Hair and Beauty Culture

By: Tiffany M. Gill

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Hair and Beauty Culture

Controlling black people's bodies was at the center of racial-based slavery in colonial America. The productive and reproductive capabilities of Africans and African Americans were policed to meet the stringent demands of a plantation economy. Still, even within this oppressive environment, Africans and African Americans, enslaved and free, found ways to define themselves and assert a level of authority over their physical selves. One area in which slaves and free blacks demonstrated some autonomy over their bodies was in the way they chose to adorn themselves and style their hair. African Americans in the early years of their presence in the New World developed and sustained a vibrant and meaningful system of hair care and beautification rituals. These seemingly frivolous practices of personal adornment provided a way for African Americans to pay homage to their African heritage and reclaim their bodies outside slave labor and degrading wage labor.

African Roots of Hair Care

Many of the grooming practices of the early Africans who arrived in America were based on the beauty rituals of traditional African society. These African beauty customs were laden with ceremonial, social, spiritual, and political significance. For example, to symbolize her availability for courtship and marriage, a West African girl might shave her hair into a particular style. Similarly, certain braiding styles were used to mark religious rites or ceremonies.

When European slave traders first encountered Africans, they did not esteem the African's physical appearance or grooming rituals. Indeed, the physical attributes of Africans—namely, their dark skin and tightly curled hair—were used as justification for their enslavement and were a key element in the formation of racial ideology in the New World. Black women and their bodies played a crucial role in the development of this discourse. Seventeenth-century travel narratives describe black women as simultaneously sexually desirable and repulsive. The meaning and aesthetics of beauty became even more complex in the context of enslavement. With the physical labor of Africans being critical to the growth of a slave society, the bodies of African men and women, including their hairstyles, would come under particular scrutiny.

African American Beauty in the New World

Once Africans arrived in the New World and became associated with difficult slave labor designed to support and uphold a plantation economy, asserting some measure of control over their bodies became an act of defiance. Enslaved men and women, attempting to replicate the beauty rituals of their African homeland, became adept at modifying what was available in their new environment. In the absence of manufactured beauty products or even running water, African Americans became creative in their hair-care routines, often using household items like grease with a heated rag as a conditioning agent and metal-toothed cards normally used to comb sheep's hair. These rudimentary products and tools were often communally shared among the slaves. When traveling through Virginia in 1797, the architect and painter Henry Latrobe noted the ways African men intricately sculpted and twisted one another's hair into elaborate styles and even shaved one another. Latrobe was so inspired, in fact, that he put this image of communal grooming to canvas.

The range of black hairstyles depicted in slave runaway advertisements underscores the richness and complexity of their grooming practices despite not having access to sufficient styling aids. From Sam, a runaway slave described in a 1786 advertisement as wearing his hair “cut in a circular form on the crown of his hair,” to Tom, a Virginia slave who wore his hair “combed up very high,” African American men proudly sported elaborate hairdos and seemingly pioneered fashion trends. Indeed, as early as the 1860s elite white women were vilified for wearing the high roll, a style achieved by bunching cow, horse, and human hair high on top of their heads because it was thought to resemble the “shock head of a Negro” man. African American women often wore elaborate hairstyles on Sundays or at weddings and other special gatherings. For such occasions, the women would wrap or thread their hair with fabric days ahead of time and then release their hair from the material to reveal a styled coif. When working in the fields, slave women usually tied a piece of fabric around their heads, either simple bandanas or colorful cloth that often invoked an African aesthetic.

Slaves not only asserted some control over grooming and hairstyling but also viewed the way they dressed and the use of clothing as an extension of their beauty rituals. While slaves were given only basic garments by their masters, slave women often used botanical dyes, patching, and quilting to produce garments that went beyond mere utility and into the realm of style. In 1744 in South Carolina, members of a grand jury responded to black women who did not obey legal clothing restrictions by complaining, “Negro Women in particular do not restrain themselves in the Cloathing as the Law requires, but dress in Apparel quite gay and beyond their Condition.” Still, despite the contempt with which whites often derided slave dress and hair, the fact that African Americans spent precious time during their days off paying attention to such seemingly insignificant details demonstrates how important control over one's body was in the face of the brutalizing institution of slavery.

By the eighteenth century some enslaved and free blacks were able to make a living as hair-care workers. Hairdressing was viewed as a natural outgrowth of the acts of personal service blacks were providing for whites in this period. Pierre Toussaint, who was brought to New York from Santo Domingo by his slave owner when he was twenty-one years old, became a successful hairdresser in the late eighteenth century. He earned enough money dressing the hair of New York City's elite white families that he was eventually able to purchase his freedom. Toussaint was not alone in his entrepreneurial success and was joined in the hairdressing profession by other black men, primarily from the French West Indies, who coiffed the heads of wealthy white men and women into the early part of the nineteenth century. Although black women were grooming the heads of their white female masters and employers informally, they were not able to capitalize on hairdressing as a vocation until the antebellum period, as black men began to concentrate their entrepreneurial efforts on barbering.

As Africans in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America struggled to create an identity, they embraced a politics of appearance that celebrated their past and helped them adapt to their present conditions with dignity. Reclaiming the use of their bodies as mere laborers, African Americans took up hairstyling and beauty culture in the colonial and national periods as a way to express themselves and created a unique aesthetic that provided the foundation for African American cultural expression for years to come.

See also Africa, Idea of; African Diaspora; Artisans; Arts and Crafts; Class; Clothing; Discrimination; Entrepreneurs; Folklore; Free African Americans before 1828; Gender; Identity; Laws and Legislation; New York City; Occupations; Race, Theories of; Resistance; Sexuality; Skin Color; Slave Trade; Spirituality; Stereotypes of African Americans; Toussaint, Pierre; Visual Arts; Women; and Work.

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