true to themselves—those who follow a strict code, though that code may be a hateful one and belong to a world that no longer exists.
One night Helle turns up for dinner at the Red House with an unexpected companion: another woman, much younger and thinner, with straight dull yellow hair cut off sharply at her shoulders, dressed in an odd overlapping array of voluminous clothes. The Sennas and their friends are stunned to learn that this is Helle and Gagne’s daughter, Erika, who has always lived in France. Who even knew they had a child?
“Poverina, they kept her a secret,” says Senna, sotto voce, to Shay. “You can see why.”
Though Helle offers no explanation, it is immediately apparent that her daughter suffers from a grave systemic disorder: below her flaxen fringe, blue eyes stare out from growths like reddish coral that encrust her face, and the same growths gnarl her hands and what can be seen of her arms. Proteus syndrome, Shay hears later: a lifelong affliction.
It is an uncomfortable evening, as the Sennas’ guests cannot bring themselves to engage in the usual lively gossip with Helle, as if her daughter’s disfigurement somehow extends to her. And although Erika, in the few remarks she exchanges with the women of the party, shows herself to be a charming and highly cultured person, still it takes resolution to look at her. Mother and daughter leave early, as Erika, who cannot stay long in tropical temperatures, must fly out in the morning. Shay walks them to the entryway, thinking how like specters the two pale-headed women look, as, lit by Mompty’s flashlight, they vanish inside the car.
All this has flashed through Shay’s memory by the time she drowsily stretches out her newly polished nails to dry, and watches the hairdresser’s scissors trimming the ends of Caroline la Blonde’s waist-length weave. Only tiny amounts are snipped away, little tips of gold littering the floor, because the weave represents millions of ariary, more than an average year’s salary in Madagascar. It is a literal fortune, this top-quality hair that has been bargained for and sold by the gram, like drugs. Hair that was harvested, probably, in a village of Moldavia or the Ukraine: a place just as poor as a village in Madagascar, the kind of place from which girls with similar corn-colored tresses are trafficked to become prostitutes in Western Europe and the Middle East.
Track after track of rippling gold, newly washed and dried, is swiftly stitched with cotton thread onto Caroline’s natural strong, blue-Black Sakalava hair, which has been braided into spiraling cornrows as Malagasy women do before ancestral ceremonies. Just a narrow frame of her original hair, bleached to the shade of the extensions, is left free around the edges and the parting. After these edges have been flat-ironed, pomaded, and blended to disguise the stitching, the two sisters, working together, run a curling iron through the long tresses. And finally Caroline stands up in all her Goldilocks glory, dark face glowing with satisfaction, loose flaxen ringlets cascading to her slim hips.
And then the two hairdressers, their little assistant, and Shay exclaim, “A-za-la!”—that inimitable Malagasy ejaculation of admiration and wonder. And Caroline rocks back and forth on her platform sandals, swinging her shining cloak of hair and laughing her little girl’s laugh. She is, after all, very young—maybe nineteen at most.
Just then, a tall shadow fills the doorway, and a man pushes through the plastic strips. He is Caroline’s boyfriend, a Frenchman in his fifties, whom Shay knows as the owner of the Chambord, one of the few elegant hotels on Naratrany. He is a handsome sun-bronzed man with a forthright face and an air of wealth and authority, but as he enters his shoulders slump and his eyes immediately fasten on Caroline with an imploring look, like a dog begging mutely for a treat.
Shay greets him, but he ignores her and every other woman in the room but Caroline, whom he approaches with unnatural slowness and heaviness, as if some invisible current is dragging him to her side.
“Ah, c’est toi,” says Caroline, in a bored tone, still swinging her weave and not bothering to look at him. She indicates Thérèse with a curt nod and commands the man: “Pay!”
The sleepy atmosphere in La Joconde suddenly crackles with strange energy as the sleekly barbered Frenchman, dressed in a fashion that suggests golf or sailing at some expensive European resort, fumblingly opens his wallet, yanks out a mass of ariary bills, and, eyes lowered, hands it to the hairdresser.
“Bien,” says Caroline la Blonde, with queenly indifference. “Now—go and wait.”
Shay stares, and all the Malagasy women burst into giggles, as the man obediently turns and exits the shop.
Outside in the market square is the big gleaming Cayenne, and Caroline, after adjusting her lipstick, exchanging a bit more banter with the hairdressers, and offering a friendly goodbye to Shay, takes her leave. Through the fly strips, Shay watches her saunter outside and issue a careless command to the Frenchman standing like a footman beside the car: “Well, what are you waiting for? Open!”
Shay catches sight of her own reflection in the dim wavery mirror and finds she has lifted her freshly polished fingernails up to touch her unruly curls, which for an instant seem coarse and dull, after the extravagant false locks she has been admiring. She is reflecting on a number of things—on beauty, subjugation, and the perverse and fascinating mystery of how and where they intersect—but what also comes to mind is an image of Helle. Helle, who has toppled from her pedestal and outlived the epoch of her own gilded dominion, riding along beside her tragic daughter, their hair blowing like dry-season pasturage as the battered Land Rover passes along the roads of dark people, who wave to them with unreadable smiles. Has Caroline, with the aid of her chimeric tresses, snatched back even more of the power, avenging the Black and brown women Helle has despised?
The market is closed for the afternoon, vendors curled up asleep in the shade of their stalls. As Shay slips her sandals on her freshly pedicured feet and opens her bag to pay her own bill, the sudden breeze of high tide sweeps in from the bay, rattling the La Joconde sign with its faded image eternally smiling out at the dusty thoroughfare.
“Ah, Caroline! Comme elle est belle!” murmurs Gisèle dreamily, as she takes Shay’s money. And the little manicure girl, with her thick hair twisted into careful knots all over her head, squats and sweeps up the centimeters of trimmed golden weave, collecting them into a small basket as if they will not be thrown out but weighed up, then locked away, like bankable treasure.