Odes to Black beauty: Derrick Barnes & Joshua Bennett
By Rachel Amaru, Co-founder of Good Trouble For Kids
When my daughter was very young, I had a lot of people telling me how to do her hair (she is bi-racial). Over the years, I figured it out (sort of), but I got an incredible amount of help by going to a Black hair salon in Denver. The only Black professor I ever had (astoundingly) told me to drive down to Denver from Boulder and let the women teach me how to do my daughter’s hair. He warned me they might laugh at me a little (they did), and make fun of me for how I spoiled her (they did), and straight up tell her that she had to sit still while they combed out her hair (she had a LOT of hair, and she wasn’t great at sitting still when I tried to comb it). He told me also that it would be a very different experience than what I had getting my hair cut. And it was — it was warm and homey and the only word I can come up with to really recall that experience (even with being laughed at quite a bit!) is joy. Chimamanda Ngoze Adiche conjures up the experience of a particular Black hair salon in Americanah. As my daughter got older, and experimented with braids, I also learned the value of extreme patience. There were times we were there for hours. Eventually the person Ariel liked to have do her hair best would actually come out to the house to do her braids. It could easily be an eight-hour day. It was a lesson in being present and still (and a lot of TV in one sitting!)
Crown evokes the experience of going to a Black barbershop — the power of a Black space that fosters Black male pride, Black beauty, and Black love. To me, the crux of this gorgeous book is the description of how the child feels after a haircut:
“It’s how your mother looks at you/ before she calls you beautiful./ Flowers are beautiful./ Sunrises are beautiful./ Being viewed in your mother’s eyes/ as someone that matters — now that’s beautiful.”
Barnes elaborates on this further in his end-notes: “And really, other than the church, the experience of getting a haircut is pretty much the only place in the black community where a black boy is ‘tended to’ — treated like royalty.” This is what renders the barbershop a safe space — Black men and boys fully allowed to be in their bodies, away from the white gaze, and present in an exclusive space honoring their Black beauty, joy, and humanity. I love how Barnes captures this so vividly in his book, and it reminded me of how I felt the first time I took my three-year-old daughter down to Denver, where the gaze was turned on me, a white mother, and where I was given lessons on fostering my daughter’s confidence and ownership of her beauty — both inner & outer. She was entirely their focus when they did her hair, and the women there let her know she mattered. It was humbling and a godsend to have strangers hold her precious head and the halo of her hair in their hands. Barnes’ recognizes the depth of this experience, of what it means for Black boys and men (I like his list: boys, sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons) to see themselves in the mirror. As he writes, “deep down inside, they wish that everyone could see what they see: a real life, breathing, compassionate, thoughtful, brilliant, limitless soul that matters — that desperately matters.” Yes. Black lives matter, and Black is beautiful.
The poet Joshua Bennett speaks to the safe space of the Black beauty salon and the barbershop in this exquisite essay. Speaking of what he learned from spending time in his grandmother’s beauty salon, he writes: “What we built in that space was indeed a refuge, but it was also something infinitely greater than that. It was a world on and in our own terms. A haven and a home.” He ends the essay with his poem, “Benediction” which I am posting here in its entirety (and from which just a few lines are included in our art and poetry collaboration featured in April 2021). Like Derrick Barnes’ Crown, it too is an ode to Black beauty, strength, and an indomitable spirit.
BENEDICTION
God bless the lightning
bolt in my little
brother’s hair.
God bless our neighborhood
barber, the patience it takes
to make a man
you’ve just met
beautiful. God bless
every beautiful thing
called monstrous
since the dawn
of a colonizer’s time.
God bless the arms
of the mother
on the cross
-town bus, the sterling silver
cross at the crux
of her collar bone, its shine
barely visible beneath
her nightshade
navy, New York
Yankees hoodie.
God bless the baby boy
kept precious
in her embrace.
His wail turning
my entire row
into an opera house.
God bless the vulnerable
ones. How they call us
toward love & its infinite,
unthinkable costs.
God bless the floss.
The flash. The brash
& bare-knuckle brawl
of the South Bronx girls
that raised my mother
to grease knuckles, cut eyes,
get fly as any fugitive dream
on the lam,
on the run
from the Law
as any & all of us are
who dare to wake
& walk in this
skin & you
best believe
God blessed
this skin
The shimmer & slick
of it, the wherewithal
to bear the rage of sisters,
brothers, slain & still function
each morning, still
sit at a desk, send
an email, take an order,
dream a world, some heaven
big enough for black life
to flourish, to grow God
bless the no, my story
is not for sale
the no, this body
belongs to me & the earth
alone the see, the thing
about souls
is they by definition
cannot be owned God
bless the beloved flesh
our refusal calls
home God bless the unkillable
interior bless the uprising
bless the rebellion bless
the overflow God
bless everything that survives
the fire
