Listening to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon While Taking My Braids Aloose
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
For Song of Solomon, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in years, and never dared to try with any other LitHum text, listen to the audiobook. Really, it was out of necessity more than anything. Wednesday, I had to pull what my family calls a “one-dayer,” to take my braids aloose, wash and dry my hair, and rush over to the African braiding shop all in one afternoon—a process that usually takes two days to do by myself. But my hair had to be done. And so did my LitHum (Literature Humanities) homework. If you want to treat your hair right, you gotta use both hands, one guiding, one unraveling the braids gently. So I couldn’t hold the book. And even if I had tried, I would have dragged slick scented African herbal oils across the pages, blurring the words beyond recognition. So I listened instead.
There was something very honest about listening to a Black woman tell a story about Black people while I was doing a very Black thing. It felt very central, ancestral. Toni Morrison’s voice was softer, more delicate than I expected it to be. But there was also something raw and coarse about it, in a very familiar way. If you listen closely, you discover that there’s something buried in her voice, like there’s a thick lump of molasses caught in her throat, like she’s swallowing back what’s not quite sadness, not quite rage, but more like the awe of both of them. Listening to her felt natural and intimate, like my kinky hair roots, the story unraveling like my braids.
The next day, my head was swollen. After I’d finished taking my hair aloose, I washed my hair and went to an African braid shop, or really more of an emporium on 125th street in Harlem, Apollo’s Beautyland. The lady who braided my hair, Sarah, did a beautiful job fixing up a royal bun for me, but she wound my braids up too tight. I didn’t feel much while she did it. I was listening to Song of Solomon, deciding to feel uncomfortable in a very different way—disturbed by how true it all was, the weight of names and family ties and inappropriate intimacy and justified bitterness and origin stories blurred by desires and myths and pain. And at one point, I almost started crying, but I swallowed back my tears. Maybe I felt more than what I am willing to admit. Or maybe she wound my head up way too tight. I missed class that next day because I took some pain medicine that knocked me out until late that night.
And now, I’m numb.
