FROM THE YOUNG girl in a beauty shop in a mall in Des Moines, Iowa, whose red mullet bristled like a fox’s tail, who’d said, ‘I just wouldn’t like, have a clue like what to do with hair like yours,’ to the older woman in the high street hairdressers in the north of England who looked as if she’d been hairdresser to the Brontë sisters, and who’d said, ‘I niver dun air like yourn, lass,’ the writer had become quite used to being told by hairdressers in different parts of the world that they did not do Black hair.
‘There is a woman here who does hair like yours, but she’s not working today.’ That woman. She is perpetually on her day off from hair salons all over the western world. Why, just the day before the woman in this story had arrived in Paris she had tried to get her hair washed, calmed with conditioner, set on medium-sized rollers and dried under a hairdryer for half an hour, in a salon on London’s Oxford Street, and she’d been told that the woman who did her kind of hair was not working that day. So, she’d arrived in Paris looking ‘like a bush baby’, as a hairdresser in Durban had once tactfully described her. But from the taxi on the way to her hotel she saw it, the answer to her hairdressing needs.
‘Les Trois-Îlets’ was lettered in gold leaf on the transom above the front door of the shop; and through the frosted glass of the French doors she’d been able to make out the figure of a dark-skinned woman. One day, she thought, I just might write a piece about trying to get my hair done in different places in the world, but really, she knew that she would never to do it. There is a list of topics that Black women writers often feel compelled to cover, Black women’s hair being near the top of the list, but maybe there are enough people writing about that subject. Does the world really need another essay about Black women’s hair?
The next day, after a breakfast of café au lait and a warm croissant she made her way from the hotel to Les Trois-Îlets. She had dressed carefully in a white silk blouse and a blue and white striped skirt. She’d hung the outfit on the hook behind the door of the tiny hotel bathroom so the steam from the shower would ease out the creases. This was a trick learned from a French-Canadian woman she’d once worked with whose name was Françoise, like Françoise Sagan, the author of Bonjour tristesse.
Bonjour Tristesse, Aimez-vous Brahms? and the stories of Colette had fed all her teenage fantasies about Paris. She had fallen in love with the idea of being in love in Paris and now, twenty-five years later, here she was, in Paris.
As she made her way from the hotel back to Les Trois-Îlets, she found herself humming Peter Sarstedt’s song ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ and after a while she realised that she was doing a kind of step and glide in time to the hurdy-gurdy waltz arrangement of the song. She quickly corrected her gait because she didn’t want to look foolish.
What she wanted was to be taken for one of the fabulously dressed women looking all soignées and Parisian moving with such ease about the city. There were flower shops on almost every street corner. Buckets of springtime daffodils and peonies, lilies, jonquils, irises and roses scented the air, and perfectly dressed people sat at tables at pavement cafes and terraces flooded with sunlight. These smartly dressed shiny people all seemed to be drinking from gleaming goblets; everyone, everything in the city of light looked burnished, glowing.
As she made her way along the rue, she began to feel light-headed, as if she had sipped champagne mimosas for breakfast, but even in this faux mimosa state she could see clearly that the women she passed on the street all had hair that was well-coiffed and coloured, usually in intense shades of red or brown. All these Parisian women, even those in their nineties, looked perfectly turned out, groomed and smoothed, as if on their way to or from meeting a lover.
When she got to Les Trois-Îlets the door was locked and the dove-grey taffeta blinds folded down. She should have asked the clerk at the front desk to call. She began to worry that Les Trois-Îlets might be closed for the day. She decided to take a walk in the area and maybe do a little shopping.
She walked on to a shoe store a few shops down from the hairdressers. After looking at at least ten pairs of shoes, she went back to the very first pair she had tried on: wickedly expensive cobalt-blue suede sandals, but so elegant, so stylish, with subtle, classy little details, like small fringed tassels floating from the straps that wound twice around the ankles. When she stood before the mirror in the shoe store, she saw how they completed her navy blue and white ensemble, and she thought: when I get my hair done, I will be so pulled together. I will look like a woman Monet would have painted. I will feel perfectly put together when I stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens; I will cut a fine dash as I proceed in a leisurely way down the Boulevard Saint-Michel where Marie-Claire, the woman Peter Sarstedt sings about, lives in a fancy apartment with her collection of Rolling Stones records and someone who is friends with Sacha Distel.
The sandals came with a soft felt bag embroidered with a gold insect that could have been a bee. She peeled off quite a few traveller’s cheques and paid for them, put her old shoes in the felt bag and walked back to Les Trois-Îlets, glancing down every few seconds to admire her own, now exquisitely shod, feet.
The dove-grey shades were up and the ‘Fermé’ sign had been replaced by an ‘Ouvert’ sign and when she pushed the door open, a bell rang and a tall, elegantly dressed woman d’un certain âge appeared from somewhere in the back of the shop.
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle, comment ça va?’
‘Ça va bien. Parlez-vous anglais?’
‘Oui. Yes, I do.’
The elegant woman was from Martinique and her name was Hortense, and she used to be a fashion model. On the walls of the salon were many photographs of her on the covers of French fashion magazines, and a few images of her on the runway for top fashion designers, and a big blow up of her, and yes, Yves Saint Laurent, and she was wearing, without a blouse, one of his famous ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo suits, the lapels caught at the waist by a braided frog.
Hortense stood quietly, smiling and nodding as the writer inspected the photographs saying things like, ‘These are all you, right?’ and, ‘Wow! Is this you and Yves Saint Laurent? Amazing!’
Finally, Hortense said: ‘And ’ow can I ’elp you?’
Shaking her head from side to side, the writer ran one hand over her hair.
Hortense smiled. ‘We need to fix that, hein? I have someone coming who has an appointment but if you can wait I will ’elp you, d’accord?’
A sleek car pulled up outside the salon, and a young woman who must have been at least six feet tall strode into Les Trois-Îlets. She was wearing jeans and a dark brown silk shirt; her hair was covered by a plaid silk scarf and most of her face was hidden by tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses.
She was carrying what the writer recognised (from reading high fashion magazines) as a Birkin bag: a handbag that cost as much as a significant down-payment on a one-bedroom apartment in many parts of the world.
There was much air-kissing and ‘ma chérie’-ing.
Then Hortense and the woman went into the area partitioned off from the main salon by a fall of grey curtains.
The writer sat happily, taking note of her surroundings. The walls of the salon were covered in grey water wave taffeta, and the chairs in the waiting area were upholstered in burgundy velvet which picked up the grey and burgundy tones in the carpet. In addition to the photographic display of Hortense in her glory days, there were several prints by Gauguin on the walls and a photograph of a small terracotta sculpture, captioned ‘Femme de la Martinique’. The writer stared at the print of the small kneeling figure, which was dressed only in a ‘foulard’, the madras headwrap that was part of the national dress worn by women from Martinique. The statue’s left arm was bent at the elbow and her hand inclined at the wrist was held upright between her breasts, as if in an attitude of devotion. This unusual feature made her look more like a figure on a Buddhist carving, which, the writer (a sometime painter and art critic) noted, made the small sculpture a cultural composite.
The writer remembered that Paul Gauguin had spent some time in Martinique, living in a lowly hut. The writer had once bought a refrigerator magnet depicting one of Gauguin’s Martinique landscapes. Gorgeous. The pinkish clay of the unpaved path, the sable and green-blue rocks, the foam white flowers on a wayside bush, just a glimpse of cobalt-blue sea and not a living soul in evidence.
Hortense passed through the fall of sheer grey curtains.
‘We can wash that hair now, hein?’ Hortense washed and conditioned the writer’s hair with products that smelt like khus khus grass, also known as vetiver, and jasmine. She explained that her products were all made exclusively for her clients, from ethically sourced organic products.
‘The life of a model, it is très dur on the skin, on the hair, so much maquillage, so much heat. I know what it is like, I know, and so I opened this place, to help the Black models. My products, they are made in Martinique, they are totalement naturels.’
Gauguin’s woman of Martinique looked out from the labels on the row of bottles on display above the wash basins; her left hand upraised as if to bless: blessed are the beautiful women who wash, cleanse and calm themselves with pure and fragrant soaps and unguents made by our lady Hortense.
Our lady Hortense then wrapped the writer’s hair in a pale pink towel, told her to wait by the sink and disappeared again behind the curtain.
While the writer waited, she looked through the magazines on display on a gilded side table with cabriole legs. In an issue of Vogue, in a spread on the latest YSL collection, she recognised the model who had just come in, the one behind the curtain being tended to by Hortense. The model was hailed as the new Iman because she too was a student and was discovered by a famous American photographer while walking down the street of her East African home town.
The writer once read somewhere that fashion models are among the most insecure and neurotic people in the world. Here is why: they are routinely rejected, sometimes several times in a day, because no matter how beautiful you are, as a fashion model, you are not going to be selected for every single job. Maybe they need a brunette for the job, and you are a blonde. Maybe they need a young girl, and you are a model who has reached the ripe old age of, say, twenty-six. And so it goes.
Then Hortense reappeared with the model, whose face was covered with a treatment mask, which Hortense noted was made mostly from egg whites and lemon juice, to refine the pores. It made the skin on the model’s face very taut and very shiny, as though she was swathed in cellophane. Her hair was now covered with a pearl-grey mushroom-shaped plastic cap and she was wearing a calf-length grey kimono. She looked very different from the vision toting the Birkin bag who strode into the salon half an hour earlier.
Hortense settled her under one of the two hairdryers set in an alcove at the back of the shop, then motioned to the writer to sit in the high chair facing the ornate mirror above her work station. She used her own brand of setting lotion and, when she squeezed some directly from the bottle onto the top of the writer’s head, the Femme de la Martinique seemed to reach down from the label and lightly touch the writer on the crown of her head. Swiftly, deftly, Hortense parted her hair into sections then rolled it onto smooth plastic rollers. She tied a pink hairnet over the rollers and positioned the writer under the dryer next to the model.
The writer sat under the dryer and turned the pages of the latest Vogue, which happened to feature the model seated in the next chair, whose name, the writer learned from reading the captions accompanying her photographs, was Mathilde.
Mathilde walking the runway, Mathilde in an advertisement for perfume, Mathilde at a party, champagne flute in hand, head thrown back, eyes shut tight, wide and perfect mouth open as if to drink in all the flavours of the lovely It-girl life.
And the writer was sitting beside her, in Paris no less! She shifted her head slightly inside the dryer in order to glance at the real Mathilde, as she studied the images of Mathilde caught on the page. Nobody is going to believe this, she thought. I best just keep this one to myself, people already believe that because I’m a writer I exaggerate, and I sometimes do, but this time they’ll accuse me of showing off if I tell them that I managed to find myself sitting in a salon in Paris, next to a famous model, who in person looks much darker than she does in all her pictures. A famous model who at this moment looked nothing like the picture of the fabulous bird of paradise streaming down the runway in an elaborate hand-embroidered ballgown.
Suddenly the model pushed the metal cone of the hairdryer back and turned to the writer. She smiled and said ‘I must tell you, your sandals? Très jolies!’
The writer pushed back her dryer too, she was so pleased that the model liked her sandals. ‘Merci beaucoup… Thank you.’ And, pointing to the model’s face on the cover of Vogue, the writer said, ‘And congratulations to you. This is so, so wonderful!’
‘You are good to recognise me looking like this!’
And they both laughed.
Maybe, after that laugh, the writer should have just stopped.
She should have just felt pleased that the famous model had been nice enough to compliment her on her exquisite taste in footwear.
She should have just felt happy that her choice of sandals had received the seal of approval from one of the world’s top fashion models, but no, she had to go on and say something more, just had to say one more thing, something she imagined the model would have liked to hear. She said, ‘Your family must be so proud and happy.’
But when she said that the model said nothing.
There was an awkward silence before the model pointed to her own face on the cover of the magazine and said, ‘Ma famille? Non. Proud? Non. My father? He does not like these photographs. He will have no pictures of me in his house. He told me, “I do not know you.” He says I have turned myself into a ghost. My brothers? They are crazy, crazy. They say I sell my body. One of them, he tells anyone who asks about me that I am a prostitute in Paris. Non, ma chère, they are not proud of me, they are happy to take the money I send, yes, but proud of me? Non.’
The famous fashion model looked so sad, so distraught under the patina of her egg-white and lemon mask that the writer was tempted to get up from under the hairdryer and give her a big hug, but she thought that might seem overly familiar. Instead she murmured that she was sorry, so sorry to hear that. Then they both put their heads back up inside the metal cones and sat staring out at the blurred stream of traffic through the frosted glass doors of Les Trois-Îlets.
But when the writer’s hair was dry, and Hortense had brushed and styled it so her face was framed by big loose curls, and after she’d paid her, and said merci beaucoup, and au revoir with a softening of the ‘re’ so it sounded like ‘au voir’, and after she’d waved goodbye to Mathilde who was having her natural hair plaited into cornrows so that Hortense could sew onto them, with a big-eyed bone needle, long falls of blue-black human hair imported from India, the writer stepped out into the spring sunshine and turned her face in the direction of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I am now well put together, she thought to herself. I am now well put together upon this gorgeous day in spring. In Paris!
YEARS LATER, the writer is sitting up in bed in a hotel room in New York. Walking about the streets earlier that day she’d noticed the many young Black New Yorkers sporting extravagant natural hairdos. She wonders to herself just how many hairdressers have been put out of business by these fine and confident young Black women who look as if they roll out of bed, shower, dress, and then just shake their heads vigorously from side to side. Wild and woolly tresses taken care of. Hairstyle that. Love it.
She turns on the television set and sees scenes of carnage in Paris. Parisians out dining, some attending a rock concert, others cheering on their team at a soccer game in a stadium, blown-up, murdered and maimed by hate-crazed zealots who condemn the city of light as the city of prostitution and decadence. And she remembers Hortense and Les Trois-Îlets and Mathilde whose brothers take her money even as they accuse her of selling herself, and who are crazy! Crazy!