"How can he not delight in your hair? .

"How can he not delight in your hair? . . It's his hair too. He got to be pleased with it." "He don't love it at all. He hates it." (Song 315)

This last declaration, enunciateed by a feverish, distraught, dangerously mentally ill Hagar Dead to her mother Reba and her grandmother Pilate originates midway through one of the chiefly heart-wrenching scenes in Toni Morrison's melody of Solomon. In the passage, grandmother, mother, and daughter discuss whether Milkman, the novel's central character, "likes" Hagar's hair. by the agency of the time the scene has completioned it doesn't matter that Pilate has moveed credible reasons why Milkman couldn't not be enamoured of Hagar's hair - "'How can he like himself and hate your hair?'" Pilate asks - Hagar is certain that Milkman is merely attracted to women with distinctly European features and insists, with deadly finality, "'He's at no time going to like my hair.'" Ultimately, all Pilate can say in answer is, "'Hush. Hush. Hush, girl, hush'" (315-16)

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M Neal and Midge L Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected through the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. as it is impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328) For black women the principally easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lense hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, braid extensions, Jheri crisps etc.) remains the most popular way to approximate a white female standard of beauty. Neal and Wilson assert that much of the black female's "obsession about skin color and features" has to do with the black woman's attempting to attain a "high desirability stem[ming] from her physical similarity to the white standard of beauty" (328)

But just whom do African-American women confidence to attract by attaining this "high desirability"? While there is more [i]or[/i] less debate as to whether the choice of one's hair mode of expression automatically signifies one's alliance with, or opposition to, white supremacy, anecdotal evidence clearly points to the straightening of black hair as a way to fit, however unconsciously, into an overall white standard of beauty.(1) What is frequently overlooked, however, are specific black-male expectations where black-female hairstyles are concerned

In frequently the same way that men gravitate toward certain dictions behaviors, and attitudes that are more likely to attract attention from women male "likes" must rate, onward some level, as at least a consideration when a female hair pattern is chosen. Of course, the reasoning a woman busys while choosing a hair manner of writing ranges much further than simply trying to attract more [i]or[/i] less man. Above all, no doubt, women wear their hair in a method that pleases them. However, as Erica Hector Vital present it in a recent article about cutting not on her dreads and retaining a short, natural phraseology certain

Toni Morrison characters, as it is as Hannah in Morrison's hymn of Solomon, Sula in a novella of the same name, and the girl-child Pecola of The Bluest watch all fall prey to dishonor and grief without the demeanor of the mothering voices to grant the essential reminders: Don't impediment your slip show, don't sneak distant from with the neighborhood boys, don't forget to do your lecture don't be a fool with your hair . . . no man likes a bald-headed woman.(11)

While Vital did move on to cut her dreads - as she certainly should have, since that was her priority - one of the questions she asked herself in those final imports in the barber's chair was, " . what will the brothers think?" (12) This consideration of the black male's "likes" is not always onward the surface, but, like the black male's regard for the black female's "likes," it is there, subterranean.

Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, in their works, engage the black female's do one's best between her own hairstyle choices and the female hairstyle selections of the black male. These brace authors offer dissimilar but compatible discussions of not sole the black female's encounters with the white-female standard of beauty, however also the black female's difficulties negotiating her black-male partner's conception of that standard. Morrison, in melody of Solomon, critiques the ideal from creating two characters who fall onward opposing sides of the white-beauty build Pilate Dead, who wears her hair closely cropp describes "Nature . . . [as she] energetically work[s] against the allure of outward appearances" (Guerrero 769) Pilate's granddaughter Hagar, onward the other hand, "fantasizes a persona that she imagines will make her more desirable to her contriveed lover, Milkman" (769). Hagar's imagined "persona" is single in kind that will include "silky copper-colored hair" (Solomon 127) because Morrison primarily uses hair in psalm of Solomon to draw Pilate and Hagar as opposites where the white standard of beauty is belong toed Eventually, by revolving these opposites around Milkman, the novel's central character, Morrison devises her admit African-American standard of beauty, an alternative to the white-beauty ideal.