Nonreview

I'd like to review this. However, it's been about six weeks since I ordered it & it hasn't arrived yet.

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Another hairdo

In the late '60s, journalist A'Lelia Bundles waged a battle repeated in many households across the country: she decided to stop pressing her hair and start wearing it in an Afro.
It didn't help that her father worked for Summit Laboratories, a manufacturer of hair-straightening products. "Who do you think pays the mortgage and tuition?" he demanded.
But Bundles' consciousness was on the rise. The day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, she was elected vice president of her high school student council, and white parents were threatening to take their kids out of the school.
While this was going on, Bundles was reading W.E.B. DuBois. She was also on the threshold of discovering the legacy of her great-great-grandmother Madame Walker, a pioneering activist, philanthropist and hair products entrepreneur.
"I'm proud to say I have all of my ancestors in my hair," Bundles writes in "Queens," a fascinating collection of African-American hair lore. "But in the era I grew up in, people only valued whatever part of your hair that was straight." She got her Afro.
"Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair" is the logical successor to photographer Michael Cunningham's "Crowns." The earlier book, a collection of stories and images of black church women and their elaborate hats, resonated so deeply with readers it was adapted into a musical production (now running in Lansing at the Riverwalk Theater; see review on p. XX). "Queens" pairs fifty Cunningham portraits with verbal histories, some in the subjects' own words and some told by co-author George Alexander.
The gatefold of "Queens" depicts an outdoor salon in Ghana, where women and men laugh and talk under a huge tree. The image sets the tone for the mingling of social life and hair that runs through the book.
Cunningham is well positioned document this world; he grew up with his mother and five sisters who turned his home into a salon every Saturday. Later, the photographer notes, "a prerequisite to dating some of the girls in high school was taking care of their weekly salon bills."
Cunningham's restless and inventive eye keeps the book's fifty portraits from becoming monotonous -- even those photos meant to convey nobility, dignity and poise have a twinkle or wrinkle that kicks them up a notch. In some of the photos, subject and hair are seen in splendid isolation, while others pull back to reveal the subject at home or in a salon.
But no hair book would be much fun without a wild side, and Cunningham is generous in serving up outrageous visions of self-expression. Tracy Poris, a hairstyling student, wears a vertical do about as tall as a flamingo, with a matching outfit itself made of hair. Angela Williams sports a Mohawk, which tells passersby "I don't care what you think." Corene Campbell colors her hair blue "to match her shoes." Jenelle Byron, a 23-year-old college student from Brooklyn, wears her hair in a literally towering do that mimics the burning World Trade Center, "flames" of curling hair rising from the top floors.
The freaky dos are great fun, but more often, the authors weave images and stories around social and political dimensions of African-American life. "There are no Black stars," writes Harriett Indira Odei, lamenting the persistent domination of European beauty standards. "They see the white hair and they like it." Odei is photographed by Cunningham in a Ghanian hair sculpture that defies verbal description (it looks like a windblown beach fence with mossy seaweed curled beneath).
Author Tonya Lewis Lee, whose hair color is gold verging on "carrottop," recalls her mother rinsing her hair with tea when summer sunshine made it too light and brassy. "You looking too much like massa," she told her daughter.
Some of the most interesting subjects in the books are hair stylists themselves. Their accounts reveal salons as not only social anchors, but sources of empowerment for both stylist and client. "The hairdo is secondary to having someone focus on them," says Sonia Mullins of her clients. "These women are busy hustling for the dollar, trying to take care of their families, and they don't have time to address themselves."
Whether the end result is whimsical, rebellious, exotic or no-nonsense, "Queens" demonstrated the degree to which self-worth and pride are bound up in these women's hair.
"When I see myself in an Afro," says actress Thoundia Bickham, "I feel more powerful."
Or, as A'Lelia Bundles concludes, "the older I get the more I realize that what endures is 'strong,' not 'cute'."

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Let's Talk About Hair Baby

I found "Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Hair" to be a wonderful book. I enjoyed the photographs and the stories that went along with them. Hair is such a loaded issue for Black women that it's refreshing to see a book that glorifies all manner of hair and hair styles. As India Arie sings, "I am not my hair" meaning I am more than my hair. However, there's a very real part of us that is our hair and Michael Cunningham has captured that part.

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