Being of mixed descent myself, I’ve watched the hair debate from the sidelines. I never needed to defend my choice of hairstyle to anyone as a teenager or young woman because there were no other black people around. And that there was the problem with my hair: There were NO black people around.

Growing up, I was more sensitive about my hair than I imagine most little black girls would be. My Mom hacked off half of it at random when I was seven, and then I moved to a middle-class suburban white neighborhood where my grandparents knew fuck all what to do with my nappy, lopsided hair. My uncle, a successful hairdresser with his own salon in Sarasota, Fla., took a stab at relaxing it into submission and chemically burned off everything longer than my ears.

After that, no more white people were allowed to touch my hair for about 15 or 16 years.

After moving to New Hampshire at 13 to live with my aunt (herself a white woman married to a mixed man), I had the luck of having a couple of black women in my church congregation who had mercy on my hair. They showed me how to chemically relax it without making it fall out of my head. When I went to college, I started relaxing it myself.

I still wouldn’t let anyone cut it. That didn’t happen until my senior year of college.

Since then, my hair has grown in fits and starts, never making it past the finish line of my shoulders. I have wanted long hair more than anything – more than being a certain clothing size or having a bigger salary. I just want long hair. Call me crazy, but I guess I’ve always thought shiny, healthy, long hair is a woman’s crowning glory.

Must go back to all those Biblical ideals I grew up with. I had a Jewish teacher in fourth grade who wore her long, dark hair up in an elaborate bun every day. She explained to me that her tradition dictated that her husband was the only one permitted to see it cascade over her shoulders. I always thought there was something sweet in keeping something that beautiful so private.

Black female hair politics be damned, I wear my hair straight. I never learned how to deal with it curly and I like it straight. I don’t care how other women style their hair – whatever makes them feel beautiful is fine with me. I just wanted to find one black woman with long hair who could tell me how I could get mine to make me feel beautiful, too.

Enter my Black Hair Mommy.

Continue reading Black Hair Mommy here.

Caption: Aunt Marianne, 2005.

I was raised by beauty queens. Living, breathing, pageanting beauty queens. I was put into modeling school in 4th grade. If you don’t believe me, I will call my aunt and have her dig up the footage and photos from the Crest Commercial I screen tested for. I sang, danced, did the 1/4 and full angel turns and learned the proper way to exit a car while wearing a skirt. I will say please and thank you, even if you are mean to me, because that is the proper thing for a lady to do.

When I moved to Florida, it was to live with my Grampa and his second wife, who I call my Grandma and who welcomed me into her side of the family like I was born into it. Grampa had seven kids (5 sons, 2 daughters), Grandma had six kids (all daughters), and besides my Mom and “real” grandmother, my entire family lived in Florida.

I had lots and lots and lots of cousins, but only on my Grandma’s side. My Grampa’s children didn’t produce a lot of grandkids, and when they did get married and have children, they moved away.

Of the cousins that came together on the holidays, I was the oldest. Looking at family photos is so funny, because I was surrounded by a bunch of blue-eyed Irish towheads. All those blondes and then there was me, a little chocolate chip muffin with shining brown eyes and hair bigger than Alfalfa from Little Rascals.

Caption: One of these things is not like the others. Seriously, look at my hair.

Caption: My Gramps and my uncles, back in the 80s.

My Irish aunts, their husbands and their children are some of the most loving and welcoming people you will ever meet.

Caption:Grandma and some of my aunts on Mother's Day 2000. That's Aunt Marianne in front.

I was so lucky to grow up so close (geographically and emotionally) to my extended family. Every family has its quirks though, and with one as large as mine the quirks are many.

Out of all my aunts and uncles, I spent the most time with my Aunt Marianne, my Uncle Joe and their three daughters. Their eldest, Katy, was the third-oldest in our group of cousins, so she and I did the most hanging out when we were growing up. We played with our barbies together and she came to me first when she found out Aunt Marianne and Uncle Joe were getting divorced. She didn’t even want to say the word, “divorce.” I was only 10 or so, but I told her I knew everything would be okay. Grandma and Grampa had both gotten divorced, I told her, but they loved all their kids just the same. We focused on quietly making outfits for our barbies that day. I always chopped their hair off. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because Uncle Steve burned off a bunch of my hair with relaxer at his salon. That’s why I do it myself now. But I digress.

Fast forward quite a few years, and Aunt Marianne has been Mrs. Florida twice (with two different husbands), as well as Mrs. International and little cousin Katy was Miss Florida 2002.

The world of pageantry is ridiculous. I was in modeling school probably for 3 months before I had to make a decision about whether I wanted to pursue that as a career. Make no mistake about it, pageantry is a career and Aunt Marianne thought I would be very good at it. I hated it. There was no way I was going to miss hanging out with my friends. I was in 4th grade and I wanted to start dancing again. I left modeling school behind and began my pre-professional career in dance.

The thing about pageant contestants is that in general they are so pretty, but you only see the surface. The contests are superficial for a reason. Once you start digging, sometimes you find ugly things. Katy is probably one of the few exceptions to this rule. She is sweet, eager and naive.

Aunt Marianne kept her very sheltered, most likely because she knew what succeeding in pageantry meant for many girls and Katy wasn’t to follow that route. Katy got married the same weekend I got engaged in 2005, and that white dress actually meant what it was supposed to on that day. You know many other virgin beauty queens from Florida? Yeah, I didn’t think so. This is what my family is like.

But in her efforts to shield my cousins from the big, bad world of Central Florida, Aunt Marianne sometimes went too far.

One day after the divorce, Katy and I were sitting at the counter and eating cookies. She and I were talking about what kind of men we wanted to marry when we grew up. I said I didn’t know whether I’d marry a Black man or a White man, and I kind of wished I had a crystal ball so I could see what my kids would look like.

Aunt Marianne was listening to the conversation and decided to pipe in.

“The girls aren’t to date or marry Black men,” she said. “If Katy married a black man, she would not have my blessing and I would not attend the wedding.”

I was just in shock. I’m 10, for Christ’s sake. I argued with her for a minute about it, but it wasn’t really my place. I was a young lady and ladies don’t argue. I remember crying that afternoon and being so sad and angry. I thought it wasn’t very fair that Katy wouldn’t be able to marry whomever she wanted. I didn’t even think of the implications Aunt Marianne’s comment had regarding my very own parents and my race.

I’ll put it out here that the two sides of my family don’t usually hang out together. I always assume it’s because we wouldn’t all fit in a mansion, let alone my grandparents’ lanai. Another reason might have been a little back and forth on race relations.

The Italian side had dropped an “i” off of our last name due to prejudice against Italian-Americans in Buffalo, NY (where my family is originally from). Some of my uncles and my aunt later put the “i” back on the surname when they turned 18. I always thought I would, too, but I began getting published at age 18 and I wanted to keep my byline.

My mom got knocked up by two different Black guys. Her sister also married a Black man. My Aunt Patty Jo (on the Irish side, and she’s no longer called this since she moved up north), moved to Boston and later married a biracial man. I lived with them when I moved back to New England.

I’ve been told joining my extended family at the age of 7 changed how my relatives saw Black people. I was a sweet little kid, smart and kind. I had good manners. There was nothing scary about me, save my Alfalfa hair. My Aunt Patty Jo said it was because of me that she could marry a mixed man. My grampa hadn’t been such a fan of Black people before me. Maybe because they kept getting his daughters pregnant? I don’t know.

The best part of all of this came when my Aunt Marianne remarried and wanted to adopt. She wanted a biracial baby boy, but they didn’t want to place him with two White parents. Willing to do what it took to get that baby, my Aunt Marianne pulled out childhood photos of me and Katy, little brown and White beauty queens in training.

“I always loved Emily like she was my own,” is what my Grandma tells me Aunt Marianne said when she gave me the news.

I laughed, perhaps a little bitterly. Aunt Marianne is now raising two gorgeous little boys, one of them biracial, the other one White, with her third husband. I hope she lets them marry whoever they want to when they get old enough. By now, she should know the beauty of us mixed folk is far more than skin deep.

That's me in the pink shirt. Katy's to the right, and her little sisters are in front of her. Wish we hadn't grown up so much.

Edit: A few of you have gotten in touch with me about taking care of your little mixed children’s hair. A friend of mine suggested these sites to me a few months ago, and they are really good resources for products suggestions and haircare tips:

NaturallyCurly.com (My friend also recommends the book, “Curly Girl.”)

Nappturality.com (This site has message boards where you can go on and talk with other people dealing with “going natural.”)

Prof. John Ernest with me and Kristin at our college graduation

I went to college with a mission: I wanted to learn more about Being Black. Problem was, $10,000 of my scholarship money for New York University had fallen through on the day of my high school graduation. I wouldn’t be attending school in the diverse Mecca-lekka-hiney-bro Melting Pot known as NYC.

Nope. The University of New Hampshire would be hosting my education in Being Black. It was as unlikely a place as one could find for increasing cultural awareness. There were 78 Black students out of 13,000. If you were counting me, there were only 77.5 Black students. We do what we can with what we have, though, and what I had was a course catalogue listing a 500-level course for Introduction to African-American Literature.

Any time I’ve ever wanted to understand anything, I’ve turned to books. From cooking to interior design to tarot card reading, if there was anything I’ve wanted to understand, I just buried myself in every chapter and verse I could get my hands on. I thought if I could read about other Black people, their history, what they had been through . . . maybe I would understand a little bit more about myself.

The first day of class was a Tuesday during my sophomore year. The classroom was small. The desks were set up in a circle. I was excited. I was finally brave enough to publicly acknowledge that I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was doing telling people I was half Black.

The truth was, I was 100 percent White. My parents broke up when I was six and I haven’t seen my father since. I was raised by a bunch of rowdy Italians and it literally took me years to figure out what to do with my hair. When I was growing up in Florida, the Black kids put me down because I didn’t talk Black or dress Black. The White kids didn’t know what the fuck I was. When they asked me, I answered to the best of my ability. I told them, “I’m tan.” Duh.

As I sat at my desk in Hamilton-Smith Hall in September 1998, I was still wondering what I was and if I needed to be anything different. I just wanted to understand what all the fuss was about. I was earnest to begin some sort of inner transformation.

Therefore, it was a little disconcerting to discover that my mentor in Blackness was to be a lanky white gentleman with balding hair and black-rimmed glasses. I was expecting something different. Maybe a member of the Black Panthers. Panther Power! Or something.

It turned out that John Ernest was something different.

The first thing he asked the class to do was make a list of our five favorite CDs and to tell the class why we enjoyed the music we did. Secondly, he was a Scorpio. I don’t care what the fuck you think about astrology – I dare you to find me a Scorpio who doesnt have an affinity for Black culture. It’s like all Scorpios are Black on the inside and they’re looking for a connection with an old cotton picker’s soul or something.

But here’s what Prof. Ernest did: he broke me open and then made me more whole. I had experienced two sexual assaults and my first relationship right before I became his student. He didn’t know that at first, but he allowed me to connect my own struggles with what I was learning through him and develop a more organic understanding of the word “plight.”

I dated a Black classmate I met in Prof. Ernest’s class. If anything revealed how little I knew about Being Black, it was dating Big Al. It was the first time I felt like I was having an interracial relationship. His CD collection went beyond my familiarity with Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest of the Puff Daddy family. His enormous lips enveloped mine when we kissed, and he made fun of my ass-less ass. (It’s sad, really. I’ve always wanted a Bonita Apple Bum.) While Al played the gentleman, he did get a little annoyed when I told him if he was going to act like a typical Black guy and refuse to go down on me, I was going to act like a Black girl and refuse to go down on him (which kind of sucked – no pun intended – because we weren’t sleeping together, either).

I read W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes and “Celia; A Slave.” I went on to take a more advanced African-American Lit. class with Prof. Ernest and that class led to an independent study with him and my close friend, Kristin. (She’s another Scorpio, by the way. She minored in Black people.) I wish I could find the paper I wrote on Toni Morrison’s”Beloved.” I just remember crying from exhaustion when I was done with it.

At the end of it all, Prof. Ernest became a friend. He and I talked about my confusion over my racial identity, about relationships, about poetry, about our relatives with mental illness. He was the sort of professor who looked beyond students’ day-to-day problems like juggling two times the course load I should have taken and the general laziness that set in after too many nights partying.

Funny that it took a lanky white guy in a staff office the size of a toaster oven and covered with pictures of jackalopes to teach me how to be Black. If Being Black for me means I’m just Emily with a killer tan and a small ass, so be it.