A saint who worked miracles with the ’fro

I could put pencils, pens, coins and folded-up dollar bills in my Afro and forget about them until

the next morning.

The patron saint of the Afro has died.

OK, that’s not quite true. And when I write “that’s not quite true,” I mean that I made that up and there is no patron saint of the Afro. If there were, he would have had to die long before he could be declared a saint of anything.

But I did Google “patron saint of the Afro,” and the first name that came up was St. Benedict the Moor. (Kids, whenever “the Moor” is attached to a name like St. Benedict or Othello, that means someone with a surprised look on their face is pointing while loudly whispering, “He’s Black!”). Benedict was born to enslaved Africans — or what some Texans would call involuntarily relocated Africans — in Sicily.

There’s no mention of Afros in any of Benedict’s bios, but in some artistic renderings, he does appear to be working a little ’fro. Benedict is the patron saint of, among other things, African missions, African Americans, Black missions and Black people. It’s as if the Catholic

Church said, “Let’s just give everything Black to Benedict until we get some more Black saints up in here.”

But if there were a patron saint of the Afro, it should be Willie Lee Morrow, who died last month at 82. Born in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Morrow moved to San Diego, where he opened a barber shop and created a multimillion-dollar Black hair care empire, including inventing the Afro pick.

Just writing the words “Afro pick” excited the few remaining follicles on my scalp to leap and aspire to an ascension once enjoyed but now impossible.

Morrow also invented the Jheri curl, but the less said about that, the better.

Afro picks were essential for teasing out hair by digging down to the scalp to stretch it from the roots so an Afro could be shaped. Sporting an Afro wasn’t simply about letting your hair grow out. It had to be cared for, nourished with the right products, trimmed and sculpted by good barbers.

Reading Morrow’s obituaries took me back to the 1970s and “Soul Train.” One of the show’s main sponsors was Johnson Products, the makers of Afro Sheen, which had a hilarious commercial in which a young man who hadn’t combed out his hair is visited by the ghost of Frederick Douglass, who chides him about leaving the house with his Afro looking a mess. The young man squirts some Afro Sheen Comb Easy on his hair, shapes it with his Afro pick and is ready to go.

As a kid, I wanted an Afro, but my maternal grandmother was against it. When my mother, aunt and other grandmother talked her into it, I started wearing one at 12. A few months later, my uncle married into a Mexican American family, and when my brother and I went to the reception in Hondo, the other kids thought we were members of the Jackson Five. My Afro was never as big as peak Jackie, Jermaine and Michael but somewhere between Marlon and early Michael.

Because my hair was very thick (I hate talking about my hair in the past tense) — so thick I’d get it braided to loosen it up — I could put pencils, pens, coins and folded-up dollar bills in my Afro and forget about them until the next morning. When I took off a baseball cap, I’d have ring around the ’fro.

I owned an assortment of steel and plastic prong Afro picks, including foldable ones with red and green handles representing Africa, and others with handles the shape of a Black Power fist. I also had steel rakes, which we called “cake cutters” because they were weapons.

Each morning, after applying Afro-Sheen Comb Easy and using the Afro pick and cake cutter, I topped off my hair with coconut-scented hairspray. All these products were purchased at an Afro shop in Alamo Plaza.

I miss my Afro. I even wrote a love letter to it once. But I don’t miss the maintenance. But St. Morrow — yeah, I’ve canonized him — made that maintenance easy.

If I ever visit his grave, I’ll pour out a little Afro-Sheen in tribute to him and in memory of my beloved ’fro.