UHURU !

Happy new year all.I wanted to start of the 2007 with some black woman liberation.
I have had my dreads for some time now and every day I feel blessed to have developed a relationship with my hair.Actually the relationship is more about having released the woman I need to be from the inside out. Somehow I knew I needed to do this way back in the day at the ripe old age of seven,but let me back up a bit.
It was 1970 something, and the black power movement was in full swing. My mother had taken me shopping and as we sat in the car getting ready to pull off two females walked out of a store in front of us.Both these women were beautiful brown skin
sisters dressed in green military style trench coats, sporting combat boots and bald heads! Now even as a child I was in awe of the beauty of their baldness.I didn't have the words but I saw true freedom in those sisters. They had those big ear rings on and lip stick but they walked with a sense of assuredness,they owned themselves.
Although my mother called them a name I had never heard of "bulldykes" I knew that even though I didn't want to be bald I did want that sense of ownership of self they had. Their image never left me,even as I type today over thirty plus years later I still see them plain as day.
Just before New Years I was in Walmart and someone complimented me on "my girls".
Yes I call them sisters but no they don't have names.Back on topic, as we talked I learned that she had a friend who passed over a few months back I think in October.
This woman had dreads too, in fact she loved them.They had come to mean so much to her she changed her name to free legally. Whenever a person called her by the old name she corrected them her friend remembered.I nodded my head in agreement I certainly knew the joy she was feeling and now I know the power and strength those ladies from my past must have felt too.
I will never know if they were part of some "radical" group, proud dykes, rebellious college students or all the above.All I know is seeing them on that day
changed my life.No matter what anyone said about conforming, I discovered there were people out in the world doing their thing to hell with societies views. I went home
to the picture of MLK at the top of the stairs in our hallway. The thinking Martin picture I liked to called it.In that place in time with so many black voices calling for justice for our community,two black women reached out and touched me.They sent a message without saying a word the meaning of which I did not feel until one day in October three years ago.
I turned my afro into god knows how many little knobs on my way to living free. I had already endured the sneers from other black folk concerning my one inch fro.A weight was lifted off my head having let go of that bad perm with the little bald spot and one last "long" strain of hair acting as a comb over! In return I found
spiritual peace.Every black woman encounters hair dilemmas,even those with straight hair.We should not be held prisoners by what we have or don't have.So if I say it a million times in this space I will say it again. Every black woman's voice needs to be heard instead of her thoughts being perceived from the way she looks and is portrayed in the media.I'm talking both the mainstream and our own,for once lets just tell our own stories.That to me is the most powerful of all quest.
In more ways than one our lives reflect out through our hair not vice versa. When we are stressed it's texture can change,when we age it greys,the list goes on and on.Is it any wonder we find true liberation by deciding how we present our pride and glory or lack of it to the world.