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Combing through memories

For black women and girls, submitting to the hot comb is about more than straightening their hair. It's tradition and even history.

By NICOLE JOHNSON
Published April 14, 2006

	[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
	Patricee Dennie, 4, has her hair straightened with a hot comb by Tammy Moore at A Precious Touch Hair Salon in St. Petersburg.
	Though flat irons and chemical relaxers are common nowadays, the traditional hot comb is still in use.

When the comb turned red, it was time.

Part. Grease. Slide the comb. Part. Grease. Slide the comb. A hair boogie of sorts, transforming woolly clumps, wiry spindles and rough waves into black satin.

One misstep, and an ear or forehead was burned.

To outsiders, it may sound more barbaric than beautifying.

To the pressed, it is both.

"It's a tradition here in the black community," said Brenda Dennie, 45, of St. Petersburg. "For little girls, we do the press."

For black women, it's not colorful eggs that bring back childhood memories of Easters gone by.

It's an arduous appointment with a 300-degree makeover: the hot comb.

For years, the metal, handheld comb has been used to straighten black hair, which is often coarse and curly in its natural state. A good pressing lasts about a week.

These days, more and more black women turn to chemicals to straighten their hair, if they straighten at all. But this time of year, as scores flock to the salon in preparation for Easter Sunday, memories of the antiquated hair ritual come back vividly, like azaleas in April.

"We'd always be in the kitchen; it was a Saturday morning thing, just sitting there with a big bushel of hair, just praying you don't get burned," said Tammy Moore, 35, a stylist at St. Petersburg's A Precious Touch Hair Salon. "On Easter, she took her time and put some love into it."

Whether you were wavy in Washington, D.C., or kinky in Kansas, the Saturday press was a special event in many black homes.

Bushy-headed girls sat low on a stool between Granny's knees or high on two telephone books at the beauty salon. The metal comb was placed directly on the stove to be heated. Blue Magic hair grease was within arm's reach, and a sturdy black comb for parting.

Once the comb got hot, a steady hand would run it through sections of hair.

The journey to straight wasn't easy. It would often take a yank or pull to get there.

Pain, laughter and sisterhood mingled with the smell of burnt hair.

"We used Blue Magic, and sometimes if you had more money you could get Crown in the red and the green can - that was a little more upscale," said Daphne Dilbert, who grew up in a Honduran family in Miami. "When she felt like that comb was hot enough, she'd take it and stretch it out.

"Thankfully, our generation graduated from that," she said.

Dilbert, 32, of Tampa, has since opted for a relaxer.

But for many like her, the hot comb serves as a reminder of an unmatched - and sometimes unwanted - closeness with family matriarchs.

"I hated it," said Dee Dee Griffin, a Detroit native who is now a stylist at St. Petersburg's Shear Essence Salon. "My mother would always burn me, and the oil would drip all over the place."

Every Saturday night, Griffin, 35, and her sister would pull out the stool (special for getting their hair done), scoot it close to the stove where their mother sat, and wait for the hot comb to turn red.

Like scores of other African-American women in the 1980s, Griffin opted for a chemical relaxer the day she turned 18.

Now, every six weeks she smooths the white goop on the roots of her short-layered cut to keep it manageable. When women with natural hair come to her shop to have their hair straightened, she uses a flat iron, not a hot comb.

"It's a lot faster, it doesn't use a lot of grease," Griffin said. "We want it flat, we want it fluffy, we want it bouncy."

When French hairdresser Marcel Grateau created the hot comb in the late 1880s, he wanted hair to be anything but flat.

Stiff waves were de rigueur in Parisian beauty circles, and Grateau fashioned a comb that could be heated and used to define his client's waves. When the comb proved inefficient, he moved on to create the curling iron.

The castaway comb arrived on American shores in the early 1900s by way of a black cosmetologist named Madame C.J. Walker, who widened the teeth and began marketing it to black women.

The history of hair in the black community goes beyond style, giving procedures like hot combing not only an aesthetic but also a historical context, said Kimberly Morgan, an actor and playwright.

"Our hair becomes an extension of who we are as a people," said Morgan, who lives in Minneapolis and whose play Hot Comb: Brandin' One Mark of Oppression ran for two months at the Pillsbury House Theatre.

When slaves arrived in North America, they were forbidden from wearing ethnic braid styles that often linked them with their native tribes. Ingredients needed to care for black hair, such as shea butter and wide-toothed combs, were not available, Morgan said. Caring for natural black hair became a burden.

Complicating the matter was 200 years of a Caucasian standard of beauty thrust upon blacks.

"Those who had attributes that were closer to being Caucasian were deemed more acceptable," Morgan said. Straight hair was one of them.

The hot comb stripped black women of part of their identity, but it also gave rise to a unique tradition that still conjures up a laugh and a story or two.

"That was some real one-on-one time you got with your mother," Moore said. "Other than that, you're doing chores, she's cooking, cleaning and probably hanging up clothes."

In Morgan's one-woman show, she plays myriad black women with various hairstyles, including a 10-year-old girl named Brenda waiting to get her hair pressed by her Aunt Wanda.

That's the segment that gets the most laughs from the audience, Morgan said. The 29-year-old drew from her own experience as a young girl getting her hair pressed while visiting her grandmother in North Carolina.

"They used a whole bucket of grease," said Morgan, who grew up in Connecticut. "And the stylist kept burning me. We all laugh at it now.

"If I have a daughter, I wonder if I would do that to her," said Morgan, who is seven months pregnant. "But I worry if I didn't, she might not be able to have this conversation."

Nicole Johnson can be reached at (727) 445-4162 or njohnson@sptimes.com Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified April 13, 2006, 18:54:48]