HAIR AFFAIR
Women tell why they went for the ‘big chop’
“Ever since I was a kid, my hair was everything,” hard-driven, perfectionist businesswoman Violet (Sanaa Lathan) says in Netflix’s new movie, “Nappily Ever After.” “It had to be fixed. Only then was I perfect.”
To many women, that line could have come from their own journals, or even been spoken aloud in front of the mirror as they tried to make their hair an absolutely flawless example of society’s expectations — and their own. For African-American women like highpowered Violet, the heroine of the movie based on Trisha R. Thomas’ 2001 novel, the subject of hair is even more fraught. The pressure for black women to conform to the high standards of society is often encapsulated in the reaction to their hairstyles, which have been endlessly debated in fashion magazines, corporations, the United States Army and even the Supreme Court.
In “Nappily Ever After,” Violet responds to that pressure by impulsively shaving it all off, and then starts to learn who she really is under that veil of feverishly achieved hair. We spoke to Palm Beach County women who have also done the Big Chop, the colloquial term for cutting one’s hair very short or completely off to get rid of any chemical relaxer. Here’s what they’ve learned on that journey.
Ann Marie Sorrell, marketing and public relations executive
Years since the Big Chop:
15; shaved head eight years ago
Ann Marie’s hairstory: Since high school, Sorrell’s hair was her thing, she says. “My mom always said ‘Your hair is your glory, your beauty. I believed that men are not attracted to you if you don’t have hair. My hair made me look like what I thought was beautiful.”
But about 15 years ago, the glorious hair she was so proud of started falling out, “something I couldn’t figure out.” So she cut out the relaxer she’d had, hoping that starting over might solve the problem. At the time, she admits to still equating her femininity with the length of her hair because, “I still cared what people thought of me.”
Instead of keeping it short, Sorrell — whose Mosaic Group company has represented several organizations, local governments and local campaigns for politicians including President Barack Obama and Andrew Gillum, current Democratic candidate for Florida governor — grew her hair long enough to have braids or weaves woven in. “I was still covering it up,” she says.
Sorrell rocked Sisterlocks for five years “when all of a sudden,
the recession happened.” As her business suffered and her stress grew, “my hair started coming out in little patches.” Concerned, she visited several dermatologists who prescribed topical solutions that didn’t work. Eventually, she found a black female dermatologist who thought something else might be going on.
After a scalp biopsy, she diagnosed Sorrell with a rare form of alopecia, an autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks the hair follicles. The news was “a little devastating, that my hair was never gonna grow back.”
As she struggled to make peace with what this meant, her boyfriend at the time pointed out an attractive woman “rocking a bald head,” but Sorrell wasn’t ready to entertain that yet. So, after weepingly shaving off her locks, she covered her bald head with a wig for months, only going au naturel to the beach. But that didn’t seem like a permanent fix, so she crowdsourced a solution. She scheduled a photo shoot wearing different wigs and then one with her bald head, posting them on social media. After her friends and family got over their shock, she started getting positive feedback — most importantly from herself.
“Coming out with my bald head was emancipating, freeing,” says Sorrell, author of the recent book “Chronicles of a Serial Dater.” She realized, she says, that the months between her alopecia diagnosis and the moment she shed her wig, that she’d been “digging deeper,” and decided she was “staring a new chapter, a fresh beginning and a new sense of confidence that I had to feel from the inside.”
Her bald head, now, is the outward symbol of that confidence, because “I know I’m bolder. I know I’m going to own the room. It’s all in what you make it.”
Bumi Benjamin, DJ, West Palm Beach
Years since the Big Chop:
About 10
Bumi’s hairstory: A West Palm Beach native who returned to the area five years ago after two decades in Atlanta, Benjamin is known to fans as D J Ifa Halima Bumi. She says she ultimately shed her hair as a journey to shed herself of a painful past.
That journey began around the time of the recession when “we threw the nation in the ditch,” and Benjamin, who ran her own graphic design business, found it “hard to stay afloat [like] many small, mom and pop businesses. I lost clients, slowly losing my house and [ended] a bad relationship. My eating habits went down the drain: fast food, pizza and sodas. There was a lot happening.”
Depressed and more than 200 pounds heavier, she “had to let go of everything and return to [my] family home. I refused to look at myself in the mirror. For two weeks, I closed myself off and lived in the basement, reviewing all that happened. I even put God on the shelf and felt that after so many prayers, how could God allow this to happen?”
After about two weeks of hard reflection, Benjamin says she knew that she had to “either continue to dig a hole for myself and spiritually commit internal suicide or rise above all and sit at the table where I belong, walking in my purpose and fighting for myself. I set my intentions and began taking action.” That action began with shaving her hair, which was in dreadlocks at the time.
“I shaved all the past negative energy, fear [and] doubt from my head,” she says. “I felt so much dead weight lifted from my spirit. Oh, how I loved my bald head … I did not care what anyone else thought. [I] saw me!”
With that self-clarity came “a sense of freedom” of “embracing me again, loving me again,” Benjamin says. Although she took a corporate management job for a short time, she started dedicating herself to her former passion, which was music and art. She started touring to promote that music and the spoken-word poetry book she’d written during her depression. The networking helped “me connect with people again.”
As she connects with people through music, Benjamin also feels the freedom to reconnect with other less temporal powers. “Most importantly, I asked the Universe for forgiveness and that God continue to pour love and healing energy into my heart,” she says. “I Am that I Am!”
Jewel Driver, call center supervisor, Riviera Beach
Years since the Big
Chop: 12
Jewel’s hairstory: A Riviera Beach native, she says her hair “always looked fresh.” She started relaxing it in 11th grade, from the moment her mother allowed it, and for the next several decades, she was constantly spending lots of time and money on her hair, even if she eschewed the salon and did it herself.
“It doesn’t matter what you do with it, the longer it gets, the longer you spend under the dryer. It could take three to four hours to get it done,” she says.
By the time she was an adult, it was becoming too much. “It was a rough time. I was finishing my master’s degree, and I was working out. I was also premenopausal with the night sweats. I was getting up and drying my hair and hot-curling it after washing it from a treacherous night. Finally, I said, “I’m not gonna do this another day.”
Driver says she sat in the stylist’s chair “for 30 minutes — I think she was giving me an opportunity to think about it,” she says now, chuckling. “It was only a week [after] my new relaxer, but I cut it down to the new growth (the naturally-textured hair that grows between relaxers). It’s only hair. But ever since then, I decided I will never do hair again.”
And then she shaved it all off.
Since then, Driver, the president of the Delta Epsilon Zeta, of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc., has not only found maintenance a breeze, cleaning her short cut with her own clippers, but she’s also found “a new level of self-confidence.” It’s more than the ease of upkeep; there’s a relative and literal weight now off her shoulders.
“I never have a bad hair day now,” Driver says. “People hold onto hair to camouflage if they’ve got nothing else. The focus now is not on my hair, but on who I am. I have a level of selfconfidence. My hair doesn’t define my womanhood. It never has.”
Kali Bacon, hairstylist, West Palm Beach
Years since the Big Chop:
About a year
Kali’s hairstory: Bacon’s very honest about something. She misses her pixie cut.
“I loved that look,” the stylist says of the short style popularized by Halle Berry, Toni Braxton and others. “I love the sleekness of it. But I know what’s best, and that’s my natural hair.”
She came to that when, about a year ago, “I started experiencing some type of hair loss. I was like, ‘Why is it getting short?’” Bacon remembers. “In one area, it wasn’t growing. I really believe that things were changing with my hair. My mother’s hair had started to thin at this age.”
Because she likes looking good and because her hair is a virtual billboard for her profession, Bacon decided that if it wasn’t going to grow, “I was just going to cut it. I always look at pictures of amazing women with short hair, who made a statement, where you just had to say ‘Look at that woman.’”
Without her relaxer, Bacon discovered her signature look, a very chic, very short cut that she’s been able to dye a striking blond, “as blond as I want,” without fear of the dye reacting with the straightening chemicals.”
A year later, she says that her hair is a statement of her style, but not of her identity — “I had no insecurity before. I was secure with who I was at the time I cut my hair, and that’s remained the same. You make your hair. I believe that. There is a level of self-confidence you have to have, no matter how short or how bald you are. You make your hair.”
And that confidence, shining under her short blond hair, has “gotten me more compliments than with any other style. People are like ‘That’s you! That’s you!,’” she says. And a lot of her clients have followed suit.
“I think [cutting one’s hair] is what some women need to be freed, instead of being bound by their hair,” Bacon says.