Respectin’ the Kitchen: A Black Girl’s Nape Line

 “Look at all those people in your kitchen!” my mother would scream as she shoved my head forward and took a soft-bristle brush to my neck. I would squirm and whine as she used all her strength to spread the stubborn coils from the nape of my neck and into my hairline. She still does it, especially since I’m wearing my hair naturally now. My mother is not above taking a razor to my kitchen to hide my shameful coils and, in the days of the relaxer, she would slather extra cream to my neck and leave it just a little longer.

Nappiness is viewed with disdain and as an unacceptable hair texture. Never have men ever looked to the back of my neck to check the condition of my nape, but now it’s a normal daily occurrence. I know that my nape line doesn’t look the best when my kitchen is nappy, but the black girl’s nape always gets a bad rep and I’m out to prove that it is unjustly so.

The Kitchen

The kitchen is one of the nicknames for the hair that dwells at the nape of our necks. Other names include: “the people” and “beady beads”. This is where our most unruly kinks gather. The hair here is the most nappy, kinkiest, and the most resistant to change of any kind. I always believed that those kinks got their name from the rebellion against the major hair ritual that occurred in its namesake.

Many combs have lost plenty of teeth in efforts to tame the naps, but one has preserved, the hot comb. My mom would pull out what looked like a medieval weapon, throw it down on a red-hot stove, and wait for it to heat up. There was no way of determining how hot the comb was and the only way to cool it down was to blow heartily until it “appeared” cooler (those who have the pleasure of using an updated hot comb that pulls into an outlet, lucky you). With any form of plastic used to cover my ear, my mom would rake the comb through my hair with ease… until she reached the kitchen. I could feel each strand coiling tighter and tighter in efforts to remain unreachable to the comb. And when I say that hair fought back; most of the sweat upon my mother’s furrowed brow had more to do with her struggle with my hair rather than the sweltering heat of the stove.

“If there was ever one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen.”

It was in the kitchen that our toughest hair stood its ground and took root, and it was those roots that continued to connect us to our past. In Henry Louis Gates Jr’s memoir, Colored People, Gates praises the stubbornness of the kitchen and how it remained a permanent part of us and our African culture. “If there was ever one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no matter how powerful the chemical, no matter how stringent the mashed-potatoes-and-lye formula of a man’s ‘process,’ neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis Jr., could straighten the kitchen. The kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, invincible kink. Unassimilably African. No matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried, nothing could de-kink a person’s kitchen.”

When I think about my kitchen representing the part of my heritage that refuses to conform to its Eurocentric colleagues, I can’t help but to have a bit more pride and want to let those naps coil up like never before. In my kinks lie my strength, and I intend on letting those kinks shine through.