In the summer of 1988, my hair went through a lot. My family moved across the country and it saw a lot of motel swimming pools with their overabundance of chlorine. By the time we got to Florida, it began to feel like a straw stack. The hair actually crackled when you touched it, and it fell out in chunks.
Mom and Dad took me to a local salon, where an expert informed them that my hair was being eaten by the chlorine. She recommended washing my hair in milk, but that seemed a little excessive to us. Instead, we had her cut in short and get rid of the brittle bits.
I enjoyed my haircut. It made me look like Annie Lennox, one of my favorite singers. I looked forward to going to school and showing off my hair to the new kids. This is not how it worked out. Unknown to me, I had moved into a very stupid and superficial community, and they taught their kids well.
“Gross, you look like a boy,” were the first words any kid in Winter Haven ever said to me. It was the beginning of an ostracizing campaign that would last for the next five years. All because I wore my hair short and I scorned dresses. It made me start to notice other unpleasant differences in the community.
School started in the middle of August, almost at the beginning, instead of after Labor Day, like I was used to. The students were forced to stand for not only the pledge, but also whatever patriotic song the principal decided to play that day. Students were ordered to line up in alphabetical order, and they had to march around on yellow lines. There was no recess, I was told, “but you have P.E.” This was said brightly, as if this was a good thing.
Physical education, it turned out, was nothing like it was out west. Boys and girls were separated and played different games. The girls’ games were dumbed down and too gentle to be any fun. While the boys got to run around on the field and play flag football, the girls were stuck playing some weird version of volleyball. It was the last disappointment of over a dozen that day, and I refused to play.
Things continued on this line as time went on. I was in an after school program where we got to play on the playground. There was this roller thing on the playground and I wanted to play on it. The teacher blew her whistle and told the boys who were playing on it to get off “so the girls can use it.” I asked her why she did that, because I wanted to play with the boys, too. She said the boys were too strong for me. I not only refused to use the roller after that, I quit the program that same day.
Back home, I’d always played with kids, regardless of their color or ethnic background. In Winter Haven you didn’t do that. You were expected to play with your own color, or face retribution from both the whites and the blacks. It was my first taste of blatant racism, and I hated it. In fact, I hated Florida, I realized.
It was sometime in late September when Dad was on the phone talking to his sister back in California. He boldly stated that “yeah, we’re happy here.” I was angry. I was so angry that I told him so as soon as I could get him off the phone. How dare he speak for me about a place I hated so much!
When I was able to talk to Mom and Dad about the phone conversation, he clarified that he was talking about himself and Mom. Like this made it much better somehow. So my feelings didn’t matter in the least, it was all about how “the couple” felt. I remember I was so angry after hearing this that the edges of my vision actually clouded. It scared me because I’d never been that angry before. Florida brought out the worst in me for the first time.
I asked Mom why I felt the way I did, and she attributed it to something called culture shock. I had heard the term before, but I never knew that it came with physical symptoms. I actually felt physically ill when I thought about it. Everything was out of my control and I was forced into the situation by someone I didn’t realize I hated at the time. It made an empty pit in my stomach, one that nothing could fill.
A few years ago, I looked back on the situation in Winter Haven to see if it was as bad as I thought it was when I was a kid. Maybe I’d just imagined all the bad things because I was a kid and I was mad. But no, it really was as bad as I thought it was.
The kids really did tell me I was “gross” because of my haircut. On Valentine’s Day, mine was the only decorative heart out of a hundred that was thrown away at the nursing home where we’d gone to decorate. During field day, I was the only kid with a dirty water cup. The teacher really did send me to the office because she didn’t like the sound of my laugh. The bus driver really did write me up for not following directions that she never gave, mostly because of the color of my skin and no other logical reason. The music teacher really did introduce herself by yelling at me in front of the whole class.
And that was just at school. There was the guy at church who ground my bare toes into the pavement at Awana because I didn’t want to run laps in 95 degree heat. There was the neighbor who tried to trap my cats and send them to the pound because they made footprints on his precious boat, and he took it out on me instead of speaking to my parents.
And then there was the presidential election of 1992, where Mom and Dad voted for the “wrong” candidate. A minister in the neighborhood found out and got the rest of the neighborhood to shun us. Someone tried to remove Mom’s campaign bumper sticker while she was in a parking lot. She also kept getting pamphlets with pictures of mutilated babies stuck under her windshield.
The bullying was the worst part. I was bullied so severely that I actually had to leave a school because it was a literal constant battle of laughter, rumors, pranks, and death threats. Why were they bullying me? Because I wasn’t interested in anyone. Yes, I was bullied out of a school for being asexual. By the time I left, I was billed as some kind of pervert, and the kids filled in the blanks as to who (or what) I was sexually attracted to. Some of their tall tales are too gross to repeat here.
I was terrified to go into the locker room during P.E. If I even turned my head, I was accused of looking at naked people. Any quirk or movement was somehow said to be perverted. I had things thrown at me. My life was threatened on more than one occasion. The teachers, of course, did nothing about it.
Well, I wouldn’t say nothing. There was the peer counseling session I went to where the teacher asked the other kids to tell me all the rumors that were being spread about me, then said nothing. She told me that I should take pills for “my condition” and kept trying to twist my words around to say I wanted meds.
Winter Haven, Florida. It was an awful place with awful people, and it deserved the three hurricanes that mowed it down in 2004. I will stand by that statement, because I’m not a “turn the other cheek” person. Go ahead and come at me, chamber of commerce. I will only publish more of my horror stories concerning your town, because I’ve been nice so far.
Well, those are my thoughts about hair. I was persecuted by an entire Southern town because I somehow chose the wrong haircut. Even if it was someone in the town who gave it to me in the first place!
Is it really true that such horrible abuse could stem from a simple haircut? Yes, as a matter of fact, it has happened to more than just me. Just ask a black woman who was told her hair wasn’t “black enough.” See the damage that has been done to some celebrities in the media based on this, and other superficial judgments about hair. It happens. Unfortunately.
What are my dreams for the future? Well, there are a lot of them. I wish climate change was a thing of the past. I wish Netanyahu and Putin would both die humiliating deaths at the hands of the people they have wronged, sort of like Gadafi died. I wish my cat would bury his shit instead of leaving it out in the open litterbox for the whole house to smell during dinner. And I wish that, like Martin Luther King, Junior, once said, people were judged not by their looks but for the content of their character. But we all have impossible dreams, don’t we?
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