“I want a job.”
“Yes, but what kind?” Ruth asked, slightly incredulous.
Ifemelu looked at her résumé on the table. “I’m a communications major, so anything in communications, the media.”
“Do you have a passion, a dream job?”
Ifemelu shook her head. She felt weak, for not having a passion, not being sure what she wanted to do. Her interests were vague and varied, magazine publishing, fashion, politics, television; none of them had a firm shape. She attended the school career fair, where students wore awkward suits and serious expressions, and tried to look like adults worthy of real jobs. The recruiters, themselves not long out of college, the young who had been sent out to catch the young, told her about “opportunity for growth” and “good fit” and “benefits,” but they all became noncommittal when they realized she was not an American citizen, that they would, if they hired her, have to descend into the dark tunnel of immigration paperwork. “I should have majored in engineering or something,” she told Curt. “Communications majors are a dime a dozen.”
“I know some people my dad did business with, they might be able to help,” Curt said. And, not long afterwards, he told her she had an interview at an office in downtown Baltimore, for a position in public relations. “All you need to do is ace the interview and it’s yours,” he said. “So I know folks in this other bigger place, but the good thing about this one is they’ll get you a work visa and start your green card process.”
“What? How did you do it?”
He shrugged. “Made some calls.”
“Curt. Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I have some ideas,” he said, boyishly pleased.
It was good news, and yet a soberness wrapped itself around her. Wambui was working three jobs under the table to raise the five thousand dollars she would need to pay an African-American man for a green-card marriage, Mwombeki was desperately trying to find a company that would hire him on his temporary visa, and here she was, a pink balloon, weightless, floating to the top, propelled by things outside of herself. She felt, in the midst of her gratitude, a small resentment: that Curt could, with a few calls, rearrange the world, have things slide into the spaces that he wanted them to.
When she told Ruth about the interview in Baltimore, Ruth said, “My only advice? Lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff but it matters. We want you to get that job.”
Aunty Uju had said something similar in the past, and she had laughed then. Now, she knew enough not to laugh. “Thank you,” she said to Ruth.
Since she came to America, she had always braided her hair with long extensions, always alarmed at how much it cost. She wore each style for three months, even four months, until her scalp itched unbearably and the braids sprouted fuzzily from a bed of new growth. And so it was a new adventure, relaxing her hair. She removed her braids, careful to leave her scalp unscratched, to leave undisturbed the dirt that would protect it. Relaxers had grown in their range, boxes and boxes in the “ethnic hair” section of the drugstore, faces of smiling black women with impossibly straight and shiny hair, beside words like “botanical” and “aloe” that promised gentleness. She bought one in a green carton. In her bathroom, she carefully smeared the protective gel around her hairline before she began to slather the creamy relaxer on her hair, section by section, her fingers in plastic gloves. The smell reminded her of chemistry lab in secondary school, and so she forced open the bathroom window, which was often jammed. She timed the process carefully, washing off the relaxer in exactly twenty minutes, but her hair remained kinky, its denseness unchanged. The relaxer did not take. That was the word—“take”—that the hairdresser in West Philadelphia used. “Girl, you need a professional,” the hairdresser said as she reapplied another relaxer. “People think they’re saving money by doing it at home but they’re really not.”
Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink, needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to different parts of her body, back up to her head.
“Just a little burn,” the hairdresser said. “But look how pretty it is. Wow, girl, you’ve got the white-girl swing!”
Her hair was hanging down rather than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a slight bob at her chin. The verve was gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss. Curt looked uncertain when he saw her.
“Do you like it, babe?” he asked.
“I can see you don’t,” she said.
He said nothing. He reached out to stroke her hair, as though doing so might make him like it.
She pushed him away. “Ouch. Careful. I have a bit of relaxer burn.”
“What?”
“It’s not too bad. I used to get it all the time in Nigeria. Look at this.”
She showed him a keloid behind her ear, a small enraged swelling of skin, which she got after Aunty Uju straightened her hair with a hot comb in secondary school. “Pull back your ear,” Aunty Uju often said, and Ifemelu would hold her ear, tense and unbreathing, terrified that the red-hot comb fresh from the stove would burn her but also excited by the prospect of straight, swingy hair. And one day it did burn her, as she moved slightly and Aunty Uju’s hand moved slightly and the hot metal singed the skin behind her ear.
“Oh my God,” Curt said, his eyes wide. He insisted on gently looking at her scalp to see how much she had been hurt. “Oh my God.”
His horror made her more concerned than she would ordinarily have been. She had never felt so close to him as she did then, sitting still on the bed, her face sunk in his shirt, the scent of fabric softener in her nose, while he gently parted her newly straightened hair.
“Why do you have to do this? Your hair was gorgeous braided. And when you took out the braids the last time and just kind of let it be? It was even more gorgeous, so full and cool.”
“My full and cool hair would work if I were interviewing to be a backup singer in a jazz band, but I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky.”
“It’s so fucking wrong that you have to do this.”
At night, she struggled to find a comfortable position on her pillow. Two days later, there were scabs on her scalp. Three days later, they oozed pus. Curt wanted her to see a doctor and she laughed at him. It would heal, she told him, and it did. Later, after she breezed through the job interview, and the woman shook her hand and said she would be a “wonderful fit” in the company, she wondered if the woman would have felt the same way had she walked into that office wearing her thick, kinky, God-given halo of hair, the Afro.
She did not tell her parents how she got the job; her father said, “I have no doubt that you will excel. America creates opportunities for people to thrive. Nigeria can indeed learn a lot from them,” while her mother began to sing when Ifemelu said that, in a few years, she could become an American citizen.
Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?
Professor Hunk has a visiting professor colleague, a Jewish guy with a thick accent from the kind of European country where most people drink a glass of antisemitism at breakfast. So Professor Hunk was talking about civil rights and Jewish guy says, “The blacks have not suffered like the Jews.” Professor Hunk replies, “Come on, is this the oppression olympics?”
Jewish guy did not know this, but “oppression olympics” is what smart liberal Americans say, to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews—all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit, but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they’re better than blacks because, well, they’re not black. Take Lili, for example, the coffee-skinned, black-haired and Spanish-speaking woman who cleaned my aunt’s house in a New England town. She had a great hauteur. She was disrespectful, cleaned poorly, made demands. My aunt believed Lili didn’t like working for black people. Before she finally fired her, my aunt said, “Stupid woman, she thinks she’s white.” So whiteness is the thing to aspire to. Not everyone does, of course (please, commenters, don’t state the obvious) but many minorities have a conflicted longing for WASP whiteness or, more accurately, for the privileges of WASP whiteness. They probably don’t really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?